Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 1936. THE HEART OF ENGLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 1936. THE HEART OF ENGLAND

What is the heart of England? The Poet Laureate, poetical-political, offers this newly-minted epitaph to Rudyard Kipling, poet-prophet of Empire:

Your very heart is England's; it is just That England's very heart should keep your dust.

Here we have the heart of England in two senses—London, and the heart within the heart, Westminster Abbey; secondly, the intangible heart of the British race, its moral and spiritual essence. In a measure the spirit of Westminster Abbey, and its stones, are one. That measure of identity is seen more or less in all human monuments and indeed in natural monuments. The venerable Abbey and Father Thames, the one as rigid as the other is mobile, are both symbolic as well as material in the way they stand for England; in a still more monumental way, some Japanese regard Fuji as enshrining the spirit of Japan. But the heart or spirit of a nation must be a growing, living thing. Staunch as the mountains, never-failing as the rivers, and enduring as the architectural stone, the heart of a nation must be sensitive to and receptive of the ceaseless change which—in the long run if not in the short run—is progress

The material heart of England is itself sound. It is sound economically, and it has lost none of its rich symbolism. Macaulay's New Zealander has come back to London and Westminster and sees no decay, physically or otherwise. But its symbolism points to change—in fact, Westminster Abbey is the greatest human record extant of change, decay, and rebirth. The Abbey, with its tombs of kings from Henry 111 to George 11, with its multitude of great men of every kind (and some who may not have been great), is a political museum of every phase of human development from feudalism to democracy, and it is equally a prophecy of changes to come. The British people would not be the people they are if they were not interested as much in the promise of the future as in the performance of the past —and this looking before and after is a quality very native to the heart of England. Ever preaching and teaching the -lessons of past and future, the Abbey now opens its vaults to receive another guest, the poet of whom Masefield sings "your very heart is England's"—arid at once the thought is lifted to the high plane of England's future and of the mission of the British race in a world which has very obviously come to a cross-roads. Britain has a priceless heritage; it is enshrined in natural monuments (insular Britain is herself a world monument) and in eloquent stone. The Britain of the past has faced decay and change more than once, as her monuments faithfully record. Today she faces the decay of democracy in a large part of Europe, and a social-economic metamorphosis. Is the heart of England still equal to landslides among the nations? Is the heart of England strong and young? In the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries a quarrel arose between democratic Britain and the Imperialistic Britain ruling subject races. At first it was a grievance in theory rather than in substance — could Britain be democrat in one place and dictator in another? In practice the two irreconcilables were co-operating well, and Rudyard Kipling said so in inspired story and verse. But the conscience of England, uneasy in the presence of Indian and Egyptian and other nationalisms, was inclined to democratic experimentation in coloured countries, and welcomed the League of Nations as a wider expression of the Commonwealth of Nations. While this democralisation was proceeding under the British flag, countries in Europe controlling more than a hundred million people, white and warlike, slipped back to a candidly dangerous despotism. Nothing since the World War has been more significant than the conscious contrast between the Statute of Westminster and the Government of India Bill, and the Italian and German Fascisms. The militarism of the two European dictators who challenge the pacifism of the League of Nations and announce the death of democracy is something more than "ancestral voices prophesying war"—it is really a declaration of war on the whole democratic system, in which Soviet Russia joined until she.realised that she had more to fear from the dictators than from the democrats. This is the world of certain enemies and uncertain friends which perplexes those democrats, the world over, who still rely on the heart of England. Evidence of the confusion that has arisen in the minds of Britons who believed in the Britain of the nineties, who sympathised with ihe later democratic trends, but who are now appalled by the reappearance of a menacing despotism in Europe (to some of them bearing the stamp of the Beast of the Apocalypse) Would be easy enough to find. Kipling

was a tremendous producer of prose \ and verse in his earlier period; then came a pause. Now he is to join those in the Abbey who, from Saxon times downward, strove to solve j similar mysteries and to interpret the smile of each successive Sphinx. What did the silent laler Kipling really think? Again, there was Lawrence of Arabia, student of and experimenter in the age-old relationship between mankind and war; it is recorded that he felt that his life had "really come to an end"; yet there is a mystery hanging over the transition of Colonel Lawrence into Aircraftman Shaw—and only a short story by Kipling could have thrown light on it. Now they are both —old poet and young soldier— gone, and a totally new thing, the League of Nations, is confronted with totally uncharted seas, in the presence of declared foes and under enemy guns. Amid so much that is new and untried, and so much that is fiercely reactionary, a testing-time now arises for Britain—the Britain of Kipling, of Lawrence, and also of Bernard Shaw—which has to prove once again its strength and its youth. From Kipling's glorious yesterdays we pass to unpredictable tomorrows, and whether they share the glory of the past will depend, now as then, on the heart of England.