Monday 5 November 2007

About the woodlands I will go...

There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly . .

"What do they know of England who only England know?"

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling's "Recessional" or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.

And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.

So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.

Perhaps, after all, we know most of England "who only England know".

So the continuity of her existence was unbroken when the looser connections which had linked her with distant continents and strange races fell away. Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt no country but this to be their own. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt there was this deep this providential difference between our empire and those others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her - in modern parlance "uninvolved".

Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the 18th century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the 17th, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel.

From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their silence."Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.

"What would they say"?

They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection; of the fields amid which they built their halls, their cottages, their churches, and where the same blackthorn showered its petals upon them as upon us; they would tell us, surely of the rivers the hills and of the island coasts of England.

One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible.

They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames, to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called 'Parliament'; and from that hall went out their fellows with fur trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England.

Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.

For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history, the product of a specific set of circumstances like those which in biology are supposed to start by chance a new line of evolution. Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned.

From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation. All its impact on the outer world in earlier colonies, in the later Pax Britannica, in government and lawgiving, in commerce and in thought has flowed from impulses generated here. And this continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles grafted upon it here and elsewhere. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.

We in our day ought well to guard, as highly to honour, the parent stem of England, and its royal talisman; for we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth.

The danger is not always violence and force; them we have withstood before and can again.

The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.

"We must recognise that we have a great inheritance in our possession,
which represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries;
that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today
for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield.
We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause.
Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?"
(Winston Churchill Paris September 1936).


Enoch Powell: Speech, 1961.

6 comments:

Newmania said...

HG I thought you had written this and this is what I said ....



"I feel this could have done with a little editing perhaps but there are some glorious passages and I`m so glad I read it to the end ...in fact I may steal your last bit .Makes an interesting parralell with my jotting s on our new home .I don`t have to tiem for proper blogging at the moment.

The opening quote was dealt with at leagth by Roger Scruton in England an Elegy.

How you would have loved last nights parade in which a strange miscellany of English figures tramped through the Town in torchlight..oh and the Romans comning up the Thames makes a starring appearance at the begginning of Heart of Darkness..Conrad "


Isn1t that odd ...I mistook you for Enoch Powell.

All the Best

hatfield girl said...

N, Editing Enoch Powell is what has been done to him in other speeches.

I heard him once, in Birmingham at the KE. Packed to the rafters.

The term'racist' is flung to divert attention from his grasp of what is the European Union - of which he whole-heartedly approved, but not for England.

So I thought I'd recall another speech, but nearly all of them are worth revisiting.

Edward Heath was a sly, machine politician who took down a very serious political threat to his european agenda by warping a Midlands issue concerned with absolute poverty being dumped into relative poverty, and two very traditional cultures being encompassed in the same space in no time at all (in terms of cultural time).
But Powell shouldn't have caused such offence; his nationwide political status and responsibility was too great for a locally exacerbated problem; he wasn't right, not on how to assimilate incomers; that was a difficult situation with local solutions.

You, of all people, can play writing styles at will; so I'll look forward to Lewes laid bare.

Newmania said...

This may be so HG but his descioision to include ther woman`s letter in his speech was a profound error . The sort of error an academic would make , and Croydonina tells me it was a rtouch and go descision for him at the last minute.

This is the Party opf the so called Rivers of Blood speech that caused the trouble

hatfield girl said...

The letter used one way of speaking, and destabilised the rest of the speech tone. It was wrong on diverse levels: wrong because it portrayed many in the behaviour of a few, and that behaviour merely one-sided assertion; wrong because it was thus untrue and should not have been recounted; wrong because it was untrue even in basic facts; wrong because he stooped to make a valid point by enrolling unworthy emotion and he, of all public figures, had the knowledge, sophistication and understanding of rhetoric to have checked himself. It was unworthy.

The extrapolations of the effects of settlement and his suggested remedies were wrong too; people can learn to live in neighbourliness and content - they have, they do. But he was personally shaken, I think (ie., this is guessing by me), to have worlds collide that were so separate in his own experience and in his own head. He had lived in the Asian sub continent, learned Urdu and Hindi, had considerable understanding of another world, just wasn't expecting to find it in the English Midlands.
He didn't want that change, he shouldn't have used the imagery and distress of others, with more to lose and infinitely fewer resources than he had to draw on for understanding and achievement of a modus vivendi, to oppose it.
That a way has been found by the people of the Midlands, and in less than two generations, is their achievement and his rejection.

The settlement of incomers is invariably a local problem with different speeds and modes of resolution; there is no state nor imposed from above response, and in Powell's wrongness the wrongness of politically correct multicultural imposition can be seen mirrored.

I shall never understand why Heath was considered a Conservative.

Anonymous said...

Somewhat Welsh, the Tudors. Judging by his surname, so was Powell. I heard him speak once: magnetic.

hatfield girl said...

No-one who heard him forgets it do they Dearieme? Yet he was a very old man when I did.

Heath, of whom Brown is some sort of Scottish parody, (or they are both the other Powell's Widmerpool, perhaps),must have hugged himself to destroy such a man because he had forgotten his wider audience and failed his own standards of how to say things with force but without unwarranted offence.