PRESERVING FREEDOM OF THE MIND

Southland Times, Issue 24005, 21 December 1939, Page 8

PRESERVING FREEDOM OF THE MIND

War Risks of Literature

[By

R. A. SCOTT-JAMES

in The Listener]

There are some risks connected with literature that I am not going to ask you to insure against. We need not worry about the risk of Dr Goebbels dropping German literature from aeroplanes. I shan’t bother you about the risks to which the stock of a wellknown bookseller was recently exposed when he protected his windows with books instead of sandbags. Nor am I going to talk to you about rates of insurance for libraries; nor debate whether dealers or Government should pay premiums on the actuarial calculation that one book in every hundred may be destroyed by the enemy. The literature-of which I want to speak cannot be directly destroyed by the enemy. It can only be destroyed by ourselves, and the risk it runs is that it may be damaged by our neglect or indifference, and that its use—the nourishment we get from it—may simply disappear through nobody’s fault but our own. FREEDOM OF THE MIND Front the point of view of literature we went through a pretty bad year before the war began; but now that the war is on it doesn’t follow that the coming year—from the literary point of view—need be worse or even as bad. Much depends on whether we mean all we have said about democracy and about fighting for the freedom of mind. During the last year of uncertainty, of perplexity about Europe and doubts concerning our own action, our minds for the most part have been far from free. And so, not only has business been hampered, but thought about any matters except international matters has been hampered, and any publisher and bookseller cah tell you that, apart from politics and light fiction, the British people have not been reading books as they used to read them. In the same way they have not been looking at or buying pictures, or creating a demand for the best plays, or giving their thoughts to those permanent things which are the subjectmatter of the arts. But now that we are no longer on the brink of war, now that all those doubts have been resolved and we are in it, we have at least set ourselves on a steady course. The sense of an impending cataclysm will probably soon disappear when we get accustomed, as people did in the last war, to conditions strangely different from peace-time conditions; and perhaps we shall soon begin to feel that we are living in a war-time world peculiarly our own, that the world that was has irrevocably gone, that life has become different. And yet, it is precisely at this time that we can get most profit by remembering what it was that sent us into this war; it was primarily to preserve the freedom of the mind upon which all other freedoms depend. Since that is what we are defending, it seems rational to begin by defending it in ourselves. RETAINING SENSE OF VALUES • The free mind cannot let itself become wholly immersed in the conditions of the present. It cannot let itself be misled by the idea that there is only this war and war-life that matters, that all the things that mattered in the past have lost importance, that all the thoughts and sentiments and emotions that have been the subject of literature in the past have been superseded. Today the Briton who wills to remain free will assert his freedom by being more than a soldier or a war-worker, trying to keep hold of the things that he valued before the war, retaining his sensibility to an infinite variety of impressions. The war will be “shop,” outside “shop” there will be philosophy, religion, friendship, love, sport and reaction of many kinds; there Will be literature and art, and the themes with which they are concerned. To turn to literature in these days is not escapism. It is not a turning of one’s back upon realities, but, on the contrary, an enlargement of the field of reality, a widening of the interests, a sharpening of the sensibility and of the capacity for pleasure. Literature helps us to remember that there are other times beside the present, other aspects of society beyond the immediate aspect, and matters of human concern which will remain whatever happens today. A mind is only free when it is, in the words of Milton, “not to be changed by place or time.” The mind is its own place, and in Itself Can make a heav’n of hell, or hell of heav’n. The free mind under any circumstances is capable, as Andrew Marvell knew, of making a garden of its own: of creating at will '. . . other worlds and other seas Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Now reading may, or may not, produce that serenity in which we are able to see all things in proportion, in a dry light. Some reading merely excites us in the mood of the moment, as when we read the war news—which we must read—or books which tell us how the conflict arose and to what end it is leading. Books of this kind cannot be neglected. We must read them to understand what is happening, both for our own satisfaction and in order

that we may play our part as intelligent citizens. But we also heed literature in the full sense of the term, now especially, since it keeps us in touch with aspects of reality which no war can disturb. I do not think it matters very much what the book may be so long as it takes hold of us strongly and is capable of touching our sensibility. Some will find stimulation in reading and rereading the story of the Odyssey, whether in the original Greek or in a translation; some will find pleasure in the Bible, or in Shakespeare, or in the romantic poets, or refreshment in the quiet stories of Trollope or the caustic novels of Jane Austen, or be moved by those powerful books of Thomas Hardy which present men with the spirit of the English countryside in their bones, carrying on an unequal struggle against fate. In the last war I found that I could read slowly and with much pleasure the short stories of Anton Tchekhov—his themes were so unlike those which we talked about in an officers’ mess, but not less real; his deftness, his penetration in extracting so much significance from so little, give us a sense of the finer edge of the most trivial things, so that their surface value is never enough. “WAR IS NOT ALL” I think at this time especially we can derive peculiar satisfaction from the fine use of language, from a style in which words are well chosen and fastidiously used, with a graciousness which is a guarantee of some inward grace informing them. That quality was never absent from the work of W. B. Yeats, whether he was writing prose or verse, whether he was dealing sweetly with old legend or robustly with modern life. Max Beerbohm is one of the few authors still living who can rise simple language so dexterously, so pointedly, as to give choiceness to the least thing he has to say. Rare also among our contemporaries is E. M. Forster, whose quiet voice, too seldom heard, gives us the assurance of contacts with a world in which Hitler, though he is there, plays a puny part. And to go back a generation or two, for those who like Walter Pater this is a good time, I think, for attuning one’s mind to his precise and sensitive prose. We have to keep a tight hold on literature, the arts, and all the amenities of life in these days, because they are first among the things which the Nazis want to take from us. If they had their way they would submerge us in materialism, and destroy our spirits as well as our bodies. That is something against which we have to be constantly on our guard in days such as these. We can do so by remembering that war is not all, by keeping our contacts with what is civilized, not letting go the more permanent experiences of literature, or music, or nature, or whatever is beautiful in the procession of life. If we hold on to these things we are defeating Nazism at its base, making its assaults ineffectual. If, for example, we insist on keeping something of good drama alive in our midst, if we read books and encourage the production of books, if we enjoy beautiful objects, and in thought and manners keep Nazi coarseness at bay, then we have prevented the possibility of the worst defeat by winning the victory of the mind.