WITHERED BUT NEVER STALED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 257, 26 May 1944, Page 10

WITHERED BUT NEVER STALED

"Q" Wrote To The End

_ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch died a few days ago at the age of 80.. How long before his death he ceased to write we do not yet know, but should not be surprised to learn that he did not cease at all, On his 80th birthday’ (November 21 last year), "Picture Post" took a series of photographs of him, two of which we tfeproduce here, together with a passage from his own "Studies in Literature." It was written during the last European war, and is of special interest at the present stage of a longer (and in some respects more terrible) struggle. T may seem a long way-even a longer way than to Tip-‘perary-from the polite irony of Menexenus [a dialogue purporting to be a true account, by Socrates, of a funeral oration composed to be recited over certain of the Athenian dead who fell in the Peloponnesian war], to the cheerful irony of the English private soldier, now fighting for us on the Belgian border. But I suggest to you that his

irony, too, plays with patriotism, just because he is at home with that holy spirit; so much at home that he may be called at any hour of the day or night to die for it. Precisely because he lives in this intimacy, he is shy of revealing it, and from shy turns to scornful when the glib uninitiate would vulgarise the mystery: Send for the army and the navy, Send for the rank and file(Have a banana!) A well meaning scholar, having written, the other day, for the British infantryman a number of ditties to which he will never march, protested that if he preferred to march to this sort of thing, his laureate should be the village idiot; which pleased me, who have always contended that the village idiot has his uses, and that Mr. McKenna was far too hasty with his Mental Deficiency Act. There is a real mental deficiencyand most of us who work on recruiting committees have bitter experience of it-in well-intentioned superior persons who, with no prospect of dying for their country, are calling on others to make that sacrifice. On platform after platform since August I have sat and seen

the ardour of young men chilled by exe hortations from intellectual speakers who lacked understanding, by middleaged people-sentimental or patronising -who schooled their hearers in what they ought to feel. To the British soldier Tipperary was, if you will, just Tipperary: to some of us who heard him singing and know what he went forth to find, it remains a city celestial. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) ’ "After this, it was noised about that Mr. Valiant-for-truth was taken with a Summons. . . . Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and tho’ with great Difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My Sword, I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and Skill, to him that can gét it. My Marks and Scarrs I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his Battels, who now will be my Rewarder. "When the Day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said, Grave; where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and the Trumpets sounded .for him on the other side." (The Pilgrim’s Progress). But there are serious, good folk who who would paraphrase Good-bye, Piccadilly Farewell, Leicester Square into Good-bye, Self-indulgence! Farewell, the soft arm-chair! and to these the British infantryman responds Have a banana! Yes, and truly (when one comes to think) it were hard to find, in a few, words, a better answer. Send for the boys of the girls’ brigade To set old England free: Send for my mother, and my sister and my brother, But for heaven’s sake don’t send me! Rule Britannia! That is "merry England." The enemy wonders that our men march-and so obstinately, too-to this stuff while by tights they should be chanting Rule, Britannia!: and it would seem that not a few cultivated Englishmen, who of late years have lent too much of their minds to Germanic ways of thought, suffer from an uneasy suspicion that we ought to be © rraggede. the perpetual Deutschland r alles! with a_perpetual Rule, Britannia! Nay, the late Professor Cramb-who felt the German hypnotism none the less for resenting it- conveys the reproach in passages like this: "It is hard for us in’ England to understand ‘what the Rhine really means for a German, the enthusiasm which he feels for that river. Treitschke himself says of it, for instance, when he has to leave Bonn: ‘To-morrow I shall see the Rhine for the last time, * The memory of that noble river,--and this

is not. in a poem, observe, but simply in a letter to a friend-‘the memory of that noble river will keep my heart pure and save me from sad and evil thoughts throughout all the days of my life. Try (writes Professor Cramb) to imagine anyone saying that of the Thames!" Well, I dare say some old Etonians have felt something like that about the Thames, and have confessed it in private letters. But how could Professor Cramb have missed to see that when we Englishmen lift our thoughts to their stature, our Rhine is not the Thames? Come, I will answer for once with a Rule, Britannia! Our Rhine, our king’s frontier, is no Thames but the royal sweep of seven oceans, The waters of our baptism flow past Dover through the Straits of Hercules, down past the Cape of Storms, to divide again to reach, to coast, to claim, Hindostan, Australia. There (if you will have it so) runs our Rhine: our Bonn and Bingen and Drachenfels are the Heads of Sydney, the ramparts of Quebec, the citadel rock of Sg ee rock which Hercules And ee and Moor bequeathed us. At this oor England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill Sweet "treble of her fifes upon the breeze, And at the summons of the rock gun’s roar To see her red coats marching from the hill!