Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] THURSDAY, 12th MAY, 1932. ENGLISH CHARACTER.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 12 May 1932, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] THURSDAY, 12th MAY, 1932. ENGLISH CHARACTER.

The English character is the result of many blendings, and, like other blends, it presents us with something vastly different from the orthodox four which every two and two ought logically to produce. It took a long time to form that character, just as it did to form the English language. We tend to forget that French was the tongue of our kings and their courts for fully three centuries after the Norman Conquest, and that not until the year 1362 —well towards the middle of the Hundred Years War with France —did English by statute take the place of French in the pleadings in courts of law. In the language thus established, and since then continually developed, many of England’s greatest achievements lie enshrined. She has never been pre-eminent in music, architecture or painting, never a worshipper of militarism —saved from that, perhaps, by her geographical position. Her two outstanding successes are in ordered government (every Legislature in the world is in effect a copy, if often a poor one, of Westminster), and in literature, particularly in poetry. Shakespeare is great, hot only in an absolute sense, but great in a peculiarly English way. Nor is it sufficiently realised that England could afford to give up Shakespeare altogether and still challenge the world with a gallery of poets unsurpassed. That is something for a people so often reminded by .others more demonstrative that it is “not a poetical

race.” Especially is it true of what may be called pure poetry, of the most imaginative sort. The racial stocks which ought, in theory, to have enriched us with the best of that description, have not fulfilled their own avowed ideals. It is to “The Skylark” of English Shelley, or —to widen the illustration for a moment —to the “Bonnie Kilmeny” of Lowlander James Hogg that we have to turn, if we would find precisely the kind of artistry which the Celts would like to have devised —if only they knew how.