HISTORY AND LEGEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 5

HISTORY AND LEGEND

| Sir, -I am, I think, at fault in one respect with regard to Mrs. Andrews’s Gloriana; I did not make it sufficiently clear that I was thinking not of Mrs. Andrews’s serial alone, but of a whole series (going back to Kingsley) of imaginative presentations of the Elizabethan period. Hence the appearance of Sir Richard Grenville. For the’ rest 1 think Mrs. Andrews misunderstood me. It is not a question of factual accuracy; I brought no complaint against her on that score and even ven-

tured, on the strength of one episode, to praise her insight into Drake’s Puritanism. My criticism was rather that popularisations of the Tudor era tend to over-concentration. It was a remarkable age, full of remarkable events and people; but that is no. excuse for presenting the daily life even of the ruling classes as a -succession of encounters with those events and people. It is too easy to build up a picture of a sort of exclusive club of eminent people, who associate all the time with one another who never meet anyone unimportant, go anywhere uneventful or do anything unspectacular. It is the cult of the spec_tacular which Kingsley began and A. L. Rowse and Arthur Bryant are continuing; the creation of a mythology, not the becca of history. Mrs. Andrews, defending herself against a charge I have. no desire to bring, of idealising the period, says she has faithfully recorded mud, smells and superstitions. But I fear her mud is glamorous mud, her smells picturesque, her superstitions colourful. My plea is that even children should not be taught history as a set of legends, conjuring up a dream-world, but as something as real and matter-of-fact as their own lives. The stories and the excitements will not be lost if their feet are placed on the cround.

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