April 18, 2013

AROUND AND ABOUT: FINEST HOUR 152, AUTUMN 2011

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Historian Andrew Roberts, interviewed during the Royal Wedding: “…although our current Queen cannot be described as an exciting personality, thatʼs not her job. Her job is to cement, personify and solidify the nation, and she does it a lot better than Churchill did.” Some of our readers thought this odd, but we agree with Andrew Roberts. FH 151 declared similar sentiments toward HM The Queen. Churchill was a politician who switched parties twice, which effectively put him at odds with all of the people, some of the time. Her Majesty does not carry that kind of baggage!

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John Derbyshire writes from London: “Roman Britain took some decades to die completely. In about A.D. 500 an Irish scholar, the future St. Tatheus, was entertained by a rich man in southeast Wales who was still living in a villa and who still heated water for his bath on Saturdays. Seeing his visitors arrive, ʻwearied with their journey and voyage…he refused to bathe, until first the strangers, more worthy of bathing, had entered the bath.ʼ

“This charitable gent must have been one of the last to keep up Roman ways. Two hundred years later there were only incomprehensible ruins to stir an Anglo-Saxon poet to melancholy: ʻSplendid is this wall-stone; fate broke it. / Shattered is the manor-house, crumbled is the work of giants. / Fallen are the roofs, tumbled the towers…ʼ

“That this will be the fate of our civilization too, there is no reason to doubt….The particular case of the U.S. is surely not encouraging. The signs of exhaustion are all around. The monstrous swelling debts we fret about are only aspects of a larger, more comprehensive falling-off—a civilizational deficit. We seem old. Our ability to survive any great shock must be doubted. Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstandan, remarked another Anglo-Saxon poet: ʻA weary heart cannot withstand fate.ʼ

“The space shuttles are retired; there will be no more great national adventures. We can no longer do those things a young civilization can do— win wars, write memorable poems, expel intruders, live within our means, execute great feats of engineering. Once, in the first fine careless rapture of civilizational youth, we could do anything. Now we can do nothing. Once we civilized wild expanses and humbled great military empires. Now we insult our ancestors, wrestle with codes of tax and regulation three inches thick, and dicker ineffectually with barbarian chieftains. The Anglo-Saxon poet again: ʻThe north sends rough hailstorms / In malice against men. / All is distressful / In the earthly realm.ʼ”

In these days we dwell strangely and precariously, listening vainly, but with a thirsty ear, as MacArthur put it, “for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll….Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.” We listen for another Churchill, to remind us that all will come right, that “we have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.” And we listen on, hoping to hear a voice like his, again. —RML