man of his time. Apparently he
didn't know when he was sublime and when he was merely drivelling. He
didn't know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.

I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, "What do they know of
England, who only England know?" It is the watchword of a shallow
Imperialism. But I felt a certain truth in it once. I was alone in the
Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the
return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like
Richard, "towards England." In that moment I seemed to see it
imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the
years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its
mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its
squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the
horizon. I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it
as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never
loved it before. I found that I had left England to discover it.

That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally. We need to take a
journey from our self-absorbed centre, and see ourselves with a fresh eye
and an unprejudiced judgment.

ON THE ENGLISH SPIRIT

I have seen no story of the war which, within its limits, has pleased me
more than that which Mr. Alfred Noyes told in the newspapers in his
fascinating description of his visit to the Fleet. It was a story of the
battle of Jutland. "In the very hottest moment of this most stupendous
battle in all history," he says, "two grimy stokers' heads arose for a
breath of fresh air. What domestic drama they were discussing the world may
never know. But the words that were actually heard passing between them,
while the shells whined overhead, were these: 'What I says is, 'e ought to
have married 'er.'"

If you don't enjoy that story you will never understand the English spirit.
There are some among us who never will understand the English spirit. In
the early days of the war an excellent friend of mine used to find a great
source of despair in "Tipperary." What hope was there for a country whose
soldiers went to battle singing "Tipperary" against a foe who came on
singing "Ein' feste Burg"? Put that way, I was bound to confess that the
case looked black against us. It seemed "all Lombard Street to a China
orange," as the tag of other days would put it. It is true th