Women face
childbed
and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber,
battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
Orwell
Miller himself would be the last to claim or want any such thing.
No
doubt he will go on writing — anybody who has ones started always goes on writing — and
associated with him there are a number of writers of approximately the same tendency,
Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a ‘school’. But he
himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to
descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism: there are signs of both in his later
work. His last book, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not
because I did not want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities have so
far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it would surprise me if it came
anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the opening chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like
certain other autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly,
and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that is
something.
Miller’s books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will happen to the
Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and Jack Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do
not know, but at any rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who
has not done so to read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little ingenuity, or by
paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it
disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken
of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or
when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to TROPIC OF
CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only
imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-
speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will
probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single
glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere
Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically,
that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in
England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a
demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself
into its new shape.
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)
Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or
twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight
bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-
sparrow ’s-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many people seem to be
unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are
something to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock.
Actually they are on sale everywhere — they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth’s,
for example — and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of comic
illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the
Wendyish, sub-pomographic ones which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a
genre of their own, specializing in very Tow’ humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s-nappy,
policemen’ s-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no
artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people
who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only
the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most
representative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know.
He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as
‘The Donald McGill Comics’, but he is also unquestionable a real person with a style of
drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his post cards in bulk
will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere
dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is
simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability
to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest. McGill is a clever
draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value
of his post cards is that they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the
nonn of the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are exactly what
comic post cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the meaning
and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill’s — if you pick out from a pile the
ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill’s —
and spread them out on a table. What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-
present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter
low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but,
even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like
those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them,
every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the
women monstrously paradied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression,
however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are
they ’so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post
cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are
really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of
smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European
consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke
columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are
aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
‘I like seeing experienced girls home. ’
‘But I’m not experienced! ’
‘You’re not home yet! ’
‘I’ve been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours? ’
‘I left off struggling. ’
JUDGE: ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman? ’
Co — respondent: ‘Not a wink, my lord! ’
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be said for McGill’s
post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke
beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and
I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX. — More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from
the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby.
Typical captions: ‘Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby’s feeding-bottle? ’
‘She didn’t ask me to the christening, so I’m not going to the wedding. ’ Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are IPSO FACTO
funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is
seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is
plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-
looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous
honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed,
red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.
HOME LIFE — Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption:
‘Did they get an X-ray of your wife’s jaw at the hospital? ’ — ‘No, they got a moving
picture instead. ’
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. Drunkenness — Both
drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women
are never represented.
W. C. JOKES — There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso facto funny,
and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned ‘A Friend in Need’, shows a
man’s hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies’ lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY — Much in these post cards suggests that they
are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes
turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum
dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type
exchanging ‘unladylike’ abuse. Typical repartee: ‘I wish you were a statue and I was a
pigeon! ’ A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee
angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic
maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc. ; but there are
no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under
£5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun
as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES — Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the
Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman
always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The ‘knut’ or ‘masher’ still appears,
almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or
even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged
in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature of the
last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The ‘Jew joke’, always
somewhat more ill-natured than the ‘Scotch joke’, disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS — Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for
example, ‘free love’, feminism, A. R. P. , nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post
cards, but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political
outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not
only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about ‘God save
the King’, the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to reflect itself in them
at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of A. R. P. Even at this
date few post cards mention the war except in A. R. P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses
at window she has forgotten to black out, etc. , etc. ) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments
of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGill’s, shows Hitler with the usual
hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption; ‘What would you do,
chums? ’ This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great
monopoly company, and evidendy they are not regarded as having any importance in
forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook
acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic post cards — their
obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their
purpose, though not in a way diat is immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out
behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has
nothing to do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure with
the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these
pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose
women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the
McGill post card — and this applies to all other post cards in this genre — is not intended
as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the
women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one
examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only
has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE,
for instance, or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card
is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and
newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even
‘sophisticated’ society. The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the
enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still considered screamingly
funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for example, a young bridegroom is shown
getting out of bed the morning after his wedding night. ‘The first morning in our own
little home, darling! ’ he is saying; ‘I’ll go and get the milk and paper and bring you up a
cup of tea. ’ Inset is a picture of the front doorstep; on it are four newspapers and four
bottles of milk. This is obscene, if you like, but it is not immoral. Its implication — and
this is just the implication the ESQUIRE or the NEW YORKER would avoid at all
costs — is that marriage is something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event
in the average human being’s life.
So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They do at least
imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for
granted. And bound up with this is something I noted earlier, the fact there are no
pictures, or hardly any, of good-looking people beyond their first youth. There is the
‘spooning’ couple and the middle-aged, cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between. The
liaison, the illicit but more or less decorous love-affair which used to be the stock joke of
French comic papers, is not a post card subject. And this reflects, on a comic level, the
working-class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure —
almost, indeed, individual life — end with marriage. One of the few authentic class-
differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working
classes age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided that they survive their
childhood, nor do they lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their
youthful appearance. This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most easily verified
by watching one of the higher age groups registering for military service; the middle —
and upper-class members look, on average, ten years younger than the others. It is usual
to attribute this to the harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is doubtful
whether any such difference now exists as would account for it. More probably the truth
is that the working classes reach middle age earlier because they accept it earlier. For to
look young after, say, thirty is largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalization is
less true of the better-paid workers, especially those who live in council houses and
labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even of them to point to a difference of outlook.
And in this, as usual, they are more traditional, more in accord with the Christian past
than the well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means of physical-jerks,
cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing. The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to
attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself
and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously
established itself. It will probably disappear again when our standard of living drops and
our birth-rate rises. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ expresses the nonnal, traditional
attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill and his colleagues are reflecting, no doubt
unconsciously, when they allow for no transition stage between the honeymoon couple
and those glamourless figures, Mum and Dad.
I have said that at least half of McGill’s post cards are sex jokes, and a proportion,
perhaps ten per cent, are far more obscene than anything else that is now printed in
England. Newsagents are occasionally prosecuted for selling them, and there would be
many more prosecutions if the broadest jokes were not invariably protected by double
meanings. A single example will be enough to show how this is done. In one post card,
captioned ‘They didn’t believe her’, a young woman is demonstrating, with her hands
held apart, something about two feet long to a couple of open-mouthed acquaintances.
Behind her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a glass case, and beside that is a photograph of
a nearly naked athlete. Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this could
never be proved. Now, it is doubtful whether there is any paper in England that would
print a joke of this kind, and certainly there is no paper that does so habitually. There is
an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in
on women’s legs, but there is no popular literature specializing in the ‘vulgar’, farcical
aspect of sex. On the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill’s are the ordinary small
change of the revue and music-hall stage, and are also to be heard on the radio, at
moments when the censor happens to be nodding. In England the gap between what can
be said and what can be printed is rather exceptionally wide. Remarks and gestures which
hardly anyone objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if any attempt were
made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller’s stage patter with his weekly
column in the SUNDAY DISPATCH) The comic post cards are the only existing
exception to this rule, the only medium in which really Tow’ humour is considered to be
printable. Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and
lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited. Remembering that, one sees
what function these post cards, in their humble way, are performing.
What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to
life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as ‘extracting as much fun as possible from
smacking behinds in basement kitchens’. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination,
which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs
more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by
mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet,
Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Hohnes-Watson
variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two
partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our
civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real
life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by
side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don
Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that
wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very
clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the
voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no
work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine
attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk
your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is
a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie
to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written
consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.
But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life,
especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There
is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he
doesn’t matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in
them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is
ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round
obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly
high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon
morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were
otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness,
dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has
always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to
demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard,
pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to
die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The
whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never
read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of 11 hirers and prime
ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national
anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and
contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all
the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.
Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil,
tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a
good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber,
battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that
the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of
us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.
The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less
important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still
basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if
they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or
cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to
condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are
meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in
the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest
hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm’s-eye view
of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where
the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is
always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of
themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed
husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait
for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want
them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a
hannless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but
a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole,
human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. For:
there is a just man that perished in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that
prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself
over wise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou
foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy time?
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of
literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the
murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of
humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-
drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The
comer of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms,
and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.
THE LION AND THE UNICORN: SOCIALISM AND THE
ENGLISH GENIUS (1941)
PART I: ENGLAND YOUR ENGLAND
I
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are
‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-
hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.
On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed
bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the
power to absolve him from evil.
One cannot see the modem world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming
strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at
certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a POSITIVE force there is nothing to
set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison
with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because
they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.
Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real
differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human
beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average
of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could
happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance,
could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very
highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike
which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure
living in England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the
sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things
conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is
greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their
mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European
crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your
feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such
things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the
diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro
of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the
rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through
the mists of the autumn morning — all these are not only fragments, but
CHARACTERISTIC fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of
this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the
same thought. 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.
doubt he will go on writing — anybody who has ones started always goes on writing — and
associated with him there are a number of writers of approximately the same tendency,
Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a ‘school’. But he
himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to
descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism: there are signs of both in his later
work. His last book, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not
because I did not want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities have so
far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it would surprise me if it came
anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the opening chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like
certain other autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly,
and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that is
something.
Miller’s books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will happen to the
Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and Jack Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do
not know, but at any rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who
has not done so to read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little ingenuity, or by
paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it
disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken
of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or
when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to TROPIC OF
CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only
imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-
speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will
probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single
glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere
Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically,
that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in
England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a
demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself
into its new shape.
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)
Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or
twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight
bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-
sparrow ’s-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many people seem to be
unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are
something to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock.
Actually they are on sale everywhere — they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth’s,
for example — and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of comic
illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the
Wendyish, sub-pomographic ones which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a
genre of their own, specializing in very Tow’ humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s-nappy,
policemen’ s-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no
artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people
who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only
the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most
representative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know.
He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as
‘The Donald McGill Comics’, but he is also unquestionable a real person with a style of
drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his post cards in bulk
will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere
dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is
simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability
to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest. McGill is a clever
draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value
of his post cards is that they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the
nonn of the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are exactly what
comic post cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the meaning
and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill’s — if you pick out from a pile the
ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill’s —
and spread them out on a table. What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-
present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter
low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but,
even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like
those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them,
every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the
women monstrously paradied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression,
however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are
they ’so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post
cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are
really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of
smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European
consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke
columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are
aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
‘I like seeing experienced girls home. ’
‘But I’m not experienced! ’
‘You’re not home yet! ’
‘I’ve been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours? ’
‘I left off struggling. ’
JUDGE: ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman? ’
Co — respondent: ‘Not a wink, my lord! ’
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be said for McGill’s
post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke
beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and
I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX. — More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from
the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby.
Typical captions: ‘Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby’s feeding-bottle? ’
‘She didn’t ask me to the christening, so I’m not going to the wedding. ’ Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are IPSO FACTO
funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is
seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is
plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-
looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous
honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed,
red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.
HOME LIFE — Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption:
‘Did they get an X-ray of your wife’s jaw at the hospital? ’ — ‘No, they got a moving
picture instead. ’
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. Drunkenness — Both
drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women
are never represented.
W. C. JOKES — There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso facto funny,
and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned ‘A Friend in Need’, shows a
man’s hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies’ lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY — Much in these post cards suggests that they
are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes
turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum
dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type
exchanging ‘unladylike’ abuse. Typical repartee: ‘I wish you were a statue and I was a
pigeon! ’ A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee
angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic
maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc. ; but there are
no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under
£5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun
as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES — Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the
Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman
always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The ‘knut’ or ‘masher’ still appears,
almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or
even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged
in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature of the
last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The ‘Jew joke’, always
somewhat more ill-natured than the ‘Scotch joke’, disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS — Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for
example, ‘free love’, feminism, A. R. P. , nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post
cards, but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political
outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not
only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about ‘God save
the King’, the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to reflect itself in them
at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of A. R. P. Even at this
date few post cards mention the war except in A. R. P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses
at window she has forgotten to black out, etc. , etc. ) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments
of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGill’s, shows Hitler with the usual
hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption; ‘What would you do,
chums? ’ This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great
monopoly company, and evidendy they are not regarded as having any importance in
forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook
acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic post cards — their
obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their
purpose, though not in a way diat is immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out
behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has
nothing to do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure with
the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these
pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose
women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the
McGill post card — and this applies to all other post cards in this genre — is not intended
as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the
women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one
examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only
has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE,
for instance, or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card
is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and
newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even
‘sophisticated’ society. The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the
enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still considered screamingly
funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for example, a young bridegroom is shown
getting out of bed the morning after his wedding night. ‘The first morning in our own
little home, darling! ’ he is saying; ‘I’ll go and get the milk and paper and bring you up a
cup of tea. ’ Inset is a picture of the front doorstep; on it are four newspapers and four
bottles of milk. This is obscene, if you like, but it is not immoral. Its implication — and
this is just the implication the ESQUIRE or the NEW YORKER would avoid at all
costs — is that marriage is something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event
in the average human being’s life.
So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They do at least
imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for
granted. And bound up with this is something I noted earlier, the fact there are no
pictures, or hardly any, of good-looking people beyond their first youth. There is the
‘spooning’ couple and the middle-aged, cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between. The
liaison, the illicit but more or less decorous love-affair which used to be the stock joke of
French comic papers, is not a post card subject. And this reflects, on a comic level, the
working-class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure —
almost, indeed, individual life — end with marriage. One of the few authentic class-
differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working
classes age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided that they survive their
childhood, nor do they lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their
youthful appearance. This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most easily verified
by watching one of the higher age groups registering for military service; the middle —
and upper-class members look, on average, ten years younger than the others. It is usual
to attribute this to the harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is doubtful
whether any such difference now exists as would account for it. More probably the truth
is that the working classes reach middle age earlier because they accept it earlier. For to
look young after, say, thirty is largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalization is
less true of the better-paid workers, especially those who live in council houses and
labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even of them to point to a difference of outlook.
And in this, as usual, they are more traditional, more in accord with the Christian past
than the well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means of physical-jerks,
cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing. The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to
attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself
and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously
established itself. It will probably disappear again when our standard of living drops and
our birth-rate rises. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ expresses the nonnal, traditional
attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill and his colleagues are reflecting, no doubt
unconsciously, when they allow for no transition stage between the honeymoon couple
and those glamourless figures, Mum and Dad.
I have said that at least half of McGill’s post cards are sex jokes, and a proportion,
perhaps ten per cent, are far more obscene than anything else that is now printed in
England. Newsagents are occasionally prosecuted for selling them, and there would be
many more prosecutions if the broadest jokes were not invariably protected by double
meanings. A single example will be enough to show how this is done. In one post card,
captioned ‘They didn’t believe her’, a young woman is demonstrating, with her hands
held apart, something about two feet long to a couple of open-mouthed acquaintances.
Behind her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a glass case, and beside that is a photograph of
a nearly naked athlete. Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this could
never be proved. Now, it is doubtful whether there is any paper in England that would
print a joke of this kind, and certainly there is no paper that does so habitually. There is
an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in
on women’s legs, but there is no popular literature specializing in the ‘vulgar’, farcical
aspect of sex. On the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill’s are the ordinary small
change of the revue and music-hall stage, and are also to be heard on the radio, at
moments when the censor happens to be nodding. In England the gap between what can
be said and what can be printed is rather exceptionally wide. Remarks and gestures which
hardly anyone objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if any attempt were
made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller’s stage patter with his weekly
column in the SUNDAY DISPATCH) The comic post cards are the only existing
exception to this rule, the only medium in which really Tow’ humour is considered to be
printable. Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and
lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited. Remembering that, one sees
what function these post cards, in their humble way, are performing.
What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to
life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as ‘extracting as much fun as possible from
smacking behinds in basement kitchens’. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination,
which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs
more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by
mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet,
Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Hohnes-Watson
variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two
partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our
civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real
life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by
side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don
Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that
wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very
clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the
voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no
work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine
attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk
your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is
a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie
to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written
consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.
But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life,
especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There
is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he
doesn’t matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in
them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is
ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round
obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly
high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon
morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were
otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness,
dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has
always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to
demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard,
pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to
die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The
whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never
read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of 11 hirers and prime
ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national
anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and
contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all
the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.
Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil,
tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a
good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber,
battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that
the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of
us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.
The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less
important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still
basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if
they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or
cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to
condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are
meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in
the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest
hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm’s-eye view
of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where
the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is
always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of
themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed
husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait
for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want
them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a
hannless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but
a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole,
human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. For:
there is a just man that perished in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that
prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself
over wise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou
foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy time?
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of
literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the
murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of
humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-
drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The
comer of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms,
and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.
THE LION AND THE UNICORN: SOCIALISM AND THE
ENGLISH GENIUS (1941)
PART I: ENGLAND YOUR ENGLAND
I
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are
‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-
hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.
On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed
bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the
power to absolve him from evil.
One cannot see the modem world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming
strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at
certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a POSITIVE force there is nothing to
set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison
with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because
they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.
Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real
differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human
beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average
of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could
happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance,
could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very
highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike
which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure
living in England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the
sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things
conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is
greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their
mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European
crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your
feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such
things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the
diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro
of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the
rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through
the mists of the autumn morning — all these are not only fragments, but
CHARACTERISTIC fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of
this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the
same thought. 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.
