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 modern 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 [Note, below]. The only enemy they ever named
was the sergeant-major.
[Note: 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 army 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 whi
ch 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 all 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
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 army. The
Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed
definitely under German 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 formalized 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
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.
iii.
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 notorious
ly two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one
pretend that there is anything in common between people with �100,000 a
year and people with �1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are
likely to have been offended because I have used the word 'England'
oftener than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London
and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of
its own.
One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point
first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel
themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for
instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see
the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands
by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the
British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.
Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our
own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two
Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a
foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English
and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the
Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a
stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the French',
recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it
is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney
and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.
And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one
regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the
inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European
country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.
Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But
at the same time the vast majority of the people FEEL themselves to be a
single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they
resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred,
and always stronger than any kind of internationalism. Except for a brief
moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the British working
class have never thought or acted internationally. For two and a half
years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly strangled, and never
aided them by even a single strike [Note, below]. But when their own
country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr Montagu Norman) was in
danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when it seemed
likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio
for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the
first twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One
has only to compare these figures with, for instance, the number of
conscientious objectors to see how vast is the strength of traditional
loyalties compared with new ones.
[Note: It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money.
Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal
five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same
period. (Author's footnote.)]
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it
runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the
Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive
emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class--the
cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic
demonstrations than the expensive ones--but the number of definitely
treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In
the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The
working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the