Earl Baldwin’? Life

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 159, 8 July 1938, Page 3

Earl Baldwin’? Life

COMFORT FROM BOOKS LONDON, June 18. How Earl Baldwin has been occupying his leisure since his retirement, nearly a year ago, was told by him wnen he opened a new £IOO,OOO library at Liverpool University. After 20 continuous years of work as nard as had fallen to tho lot of any man, said Lord Baldwin, he had looaeU forward to that hour of release, and had always pictured himself as sitting down to read and to think. But he could do neither. He had 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 road was “The Excursion,” which seemed to bring back the calm he wanted. Then he read “The Prelude.” That did him good. Next he begau to contrast tho peace of those books with the restless world outside. Ho thought of Europe with its boundaries once more fiuid. Ho thought of the great crisis in history, and he read “The Dynasts,” every word. After that, said Lord Baldwin, he felt able to read some prose. After considerable browsing he took down a book he had not read lor 50 years, Froude’s “Letters of Erasmus.” Ho thought, “Hero aro the letters of a man with a fine and sensitive mind who lived in a time when Europe was breaking up.” It showed the civilisation he had known when strange winds were blowing across the Continent and into England. It was au age, to use a platitudinous phrase, of transition, but it resembled this age, iu that no man knew where Europe was proceeding, or whether the transition was needed, any more than anyone did to-day. “1 read right through that,” continued Lord Baldwin, “and I found the poise 1 had lost.” It was a comforting thought that there was no brotherhood on earth like that brotherhood of the men and women who love 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 circumstances of birth; others —and he could think of friends in the Labour Party whom he knew well had toiled against incalculable difficulties iu early life to win their freedom in this republic. Lord Baldwin’s love of libraries goes :»aek to his boyhood days. He spent many hours lying on the hearthrug in his father’s library, 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 iu 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.