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Roger Scruton's England: Elegy Or Warning? - Review - book review
Contemporary Review, Feb, 2001 by Robert S. Redmond
ENGLAND -- An Elegy. Roger Scruton. Chatto & Windus. [pound]16.99. 257 pages. ISBN 1-85619-251-2.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word 'elegy' as a song of mourning, a funeral song. We can hope England still lives, but Roger Scruton tells a sorry tale. He starts from a humble family background as the son of a patriotic Socialist with a chip on his shoulder. He tells us about a schoolmaster, ex-colonial civil servant who showed devotion to the service of the Empire. Here was the true colonist -- not the money grabbing unscrupulous upper class operator supposed by some to be there for his own ends.
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Yet was that schoolmaster typical only of the English? As one reads the book with its description of English customs and culture, one finds oneself saying, that surely is the British. Irish, Scots and Welsh were also good colonists. Mr Scruton shows us, however, that it was the English who set the standards.
Roger Scruton goes on to describe the English love of fair play and how they have taken delight in making fun of things they cherish. In this, Gilbert & Sullivan and Dad's Army are truly English, but modern satire is different. His exposition of English Common Law is an essay in itself. It is something for England to be proud of and has developed since Anglo Saxon times in order to be just. Alas, as he says, it is being eroded by statute -- very often enacted by decree and from outside our boundaries.
The author devotes many pages to the way English society has developed and regrets the loss of valuable institutions. The changes made in education alone show how the idea that everything has to be 'relevant' has brought the eclipse of learning for its own sake with concern that what may be relevant today could be useless ten years hence.
Cricket was played in England as a game which you could lose with dignity. England played by the rules. What is happening on the football terraces, and now invading the cricket fields, encourages one to believe the spirit of English sportsmanship is in decline.
Mr Scruton looks with jaundiced eye at our system of Government today. Politics and Law went together in the past. No longer, her thinks, does Parliament represent the people. He argues that it represents the Government to the people. It receives orders from the Cabinet which it does nothing to control. Mr Blair, he thinks, sees the Monarch as someone who tags behind him rather than the person who appointed him. One step more, he fears, and England will become in fact what it is already -- a secular republic governed by conspiratorial elites.
This, surely, does not apply only to England, but to all the UK, which is in danger of fragmentation. Nevertheless, once the truth dawns, will the mild a-political English not rise up and say 'No More'. Is it never to be that English MPs will refuse to accept the idea of being overruled by those from Scotland while having no say north of the border?
What Mr Scruton has to say about English culture is reminiscent of the writings of that great patriot, Arthur Bryant. Here is a requiem. One can see how the literature of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the music of Britten, the architecture of Pugin, the art of Constable and others are losing their standing and are sneered at by modernists.
England has led the world in Common Law, Parliamentary Representation and in many other ways, but it has never worried about absorbing culture from elsewhere. At one time, there was the grand tour. Now, there is the package tour. What a pity there is little hope that the latter may bring the culture of the former!
Mr Scruton looks at The National Trust, The Council for the Preservation of Rural England and other bodies as memorials of the past as if they are powerless. He adds a brief reference to the Countryside Alliance, but might that not be an effective force for the future?
Perhaps some modern 'intellectuals', who know only a history of their choosing, will read this book and retort deprecating such chapters as the Slave Trade -- or what they believe about it. They forget -- if they have ever learned -- that it was Britain that led the world in abolishing it.
England may no longer be a gentle country, but this very loss of gentleness may not mean its end. G. K. Chesterton is famous for having said 'We are the people of England that have never spoken yet'. He was wrong. Roger Scruton refers to ways in which they have spoken in the past. Let us hope they will speak again soon. In this book, we have Elegy and warning.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
