LESSONS FOR THE EMPIRE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 9

LESSONS FOR THE EMPIRE.

BEAUTY OF THE CLASSICS MR BALDWIN IN A NEW ROLE. C/rou Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 12. The Prime Minister appeared in an un accustomed role when, as president of tb* Classical Association, he delivered an address in the Middle Temple Hall 01 v Classics and the Plain Man.” The Middle Temple Hall, with its high vaulted roof, the windows of darklyglowing glass and the lights, was a fitting background for Mr Baldwin’s address The walls are lined with coats of arms in miniature, and the face of King Charles, “comely and calm.” looked down upon the dais where Mr Baldwin stood to deliver his address. The hall was crowded with professors in hoods of scarlet and geld, white and purple, and women in evening gowns. In the midst of all this splendour, the Prime Minister himself stood in plain evening attire, the “plain man ” of his lecture. He gave an outline of the position ot the British Empire, in relation to th.* classical world: “It w'as not for nothing that Western Europe was forged on the anvil of Rome, and who can 6ay how much we owe to those long years of Roman law, Roman discipline, Roman faith and partnership in a common Empire? During the first four centuries of the Roman era Roman thought and Roman manners imposed themselves upon cur island, and made themselves a home here,” Rome must have seemed very real and present to the children of the near by hamlets as they saw the great roads creeping towards them, past them, and ever onwards in ruthless and undeviatin? com }, making the furthest ends of the island pervious to the legion’s tread. Wh did the Empire come into existence at all, and why, having come into existence did it perish? “ Surely the character of the Roman played as great a part in the rise of the Empire as his character played in the fall? I can imagine no historian of the British Empire neglecting the study of the character of the Englishman as shewn, for example, in the Elizabethan age and through the period of the Rebellion. And to me the outstanding and peculiar strength of the Roman character lies in the words pietas ;.nd gravitas. These were the foundation of a patriotism which alone could carry the burden of Empire, a patriotism innate, a motive force of incalculable power, yet something at its best so holy that it was never paraded, sought no reward, was taken for granted, and had no single word i.o express it. "It would be an interesting study to trace the changes in the Roman character which accompanied the social developments through the chequered history of the Empire This is the happy task of the historian, and it must suffice for me in these few minutes to pause before certain salient facts. It is from Ammian, who wrote while the legions were leaving Britain, that we learn that‘the Roman word could no longer be trusted. This is to me o far more 'significant portent than the aggregation of the population in cities, the immense luxury and the exhaustion of the permanent sources of wealth, all of which combined to sap that very char acler whose continued existence was neces sary for the life of the State- “ There arp fears among those who arc responsible for government to-day, fears not vet gripping us bv the throat, hut taking grisly diape in the twilight, that the Grout War. by the destruction of our best lives in such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to cary on the work of the .Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished yet who in Europe does not know that one more wa r in the West and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great, a shock a? that of Rome? She has left, danger signals along the road; it is for us to read them “Believing as I do that much of the civilisation and culture of the world is bound up with the life of Western Europe, it is good for us to remember that we western Europeans have been in historical times members together of a great Empire. that we share in common, though in differing degree?, language, law. and tradition. That there should be wars between nations who learned their first lessons in citizenship from the same mother seems to me fractricidal insanity. It should rather bo our endeavour to help ourselves and to help each other to recover those qualities of character so peculiar to the Romans, the pietas, the gravitias, and the truth of the spoken word. On such foundations alone can civilisation he built; on such foundations alone can civilisation stand. “But what of us, the ultimi Britanm, the youngest member of the great family? I like to feel that the fortune of the youngest son is ours. I like to picture the procession of the nations through the ages as a great relay race of heroes. Over a course infinitely hard, with little experience to guide her. Rome ran her mighty race bearing her torch on high. Of those who came before, of those who followed after, none ran so far, none so surely And when her course was run the torch came into other hands, who bore it forward according to the strength and guidance that was in them, until after many centuriee it was passed to us, the youngest son. “Our race is not yet run. But we shall run more worthily so long as we base our lives on the stern virtues of the Roman character, and take to ourselves the warnings that she left for our guidance.”

The Prime Minister then paid tribute to the virtue and beauty of the classic tongues. “It is distressing,” he said, “to find ourselves in saying in ten lines what the Romans said in five; but at least it may give rise in us to a conscious effort to tighten up the belt of our speech when we see the sentences of the ancients run like athletes and fit for their work, as compared with the prolapsed and slovenly figures of so much of our diction. . . . Moreover, the ancients did not overelaborate their thought, being content to leave something to the mental processes of the readers. ' by do we know all about the beauty of Argive Helen? Not because Homer gave us a catalogue of her charms with exhaustive precision, but just because he gave a hint and left it to ua. • • • Her loveliness is left to

each of us to envisage as we will, and thus it is that it lives afresh in a myriad forms, newborn throughout the centuries iu each man's heart. Mr Baldwin, moving to the personal note, said that he thought, through his studies of the classics, he had gained some sense of proportion, a standard of values, and a profound respect for the truth of words, which had been of use to him in his daily life. He was fortunate enough to find in the sheei beauty of Latin and Greek and the thousand images they call up in the mind perennial happiness. He related memories of his first election campaign—an “old-fashioned election” in an ancient borough, n *w disfranchised, where he was expected to sit three evenings a week in one or another of the public-houses listening to and applauding comic songs. After a time he felt the need of a moral purge and a literal sedative, and he found it in the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Odes of Horace. “By the date of the election.” he said, ‘‘l had read all the last-named and most of the others, not without lal ur in the dictionaries, not always with each, but with cave, and with increasing joy.” He paid tribute to the Earl of Oxford and Asquith as a speaker in the classical tradition. ‘'He is a Roman in his lucidity, in his phrasing, in his felicity. It required but little 9tretch of imagination to picture him in the courts, delivering a defence, shall we say, ProGeorgic, or in its greatest da> addressing the Senate, in a speech which for its incisive and dexterous advocacy, its compact and pregnant sentences, would be the despair alike of the translator and the most experienced writer of Latin prose.” *1 remember.” Mr Baldwin concluded, “many years ago standiug on the terrace of a beautiful villa near Florence. It was a September evening, and the valley below wa3 transformed in the long horizontal rays of the declining sun. And then I heard a bell, such a bell as never was on land or sea, a bell whose every vibration found an echo in my innermost heart. I said to my hostess: ‘That is the most beautiful hell I have ever heard.’ ‘Yes/ she replied, ‘it is a English bell.' And so it ',t is. For generations its sound had -gone out over English fields giving the hours of work ar.d prayer to English folk from the tower of an English abbey, and then came the Reformation, and some wise Italian bought the bell whose work at home was done, and sent it to the valley of the Arno, where after four centuries it stirred tfc?- heart of a wanderiug Englishman and made him sick for home. “Thus the chance word of a Latin inscription ,a line in the anthology, a phrase of Horace, or a ‘chorus ending of Euripides’ p lucks at the heart strings and stirs a thousand memories, memories subconscious and ancestral.”