Conquerors Close Up

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 194, 12 March 1943, Page 3

Conquerors Close Up

first remarked that no man is a hero to his valet. But it was a woman, and she was not English. Nor was it an English man who ‘first asked whose fault it was that the servant could not see his master’s size. It was a Scot. The English are slow to _ worship, slower even than the Scots, but when they start they are difficult to stop. Take the case of Mr. Churchill. He was sixty-five before he could persuade his own people to trust him, but if he retains office, and his health, till the war is won it will be dangerous to criticise him a hundred years hence. Do we not still refuse, more than two hundred years after his death, to look frankly at Marlborough? We don’t like spots on the portraits of our heroes -even the little spots of vanity and ostentation-and our L's is not quite certain yet who debunkers seldom become bestsellers. After ail what is a hero? To begin with he is someone who doés Something we are too timid or dull or squeamish to do ourselves, but which, when it is done, makes us all happy. But to capture us completely he must be romantic and generous afid humatie and even sentimental, as Nelson was, and die saving us. So Nelson is almost the only hero we can bear to look at with both eyes; the only one we have always seen more or less as he was — not "the strong silent man of fiction and fools," as A. L. Rowse put it tecently in a review of an anthology of Nelson letters compiled by Clemence Dane, but a vain, sensitive, self-conscious, talkative man, who got sick in a rough sea, lost his head. completely over Lady Hamilton, and wept like a child over the deaths of his friends, He had to be a conqueror too; but it was the fact that he was a conqueror and at the same time "all soul and _ sensibility" (as he described himself to Emma) that brought England to her knees in worship and keeps her there.