Love of England

When President Roosevelt went to Teheran in 1943, he took 50 detective stories along. For his 1945 conference with Churchill and Stalin he planned to take with him some of the most genial English essays in modern literature: The English Spirit by Alfred Leslie Rowse, Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College.

The English Spirit was published last year in London, will be published in the U.S. by Macmillan next week. It is a kind of book that U.S. readers seldom see, a miscellany of incidental writings on related subjects. It begins with a tribute to Winston Churchill: "I wonder how many people, when they see that so familiar, endearing, bulky figure on the films or on railway platforms returning from one of his innumerable journeys, think how much of English history is embodied in it?" It ends with a review of three books on England by American writers.

In between there are reminiscent essays, a travel sketch, essays on English heroes and English character, reprints of the author's literate radio broadcasts to English schoolchildren. Professor Rowse says that when he came to collect his writings he was surprised to find the strong and consistent theme that ran through them--"something more than pride in, a deep love for, English things . . . for our tradition itself and the literature in which it is expressed and handed on." It is likely to inspire much the same emotion in President Roosevelt (most of whose ancestors were English, not Dutch), and any other sympathetic U.S. reader.

Contentment With Life. One of the qualities of the English spirit is happiness--"a deep source of inner contentment with life." Professor Rowse agrees with Santayana that the English provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment. In Professor Rowse's case the harmony means far more than love of the rolling English landscapes which he evokes at the slightest excuse, and occasionally with no excuse at all. He loves English history as he loves the lilacs and rhododendrons, the chestnuts, yews and sycamores that he sees on his walks. The great houses where so much of the history was made, the letters that the history makers and their wives wrote, the diaries they kept, the gardens they planted, the poems they wrote, the music they loved--all this is part & parcel of the environment that the Englishman is at peace with, and whose value and savor Professor Rowse celebrates.

The English, he says, are not dull, plodding, humdrum, hardworking. They are constitutionally indolent, and being at peace with nature find it hard to understand other people, like the Germans, who are not. So the English are always caught unprepared and forced to make up for lost time by their resourcefulness, inventiveness, self-reliance. Far from being plodders, they are creative, imaginative, the most brilliant modern nation "with the single possible exception of the French."

Great, Magnificent, Beautiful. Professor Rowse has had enough of the destructive self-criticism that has characterized modern writing. He cannot understand the meanness and obtuseness of mind which refuses to recognize genius, or the service to the country of its great men. Great, magnificent, beautiful, superb--these are his words, and he uses them frequently. Drake, Elizabeth, Marlborough, T. E. Lawrence, Lloyd George, Pitt, Froude, Macaulay, Churchill--these are his heroes, and he praises them with an Athenian sonority, though never without an affectionate mention of their human vanities and trivialities.

He rejoices when a professor of Greek tells him that English literature surpasses Greek literature, and hurries to the microphone to tell English schoolchildren the good news. When an American Catholic writer says that the great Queen Elizabeth was ill in mind & body with "a sexual abnormality aggravated by syphilis," Professor Rowse exclaims: "This strikes me as little short of wicked." But his ardent patriotism is never offensive--partly because of his style, which is finished and yet with a deliberately rough texture, like good tweed, and partly because of his humor. He quotes with approval the owlish Oxford dean who, on being asked what he had done in the war said, "I am the civilization they are fighting for."

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