OPTIMIST’S LETTER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4528, 26 January 1942, Page 8

OPTIMIST’S LETTER

HUGH WALPOLE’S VIEW THE COMING NEW WORLD (Reviewed by R.W.) Hugh Walpole’s “ Open Letter of An Optimist ” (Macmillan War Pamphlet, number nine) is not, in the strictest sense of the term, a recent publication. It first appeared quite early last year, and in these days of voluminous literdry output twelve months is sufficient to consign a book to a back shelf. Yet there are two good reasons for resurrecting the optimist’s letter. First, the salient features of its message cannot be repeated too often; and, second, this short pamphlet will have a permanent interest for those caring to know a side of the writer’s character seldom if ever revealed in his great novels. For the nonce, Walpole abandoned the elevated plane of his art to make the happy choice of a simple letter to a friend as the medium through which to express his feelings as an ordinary man concerned about the future welfare of his kind. Justly, the booklet has been called “ in little the spiritual autobiography of a man driven by experience from the Ivory Tower to which his class and education might have condemned him.” “A FINER BRITAIN” “ We’ll see a finer Britain after all this than there’s ever been.” That is the writer’s initial statement, the peg, as it were, on which all else hangs; it is the justification for his self-styled “ optimist.” At first sight this seems (at least to the present generation) small reason for the term “ optimist.” Is it not true that, after all shams, hypocrisies, and pseudo-patriotisms have been swept aside, there remains the one truth that we are fighting for a better Britain, and in the widest sense for a better world. “ And would men spill their blood to chase elusive shadows ? ” But before charging Walpole with that vanity which often impels men to falsely classify themselves in some extreme category, let us remember that something like a quarter of a century ago he was among the millions who rallied to the now-disgraced battle-cries of “ A War to End War ” and “ The Way to the New Jerusalem.” We are in the turmoil of a second war, and Jerusalem seems as distant now as ever before. Walpole, like the countless thousands who also knew the tragedy of the last great conflict and the ever-growing bitterness and disillusion of a short lull between two storms, and who yet retain their faith in ultimate victory, can modestly lay claim to something greater than optimism. That is courage. THE GREAT CHANGE In the early days of the war Walpole was the subject of a great change—such a transformation as can only follow close upon the heels of a catastrophe—and the sincerity and frankness which so mark his telling of it are typical of the straightforward honesty which characterises the entire letter. “ Too long,” he writes, “ as I see now, the Ivory Tower has been my refuge. One night last May drove me out of it forever.” That night, or rather week—,l7th to 24th May, 1940—was the terrible period during which the Nazi Juggernaut swept across France. How many more in common with him have been through the testing trials of fear to emerge purer and nobler ? Surely acute self-knowledge forms one of the tenets on which the optimist builds his faith. After Cambridge, Walpole had what he terms “an opportunity of learning that something was wrong with England,” for he joined for a year the Mission to Seamen in Liverpool. He did not, he confesses, take that chance. “It was the Liverpool slums that should have stirred my discomfort. . . . But nothing happened at all. I was pre-occupied with my solemn intention to be a great novelist. What ought to have happened was a linking by my novelist’s imagination of that childhood’s picture of my elderly relative (an aunt), the frost glittering on the lawns, the marble statues of Caesar and Socrates, the footmen holding the cans with the hot soup, the horses pawing the frozen ground, my elderly relative proceeding, wrapped in furs, down the wide stone steps . . . and the naked, drunken labourer in Liverpool, sitting on the edge of the filthy bed in that filthy room, nursing in his grey-white arms his little boy who had been hit in the face by the labourer’s drunken friend.” SEEING THE LIGHT Again, speaking of the great general strike, he says: “ As to why there had been a strike, whether there were not wrongs here that must, and one day would, be righted, to all this I never gave a thought.” Never, though, does Walpole speak as a guilty man “ getting in first ” to lighten the punishment, but as one who, from being blind, sees the light and wishes to follow it. It is a debatable point, too, whether good eyes (in both literal and figurative senses) are not a more certain guide than a good conscience. EDUCATION SYSTEM Not a few of Britain’s evils, contends Walpole, are traceable to her whole system of education. It has resulted in a “ monstrously divided country,” this “ rotten, perverted, sterile, snobbish system of British education.” His own Public School experience is interesting and' enlightening. “ I went to three schools. At the first of them I was tortured, at the second I was happy, at the third I was miserable, being a day-boy. At none of them was I educated. But at all of them I learned the importance of the difference of the classes—at all of them I was encouraged to become the vilest of snobs.” Elsewhere he says: “ None of my three Public Schools taught me anything,” and in pointing out that he was remarkably unsuited to write with serious accuracy about education, he curtly adds: “ I have never myself been educated.” Now, these are fairly grave, charges. After all, no pupil could say anything much more condemnatory about his school than that it failed to educate him; except, perhaps, that he was taught pernicious things; and Walpole says this too I The “ have nots ” have for long been accustomed to levelling abuse at the English Public Schools, but then “ Envy ” has always been a safeguarding, if not effective, reply. At least Walpole’s criticism merits a fresh answer. Before quitting the .subject of education it is interesting to note that Walpole lists H. G. Wells among those who could not be kept down by any traditional system based

on snobbery born of perverted education. Those who can, should read the very trenchant things Wells has to say about the education that was denied him. “ OUT OF NECESSITY ” “ New worlds,” says Walpole, “ are made not because of altruism but because of necessity.” That is no mean effort at political philosophy for one who readily acknowledges that politics and economics have always been beyond him. This is a deep and fundamental truth. Altruism is constantly tending to coincide with necessity: today’s ideal is to-morrow’s institution. Such movement is the true stuff of politics. It is interesting to speculate just what strange and unexpected company Hugh Walpole would have found himself clasping hands with had he proceeded with his political thought along these lines. However, posterity will adjudge him a great novelist, not a political thinker, and it is certainly unjust and not seldom unwise to judge men by tendencies rather than by ultimates. WHOLESOME CRITICISM The pamphlet contains, besides attacks on British provincialism, social snobbery, and economic injustice, some welcome criticism of British Philistinism. British people as a whole, he objects, have never had any aesthetic sense. To the notion that the Elizabethans were gloriously aesthetic he answers The English people in general went to the theatre for the crudest melodrama and the bawdiest farce. Did the people of England enjoy the “ Faerie Queene ” of Spenser, the sonnets of Sidney, the Essays of Bacon, the poems of John Donne ? They were not, for the most part, aware of their existence.” The world in general, he rightly maintains, has always been Philistine, but seemingly different ages view the matter with varying degrees of concern. Where, for instance, is there to-day one so eloquent in favour of national aestheticism as was Matthew Arnold in Vic-

torian England ? A generation of economic and social ugliness has not been conducive to either the birth or nurture of the beautiful. A change, however, is seen by Walpole, who cites the frustration some time ago of an attempt to lay a tax on literature (“ at the very moment when it is of burning importance to our cause”) as a “ very significant event.” Under the heading, “ Art for a Penny ! ” he also draws some illuminating points—the popularity of the Twopenny Library containing the works of such writers as Priestley and Forester; the colossal success of the last summer season at Sadler’s Wells (“because it was both good and cheap!”); the sudden rush of the English people to the National Gallery Concerts since they have been made easily accessible to all; and, finally, the almost unprecedented interest the pubic is taking in painting. “A NOBLE WORLD STATE ” Lastly, there is Walpole’s conception of the new Britain fit to form a part of a “noble World State in which all men will be equal citizens with equal rights.” The old barriers of class must and will go; there must be no British school, whether Eton, Harrow, or Winchester, or any other that is not as easy of entrance for the son of a tramp as for the son of a marquis.” “ The public schools can survive only by feeding their tradition and romance with the actual power of the new world that is coming into being.” By such steps will Britain move forward to her goal and become “ truly educated, truly socialist, truly a country governed by the People for the good of the People.” Let mankind decide whether now is the time to effect the change of name from altruism to necessity !