YOUNG ENGLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 16, 20 January 1936, Page 3

YOUNG ENGLAND

REVEALED IN LETTERS

READINGS OF A LOST LEADER

THE POST-WAll MIND

I When the late Viscount Knebworth was killed in an aeroplane accident in 1933 it was realised, even beyond the immediate circle of his friends, that a young life of exceptional promise , had been pitilessly cut short, writes J. B. Firth. How exceptional that promise was is now revealed to all in a memoir, written by his father, the Earl of J Lytton. It is entitled "Antony." | No one can say what; might have been. In his short twenty-nine years of life Antony had already changed course more thaa once. But the course he had been ■ steadily holding for two years before his death was one which well suited his eager tem-| perament, and would almost certainly have carried him to a place in public estimation as distinguished as his father's. He was already vice-chairman of the Army and Navy Stores, to which he had been introduced by the late Lord Ebury; he had made a successful debut in the House of Commons as member for North Herts, and he • had joined the Auxiliary Air Force j and was intoxicated with the joy and! rapture of flight. The big prizes of life were already within his grasp when in an instant all was irretrievably wrecked. Only the pity of it remains. Lord Lytton calls this memoir A Record of Youth," and it is in fact much more than the story of a single individual. The letters of Antony express and interpret the feelings of the youth of the difficult period which immediately followed the.Great War. HELD BY SPEED. Born in 1903 he would be somewhere in the middle forms at Eton at the Armistice, where his school life was "a crescendo of enjoyment." That enjoyment was as regularly carried over into the holidays. His passion was skiing—always what attracted him was speed. But Eton he worshipped. "I think it is just the most wonderful thing in the world," he wrote, "what Eton means to Etonians." He had been entered for Trinity, Cambridge, but at the last moment he decided that it must be Magdalen, Oxford. '«■ "I thought," comments his father, "that the grounds for this sudden change of plan were altogether inadequate, but as it was impossible either to ask questions"—Lord Lytton was then in India—"or argue the merits, I could not do otherwise than leave the matter to his own discretion." The warmth of family affection displayed in these letters—and the memoir largely consists, of letters—is wonderful. The ordinary gap between the generations was bridged as far as that is possible. There is a total absence of reserve in the expression of deep affection, and a full outpouring of confidence, such as it would be hard to match elsewhere. Very delightful this must have been for the parents who watched with pride the development of their brilliant boy, yet at times his letters must have caused them many a sharp pang, though in their hearts they could not doubt that all would come right in the "Vntony went through a dangerous and perverse phase at Oxford, as thousands of other high-spirited young men have done before him. He professed himself a convinced hedonist. "I won't work till I want to. Ive never wanted to yet Call me a rotter if you like; work is not in any way a thing which will ever go hand in hand with your son. When I leave Oxford I am going on the ran-tan; so you'd better cut me oft with a shilling, right now, and let me try my system." "A SILLY LIFE." Nevertheless, he added a postscript: "But I'll get a First for your sake before I do." Or in another letter:— "No wonder people get drunk in Oxford. It is a silly life. But it is just as silly sitting in the City all day and wondering whether rubber is going up or down. ' "I'm damned if I can see what the point of living is, unless it is to be happy, and I entirely disagree with anyone who says that happiness is not pleasure. I know that whatever better and older and wiser people tell me I am, damned well not going to waste my life doing what I don't like, and don't believe in, simply because they say it's what I ought to do and point to its many advantages. . But then all young men feel as' I do at this age. Oh, yes, I shall get over it; that makes it all the sillier because I'm so right." Dangerous doctrine, and Antony made no concealment : of his losses at cards and his convivial parties, and his headaches the morning after, and his occasional rackety junketings to London and Paris. He was sowing his wild oats but without the slightest concealment. His parents handled him with wonderful tact. Instead ol remonstrating or storming or weeping over him, they quietly replied to the young hedonist's protestations and retrimmed for him the lamp of reason to which they knew he would return when, in his own phrase, he had got over it." A PATTERN. His mother knew just the right word to say and said it in a beautiful letter, which may well stand as the pattern letter from any mother to any S "When you say you are keen about nothing, and see no reason for hying except pleasure, I just realise how sleepy you must be as you write! What is the use of pearls without a string? You cannot wear them. "You who love life and can tuin stones to laughter, must needs get hold of life and shape it finely. Where is the use or the honour or the fun oi the satisfaction of letting life get hold of you? God has given you so mucn, darling son; do not spill His gifts by the way and render them valueless Those quiet words were more searcning than any learned lecture on moral philosophy. Nor did they fail to win fhe desired response. The young hedonist replied:— "There is no more wonderful leeiin« in the world than when' you are feeling really rotten and ""happy and ashamed and nervous to feel a gieat strength and confidence come over you owing to someone having confidence in you and loving you. Our love will always be the strongest thing in the world, and when everything else is gone, when every brick is fallen, and every beam rotten, it win stand as straight and as safe as ever it did. With such a force to help me I can have no fear, no shame, no hesitating." : ... Again, after a few days alone with his mother at Knebworth, he wrote:— "I feel as if my whole soul and mind had been dusted and tidied and cleaned up. I seem to myself such a completely different human being, toi having been in touch with you again. I am just incredibly happy with all the wonderful goodness of life." There was not much wrong at heart with such a hedonist. Then i arose in clue course the question of a

profession. Antony realised the need of making money, but the ways by which it is made did not appeal to him. After a joyous visit to India while his father was Governor of Bengal, Antony tried stockbroking, but disliked it. Then he got a job in the Education Department of the Central Conservative Office, at which he worked without much enthusiasm, for at that moment his ambition was to be a writer, ink running freely in Lytton veins. His father urged him to stand for Parliament, and he contested Shoreditch at the election of 1929. It was a hopeless fight and he was badly beaten, but the experience was enormously valuable. He began to think' seriously.

"The more I see of this political busi■ness the more convinced I become that it is a class war. Some may follow us a little while yet, probably because they like us. But it only takes a bad generation and the thing is gone, and gone for ever.

"The Labour people are bound to I win, as the French won and as the Russians won, but our tradition will be maintained and it will be a blood- [ less revolution. How much they will do or undo I don't know, probably less than we believe; but it has got to happen, and in my lifetime, and there will be great changes and an aristocracy destroyed. After all, we are i the last aristocracy in the world, and it doesn't much matter whether we give way to wealth or Socialism. "What will come after I don't know. A gradual sorting and sifting, I imagine, and in the end a new aristocracy, like the American one, which will be all money. But I think our day is done, because, though we are trying hard now to build on logic there is too much logic the other way." THE MODERN MACHINE. After the election Antony judged that the Conservative Party was smashed for eight years at least, but believed that "the hour for Young England was nearly ripe." Young England! So that was the turn his thoughts were taking.' He resolved to "sit tigh,t, wear the badge of party, say the right things, write some books, seem a little disinterested, know what goes on, and wait till the moment arrives." Two years later, before the crash of the Socialist Government, he wrote:— "God help us! We have made machines, and we can produce thousands of miles of cotton fabrics in twenty-four hours-; we can talk across the globe, we can fly at 400 miles per hour, we can measure the stars, we produce so much and so fast and so well that nobody wants our products, and where the hell are we? "I believe there will be a great collapse and a great disillusionment, and it will all come back to the only fundamental truths—the colour of the apples, the ripeness of the corn, and 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' "I firmly believe that the next twenty years are going to see the most stupendous upheaval in the history of the world and that it will, as like as not, come down to physical strength. Hence I thank God and you that I am not made with a club foot and myself that I am learning to fly." There showed itself the right stuff for future leadership. Antony was arraying himself to fight many a losing battle before winning through to distant victory. Yet, loving life as he did, he had his fill of joyous moods. When his sister Hermione was engaged this is how he wrote home from Switzerland: — "Hermione is so radiant, the stars so bright in her eyes that I feel we must all be little unimportant futile things beside her great joy. ... It is God's loveliest moment, His greatest gift." It was to this same sister that he wrote: — "Life is too good a thing to niggle over and spoil or cherish. You want to get hold of it with both hands and simply pour it over yourself like a bucket of spring water. Perhaps lam a bit too fond of doing this and rather apt to splash it over other people." The above extracts will show ■ the quality of these letters, and also the quality of their author's character. It was a striking blend of hedonism and devotion, puzzling often to himself. The spirit of post-war youth—restless, provocative, often conceited and unreasonable, yet passionately alive and i vivid—was strong in him. Yet it was the same headstrong boy who could write to his mother: "All we must try and do is to see that we, like you, are Signed of the Cross of Christ, and then be content to go gaily in the dark and meanwhile hold hard by truth." A golden sentence to be hid and treasured in a mother's heart.