Europe in the Looking Glass Read Free

Oxford. Simon and I arrived there a year later, he having spent most of 1922 at Tours, while I had remained at school.
    Simon’s communism is the misdirected outcome of sympathy for those less fortunate than himself. During our trip he talked vaguely of the nationalization of the banks. Otherwise he was considered at Oxford a brilliant historian. He is fond of obscure details, and paradoxes culled, from Chesterton and Belloc, which upset the views of every single authority on any given subject. His knowledge of out-of-the-way facts, such as the date of the death of the last woman who spoke Cornish, or the dimensions of the Albanian fustanella, is astonishing, though uncoordinated. He is extremely well read.
    Unfortunately, his relations with his college authorities did not run smoothly. Regardless of his degree, he forsook the pleasures of university life and started to write a history of church persecution under Cromwell. Then he joined the scientific expedition. This, for some reason, elected to go ina sailing ship, and spent most of its time waiting for funds at Panama, to the complete demoralization of all on board. The town was full of American officials and their wives. Eventually they did succeed in reaching the Galapagos Islands; and were finally faced with complete starvation. By that time, however, Simon had left them.
    In appearance Simon is upright and neat. He affects a pearl pin and stiff collar. Whenever possible he likes to dress for dinner. Both he and David have lost their fathers.
    David is of a different type. A kind of supernatural vigour is his outstanding characteristic. He is lazy, partly because this exhausts him. But whatever he does becomes of itself remarkable.
    He is slim, and possesses and wears an enormous wardrobe of fashionable, though sombre, clothes. Whereas Simon is shy and does not converse fluently with strangers, David is totally devoid of even a decent sense of embarrassment and can make inexhaustible conversation to any living creature that understands a single word of French, German or English. He also has a knowledge of history, but his chief interests are decoration and architecture. In the latter he is a purist. To both him and Simon, Sentiment and Romance, far from palliating the defects of a building or the unauthenticity of a legend, are not only meaningless, but repellent. It was on this common ground that they differed most fundamentally from myself.
    As mentioned above, Simon’s knowledge of the Universe was confined to Panama, some desert islands and Tours. I had, in the spring of 1923, spent five weeks in Italy under ideal circumstances, and could claim some knowledge of that country and her monuments. I had also visited parts of Central Europe. But of the three, it was only David who possessed more than a superficial familiarity with Europe, her countries and their inhabitants. He knew France. He had experienced revolutions in Germany after the war. And in 1924 he had motored to the Russian frontier, spent six weeks in Poland, and then taken Prague, Vienna and Rome in his stride home.This had been a most remarkable tour, which only his initiative could have carried through. It is his outstanding ambition, in fact, to make the acquaintance of the whole earth and the races with which it is peopled.
    To attain a sense of the relative proportions of the various entities of which the modern world is composed, it is essential clearly to define the position occupied by the civilization of the United States. This is only possible by comparison with Europe. But Europe, taken as a whole, is such an unknown quantity to most of her inhabitants, nurtured in the disastrous tradition of the armed and insular state, that they are unable to gauge the contrast between their own corporate civilization, the laborious construction of two thousand years, and the retrograde industrialism sprung up in a night on the other side of the Atlantic. Admittedly it is not to be expected that the doings