A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
AMONG the myriad articles poured out already on the Silver Jubilee there is one conspicuously absent— on " How to Celebrate a Jubilee." It is too late for it now, but it was badly needed. The various papers have been obviously at sea. Most of them, like a good many writers of books, have got no further than the idea of a review of the last twenty-five years. That, of course, is natural and inevitable, but there is singularly little originality about it. The events of the period 1910-1935 would have been much the same if five successive kings had reigned through the quarter-century instead of one. The Jubilee surely concerns primarily King George and the royal family generally. It ought to be a moment for recognizing what the country owes them, what they have contributed to the national conception of kingship, where they stand in relation to particular sections of the community, for example, Labour or the Churches, how their interpretation of their ?Ale compares with that of other monarchs past and present, the place they hold in the British Commonwealth as distinct from the British Isles. To ride off on "Twenty-Five Years of Herring Fishing," or " Twenty-Five Years of Flying," or a simple slab of twenty-five years of English History is a very pedestrian pis alter. There is still room for a monograph on celebrations right and wrong to be " brought forward," as they say in the civil service files, some twenty-four and a half years hence for the benefit of another generation.
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