LORD BALDWIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 3, 4 July 1938, Page 18

LORD BALDWIN

PEACE ArONG BOOKS

POETRY BRINGS CALM

RECOVERY OF HIS POISE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, May 25.

How he has been occupying his leisure since his retirement, nearly a year ago, was told by Lord Baldwin when he opened a new £100,000 library at the Liverpool University. After twenty continuous years of work as hard as had fallen to the lot of any man he had looked forward for many years to that hour of release and had always pictured himself as sitting down to read and to think. But, said Lord Baldwin, he could do neither. He Jiiad given the last ounce of strength, physically, and mentally, to his job. For months he was unable to do anything. Gradually it came into his sub-con-scious mind, "You have to get back to the poets," and something said "Wordsworth." So the first book he read was "The Excursion," which seemed to bring back the calm he wanted. Then he read "The Prelude." That did him good. Next he began to contrast the peace of those books with the restless world outside. He thought of Europe with its boundaries once more fluid. He thought of the great crisis in history and he read "The Dynasts," evary word. •. After that he felt able to read some prose. After considerable browsing he took down a book he had not read for fifty years, Froude's "Letters of Erasmus." He thought, "Here are the .letters of a man with a fine and sensitive mind who lived in a time when Europe was breaking up." ;.' - ; A SPIRITUAL REPUBLIC. It showed the civilisation he had known when strange winds were Mowing across the Continent and into pigland. • . It was an age, to use a platitudinous phrase, of transition, but it resembled this age in that no man knew where Europe was proceeding, or whether the transition was needed any more than anyone did today. "I read right through that," continued Lord Baldwin, "and I found the poise I had lost." It was a comforting thought that there was no brotherhood on earth like that brotherhood of the men and women who loved books. It was a brotherhood with no borders of class, recruited from all ranks. It was a spiritual republic. Some entered into <it more easily by the fortunate circum- 1 stances /of birth; others —and he could think of friends in the Labour Party whom he knew well —had, toiled against incalculable difficulties in early life to win their freedom in this republic.

Lord Baldwin's love of libraries goes back to his boyhood days. He spent many hours lying on his stomach on the hearthrug in his father's study reading by the warmth of the fire. Nowadays, as he has confessed, "a kind of senile convexity" would disturb the equilibrium ,of such a posture. His hearthrug reading was solid. It was usually selected from the consignment regularly sent to his father from the London Library. Lord Baldwin is fond of the conversational gambit which consists in picking the work he would take if allowed only one book for companionship on a desert island. Once his choice was the Oxford English Dictionary. There are 20 volumes and they weigh anything up to 2cwt.