“NO GREAT LONDONERS.”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18163, 27 April 1921, Page 6

“NO GREAT LONDONERS.”

Mr Walter Sharman, the newlyelected President of the London Teachers’ Association, and himself a Londoner, has inaugurated his term of office by declaring that London has ceased to produce great men of her own soil and spirit. Our statesmen, our leading novelists, journalists, musicians, and men of light and leading generally, are not Londoners; they come to London. “It seems,” said Mr Sharman, “as if the rainbow has ended.”

I am afraid that he is right, writes Wilfred Whitten in the London “Evening News.” It would be easy to draw up a list of great men who have been born under that rainbow, but however imposing that list might be it could not affect the argument. This is concerned with the London of to-day, and not with thg' entirely different London which produced men like Chaucer, Francis Bacon, Milton, Pope, Daniel Defoe, the elder Pitt, Keats, Lord Beaconsfield, and Robert- Browning—to name a few of London’s great sons at random. Even Dickens’s London, though he yas not born in it, is of the past, and peeps up in isolated relics in a town that has smothered it for ever. We are about to do honour to the memory of John Keats, perhaps the purest and most impassioned of all our poets. Like Milton before him, he was a Cockney. But when he died in Rome a hundred years ago this month he had known a London which, compared with ours, was a sleepy country town with near and beautiful country. To-day we see an immensely greater London, and little else. We are shut in by urban magnitudes. I should guess that there are now 5000 ! miles of streets in London. Only thirty years ago, and later, when the horse bus and the hansom cab flourished. when there were trespass boards on Parliament Hill and gipsies on the Heath beyond, it was still possible for the Londoner to walk, like Isaac, in the fields at eventide and meditate. But it is not the mere vastness of London that abashes genius; it is the accompanying and deadly mechanisation of its everyday life. How can a young man submit night and morning to the dehumanising spell of the Tube lift and develop toward greatness? Efficiency, cleverness, mastery of material things—these are within his gasp. But genius needs space and oxygen.