A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK I CANNOT understand why the able-bodied need make
any hardship of spending an hour or two in the corridor of a railway carriage when they are travelling across England by daylight in high summer. I seem to remember that the corridors of French trains, in pre-war days, were full of people merely looking out of the windows at France. A week ago I saw Southern England from this wide angle of view ; mile upon mile of England between Penzance and Oxford. England is worth seeing in any month of the year ; but now, in mid-July, with field after field of ripening corn, and every embankment a tapestry of flowers, a traveller who sits reading a newspaper is wasting the use of his eyes.
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I noticed that a bookstall on Exeter Station carried a poster of The Spectator. Date, May 17th, 1940 (no one can say that in calling attention to itself The Spectator employs an element of vulgar surprise) ; subject, an article by " Strategicus " on Hitler's bid for a decision. I though: that the poster had worn well. It is comfort- able reading in 1943. The sight of it brought back memories of a journey in the early summer of 1940. It was often said at the time -that the English country had never looked more lovely than in those months of great danger. There was no more and no less beauty in 1940 than in 1930. Nevertheless, I agree that in the summer and autumn of 1940 the English landscape (and, I would add, the ugliest street of the ugliest Midland town) held something which no English- man had seen before. Or, rather, morning, and evening were as they had always been, yet we saw the procession of summer as we had never yet seen it. I wonder how many will understand, years hence, what the visible form and shape of England meant to us in the days after Dunkirk?
* * * * For my part,1 then saw the country most clearly as man-made ; a record of the labour of many centuries. Not everything which had gone to the making of this landscape was happy, or generous or wise. I cannot forget Cobbett's phrase about the oppression of the Poor Law in the "little, hard, parishes," or his question, " What is a pauper? " and the answer, " Only a very poor man." I did not even think of England as peaceful, even though the peace of the land • had not been broken for nearly ten generations. The very place-names tell of conquest and dispossession, and again conquest ; 1066 was not a pretty piece of work from the point of view of those who tried to block William's way inland. Nevertheless, it is not merely that time has " weathered" these early conquests and taken the sting of sorrow out of them. The Norman Conquest did not set back, over the greater part of England, the development of a civilised life as the conquest of Great Britain by a German army in 7940 would have set back the reasonable development of civilisa- tion throughout Europe. Indeed, although it has always been a matter of surprise to me that people should be so anxious to prove their descent from the band of needy adventurers who came to England with William the Bastard, I know that a strong case can be put forward for the view that the intrusion of these men was a good thing in the long run, or even that their coming made little ultimate difference to the course of English history. However, these questions must be left to Chloe, as an aspirant to an honours degree in History recently described to me the Muse of his pursuit. " Chloe " must be looking with surprise at the Anglo-American expedition to Sicily. Sicily has always been a museum piece for historians. The island had its Norman Conquest, and to this con- quest, in the chain of historical events, the Habsburgs owed some of the splendid ceremonial vestments formerly displayed in the Hofburg at Vienna ; Christian vestments embroidered by Saracenic craftsmen with Arabic inscriptions. Sicily again, was the scene of a curious experiment in bicameral legislatures attempted, somewhat high- handedly, by a Whig magnate in an earlier English occupation. Yet one asks: ..What would Count Cavour, Mr. Gladstone, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Lord John Russell, old uncle Tom Cobley and all have thought of a prophet who, in r860, had forecast that the United States Army would land on Sicilian beaches?
The learned experts who have been writing to the Press, and correcting one another, on the subject of Cologne Cathedral do not appear to have a complete mastery of the facts. Anyone who wants to see at a glance how much is new and how much old in the fabric of the cathedral may consult Bumpus' The Cathedrals and Churches of the Rhine and North Germany. On page 332 of this excellent book is a reproduction of a picture of the cathedral in 1820, before the work of repair and completion had begun. The facts and dates about the building are not all. The completion of Cologne Cathedral was to a certain extent a political event, one of the last manifestations of catholic romanticism in Germany, a counter- gesture to the chauvinism of Thiers in 1840, a symbol of German unity and even of pan-Germanism which Metternich thought dangerous. On the romantic side, the work was due partly to the enthusiasm of Sulpicius Boisseree, a counterpart in Germany to Pugin in England. Neither of these enthusiasts was a native of the country in which he preached Gothicism. Pugin was the son of
a Frenchman and Boisseree was of Belgian and Italian descent. * * * *
It is difficult -to speak of the damage caused by our bombs to noble buildings in Europe without giving an impression of hum- bug. . Yet we might remember that Wordsworth, who dismissed the Cathedral of Aachen as a " puny " memorial of Charlemagne, began a sonnet on the unfinished church at Cologne with the words: 0 for the help of Angels to complete
This Temple.
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There is enough decency in England to save us from gloating over the sufferings of our enemies. It is not often that our public men use language borrowed from the vocabulary of Hitler. Twenty-six years ago I had a chance of protesting against the phrase, "Our men are enjoying killing Germans in the spring sunshine." This phrase, which was sent out to Salonika as propaganda for the neutral Press, came, as one might expect, from the pen of a non-combatant. It was an isolated instance of its kind. Another non-combatant appears recently to have produced a sentence hardly less disgusting and ludicrous. If the daily Press is to be believed, one of our rising politicians told a Canadian audience a few weeks ago that " in the Atlantic we have had a dead submarine served up for breakfast every morning for a fortnight now."
NUMA POz4PluUs.
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