But I have said enough to make it clear that, as we owe so much
of our best to understanding Europe, so the need to understand
Europe lies urgently to-day upon large classes in this country;
and that yet, in the nature of things, these classes can never
enjoy such leisure as our forefathers enjoyed to understand what
I call the soul of Europe, or at least to misunderstand it _upon
acquaintance._
Let me point out further that within the last few months we have
doubled the difficulty at a stroke by sharing the government of
our country with women and admitting them to Parliament. It
beseems a great nation to take great risks: to dare them is at
once a sign and a property of greatness: and for good or ill--but
for limitless good as we trust--our country has quietly made this
enterprise amid the preoccupations of the greatest War in its
annals. Look at it as you will--let other generations judge
it as they will--it stands a monument of our faith in free
self-government that in these most perilous days we gave and took
so high a guerdon of trust in one another.
But clearly it implies that all the women of this country, down
to the small girls entering our elementary schools, must be
taught a great many things their mothers and grandmothers--happy
in their generation--were content not to know[1].
It cannot be denied, I think, that in the long course of this
War, now happily on the point of a victorious conclusion, we have
suffered heavily through past neglect and present nescience of
our literature, which is so much more European, so much more
catholic, a thing than either our politics or our national
religion: that largely by reason of this neglect and this
nescience our statesmen have again and again failed to foresee
how continental nations would act through failing to understand
their minds; and have almost invariably, through this lack of
sympathetic understanding, failed to interpret us to foreign
friend or foe, even when (and it was not often) they interpreted
us to ourselves. I note that America--a country with no
comparable separate tradition of literature--has customarily
chosen men distinguished by the grace of letters for ambassadors
to the Court of St James--Motley, Lowell, Hay, Page, in our time:
and has for her President a man of letters--and a Professor at
that!--whereas, even in these critical days, Great Britain,
having a most noble cause and at least half-a-hundred writers and
speakers capable of presenting it with dignity and so clearly
that no neutral nation could mistake its logic, has by preference
entrusted it to stunt journalists and film-artistes. If in these
later days you have lacked a voice to interpret you in the great
accent of a Chatham, the cause lies in past indifference to that
literary tradition which is by no means the least among the
glories of our birth and state.