Literature,
especially
poetry, and lyric poetry
most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-
group.
most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-
group.
Orwell
Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English
civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with
solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and
red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the
future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can
the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you
in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the
mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is YOUR civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it,
you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the
red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it,
and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything
else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is
not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others
not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a
parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and detennine what England IS,
before guessing what part England CAN PLAY in the huge events that are happening.
II
National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn
out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel
to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are
addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless,
nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something
about the realities of English life.
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all
observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as
the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they
have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They
have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic
‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for
themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply,
their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system
that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the
compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they
have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy —
their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance — is bound up with this.
Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act
upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost
everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a
sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is
anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.
But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though
not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that
one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from
southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really,
because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link
up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we
barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the
PRIVATENESS of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of
stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players,
crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which
even when they are communal are not official — the pub, the football match, the back
garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed
in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty,
the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do
what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them
chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey
Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like
all other modem people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled,
conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the
kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No
party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’
demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
But in all societies the common people must live to some extent AGAINST the existing
order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the
surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one
notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that
they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages
will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the
world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws
(licensing laws, lottery acts, etc. etc. ) which are designed to interfere with everybody but
in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite
religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real
hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects
only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling,
while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion
of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the
common people. They have never caught up with power politics. The ‘realism’ which is
preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good
deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the
windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the
English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook,
their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme
gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You
notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are
good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white
men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is
always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred
of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle
class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it.
Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets
and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the
premises. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill
the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a
specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum
proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and
their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by
promising them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any
appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their
own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist*. The only enemy they
ever named was the sergeant-major.
* For example:
‘I don’t want to join the bloody Army,
I don’t want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam.
I’d rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.
But it was not in that spirit that they fought.
(Author’s footnote. )
In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small
minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do
not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English
literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the
ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and
retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John
Moore’s anny at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas
(just like Dunkirk! ) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-
poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And
of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular
memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names
of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the
general public.
The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores
the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English
have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare
they then turn round and say that war is wicked?
It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class
this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of
standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people,
and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military
dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What
English people of nearly ah classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the
swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler
was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as
‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of
the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.
One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of
its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet,
expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most
horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an
affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the
vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is
saying is ‘Yes, I am UGLY, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces
at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows,
plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not
used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military
display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the
anny. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely
under Gennan control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans.
The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground
discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and
complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the
march is merely a fonnalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword,
no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.
And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and
anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over
against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the
hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century,
handing out savage sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged
with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but
there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them (and
Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law’,
which is assumed to be unalterable.
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and
legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual,
something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate INCORRUPTIBLE.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for
the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone
takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of
outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything
wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of
England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else.
One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s WALLS HAVE MOUTHS or Jim
Phelan’s JAIL JOURNEY, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of
conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing
out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that
the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The
totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken
root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The
familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’
totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying
that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and
objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful
illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.
In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor
oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go
beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open
fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class.
But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become
COMPLETELY corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with
revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any
direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old
man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach
what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the
books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of
England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and
privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation
keeps itself in its familiar shape.
Ill
I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, ‘England’, ‘Britain’, as though forty-five
million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But is not England notoriously two
nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one pretend that there is anything in common
between people with £100,000 a year and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and
Scottish readers are likely to have been offended because I have used the word ‘England’
oftener than ‘Britain’, as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home
Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own.
One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite
true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one
another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman.
You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no
less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United
Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and
south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the
moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a
foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or
even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very
different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of
‘France’ and ‘the French’, recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in
fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney and the
York shi reman have a strong family resemblance.
And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the
nation from the outside. There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It
is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest
street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at
the same time the vast majority of the people FEEL themselves to be a single nation and
are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism
is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of
internationalism. Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the ‘Hands off Russia’ movement)
the British working class have never thought or acted internationally. For two and a half
years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly strangled, and never aided them by
even a single strike*. But when their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr
Montagu Norman) was in danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when
it seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio
for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the first twenty-four
hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One has only to compare these
figures with, for instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how vast is the
strength of traditional loyalties compared with new ones.
* It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money. Still, the sums raised for the
various aid-Spain funds would not equal five per cent of the turnover of the football pools
during the same period. (Author’s footnote. )
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a
connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are
really immune to it. As a positive emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the
upper class — the cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic
demonstrations than the expensive ones — but the number of definitely treacherous rich
men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In the working class patriotism is
profound, but it is unconscious. The working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a
Union Jack. But the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in
the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are more national than
the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign
habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of
working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.
During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to
an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French
soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The insularity of the English, their refusal
to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to
time. But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to
break it down have generally done more hann than good. At bottom it is the same quality
in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader.
Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out, seemingly at
random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the lack of artistic ability. This is
perhaps another way of saying that the English are outside the European culture. For
there is one art in which they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is
also the only art that cannot cross frontiers.
Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry
most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-
group. Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely known in Europe, even
as names. The only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong
reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy. And linked up
with this, though not very obviously, is the lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in
nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered system of thought or even for the use of
logic.
Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a ‘world-view’. Just because
patriotism is all but universal and not even the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be
moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a
herd of cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time of the
disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the
people suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk,
and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger!
The Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous action — and, then,
alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that would have been exactly the
moment for a big peace movement to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the
English will always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will tell them
to do the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for instance, we all did the wrong
thing in perfect unison. We were as single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly
doubt whether we can say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.
It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes appears. A foreign
observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the
governing-class control over the press, the radio and education, and concludes that
democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable
agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much
one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National
Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums,
unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a
stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.
In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly certain that the bulk
of the English people were behind Chamberlain’s foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain
that the same struggle was going on in Chamberlain’s mind as in the minds of ordinary
people. His opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell
England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best
according to his very dim lights. It is difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of
his policy, his failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass of
the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of war. And public opinion
was behind him all the while, in policies that were completely incompatible with one
another. It was behind him when he went to Munich, when he tried to come to an
understanding with Russia, when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it,
and when he prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy
became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned against its own
lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their
mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without
lighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist
nations can fight effectively.
Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even a reader of the
DAILY TELEGRAPH could quite swallow that.
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and
privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to
take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel
alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe
that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the
concentration camp. At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets
abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold
on the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of
speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t matter. It is safe to let a
paper like PEACE NEWS be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the
population will never want to read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.
At any nonnal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck;
but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that they
cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who
denounce the whole of the ruling class as ‘pro-Fascist’ are grossly over-simplifying. Even
among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful
whether there were any CONSCIOUS traitors. The corruption that happens in England is
seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right
hand not knowing what the left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One
sees this at its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest?
At nonnal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their
advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do
not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard
cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could
notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in
England has never been OPENLY scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of
disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the
inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy
Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with
skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are
horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family
income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is
in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its
private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its
ranks. A family with the wrong members in control — that, perhaps, is as near as one can
come to describing England in a phrase.
IV
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening
battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English
life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling
class.
In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical
reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like
the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of
English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the
old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming
a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who
had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy
shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his
sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that
purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And
considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were
buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one
might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.
And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its
ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as
men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name
of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England’s domestic
problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy
between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened?
What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong
thing with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to
be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial
network, drawing interest and profits and spending them — on what? It was fair to say that
life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty,
with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and
unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely
benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge
together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and
technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living
on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose
photographs you can look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always supposing
that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They
were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were
aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their
usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was
not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by
bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition,
they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is
laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one
escape for them — into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by
being UNABLE to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was,
they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the
changes that were going on round them.
There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to
the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land.
It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the
eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and
again startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has
started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people
comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the
aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would
have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of
the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the
Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of
thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely
useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular anny. But the navy is only
partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling
class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However
unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or
haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever
been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed
men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and
looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the British ruling class
had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists.
But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from
the outside.
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand
them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a
serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the
theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system
by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact
that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry
generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns — by ignoring it. After years of aggression
and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to
Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-
drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M. P. s wildly cheering the
news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been
bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was
dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of
making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the
time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be
acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result
would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had
given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political
ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers,
ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the
‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as
bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think
that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic
doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their
side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than
from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for
nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural
instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with
Hitler. But — and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep
sense of national solidarity, comes in — they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this
without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England.
Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our
conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their
incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do
anything but make the worst of both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY fairly
sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several
dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not
happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to
be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions.
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity,
unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not
wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money
and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are
living in.
V
The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but
it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class.
One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and
the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic
opposites — the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur,
the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck — are mentally linked together
and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable
extent into the same families.
Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families
celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and
navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the
Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph.
In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less
room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no
place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the
colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark
suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were
imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and
deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over
the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently
under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to
impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And
what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly
companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life
in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist
sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the
job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if
there was any way of avoiding it.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British
morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing
intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’.
Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone
describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing
order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an
Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an
England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be
suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any
important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary
reviews and the left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen
weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their
generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive
suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have
never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic
is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact
with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935,
shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were
most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying
this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their
severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their
cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the
country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great
country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is
always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it
is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a
strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel
more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English
morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes
violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this
had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real
weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and
that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly
responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out
against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible.
civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with
solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and
red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the
future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can
the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you
in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the
mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is YOUR civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it,
you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the
red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it,
and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything
else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is
not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others
not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a
parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and detennine what England IS,
before guessing what part England CAN PLAY in the huge events that are happening.
II
National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn
out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel
to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are
addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless,
nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something
about the realities of English life.
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all
observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as
the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they
have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They
have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic
‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for
themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply,
their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system
that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the
compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they
have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy —
their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance — is bound up with this.
Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act
upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost
everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a
sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is
anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.
But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though
not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that
one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from
southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really,
because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link
up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we
barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the
PRIVATENESS of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of
stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players,
crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which
even when they are communal are not official — the pub, the football match, the back
garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed
in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty,
the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do
what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them
chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey
Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like
all other modem people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled,
conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the
kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No
party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’
demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
But in all societies the common people must live to some extent AGAINST the existing
order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the
surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one
notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that
they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages
will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the
world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws
(licensing laws, lottery acts, etc. etc. ) which are designed to interfere with everybody but
in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite
religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real
hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects
only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling,
while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion
of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the
common people. They have never caught up with power politics. The ‘realism’ which is
preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good
deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the
windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the
English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook,
their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme
gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You
notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are
good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white
men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is
always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred
of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle
class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it.
Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets
and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the
premises. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill
the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a
specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum
proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and
their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by
promising them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any
appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their
own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist*. The only enemy they
ever named was the sergeant-major.
* For example:
‘I don’t want to join the bloody Army,
I don’t want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam.
I’d rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.
But it was not in that spirit that they fought.
(Author’s footnote. )
In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small
minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do
not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English
literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the
ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and
retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John
Moore’s anny at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas
(just like Dunkirk! ) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-
poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And
of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular
memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names
of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the
general public.
The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores
the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English
have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare
they then turn round and say that war is wicked?
It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class
this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of
standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people,
and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military
dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What
English people of nearly ah classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the
swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler
was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as
‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of
the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.
One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of
its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet,
expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most
horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an
affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the
vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is
saying is ‘Yes, I am UGLY, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces
at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows,
plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not
used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military
display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the
anny. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely
under Gennan control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans.
The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground
discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and
complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the
march is merely a fonnalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword,
no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.
And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and
anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over
against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the
hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century,
handing out savage sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged
with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but
there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them (and
Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law’,
which is assumed to be unalterable.
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and
legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual,
something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate INCORRUPTIBLE.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for
the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone
takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of
outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything
wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of
England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else.
One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s WALLS HAVE MOUTHS or Jim
Phelan’s JAIL JOURNEY, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of
conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing
out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that
the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The
totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken
root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The
familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’
totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying
that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and
objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful
illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.
In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor
oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go
beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open
fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class.
But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become
COMPLETELY corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with
revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any
direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old
man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach
what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the
books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of
England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and
privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation
keeps itself in its familiar shape.
Ill
I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, ‘England’, ‘Britain’, as though forty-five
million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But is not England notoriously two
nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one pretend that there is anything in common
between people with £100,000 a year and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and
Scottish readers are likely to have been offended because I have used the word ‘England’
oftener than ‘Britain’, as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home
Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own.
One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite
true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one
another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman.
You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no
less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United
Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and
south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the
moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a
foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or
even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very
different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of
‘France’ and ‘the French’, recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in
fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney and the
York shi reman have a strong family resemblance.
And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the
nation from the outside. There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It
is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest
street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at
the same time the vast majority of the people FEEL themselves to be a single nation and
are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism
is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of
internationalism. Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the ‘Hands off Russia’ movement)
the British working class have never thought or acted internationally. For two and a half
years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly strangled, and never aided them by
even a single strike*. But when their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr
Montagu Norman) was in danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when
it seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio
for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the first twenty-four
hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One has only to compare these
figures with, for instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how vast is the
strength of traditional loyalties compared with new ones.
* It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money. Still, the sums raised for the
various aid-Spain funds would not equal five per cent of the turnover of the football pools
during the same period. (Author’s footnote. )
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a
connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are
really immune to it. As a positive emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the
upper class — the cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic
demonstrations than the expensive ones — but the number of definitely treacherous rich
men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In the working class patriotism is
profound, but it is unconscious. The working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a
Union Jack. But the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in
the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are more national than
the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign
habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of
working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.
During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to
an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French
soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The insularity of the English, their refusal
to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to
time. But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to
break it down have generally done more hann than good. At bottom it is the same quality
in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader.
Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out, seemingly at
random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the lack of artistic ability. This is
perhaps another way of saying that the English are outside the European culture. For
there is one art in which they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is
also the only art that cannot cross frontiers.
Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry
most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-
group. Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely known in Europe, even
as names. The only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong
reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy. And linked up
with this, though not very obviously, is the lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in
nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered system of thought or even for the use of
logic.
Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a ‘world-view’. Just because
patriotism is all but universal and not even the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be
moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a
herd of cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time of the
disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the
people suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk,
and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger!
The Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous action — and, then,
alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that would have been exactly the
moment for a big peace movement to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the
English will always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will tell them
to do the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for instance, we all did the wrong
thing in perfect unison. We were as single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly
doubt whether we can say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.
It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes appears. A foreign
observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the
governing-class control over the press, the radio and education, and concludes that
democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable
agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much
one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National
Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums,
unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a
stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.
In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly certain that the bulk
of the English people were behind Chamberlain’s foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain
that the same struggle was going on in Chamberlain’s mind as in the minds of ordinary
people. His opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell
England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best
according to his very dim lights. It is difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of
his policy, his failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass of
the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of war. And public opinion
was behind him all the while, in policies that were completely incompatible with one
another. It was behind him when he went to Munich, when he tried to come to an
understanding with Russia, when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it,
and when he prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy
became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned against its own
lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their
mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without
lighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist
nations can fight effectively.
Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even a reader of the
DAILY TELEGRAPH could quite swallow that.
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and
privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to
take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel
alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe
that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the
concentration camp. At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets
abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold
on the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of
speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t matter. It is safe to let a
paper like PEACE NEWS be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the
population will never want to read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.
At any nonnal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck;
but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that they
cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who
denounce the whole of the ruling class as ‘pro-Fascist’ are grossly over-simplifying. Even
among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful
whether there were any CONSCIOUS traitors. The corruption that happens in England is
seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right
hand not knowing what the left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One
sees this at its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest?
At nonnal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their
advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do
not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard
cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could
notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in
England has never been OPENLY scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of
disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the
inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy
Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with
skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are
horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family
income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is
in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its
private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its
ranks. A family with the wrong members in control — that, perhaps, is as near as one can
come to describing England in a phrase.
IV
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening
battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English
life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling
class.
In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical
reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like
the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of
English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the
old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming
a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who
had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy
shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his
sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that
purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And
considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were
buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one
might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.
And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its
ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as
men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name
of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England’s domestic
problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy
between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened?
What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong
thing with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to
be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial
network, drawing interest and profits and spending them — on what? It was fair to say that
life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty,
with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and
unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely
benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge
together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and
technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living
on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose
photographs you can look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always supposing
that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They
were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were
aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their
usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was
not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by
bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition,
they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is
laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one
escape for them — into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by
being UNABLE to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was,
they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the
changes that were going on round them.
There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to
the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land.
It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the
eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and
again startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has
started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people
comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the
aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would
have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of
the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the
Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of
thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely
useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular anny. But the navy is only
partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling
class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However
unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or
haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever
been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed
men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and
looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the British ruling class
had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists.
But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from
the outside.
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand
them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a
serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the
theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system
by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact
that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry
generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns — by ignoring it. After years of aggression
and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to
Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-
drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M. P. s wildly cheering the
news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been
bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was
dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of
making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the
time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be
acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result
would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had
given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political
ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers,
ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the
‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as
bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think
that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic
doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their
side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than
from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for
nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural
instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with
Hitler. But — and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep
sense of national solidarity, comes in — they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this
without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England.
Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our
conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their
incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do
anything but make the worst of both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY fairly
sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several
dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not
happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to
be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions.
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity,
unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not
wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money
and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are
living in.
V
The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but
it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class.
One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and
the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic
opposites — the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur,
the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck — are mentally linked together
and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable
extent into the same families.
Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families
celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and
navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the
Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph.
In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less
room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no
place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the
colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark
suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were
imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and
deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over
the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently
under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to
impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And
what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly
companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life
in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist
sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the
job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if
there was any way of avoiding it.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British
morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing
intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’.
Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone
describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing
order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an
Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an
England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be
suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any
important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary
reviews and the left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen
weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their
generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive
suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have
never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic
is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact
with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935,
shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were
most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying
this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their
severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their
cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the
country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great
country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is
always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it
is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a
strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel
more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English
morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes
violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this
had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real
weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and
that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly
responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out
against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible.
