An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 9

preparing now
for social dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing the
detail of these events with an air of things accomplished. They will
decide whether the Coronation has been a success and whether
everything has or has not passed off very well. For us in the great
crowd nothing has as yet succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are
intent upon a King newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom we
know as yet very little, but who has, nevertheless, roused such
expectation as no King before him has done since Tudor times, in the
presence of gigantic opportunities.

There is a conviction widespread among us--his own words, perhaps,
have done most to create it--that King George is inspired, as no recent
predecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that his is
to be no rôle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad processes
of our national and imperial development. That greater public life
which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told, taken
hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity and
correlation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents,
but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.
Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable
democracy of individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such
a Prince. Our consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of
vast possibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has
never really slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the
Boer War. Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the
traditions of party government and a legacy of intellectual and social
heaviness, has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness,
against stupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every
department of life. We have come to see more and more clearly how
little we can hope for from politicians, societies and organised
movements in these essential things. It is this that has invested the
energy and manhood, the untried possibilities of the new King with so
radiant a light of hope for us.
Think what it may mean for us all--I write as one of that great
ill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside the
echoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society--if
our King does indeed care for these wider and profounder things!
Suppose we have a King at last who cares for the advancement of
science, who is willing to do the hundred things that are so easy in his
position to increase research, to honour and to share in scientific
thought. Suppose we have a King whose head rises above the level of
the Court artist, and who not only can but will appeal to the latent and
discouraged power of artistic creation in our race. Suppose we have a
King who understands the need for incessant, acute criticism to keep
our collective activities intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold,
unhampered thought through every department of the national life, a
King liberal without laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity.

Such, it seems to us who wait at present almost inexpressively outside
the immediate clamours of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendid
possibilities of the time.
For England is no exhausted or decaying country. It is rich with an
unmeasured capacity for generous responses. It is a country burthened
indeed, but not overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities of Empire,
a little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than enslaved by a
certain shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity,
slovenliness and insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful of
intellectual power and enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious to
brave and beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaning
and industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers hypocrites
gladly, because its criticism is poor, and it is wastefully harsh to frank
unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short of
acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a
quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its
respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new
quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the
spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such
emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King
alone can give it....
When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, what
will the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things visible?
Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add
abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of
ill-conceived rebuilding which testify