Goodbye, Mr. Chips was one of those books I not only had never read but had never really seriously considered reading. I saw bits of one of the television adaptations, long ago, and actually watched the abysmal musical movie as well, but I’m not sure it ever occurred to me that there was a source book, or that the source book might actually be any good. In fact, it’s great.
Oh, it’s sloppy sentiment, yes, of course it is. There’s nothing wrong with sloppy sentiment, if it’s done well, and mixed with something else. This is mixed with something else. I think, in a lot of ways, it’s about the war. World War One, that is. It’s written in 1934 (by James Hilton, who also wrote Lost Horizon, although I didn’t know that they were both written by the same person until yesterday; I must remember to seek out his Random Harvest), and Mr. Chips teaches at Brookfield from 1870 until then. Mr. Chipping, I should say. He looks back on his years with something of the same mixture of regret and nostalgia that I once wrote about in connection with The Wimsey Papers. I’m talking about the sense that the Old Order is going, inevitably going, together with the knowledge that there was much about the Old Order that was indefensible and awful, together with the knowledge that there was much about the Old Order that was wonderful and noble.
It’s a sentiment we seem to be lacking, in our culture at the moment. Have we not yet reached the zeitgeist awareness that the Old Order is going? Are we successfully kicking against the pricks, at least insofar as awareness is concerned? Or are we sufficiently disgusted with the last two generations that we haven’t the sentiment that Mr. Hilton (and Ms. Sayers, as well as Mr. Waugh and others) has? Or is sentiment unAmerican, and I’m just enough of an Anglophile to tap into it, and tap out of my own cultural wrestling match?
Anyway, Gentle Reader, I would like you to spare a moment to think of Mr. Chips, beloved but not terribly competent. He beats the children, and teaches them bad Latin, which they forget immediately just as he expects them to, and he tells terrible little jokes. And he does all that for fifty years or more, and provides no benefit whatsoever to his students other than his affection for them and their affection for him, and a sense that perhaps his kindliness and ineffectiveness is valuable beyond their ken.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.