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ROBERT MENZIES AND QUEEN ELIZABETH
II, HERE
IN 1954
The English Tradition
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Go here for more about
 Robert
Menzies.
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Robert
Menzies The English
Tradition article.
Photo above:
Prime Minister Robert Menzies escorts Queen Elizabeth II at
the State Banquet at Parliament House, Canberra, on February
16, 1954, with Pattie Menzies and the Duke of Edinburgh
following — National Archives Australia. |
It follows the full text transcript of
Robert Menzies' article entitled The English Tradition, as published in New York Times Magazine —
July 10, 1949.
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Since the war
ended there have been great changes |
in the British
Empire. Eire has gone. Burma has gone. Pakistan
and Ceylon have acquired full self-government.
India has declared for a republic, but has
retained a defined membership in the British
Commonwealth under a new formula worked out at a
conference of Prime Ministers. The British
position in the Middle East has been visibly
weakened. There are great movements in China,
and they are certainly not friendly to British
interests.
Are we, then, witnessing the end of an era? Are
we the close spectators of a British decline, to
be followed by a British fall? Or is there in
the English, the chief original founders of this
famous structure, some element of permanence
which will enable them 'to strive, to seek, to
find and not to yield'?
As a reasonably bigoted descendant of the
Scottish race, I do not want to be
misunderstood. The Scot has made and will
continue to make a fine contribution to the
world; in quality and character, as I think,
unsurpassed. But the early foundation of the
British Empire, its seafaring origins, and its
parliamentary and legal development, represent a
peculiarly English contribution to the world
history and world security. It is therefore to
the English characteristics that I propose to
devote attention.
It is easier for an Australian than for an
Englishman to write about the English tradition.
For there are things about the English which
even they themselves do not always clearly
understand, and which are frequently completely
misunderstood outside of England; particularly,
perhaps, in America.
The travelling Englishman, the writing
Englishman, the politically vocal Englishman,
the governing Englishman in scattered colonies
and protectorates has, so far, been broadly the
educated Englishman. Education in England has a
long and, if you like, conservative tradition
behind it. The educated Englishman, therefore,
has certain inherited and acquired mental habits
which deserve study. He cannot be explained in a
sentence, or disposed of by a single epigram. He
is probably the most civilized of human beings;
he is certainly one of the most complex.
He has, for example, great social confidence; a
faculty which, if accompanied (as it sometimes
is) by a dogmatic and unmodulated voice, easily
creates the impression of coldness and
arrogance. At his best, he possesses miraculous
powers of real conversation, a social and
intellectual art which is in process of decay in
most countries, degenerating too often into
indiscriminate wisecracking exchanges or a
series of boring monologues.
But the educated Englishman, whatever his
conversational powers, has an obstinate
objection to wearing his heart on his sleeve, or
parading his private affairs in the public eye.
The more deeply he feels about anything, the
less likely is he to discuss it seriously or
even to mention it at all. When, driven to it by
circumstances, he consents to speak of it, he
does so with a deliberate under-emphasis which
contrasts oddly with the over-emphasis by which
most of us seek to indicate strength of
conviction or violence of opinion. I have myself
heard an English statesman, fresh from Berlin a
few years before the war, say with exasperation
that Hitler was 'being very tiresome'. This
Englishman was no appeaser; he had strength,
conviction, and resolution; but he was very
English.
The truth is that by tradition and training, the
educated Englishman keeps his inner life to
himself. He burns more readily with inward
passions than with the facile fire of the lips.
His reserve in great matters, his sense of 'good
form', his belief that deep emotion is not for
daily display, his odd faculty of getting
himself mixed up in the world's most dramatic
crises and remaining, for the most part, dry and
cool and undramatic - these paradoxical
elements, have in more exuberant countries,
given him his reputation for cold-bloodedness
and hypocrisy.
In the United States (and to an extent in
Australia), where men are most widely
appreciated when they are 'folksy', or 'good
mixers', or, let's be frank, unsubtle, I have
frequently sensed a feeling that the Englishman
is a cagey sort of fellow, who 'must have a lot
up his sleeve', and who is undoubtedly playing
some mysterious and selfish game of his own.
In a world of boisterous and hail-fellow
democracy, this English reticence is easily
construed as aloofness. In a world, a restless
world, in which we have confused mechanical
skill with civilization and have assumed,
blindly, that all movement is progress, there
may seem to be less and less room for the
Englishman and his ancient ways.
Yet, this same Englishman has, twice this
century, been the defender of the world's
freedom in dark and desperate times. In the
twentieth century, unlike the nineteenth
century, Great Britain has not been, in absolute
terms, the greatest power in the world. In two
wars she has been the first into the field, and
has been literally in the front line of battle.
These two wars have, at least temporarily,
exhausted her. Today, in spite of her victorious
efforts and good-humoured tenacity, indeed,
because of the occasion for them and the
material and nervous sacrifices they have
involved, she has a problem of economic survival
which has called upon her people for renewed
efforts and sacrifice, and has moved the
generous people of the United States to a
magnificent measure of help through the Marshall
Plan.
Yet, as the material power of Great Britain has
become relatively smaller, I am convinced that
the English tradition, of cheerfulness, justice
under the law, tenacity, and the abiding
importance of the individual, becomes richer and
more significant. Walter Scott's passage in
Ivanhoe provides us with the key to this
tradition and its influence on the Englishman.
The famous archer match was on; the archer
Hubert was under challenge:
'A man can but do his best,' answered Hubert,
'but my grandsire drew a good long bow at
Hastings, and I trust not to dishonor his
memory.'
Come forward to our own times. Early in 1941,
during the period when the British nations,
without any major ally, were under attack by a
so-far victorious enemy, I was in England. Every
night for the ten weeks that I sat with the War
Cabinet in London, the sirens sounded, and some
of the town was bombed, factories destroyed,
thousands of men and women and children blasted
to death.
I was much in the company of Winston Churchill
and became familiar at first hand with his
unwavering confidence and his cheerful and
chuckling courage. It was not without
significance that he lived and moved at Chequers,
a Tudor mansion deep in the Chiltern Hills,
surrounded by reminders, in book and picture and
church steeple and the ancient scars still
visible on the hillsides looking down to the
Roman Road to Wendover, of old struggles and the
heroes of the past. Amid visible memories of
Hampden and Cromwell and the whole course of the
English struggle for freedom, it is small wonder
that Churchill came to embody, for millions all
over the world, that continuing English spirit
which confronts the future with confidence
because its roots are deep in the soil of
English history?
For tradition, to the Englishman, is not a
barren pride in departed glories; it is
something from which he derives a profound
assurance, a sense of destiny, and a
determination never to abandon what has been
purchased with such valor and endurance by those
who have gone before him. There is the essence
of the matter. The English tradition is not a
recollection of the dead; it is real, and
living, and growing. It rests upon an unspoken,
and perhaps in many cases unrealized, faith in
the undefeated continuity of the race.
'Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we
die.' is the motto of those who lack this faith.
But a man with a deep sense of continuity sees
himself not as an accidental unit doomed to
vanish in a few years but as one of a great
human procession, influenced and helped by those
who have gone before him, responsible in his
turn for giving help and encouragement to those
who will come after.
In no rhetorical sense, I declare my own belief
that the English tradition, so understood,
cannot be destroyed, and that no material change
of circumstance, no international rearrangement,
can ever outmode it. There are two things about
this traditional spirit which must be
appreciated if the English are to be accurately
understood and justly valued.
The first is that, in the language of the
logicians, the Englishman's habitual mental
method is inductive, not deductive. He reasons
from the particular to the general. We newer
peoples, the Americans, the Australians and
older Latin countries bred in the traditions of
the Roman Law and the kind of mind that produced
it, readily adopt broad theories - of
international organization, of statecraft, of
economics, of social or individual behavior. The
broader the better.
And then we are disposed to take our theory and
fit the facts to it, squeezing them here,
stretching them there; forgetting all too
frequently that facts are intractable things
which have shattered many theories before today
and will shatter many more in the future.
The Englishman starts at the other end. Subject
to human frailty, he deals with the individual
case as it arises, as justly and as fairly as he
knows how. After a while he finds that, by a
series of decisions, he has established a line
of precedent. His line of precedent becomes a
working rule; a mass of working rules is seen by
some student to evolve into a theory of
doctrine. The Englishman thus works up to a
proved theory, and not down from an unproved
one.
This simple analysis explains and is illustrated
by the origin and growth of the English Common
Law. Over a period of centuries that law
developed, with little statutory assistance,
from one judicial decision to another on the
particular facts of some dispute; case piled on
case, precedent on precedent, until at long last
all the basic elements in the laws of contract
and civil wrongs and the like were hammered out
and took form and obtained an accepted
authority. This slow and inductive process
contrasts sharply with that instinct for
codification, for the promulgation (in advance)
of the complete law, which has characterized
European law from the Institutes onward, and
which still has its champions in the draftsmen
of the Charters of San Francisco and Havana.
The second feature is the English humor, a rich
part of the English tradition. It is an integral
part of the national sanity and therefore of the
national continuity. We are told that we are not
to argue about matters of taste, though we
constantly do, and for the very human reason
that our taste is demonstrably right and the
other fellow's absurd!
Similarly about humor, only more so. You may
tell Jones that he is color blind, or has poor
timing in games; but you tell him he has no
sense of humor at your peril.
And if this is true among individuals of the
same race, how much more true it is among
nations themselves. To the average Frenchman the
Englishman is a long-faced fellow with no humor
save an occasional wintry smile. To the average
Englishman the French wit seems to have an undue
element of cruelty in it, while it has become a
convention, based upon an occasional visit to
Paris's Montmartre and Montparnasse (where in
the better-known places of tourist entertainment
there are few Frenchmen to be found) that French
humor entirely revolves around sex. In the
United States, Punch, London's famous humor
magazine, is not infrequently treated with the
respect that would be accorded to any other
antique, a chair by Chippendale or a table by
Sheraton, while I myself (let me confess it
without either sackcloth or ashes) can sometimes
read through an entire number of The New Yorker
with nothing more than mild bewilderment.
Let me not, therefore, try to analyze the
unanalyzable. Let me rather say, quite simply,
that the English humor is not of words but of
character and situation. It quickly sees and
enjoys the ridiculous; it makes game of the
pompous; it instinctively seeks a laugh out of
misery. It knows, as Shakespeare knew, that
tragedy cannot be unrelieved if men are not to
go mad; and so, in 1940 and 1941, under the
blitz, it continued to sprinkle its Hamlet with
grave-diggers' humor.
In Cardiff, in March 1941, I visited an area
where a German parachute mine, dropped from a
raiding bomber, had finally landed. Well over a
hundred houses had been literally blown out, and
many hundreds of others damaged. The destruction
was dreadful; the smoke was still rising; among
the hot ruins people were still digging and
searching.
I spoke to fifty violently evicted householders
and asked about casualties. A cheerful voice
spoke up. 'No, only one killed, mister, and you
can't rightly say killed, because he died of
heart failure!' They all laughed. Call it
macabre, or heartless, if you will, but it was
the quaint, strange element which Hitler never
understood, and which ultimately defeated him.
In a broadcast in Australia in November 1942, I
used words which I now repeat:
"If ever
anybody writes a history of the human mind
under the strain of war, he will give a
chapter of honor to the English people under
the blitz. There he will find few heroics,
oddly little black rage, no imitation
intellectualism, no showing off. On the
contrary, he will find a strange and
enduring mixture of brave wit, patient
humor, high spirits and merry talk in the
midst of dirt and discomfort and danger."
Well, there it is, as one observer sees it; a
tradition compounded of a sense of continuity, a
conviction of responsibility, a distrust of the
vague and theoretical, and the laughter which
sets a rainbow across the cloud.
It is a good tradition, and it cannot die.
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