THE KING’S ENGLAND

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3941, 18 August 1937, Page 3

THE KING’S ENGLAND

LOOKING BENEATH THE SURFACE.

Is King George the Sixth’s England still the country which was ruled with such steady success by Victoria, Edward the Seventh, and George the Fifth? asks Andre Maurois, in the Brisbane Courier Mail.

A few months ago the foreign traveller who had explored pre-war England and visited that country again in 1936 might have been tempted to answer the question in the negative.

“No,” he might have said, “this post-war England has neither the same appearance, the same behaviour, the same tastes, nor the same ideas as the England I saw in 1913. Its outward appearance? Admittedly the old villages and thatched roofs still exist, and some of the great parks likewise; but that once tranquil (countryside is now traversed by vast straight roads as wide as great rivers. “At the week-ends these roads are covered by a steady stream of vehicles. And these, as in America, are no longer the large motor cars of the wealthy, but the countless small cars of middle and working classes, the motor bike of the young engineer with his girl on the pillion, and (above all) the huge buxom, brightly coloured motor coaches, bearing each its scores of city clerks and their families towards the open country and seaside beaches. “This new England is criss-crossed by these modern roadways, and at night their flowered crossroads are picked out by suspended buoys of light. It makes one think almost of a land of pioneers. Across it a whole ciass, formerly sedentary is hurrying forth in quest of happiness. Beaches, read-houses, swimming pools, capping grounds, are organised for the enjoyment of this class, and no longer for that of an oligarchy of birth

and money. “Gradually the manors and mansions are vanishing, ruined by taxation to be transformed into guest houses or nursing homes or schools; and meanwhile thousands, hundreds of thousands of little houses are springing up. In most of the large towns the monstrous slums of 50 or 100 years ago are obliterated; the England of 1936 has been rebuilt, so as to satisfy the needs of those who have acquired real power since the extension of the suffrage. MODE OF LIFE CHANGED ALSO “And the mode of life has changed nr- less than the landscape. Where is Victorian prudery to-day? Here is a whole generation in search of pleasure. and making use of the pseudoscientific reasoning provided by disciples of Freud in order to justify its own sensuality 7. At the seaside, or along the riverside meadows, a new ‘Merrie England’ has come into being, with gramophone and wireless taking the place of viol and virginal. An easier code of behaviour allows young men and young women to enjoy the pleasures of sport and travel together. Parental authority is practically null and void. “Books and plays are inciting these young people to break with puritan modes of thought, even with ideas, of religion. Time was, when the yellowcovered French novel, in English homes, was deemed a work of the Devil, the spectacle of the Parision ' boulevard a gateway 7 to Hell. Nowadays, on the contrary, it is Frenchmen who are amazed, and sometimes shocked, by 7 the license of the English stage. Novels like those of Lawrence or Huxley are shattering the Victorian, even the Edwardian barriers. Scientists and philosophers uphold views on education, love, and marriage, which would have outraged and stupefied their grandsires. The English Sunday is moribund, and the Sabbath reading of the Scriptures is being supplanted in millions of homes by the mass-produced dramas of Hollywood.

NEW POLITICAL IDEAS CLASHED.

“In politics, too, thq shift in ideas is no less marked than than in morality and religion. Before the late war, and even in the years immediately after it, the triumph of British institutions seemed to be assured throughout the world. Every people, in Africa and Asia as well as in Europe dreamed of having its own Parliament on the British model, complete with two Houses and a responsible Cabinet. This was part and parcel of the ordinary house-planning of nations, like a bathroom or central beating in private houses. “But in 1936-—nothing of the sort! Parliamentary 7 institutions have been overshadowed by the success of dictatorships and totalitarian States. In some great countries these institutions have vanished; in others they are under heavy fire; even in England they now have their foes, partisans of a fascist dictatorship or the dictatorship of the proletariat.

“The British Empire is bound together only bv the frail links of the Statute of Westminster. One may even wonder whether it will endure or whether the majority of Englishmen wish it to endure: Ar here, there and everywhere, in the universities particularly, doctrines are now openly vrofessed which before the war would have seemed sacrilegious.

“No,” our observer would conclude, “the England of 1936 has very little in common with that of Victoria, or even with that of George the Fifth. The England of days gone by knew that she lay safe behind her seagirt parapets, shielded from all danger. Her Empire could be disputed only by a Power having a fleet superior to her own; and the very idea of this seemed hardly conceivable. “But on the day when Bleriot’s aeroplane crossed the Straits of Dover, England ceased to be an island. She lies open to the attacks of aerial fleets; even the naval bases which used to assure her safety in the Mediterranean are now threatened. She must needs adapt herself to this new state of affairs and make certain of holding in the air alone or with her allies that margin of safety which in the past she held on the seas. “Will she do so? Will she be able to do so? Will she wish to do so? However that may be, a chapter of her history is closed. Another is opening. It will have neither the same themes, nor the same philosophy, nor the same heroes.” THE AGE-OLD TRUNK. All of this might have seemed reasonably true in November, 1936. But since then a fierce storm, has swept across England. It shook the branches of the tree violently, but the age-old trunk scarcely yielded; our observer must have had to confess his surprise that these roots which he had supposed to be perishing were actually full of their old vigour. Abruptly England had to choose between the new morality and the old tradition, between the religious temper (which is not identified with any creed or sect) and the spirit of indifference, betwen Imperial cohesion and a beloved Sovereign, upon whom for twenty years, she had founded the most affectionate hopes. Almost unanimously she chose tradition, religion, and Empire. Eminent writers, like Shaw and Wells, maintained the contrary pleas; up to a point the popular Press supported them; for a moment it looked as if the London crowd had rallied to the side of change. But events soon showed that neither London nor the provinces nor the Dominions were willing to follow the new paths, that the Prime Minister desired to keep England on the old tracks, and that in English eyes the simple domestic virtues were still more precious than the life of pleasure.

In point of fact, it was only those with a faulty knowledge of England who were left surprised. The others knew that the outward changes were superficial, that the framework remained solid, and that, although postwar Englishmen may occasionally have been diverted by the play of “advanced” ideas, they had never taken these seriously. Just because a few writers had not unsuccessfully depicted and praised a mode of life, which would have scandalised Victorians and Puritans, certain ill-inform-ed foreigners supposed that these novelists and philosophers and playwrights had converted England to a new faith.

They were blind to the fact that the traditional England remained infinitely more powerful, and that, although, in the confusion following the terrible shocks of war, a minority had contrived to numb their pain with cocktails and paradoxes, that minority was still at heart true to the main British instincts. They did not perceive that,- if the English masses good-naturedly tolerated an extreme measure of liberty in ideas, this was precisely because they had gauged and tested the staunchness of the framework.

FORMULA FOR INTELLIGENCE

Paradoxical in thought, solid in instinct—that is a formula for the British intelligence, and it is no bad blend. In default of fixed frameworks, the human spirit falls into disorder and folly. If these frameworks exist, evolution moves safely forward within their protection. There is a body of custom (“I can forgive anything except bad manners,” said one of the most openminded English women I have ever known); there is a body of thought (“Scratch an English socialist or pacifist, and you will find a nonconformist”); there are bodies of political tradition (note the tone of the questions put to the Premier during those moving meetings of the Commons in December); and all this 'structure, the edifice of centuries, without which there would be no British Empire, remains intact. Post-war Europe had reason to doubt it. One severe ordeal sufficed to display the solidity of the older England in the most unmistakable way.

The question is not one of a political or religious reaction. The currents of public opinion in England showed dearly enough that the country had no wish to be carried too far in that direction.

“The conscience of England,” wrote Shane Leslie, “is not kept at Lambeth. It lies in commission between the Speaker of the House, the Dean of St. Pauls’ and the editor of ‘Punch.’ ” But these currents showed also how conscious the English people is of the basis of its pow 7 er. George the Sixth’s England, like that of George the Fifth, will require its sovereigns to be a couple whose life can be an open model to all, and

in them it will find that beloved image of an exemplary family. George the Sixth’s England, like that of George the Fifth, will have confidence in its own institutions. Recent events showed forth the strength and dignity of its Parliament; with a touch of irony it noted that Russia’s dictatorship was being obliged to adumbrate, albiet timidly, a return towards constitutional government; it knows that no other .regime could so simply have resolved so awkward a crisis.

More firmly than ever will England shun adventures; more convinced that, as one of her interpreters has said: “Unlike the more spectacular revolutions of other nations, we are not affected either by syllogisms or machine guns, but by gradual or almost imperceptible processes of change, which for that very reason are more fundamental and permanent.”

CONSOLIDATED: NOT SHAKEN.

George the Sixth’s England, like that of his father, will not doubt the solidity of the Empire, which emerged consolidated rather than shaken by the blow it sustained. Those who were still sceptical regarding the efficacy of the Statute of Westminster and the possibility of consultation and agreement between the Dominions and the capital, have been shown that consultation was rapid and effective, that agreement was possible and firm.

This new reign which all friends of Great Britain must wish to be long and happy, does not begin a new chapter of England’s history; it continues an old one, after a brief parentheses of the post-war age.