Title:      Fifty Orwell Essays
Author:     George Orwell
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Fifty Orwell Essays
Author:     George Orwell




CONTENTS

The Spike (1931)
A Hanging (1931)
Bookshop Memories (1936)
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Down the Mine (from "The Road to Wigan Pier") (1937)
North and South (from "The Road to Wigan Pier") (1937)
Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)
Marrakech (1939)
Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940)
Charles Dickens (1940)
Charles Reade (1940)
Inside The Whale (1940)
The Art of Donald Mcgill (1941)
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
Rudyard Kipling (1942)
Mark Twain--The Licensed Jester (1943)
Poetry and the Microphone (1943)
W B Yeats (1943)
Arthur Koestler (1944)
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
Antisemitism in Britain (1945)
Freedom of the Park (1945)
Good Bad Books (1945)
In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse (1945)
Nonsense Poetry (1945)
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Revenge is Sour (1945)
The Sporting Spirit (1945)
You and the Atomic Bomb (1945)
A Good Word for the Vicar Of Bray (1946)
A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
Decline of the English Murder (1946)
How the Poor Die (1946)
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (Second Thoughts On Burnham)(1946)
Pleasure Spots (1946)
Politics and the English Language (1946)
Politics vs. Literature: an examination of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1946)
Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
The Prevention of Literature (1946)
Why I Write (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)
Writers and Leviathan (1948)
Reflections on Gandhi (1949)




THE SPIKE


It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman,
lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk
much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes
sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were
covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost
motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban
riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the
seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil,
everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable
dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a
tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back
answer. When You, came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and
shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was bell to. Pay, and if
you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. 'For the love of Christ, mate,' the old hands
advised me, 'don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into
the spike with eightpence!'

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a
lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for
it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed
to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the
twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in
their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with
contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of
elephantiasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp
Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was
caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired
by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock
at the wrong moment, and was impounded.

At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate
entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our
bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we
others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place,
consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow
stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us
into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly
man of forty, who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the
dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their
faces. But when he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said:

'You are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so,' I said.

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he
said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And thereafter he took it into
his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our
underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of
string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary
garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt.
The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the
tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike.
Some of the men refused the bath, and washed only their 'toe-rags', the
horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of
us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery
roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were
dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts,
reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the
dining-room, where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the
invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or
supper--half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of
so-called tea. It took us five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious
food. Then the Tramp Major served us with three cotton blankets each, and
drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were locked on the
outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for
the next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus
except a tiny, barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the
door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare
luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some
on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to
myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night's rest. But I did not
get it, for there is always something wrong in the spike, and the
peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered immediately, was the cold. May
had begun, and in honour of the season--a little sacrifice to the gods
of spring, perhaps--the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot
pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in
turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half
frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably
asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major came marching down
the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us
to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad
figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of
water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served.
When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one
glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for
the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the dining-room to bolt our
breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the
military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight,
so that it was as hard as ship's biscuit. But we were glad of our tea
after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do
without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food,
their medicine, their panacea for all evils. Without the half goon or so
of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they could not face
their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which
is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before
the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what
manner of men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering
naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light,
bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can
imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate
curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat
feet, sagging muscles--every kind of malformation and physical
rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are
under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay
ineradicably in my mind. Old 'Daddy', aged seventy-four, with his truss,
and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard
and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive
picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles,
coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him
nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten
decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in
hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As
soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its
door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably
dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison
smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and
the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any
casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one
could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight
o'clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was
nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and
bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of
the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these
subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing
worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no
speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next
meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except
the next meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back
bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor.
George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in
his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the toad.
Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar
who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of
mooching, of pints stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had
peached to the police and got him seven days. William and, Fred, two
young, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella,
who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an
imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden
sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities.
Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and
he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings
of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like
schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major's step, for smoking though
connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is
hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to think that
boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and
discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially
disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all
day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel, only an
educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure
confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face
their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a
comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they
think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They
have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so,
since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer
agonies from boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp
Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the
job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to
be done there, and I was able to make off and hide in a shed used for
storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were skulking
to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and
comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the FAMILY
HERALD, and even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse library. It was
paradise after the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the
biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice
in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they
always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and went hungry six days
of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the washing-up,
and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was
astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and
vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with
tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And
while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in
the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the
everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in
honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away from
deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The,
boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even
smoking had ceased, for a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette
ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the
pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior
tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road,
he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the
other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had
literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his
wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by
hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the
south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks
at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a
tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in
walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case--six months at
the public charge for want of three pounds' worth of tools. It was
idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and
what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw
that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman.
Though he had been famished, along with the rest, he at once saw reasons
why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps.
He admonished me quite severely.

'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too pleasant
you'd have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the
bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work,
that's all that's wrong with them. You don't want to go encouraging of
them. They're scum.'

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept
repeating:

'You don't want to have any pity on these tramps--scum, they are. You
don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me.
They're scum, just scum.'

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his
fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of
God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the
spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle
classes.

The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too
bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating
yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an
age, and then look back again to see that the hands had advanced three
minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached
because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and supper was not
till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting
moon.

At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant
arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at
feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad
enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that
even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older men
went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry
though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served
out immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly
cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to
squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and
tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could riot go until the doctor
had examined us again, for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and
its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours this
time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright
everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy,
reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated
possessions, and a hunk of bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then
we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the spike and its
discipline, This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights
of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour
the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had
to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike,
where the game would begin anew.

I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable,
downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the
Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were scattering north, south, cast
and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the
spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars
passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles.
Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that
only a few minutes ago we had been packed with that band of prisoners in
a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all disappeared; we two
seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was
little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box
from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an
obligation.

'Here y'are, mate,' he said cordially. 'I owe you some fag ends. You
stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag
ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another--here
y'are.'

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.



A HANGING (1931)


It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like
yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We
were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with
double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet
by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of
drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the
inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the
condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny
wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick,
sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the
moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were
guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by
with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a
chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his
arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their
hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while
feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish
which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite
unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly
noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air,
floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who
was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with
his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a
grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. "For God's sake hurry up,
Francis," he said irritably. "The man ought to have been dead by this
time. Aren't you ready yet?"

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold
spectacles, waved his black hand. "Yes sir, yes sir," he bubbled. "All
iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed."

"Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till
this job's over."

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the
prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close
against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing
and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed
behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped
short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened--a
dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came
bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging
its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together.
It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it
pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a
dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone
stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

"Who let that bloody brute in here?" said the superintendent angrily.
"Catch it, someone!"

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but
it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part
of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and
tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us
again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of
the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another
formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed
to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and
moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of
the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound
arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never
straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place,
the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed
themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped
him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the
path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means
to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside
to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of
cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he
was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working--bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing,
tissues forming--all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would
still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through
the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel
and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw,
reasoned--reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men
walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same
world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be
gone--one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the
prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection
like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two
beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired
convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word
from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than
ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up
the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the
prisoner's neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough
circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the
prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of
"Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!", not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for
help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the
gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down
over the prisoner's face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still
persisted, over and over again: "Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!"

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes
seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and
on, "Ram! Ram! Ram!" never faltering for an instant. The superintendent,
his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick;
perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number--fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The
Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets
were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and
listened to his cries--each cry another second of life; the same thought
was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he
made a swift motion with his stick. "Chalo!" he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had
vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and
it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there
it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard,
where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner's body. He was dangling with
his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a
stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it
oscillated, slightly. "HE'S all right," said the superintendent. He
backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody
look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his
wrist-watch. "Eight minutes past eight. Well, that's all for this
morning, thank God."

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and
conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out
of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting
prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under
the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their
breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin,
while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed
quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had
come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to
break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering
gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come,
with a knowing smile: "Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead
man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor
of his cell. From fright.--Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you
not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight
annas. Classy European style."

Several people laughed--at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. "Well,
sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all
finished--flick! like that. It iss not always so--oah, no! I have known
cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull
the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!"

"Wriggling about, eh? That's bad," said the superintendent.

"Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall,
clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will
scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three
pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. 'My dear fellow,' we said,
'think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!' But no, he
would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!"

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the
superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. "You'd better all come out and
have a drink," he said quite genially. "I've got a bottle of whisky in
the car. We could do with it."

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road.
"Pulling at his legs!" exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst
into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment
Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink
together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a
hundred yards away.



BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)


When I worked in a second-hand bookshop--so easily pictured, if you
don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen
browse eternally among calf-bound folios--the thing that chiefly struck
me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally
interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew
a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than
lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks
were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents
for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a
nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For
example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a very
common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice
book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately
she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was
about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from
these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand
bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old
bread-crusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries
to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large
quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of
paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books
aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them
away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came
back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would
come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise
over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to
return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They
used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most
ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors
without any money--stories which, in many cases, I am sure they
themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not
quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to
gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places
where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In
the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their
big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside
the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment
he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away
without paying for them; merely to order them was enough--it gave them,
I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold
second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps--used stamps, I
mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all
ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the
peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have
foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I
never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often
came back and told us how 'true' their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless
any horoscope seems 'true' if it tells you that you are highly attractive
to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good
deal of business in children's books, chiefly 'remainders'. Modern books
for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in
the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius
Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome
compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a
feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which
are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It
used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian
sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to
come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of
their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: '2 doz. Infant Jesus with
rabbits'.

But our principal sideline was a lending library--the usual 'twopenny
no-deposit' library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the
book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the
world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and
sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books
stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers
away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town,
and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors.
Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's
reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in
our library the one who 'went out' the best was--Priestley? Hemingway?
Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second
and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are
read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one
might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of
tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true
that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly
speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel--the ordinary, good-bad,
Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel--seems
to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to
respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories
is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five
detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got
from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read
the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of
trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three
quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice
of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a
book whether be had 'had it already'.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended
ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical'
English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put
Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending
library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century
novel people say, 'Oh, but that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it
is always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell
Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always
meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand.
People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber
had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a
basket of bulrushes and saw the 'back parts' of the Lord. Another thing
that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books.
And another--the publishers get into a stew about this every two or
three years--is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person
who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by
saying 'I don't want short stories', or 'I do not desire little stories',
as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they
sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of
characters with every story; they like to 'get into' a novel which
demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though,
that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern
short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless,
far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are
popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular
as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller DE MÉTIER? On the whole--in spite of my
employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop--no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person
ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless
one goes in for 'rare' books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and
you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of
books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a
look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't
see an ad. for Boswell's DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one
for THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade
which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The
combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of
existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours
of work are very long--I was only a part-time employee, but my employer
put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours
to buy books--and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is
horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted
over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and
nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of
a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for
life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has
to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still
worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to
and fro. There was a time when I really did love books--loved the sight
and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more
years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them
for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about
the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection:
minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of
forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies' magazines of the sixties. For
casual reading--in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you
are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before
lunch--there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper.
But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and
even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if
it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk.
The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too
closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.



SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)


In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the
only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen
to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an
aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one
had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As
a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football
field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end
the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my
nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were
several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have
anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already
made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I
chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically--and
secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their
oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the
dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling
in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the
long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged
with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated
and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the
British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal
better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew
was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage
against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job
impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an
unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist
priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off
duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It
was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had
had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which
despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police
station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that
an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something
about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an
old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought
the noise might be useful IN TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the
way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a
wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained
up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but
on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout,
the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set
out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly
reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were
quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo
hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock;
also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped
out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted
violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me
in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor
quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf,
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy,
stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the
scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the
elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had
almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we
heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of
"Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in
her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd
of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to
have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the
mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he
could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant
had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with
its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This
was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly
with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was
coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an
expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the
dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The
friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as
neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an
orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had
already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and
throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges,
and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was
in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started
forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting
excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it
was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to
them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat.
It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is
always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill,
looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an
ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you
got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry
waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy
from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was
standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not
the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches
of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them
into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with
perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter
to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and
costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can
possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think
now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he
would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and
caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided
that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not
turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It
was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.
It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the
sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited
over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a
trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to
shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got
to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward,
irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle
in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the
white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading
actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this
moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he
destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized
figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall
spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis
he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and
his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had
committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind
and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two
thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away,
having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at
me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long
struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch
of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that
elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At
that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot
an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a
LARGE animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered.
Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would
only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had
got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been
behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you
left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to
within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If
he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe
to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going
to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was
soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged
and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a
steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own
skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with
the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would
have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front
of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought
in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans
would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning
corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite
probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine
and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still,
and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go
up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have
their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with
cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one
would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I
ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight
at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this,
thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one
never does when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee
that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one
would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious,
terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell,
but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken,
shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a
long time--it might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged
flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years
old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not
collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly
upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That
was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his
whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed
beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his
trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only
time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was
obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He
was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound
of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could
see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for
him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two
remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die.
His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing
continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony,
but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him
further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and
yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back
for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his
throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued
as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later
that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and
baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body
almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting
of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and
could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad
elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control
it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was
right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for
killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been
killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient
pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the
others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.



DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER")


Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely
than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that
keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or
indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world
the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything
that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual process by
which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and
are willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal
face when the 'fillers' are at work. This is not easy, because when the
mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if
you go at any other time, it is possible to come away with a totally
wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the
air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what the
miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate
like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in
hell are if there--heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and,
above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for
there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and
electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.

When you have finally got there--and getting there is a in itself: I
will explain that in a moment--you crawl through the last line of pit
props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high.
This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock
from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that
the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself,
probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all,
overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening
din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see
very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp,
but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling
men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the
fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are
feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of
feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a
glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying
away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in
the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun, and thence
dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.

It is impossible to watch the 'fillers' at work without feeling a pang
of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost
superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they are not
only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing, it in a
position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while--they could hardly rise from their knees without
hitting the ceiling--and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you
are standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the
shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your
arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make
things easier. There is the heat--it varies, but in some mines it is
suffocating--and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils
and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor
belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine
gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. They
really do look like iron hammered iron statues--under the smooth coat of
coal dust which clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see
miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they
are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job)
but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders
tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and
sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter
mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the
hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell
by the look of them whether they are young or old. They may be any age up
to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all
look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man's body,
and a figure fit for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of extra
flesh on the waist-line, and the constant bending would be impossible.
You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it--the line of
bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the
job for seven and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there
is no time 'off'. Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at
some time during the shift to eat the food they have brought with them,
usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first
time I was watching the 'fillers' at work I put my hand upon some
dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of
tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good
against thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much
grasp of the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly
because the mere effort of getting from place to place; makes it
difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even disappointing,
or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage,
which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three
times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a
tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon
you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void.
You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation
in the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the
bottom, when the cage slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is
going upwards again. In the middle of the run the cage probably touches
sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it touches even more.
When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred yards
underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of
you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil,
flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it--all
this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick
as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at which the cage has
brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you have
travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the
bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal
distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a
mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and
getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had not realized
that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages
as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of
course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that
seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get
further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit
bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three
miles is a fairly normal one; there are even said to be a few mines where
it is as much as five miles. But these distances bear no relation to
distances above ground. For in all that mile or three miles as it may be,
there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places even
there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred
yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight
or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs
of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are
wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have
buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is
bad going underfoot--thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some
mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is
the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track with sleepers
a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything is grey
with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same
in all mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the
purpose, and bundles of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice
darting away from the beam of the lamps. They are surprisingly common,
especially in mines where there are or have been horses. It would be
interesting to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by
falling down the shaft--for they say a mouse can fall any distance
uninjured, owing to its surface area being so large relative to its
weight. You press yourself against the wall to make way for lines of tubs
jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel cable
operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains and thick
wooden doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air.
These doors are an important part of the ventilation system. The
exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the fresh
air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the air
will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings
unventilated; so all the short cuts have to be partitioned off.

At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that
soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when
the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except
a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got
to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and
dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the
neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After
half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You
begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end--still more, how on
earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You
come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all
exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting
position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious height--scene
of and old fall of rock, probably--and for twenty whole yards you can
stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is
another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams
which you have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a
relief after the squatting business. But when you come to the end of the
beams and try to get up again, you find that your knees have temporarily
struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and
say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a miner)
is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. 'Only
another four hundred yards,' he says encouragingly; you feel that he
might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow
creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best
part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty
minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get
your strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work
in progress with any kind of intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired
out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get
through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame
now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are
carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it;
whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes
more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try
walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even
the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in
very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the
miners have what they call 'buttons down the back'--that is, a permanent
scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes
fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails
and slide down. In mines where the 'travelling' is very bad all the
miners carry sticks about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below
the handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of the stick and
in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These sticks
are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets--a comparatively recent
invention--are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel
helmet, but they are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so
strong, that you can take a violent blow on the head without feeling it.
When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps three
hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week
afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a
difficult feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong
manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the
stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. ('How'd ta like to work
down pit, eh?' etc.) Yet even a miner who has been long away front
work--from illness, for instance--when he comes back to the pit, suffers
badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an
old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and
actually gone as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I
want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful business of crawling to
and fro, which to any normal person is a hard day's work in itself; and
it is not part of the miner's work at all, it is merely an extra, like
the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and
fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage
work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but
often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than
coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that
one is always liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think
of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you
don't think, necessarily, of those miles of creeping to and fro. There is
the question of time, also. A miner's working shift of seven and a half
hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least
an hour a day for 'travelling', more often two hours and sometimes three.
Of course, the 'travelling' is not technically work and the miner is not
paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to
say that miners don't mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for
them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood,
they have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro
underground with a startling and rather horrible agility. A miner puts
his head down and runs, with a long swinging stride, through places where
I can only stagger. At the workings you see them on all fours, skipping
round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to think
that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they
all admit that the 'travelling' is hard work; in any case when you hear
them discussing a pit among themselves the 'travelling' is always one of
the things they discuss. It is said that a shift always returns from work
faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the
coming away after a hard day's work, that is especially irksome. It is
part of their work and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an
effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before
and after your day's work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp
of the processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the
way, that I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I
am merely describing what I have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between
enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of getting it
out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old
days the miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and
crowbar--a very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state,
is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an
electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically,
with teeth a couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It
can move backwards or forwards on its own power, and the men operating
it can rotate it this way or that. Incidentally it makes one of the most
awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth clouds of coal dust
which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and almost
impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting
into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet
or five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to extract
the coal to the depth to which it has been undermined. Where it is
'difficult getting', however, it has also to be loosened with
explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of
the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal,
inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes round the corner if
there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five yards
distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is
not intended to bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of
course, the charge is too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal
out but brings the roof down as well.

After the blasting has been done the 'fillers' can tumble the coal out,
break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in
monstrous boulders which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The
conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are shoved into the main
road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which drags
them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is
sorted by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As
far as possible the 'dirt'--the shale, that is--is used for making the
roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped;
hence the monstrous 'dirt-heaps', like hideous grey mountains, which are
the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been
extracted to the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has
advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put in to hold up the newly
exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor belt is taken to
pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the
three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three
separate shifts, the cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night
(there is a law, not always kept, that forbids its being done when other
men are working near by), and the 'filling' in the morning shift, which
lasts from six in the morning until half past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only
watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few
calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are
performing. Normally each o man has to clear a space four or five yards
wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so
that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut
out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve
cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing
twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed
approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and
shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging
trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon,
I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared
with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet
underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every
breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin.
The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to
perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a
manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some
kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a
tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate
farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I
become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different
universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world
apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing
about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about
it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.
Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the
Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of
coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed;
if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the
miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface,
the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at
any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order
that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce
Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets
may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on
the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal',
but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I
sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I
still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door
and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling
of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is
only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect
this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just
'coal'--something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives
mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have
to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north
of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road
you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the
miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there
is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the
flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are
now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have
worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that
passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of
coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And
even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging
it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive
ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to
forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work;
it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than
anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also
because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience,
so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we
forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch
coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own
status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is
brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only
because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain
superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets
and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for
Infants--all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to
poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full
of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles
of steel.



NORTH AND SOUTH (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER") (1937)


As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does
not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry
you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is
not unlike Norwich Market, and between all the towns of the Midlands there
stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the South.
It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and
beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of
industrialism--an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are
obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and
functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying
of a giant's dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are
frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by
jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-head the
steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country.
Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red
rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue
flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always
spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only
an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One
in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea
suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it is called locally. Even
centuries hence when the plough drives over the places where coal was once
mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be distinguishable from
an aeroplane.

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All
round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the
passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the
factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a
mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of
innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the
distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had seeped
into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly
cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the
bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of
ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing
existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even
Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could
justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its
inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do
make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it
contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of
five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling
sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow
river that runs through the town is-usually bright yellow with some
chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory
chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would
have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene
especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground
(somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that
would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered
with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt
four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an
interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading
away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made of the
slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste ground, a cubical
building of red and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas Grocock, Haulage
Contractor'.

At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the
blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister
magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and
serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath
the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you
see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you
hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under
the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way.
Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it
were, are the 'pot banks'--conical brick chimneys like gigantic burgundy
bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke almost in your face.
You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as
deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and
on the other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the
face of the cliff with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather,
and even the snow was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery
towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than ten miles
away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills, and
the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions
that strike you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably
ugly about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of
its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a
cathedral. It all depends on the architectural tradition of the period.
The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have
been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and
smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money
to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because the
Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many
of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along
the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it. But
since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has
grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack
or an awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering
white structure of concrete, glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns
and beds of tulips. Look at the factories you pass as you travel out of
London on the G.W.R.; they may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly
they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any
case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about
it and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it
is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable,
industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself
as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic
mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of
mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the
industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow
aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive
chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it
from a purely aesthetic standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre
appeal. I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by
fascinating me even when I abominate it. The landscapes of Burma, which,
when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of
nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged
to write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the
East the scenery is the real subject-matter.) It would probably be quite
easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the
blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for
instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of
industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite
uneradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always
a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is
clean and orderly.

But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart
from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly
because of certain real differences which do exist, but still more because
of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a
long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness,
sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always
take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask
him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real'
life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work,
that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers
and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour',
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish,
effeminate, and lazy--that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner
goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague
inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the
Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a
barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result
of tradition, are not affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman
five feet four inches high and twenty-nine inches round the chest feels
that as an Englishman he is the physical superior of Camera (Camera being
a Dago), so also with the Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a
weedy little Yorkshireman, who would almost certainly have run away if a
fox-terrier had snapped at him, telling me that in the South of England he
felt 'like a wild invader'. But the cult is often adopted by people who
are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year or two ago a friend of
mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was driving me
through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village.
He glanced disapprovingly at the cottages and said:

'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the
Yorkshiremen are splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other way
about--beautiful villages and rotten people. All the people in those
cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless.'

I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that
village. No, he did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they
were obviously worthless. Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by
birth, loses no opportunity of praising the North to the detriment of the
South. Here is an extract from one of his letters to me:

I am in Clitheroe, Lanes...I think running water is much more
attractive in moor and mountain country than in the fat and sluggish
South. 'The smug and silver Trent,' Shakespeare says; and the South--er
the smugger, I say.

Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only
are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as 'fat
and sluggish', but even water when it gets north of a certain latitude,
ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the
interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent man
of 'advanced' opinions who would have nothing but con-tempt for nationalism
in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as 'One Britisher is
worth three foreigners', and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it
is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize. All
nationalistic distinctions--all claims to be better than somebody else
because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different
dialect--are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people
believe in them. There is no doubt about the Englishman's inbred
conviction that those who live to the south of him are his inferiors;
even our foreign policy is governed by it to some extent. I think,
therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into
being.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the
map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern
Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the
more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy
generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate
made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat
of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the
English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at
least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly Reviewer
of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to
luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums
up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of
Garlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is
pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals,
while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious. This theory was
never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that the
finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting
that the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves.
Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has so
deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the
industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its
peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England
was the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was
concentrated in London and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance,
roughly speaking a war of money versus feudalism, the North and West were
for the King and the South and East for the Parliament. But with the
increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and there grew up a
new type of man, the self-made Northern business man--the Mr Rouncewell
and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful
'get on or get out' philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth
century, and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the
type edified by Arnold Bennett--the type who starts off with half a crown
and ends up with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an
even greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis his
sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to
admire him because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant,
grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on'; in other words, he knew
how to make money.

This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern
business man is no longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by
facts, and the tradition of Northern' grit' lingers. It is still dimly felt
that a Northerner will 'get on', i.e. make money, where a Southerner will
fail. At the back of the mind of every Yorkshireman and every Scotchman who
comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington picture of himself as the boy
who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as Lord Mayor. And that,
really, is at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one can make a
great mistake is in imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine
working class. When I first went to Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined
that I was going to a country of boors. I was used to the London
Yorkshireman with his interminable harangues and his pride in the sup-posed
raciness of his dialect (' "A stitch in time saves nine", as we say in the
West Riding'), and I expected to meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I
met with nothing of the kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the
Lancashire and Yorkshire miners treated me with a kindness and courtesy
that were even embarrassing; for if there is one type of man to whom I do
feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed any sign
of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This has
its importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are
nationalism in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a
working-class characteristic.

There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and
there is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as
one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the
parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to settle in the South. In a
Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once
hearing an 'educated' accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the
South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of
a bishop. Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace, the
bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is taking place in the
North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern accents, for instance,
persist strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the movies
and the B.B.C. Hence your 'educated' accent stamps you rather as a
foreigner than as a chunk of the petty gentry; and this is an immense
advantage, for it makes it much easier to get into contact with the working
class.

But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class?
I shall have to discuss that later; I will only say here that I do not
think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier in the North than it
would be in the South to meet working-class people on approximately equal
terms. It is fairly easy to live in a miner's house and be accepted as one
of the family; with, say, a farm labourer in the Southern counties it
probably would be impossible. I have seen just enough of the working
class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a great
deal in a working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential
point is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by
contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly
different.

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A
working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the
relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly
weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I have
pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces under
the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his
family--to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering
him night and day for failing to 'get on'. The fact that the working class
know how to combine and the middle class don't is probably due to their
different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade
union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every
middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the
other fellow's job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at
first, is their plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If
you offer a working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he
doesn't want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving
offence. And again, take the working-class attitude towards 'education'.
How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people
often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education'
touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy
instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures
of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work
at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should
descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one
working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will
leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on
ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the
notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely
contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who
ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in
a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just
fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way
of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on
his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly,
debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly
and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

In a working-class home--I am not thinking at the moment of the
unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes--you breathe a warm,
decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere.
I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good
wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of
being happy than an 'educated' man. His home life seems to fall more
naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the
peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a
working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after
tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the
steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair
at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on
the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of
mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat--it is a
good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but
sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes,
though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon
one question--whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I
have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after
kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could
not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years
into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of
the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is
no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is hardly likely that
Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in
shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'. And there won't be a
coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture
will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as
evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for
gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and
the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will
have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won't be so many
children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. But move
backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a world almost equally
foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in your face because
there is no chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John', lice, scurvy, a yearly
child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with
tales of Hell.

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the
radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are
published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match,
but the memory of working-class interiors--especially as I sometimes saw
them in my childhood before the war, when England was still
prosperous--that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad
one to live in.



SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)


The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any
event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of
all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the
eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers
that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the NEWS
CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of
distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real
nature of the struggle.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the
Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is
far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost
certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is
even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail
without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no
doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own
revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror--forcible
suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press,
ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial--has been in
progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging;
indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners
were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that
could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who
are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there
not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they
are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them
there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes
in his galoshes--the Communists.

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor
devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of
it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and
counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on
to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who
are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so
few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is
now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in
alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful
machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of
revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists
assailed as wicked 'Reds' by right-wing intellectuals who are in
essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to
love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the Communist-Liberal
alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the Spanish
workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a
few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants
last year; and presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later,
when there is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present
situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the civil
war.

Franco's bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in
that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion,
and therefore had not much mass backing, though Franco has since been
trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart from certain sections
of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge, parasitic
Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various
forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the
worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the 'liberal'
bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of
Fascism, at least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The 'liberal'
bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests
stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase 'la
carrière ouverte aux talents'. For clearly he has no chance to develop in
a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy
goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops'
vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course
to the friend of the catamite of the duke's illegitimate son. Hence, in
the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a
situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly
enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the
Popular Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously
democratic appeal, People's Front). It is a combination with about as
much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads
or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front
is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois
are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same
things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e.
capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for
Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers
understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated
they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of
the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories
and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers' government by means of
local committees, workers' militias, police forces, and so forth. They
made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active
revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of
leaving the Republican Government in nominal control. And, in spite of
various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government had been of
approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning
this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in
Catalonia, was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or
even (this was still happening when I reached Spain in December) to
disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of
the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing
Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie
came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor
reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few
dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of
the first few months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could
choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers'
militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with
officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete
equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in
Communist jargon, 'People's Army'), modelled as far as possible on an
ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a
military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for military
efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted purpose of the
change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every department the
same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the
outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary
bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the
status quo.

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have
taken place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of
the Government made this impossible. In the face of France's foreign
mercenaries they were obliged to turn to Russia for help, and though the
quantity of arms sup--plied by Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my
first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary
machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into
power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good
military qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily
Communist but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist
prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the only
countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get
money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well. Put in their
crudest form, the terms were: 'Crush the revolution or you get no more
arms.' The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if
Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact
(and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it
may be, also, that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would
rouse unwanted echoes in Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any
direct pressure has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this,
even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all
countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain
that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom
they control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all
their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of
counter-revolution.


In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in
Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and
counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid
being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the
revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully
dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish
Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never
happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend
democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the
Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think
that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small
and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if
England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even
earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to
increase--visibly is increasing--as more and more of the capitalist
class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people
with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves
pretending--not in so many words, but by implication--that Fascism has
nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless
wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would
happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.
Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion
against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary
movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy, meaning
capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome
person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois 'democracy' are
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an
impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue,
that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the
moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have
got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are
fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your
tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word--in Spain at this moment
you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial,
on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist--is only beginning to be
bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The
word 'Trotskyist' (or 'Trotsky-Fascist') is generally used to mean a
disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split
the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact
that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky,
wished for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of
which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the
disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped
one into the other at will. Meaning No. 1 may or may not carry with it
meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it
meaning No. 3. Thus: 'XY has been heard to speak favourably of world
revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.' In
Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary
Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until
a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of
Franco or Hitler.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless
one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy
probably WOULD disguise himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone
whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner
or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At the
beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly
corresponding to the English ILP., was an accepted party and supplied a
minister to the Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the
Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed,
every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into
jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as
'working loyally' beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists
were levered out of the Government; then it appeared that they were not
working so loyally; now they are in the process of becoming traitors.
After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the
left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist
press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and 'enemy of the
people'. And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which
every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient
of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism.
It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even
be better than Franco's fascism to the extent of being worth fighting
for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and
Liberals, it will be called something different.

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against
revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended
to produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the
Government from August to October 1936, the Communists have saved it from
October onwards. But in organizing the defence they have succeeded in
killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They made a militarized
conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is
significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting
had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by
enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is
unlikely that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms
unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off
with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a
deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to
lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with
Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would
raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to need mentioning.
There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I
suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that
would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are
wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say
that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will
end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic
zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by
either side, or by both.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in
Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense
interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very few people who have
even heard of the enormous struggle that is going on behind the
Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite
deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the
Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better
have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the
truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had
been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an
opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it
is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania
peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been
established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the
great war 'against Fascism' (cf. 1914, 'against militarism') which will
allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the
first week.



MARRAKECH (1939)


As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud
and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women--threaded
their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates
and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over
again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of
rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends.
When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a
foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the
dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no
name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a
huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month
or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.

When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants,
of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags
they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how
easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking
among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon
that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have
names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about
as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they
sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the
nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.
And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes,
out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you
notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity
in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.

I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are
still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without
thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that
this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was
holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the
bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another
nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could
drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.

An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and
sidled towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the
bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had
never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in
French:

"_I_ could eat some of that bread."

I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place
under his rags. This man is an employee of the Municipality.

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the
medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the
Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and
after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother
about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six
feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children
cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down
the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of
urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe
and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that
look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe,
turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in
his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a
lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of
shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the
simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I
was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round,
there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with
flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man
somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes
and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a
minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose,
works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a
cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same
trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters,
silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors,
water-carriers, beggars, porters--whichever way you look you see nothing
but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all
living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn't here.
Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about
the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

"Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The
Jews! They're the real rulers of this country, you know. They've got all
the money. They control the banks, finance--everything."

"But," I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer
working for about a penny an hour?"

"Ah, that's only for show! They're all money-lenders really. They're
cunning, the Jews."

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used
to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic
to get themselves a square meal.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more
important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white
skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a
labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a
hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In
a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human
beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree
and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his
patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less
interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa
are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap
trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown
skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a
Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an
Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass
trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without
noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an
endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded
soil.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare
can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have
turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up
brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful
labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double
like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields,
tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering
lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it,
thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched
wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one's shoulder,
and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a
depth of about four inches. This is as much as the strength of the
animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey yoked
together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other
hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no
harrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different
directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows, after which the whole
field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches, to conserve
water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never
enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a
depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run
through the subsoil.

Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my
house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with
age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems to be generally the
case in primitive communities that the women, when they get beyond a
certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old creature
who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a
vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more
than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost
a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that
from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to
be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is
quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys,
and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For
several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old
women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they
had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had
seen them. Firewood was passing--that was how I saw it. It was only that
one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down
motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath
it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured
bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the
crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan
soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated
by it. There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The
Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a
load which in the British army would be considered too much for a
fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off its
back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is
the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and
does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted
work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch
and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.

This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas--on the whole--the
plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely
pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible.
Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is
generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.


As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward--a
long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more
infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a
clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.

They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that
sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair
begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khaki
uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like blocks of
wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small. It was
very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the
weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive black faces were
glistening with sweat.

As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But
the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might
expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive.
It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of
profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French
citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors
and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence
before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his
masters, and he still believes it.

But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection
it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when
he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on
kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other
direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed
somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so
had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching
in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too
clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or
two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great
white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like
scraps of paper.



BOYS' WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS'S REPLY (1940)


You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without
coming upon a small newsagent's shop. The general appearance of these
shops is always very much the same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and
the NEWS OF THE WORLD outside, a poky little window with sweet-bottles
and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling of liquorice
allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.

Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly
overlaps at all with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line
is the twopenny weekly, and the number and variety of these are almost
unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime--cage-birds, fretwork,
carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately,
chess--has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several.
Gardening and livestock-keeping must have at least a score between them.
Then there are the sporting papers, the radio papers, the children's
comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the large range of
papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's
legs, the various trade papers, the women's story-papers (the ORACLE,
SECRETS, PEG'S PAPER, etc. etc.), the needlework papers--these so
numerous that a display of them alone will often fill an entire
window--and in addition the long series of 'Yank Mags' (FIGHT STORIES,
ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc.), which are imported
shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence.
And the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the
ALDINE BOXING NOVELS, the BOYS' FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS' OWN
LIBRARY and many others.

Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of
what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly
nothing half so revealing exists in documentary form. Best-seller novels,
for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is aimed almost
exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably
a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is
virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its
public at all closely. The same applies to some extent to the daily
papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the weekly
paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers
like the EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE,
or the PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is
a definite demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers
as a great national daily with a circulation of millions cannot possibly
do.

Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys' twopenny
weeklies, often inaccurately described as 'penny dreadfuls'. Falling
strictly within this class there are at present ten papers, the GEM,
MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION, all owned by the Amalgamated
Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE, all owned
by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these papers are, I do
not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to
fluctuate widely. But there is no question that the combined public of
the ten papers is a very large one. They are on sale in every town in
England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through a phase of
reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and
they have evidently lost some of their popularity during the past few
years. A good many boys now regard them as old fashioned and 'slow'.
Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they are more
interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere
survival of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling
phenomenon.

The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper
frequently appear in the other), and were both started more than thirty
years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the old B[oy's] O[wn]
P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and they remained dominant
till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen--or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more
or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition
to its school story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the
two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though the
MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably because it
possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.

The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and
the schools (Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim's in the GEM) are
represented as ancient and fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or
Winchester. All the leading characters are fourth-form boys aged fourteen
or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very minor parts.
Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy
arrives or a minor character drops out, but in at any rate the last
twenty-five years the personnel has barely altered. All the principal
characters in both papers--Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny
Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them--were at Greyfriars or St Jim's
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having
much the same kind of adventures and talking almost exactly the same
dialect. And not only the characters but the whole atmosphere of both Gem
and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by means of very
elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed 'Frank
Richards' and those in the GEM, 'Martin Clifford', but a series lasting
thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.
Consequently they have to be written in a style that is
easily imitated--an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple
of extracts will do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:

Groan!

'Shut up, Bunter!'

Groan!

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up,
though often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat
Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not
shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went on groaning.

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in
fact, were inexpressible.

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of
woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough
for the whole party and a little over.

Harry Wharton & Go. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed
and stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc., etc., etc.

Here is one from the Gem:

'Oh cwumbs!'

'Oh gum!'

'Oooogh!'

'Urrggh!'

Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed
it to his damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked
at one another.

'Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy!' gurgled Arthur Augustus. 'I have been
thwown into quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahs! The wuffians! The feahful
outsidahs! Wow!' etc., etc., etc.

Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something
like them in almost every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five
years ago. The first thing that anyone would notice is the extraordinary
amount of tautology (the first of these two passages contains a hundred
and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about thirty),
seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part
in creating the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious
expressions are repeated over and over again; 'wrathy', for instance, is
a great favourite, and so is 'diddled, dished and done'. 'Oooogh!',
'Grooo!' and 'Yaroo!' (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does 'Ha! ha! ha!', always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a
quarter of a column or thereabouts consists of 'Ha! ha! ha!' The slang
('Go and cat coke!', 'What the thump!', 'You frabjous ass!', etc. etc.)
has never been altered, so that the boys are now using slang which is at
least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames are
rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded
that Harry Wharton & Co. are 'the Famous Five', Bunter is always 'the fat
Owl' or 'the Owl of the Remove', Vernon-Smith is always 'the Bounder of
Greyfriars', Gussy (the Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy) is always 'the
swell of St Jim's', and so on and so forth. There is a constant, untiring
effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every new
reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make
Greyfriars and St Jim's into an extraordinary little world of their own,
a world which cannot be taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which
at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a debasement of the Dickens
technique a series of stereotyped 'characters' has been built up, in
several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one
of the best-known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of
people who know him he ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes
and a handful of characters in Dickens.

Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real
public school. They run in cycles of rather differing types, but in
general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type of story, with interest
centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one
in which a boy is accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too
much of a sportsman to reveal the truth. The 'good' boys are 'good' in
the clean-living Englishman tradition--they keep in hard training, wash
behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc., etc.,--and by way of
contrast there is a series of 'bad' boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others,
whose badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting
public-houses. All these boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion,
but as it would mean a change of personnel if any boy were actually
expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely
taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises at public
schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories, and very rarely there
is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides
together--that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would
be regarded as 'soppy'. Even the bad boys are presumed to be completely
sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is probable that there
was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In
the nineties the BOYS' OWN PAPER, for instance, used to have its
correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation,
and books like ST WINIFRED'S and TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with
homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully aware of
it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist as a problem.
Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years' issue of the two
papers the word 'God' probably does not occur, except in 'God save the
King'. On the other hand, there has always been a very strong
'temperance' strain. Drinking and, by association, smoking are regarded
as rather disgraceful even in an adult ('shady' is the usual word), but
at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of
substitute for sex. In their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a
great deal in common with the Boy Scout movement, which started at about
the same time.

All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for
instance, started off quite frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes,
and still resembles him fairly strongly; he has hawk-like features, lives
in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-gown when he
wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the old
school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century
models. In so far as Greyfriars and St Jim's are like real schools at
all, they are much more like Tom Brown's Rugby than a modern public
school. Neither school has an O.T.G., for instance, games are not
compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like.
But without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This
book has had an immense influence on boys' literature, and it is one of
those books which have a sort of traditional reputation among people who
have never even seen a copy of it. More than once in boys' weekly papers
I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which the word was
spelt 'Storky'. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO., and so is much of the
slang; 'jape', 'merry','giddy', 'bizney' (business), 'frabjous', 'don't'
for 'doesn't'--all of them out of date even when GEM and MAGNET started.
There are also traces of earlier origins. The name 'Greyfriars' is
probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in the
MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens's dialect.

With all this, the supposed 'glamour' of public-school life is played for
all it is worth. There is all the usual paraphernalia--lock-up,
roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects, cosy teas round the study
fire, etc. etc.--and constant reference to the 'old school', the 'old
grey stones' (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century),
the 'team spirit' of the 'Greyfriars men'. As for the snob-appeal, it is
completely shameless. Each school has a titled boy or two whose titles
are constantly thrust in the reader's face; other boys have the names of
well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We are for
ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, son of
Lord Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to 'broad acres', that Hurree
Jamset Ram Singh (nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that
Vernon-Smith's father is a millionaire. Till recently the illustrations
in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated from those of
Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim's still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy
sticks to his top-hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as
part of the MAGNET, Harry Wharton writes an article discussing the
pocket-money received by the 'fellows in the Remove', and reveals that
some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of thing is a
perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth
noticing a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a
thing peculiar to England. So far as I know, there are extremely few
school stories in foreign languages. The reason, obviously, is that in
England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is
that the former pay for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there
is another unbridgeable gulf between the 'public' school and the
'private' school. It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of
thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a 'posh' public
school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that
mystic world of quadrangles and house-colours, but they can yearn after
it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch. The
question is, Who arc these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?

Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I
can say from my own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to
public schools themselves generally read the GEM and MAGNET, but they
nearly always stop reading them when they are about twelve; they may
continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time they have
ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap
private schools, the schools that are designed for people who can't
afford a public school but consider the Council schools 'common',
continue reading the GEM and MAGNET for several years longer. A few years
ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I found that not only
did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they were
still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even
sixteen. These boys were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and
small business and professional men, and obviously it is this class that
the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are certainly read by
working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one
might expect to be completely immune from public-school 'glamour'. I have
seen a young coal miner, for instance, a lad who had already worked a
year or two underground, eagerly reading the GEM. Recently I offered a
batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the French Foreign
Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first. Both
papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department
of the GEM shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by
Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese,
etc., etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be aged round
about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps,
water pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the
Phine Phun Ring which runs a needle into your friend's hand, etc., etc.)
indicate roughly the same age; there are also the Admiralty
advertisements, however, which call for youths between seventeen and
twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that
they have read every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty
years. Here, for instance, is a letter from a lady in Salisbury:

I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars,
that they never fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the
finest stories of their type on the market to-day, which is saying a good
deal. They seem to bring you face to face with Nature. I have taken the
Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of Harry Wharton
& Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there's
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband,
too, was a staunch reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away
from us.

It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET,
especially the GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns.
What is truly startling is the intense interest with which the pettiest
details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim's are followed up. Here, for
instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:

What age is Dick Roylance?' 'How old is St Jim's?' 'Can you give me a
list of the Shell and their studies?' 'How much did D'Arcy's monocle
cost?' 'How is it that fellows like Crooke are in the Shell and decent
fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth?' 'What arc the Form
captain's three chief duties?' 'Who is the chemistry master at St Jim's?'
(From a girl) 'Where is St Jim's situated? COULD you tell me how to get
there, as I would love to sec the building? Are you boys just "phoneys",
as I think you are?'

It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are
living a complete fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance,
giving his age, height, weight, chest and bicep measurements and asking
which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he most exactly resembles. The
demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an exact
account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of
course, do everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM
Jack Blake is supposed to write answers to correspondents, and in the
MAGNET a couple of pages is always given up to the school magazine (the
GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and there is another page
in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories run
in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for
several weeks at a time. First there will be a series of rollicking
adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five and Billy Bunter; then a run
of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the make-up wizard)
in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which
Vernon-Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes
upon the real secret of the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why
they continue to be read in spite of their obvious out-of-dateness.

It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every
type of reader a character he can identify himself with. Most boys'
papers aim at doing this, hence the boy-assistant (Sexton Blake's Tinker,
Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.) who usually accompanies the explorer,
detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases there is only
one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the normal
athletic, high-spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a
slightly rowdier version of this type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic
version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry
Wharton), and a stolid, 'bulldog' version (Johnny Bull). Then there is
the reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely
'clever', studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy
who is not good at games but possesses some special talent (Skinner
Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom Redwing), an important
figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys from
very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere.
In addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and
Lancashire boys to play upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of
characterization goes deeper than this. If one studies the correspondence
columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the GEM and
MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the
out-and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the
money-grabbing American boy) and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though
in his origin he probably owed something to the fat boy in PICKWICK, is a
real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are
constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order
which never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves.
But he is not a subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another
seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, 'the swell
of St Jim's'), is evidently much admired. Like everything else in the GEM
and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He is the 'knut'
of the early twentieth century or even the 'masher' of the nineties ('Bai
Jove, deah boy!' and 'Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful
thwashin'!'), the monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and
Le Gateau. And his evident popularity goes to show how deep the
snob-appeal of this type is. English people are extremely fond of the
titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Whimsey) who always turns up trumps in the
moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy's girl admirers;

I think you're too hard on Gussy. I wonder he's still In existence, the
way you treat him. He's my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How's
this--to the tune of 'Goody Goody'?

Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
'Cos I'm wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench
Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can't get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: 'Don't disturb!'
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That's soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.

P.S.--Do you get on well with girls?

I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as
being probably the earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM
there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter.
Vernon-Smith, 'the Bounder of the Remove', a Byronic character, always on
the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even some of the
cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, 'the rotter of
the Sixth', is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying
sarcastic things about football and the team spirit. The boys of the
Remove only think him all the more of a cad for this, but a certain type
of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke & Co. are
probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; 'What
brand of cigarettes does Racke smoke?')

Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a
completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic
political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are
funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still Froggies and Italians are
still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the usual
comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the
Indian boy, though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also
the comic babu of the PUNCH tradition. ("The rowfulness is not the
proper caper, my esteemed Bob," said Inky. "Let dogs delight in the
barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the cracked pitcher
that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks.")
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee ("Waal, I guess", etc.)
dating from a peroid of Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the
Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late, no doubt because some of
the MAGNET'S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-century
pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English.
The assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are
put there for us to laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the
same way as insects. That is why in all boys' papers, not only the GEM
and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the
thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman's beard or the Italian's
barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when
the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to
describe the natives as individual human beings, but as a rule it is
assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike and will conform
more or less exactly to the following patterns:

FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
SPANIARD, Mexican, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
ARAB, Afghan, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
CHINESE: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.
ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, Dane, etc.: Kind-hearted, stupid.
NEGRO: Comic, very faithful.

The working classes only enter into the GEM and MAGNET as comics or
semi-villains (race-course touts, etc.). As for class-friction, trade
unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil war--not a
mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years' issue of the two papers
you might perhaps find the word 'Socialism', but you would have to look a
long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it
will be indirectly, in the word 'Bolshy' (meaning a person of violent
disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make
their appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above. The war-crisis
of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a story in which
Mr Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's millionaire father, cashed in on the
general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to 'crisis
scuttlers'. But that is probably as near to noticing the European situation
as the GEM and MAGNET will come, until the war actually starts.
That does not mean that these papers are unpatriotic--quite the
contrary! Throughout the Great War the GEM and MAGNET were perhaps the
most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost
every week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and
during the rationing period 'EAT LESS BREAD' was printed in large type on
every page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with
power-politics or 'ideological' warfare. It is more akin to family
loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude of
ordinary people, especially the huge untouched block of the middle class
and the better-off working class. These people are patriotic to the
middle of their bones, but they do not feel that what happens in foreign
countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they rally
to its defence as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not
interested. After all, England is always in the right and England always
wins, so why worry? It is an attitude that has been shaken during the
past twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes supposed. Failure to
understand it is one of the reasons why Left Wing political parties are
seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy.

The mental world of the GEM and MAGNET, therefore, is something like
this:

The year is 1910--or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at
Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes,
sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting
game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute.
There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The
ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne
and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are
jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British
Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the
monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has
just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea
of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After
tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter
and discussing the team for next week's match against Rook-wood.
Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the
same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.

But now turn from the GEM and MAGNET to the more up-to-date papers which
have appeared since the Great War. The truly significant thing is that
they have more points of resemblance to the GEM and MAGNET than points of
difference. But it is better to consider the differences first.

There are eight of these newer papers, the MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH, CHAMPION,
WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE. All of these have appeared
since the Great War, but except for the MODERN BOY none of them is less
than five years old. Two papers which ought also to be mentioned briefly
here; though they are not strictly in the same class as the rest, are the
DETECTIVE WEEKLY and the THRILLER, both owned by the Amalgamated Press.
The DETECTIVE WEEKLY has taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these papers
admit a certain amount of sex-interest into their stories, and though
certainly read by boys; they are not aimed at them exclusively. All the
others are boys' papers pure and simple, and they are sufficiently alike
to be considered together. There does not seem to be any notable
difference between Thomson's publications and those of the Amalgamated
Press.

As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical
superiority to the GEM and MAGNET. To begin with, they have the great
advantage of not being written entirely by one person. Instead of one
long complete story, a number of the WIZARD or HOTSPUR consists of half a
dozen or more serials, none of which goes on for ever. Consequently there
is far more variety and far less padding, and none of the tiresome
stylization and facetiousness of the GEM and MAGNET. Look at these two
extracts, for example:

Billy Bunter groaned.

A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was
booked for extra French.

In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But every one of
those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by
like tired snails.

Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe
that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours,
if not fifteen days!

Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not
matter. Bunter did! (The Magnet)

* * *

After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every
step of the way up. Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now
clinging like a human fly to the face of an icy cliff, as smooth and
treacherous as a giant pane of glass.

An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the
blinding snow into his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their
handholds and dash him to death on the jagged boulders which lay at the
foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.

Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had
done their best to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim
Rogers--until the blizzard had blotted the two Mounties out of sight
from below. (The Wizard)

The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes
a hundred words to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class.
Moreover, by not concentrating on school stories (in point of numbers the
school story slightly predominates in all these papers, except the
THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., have far
greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover
illustrations of the papers which I have on the table in front of me,
here are some of the things I see. On one a cowboy is clinging by his
toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and shooting down another
aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming for his
life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after
him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel
robot feels for him with its claws. On another a man in airman's costume
is fighting barehanded against a rat somewhat larger than a donkey. On
another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular development has just
seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, 'Take back your blooming lion!' Clearly no school
story can compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school
buildings may catch fire or the French master may turn out to be the head
of an international anarchist gang, but in a general way the interest
must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc. There
is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes,
mustangs, octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.

Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside
school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North,
Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective's angle), the Great War
(Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in
varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc.) and scientific
invention. The Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though
the Red Indian seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really new
is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots,
helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there
there are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands.
Whereas the GEM and MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD,
CHAMPION, MODERN BOY, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather
than Jules Verne, is the father of 'Scientifiction'. Naturally it is the
magical Martian aspect of science that is most exploited, but one or two
papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: 'A Kauri tree in
Queensland, Australia, is over 12,000 years old'; 'Nearly 50,000
thunderstorms occur every day'; 'Helium gas costs £1 per 1000 cubic
feet'; 'There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain';
'London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually', etc., etc.)
There is a marked advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in
the demand made on the reader's attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET
and the post-war papers are read by much the same public, but the mental
age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years--an improvement
probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education since
1909.

The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys' papers, though not
to anything like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the
cult of violence.

If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the
thing that immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle.
There is no central dominating character; instead there are fifteen
or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom
readers of different types can identify. In the more modern papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of
more or less his own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc., is
led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant
of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist--at
any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone
about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the
jaw. This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength
is the form of power that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort
of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of story he is sometimes actually a
giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes of violence in
nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There
is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English
paper and the threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc.
(not strictly boys' papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags
you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in,
jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been
perfected by people who brood endlessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists
and masochists. You can see the comparative gentleness of the English
civilization by the amateurish way in which prize-fighting is always
described in the boys' weeklies. There is no specialized vocabulary. Look
at these four extracts, two English, two American;

When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great
red marks on his chest. Bill's chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over
his right eye.

Into their corners they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were
up swiftly, and they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)

* * *

He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood
spattered and I went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right
under the heart. Another right smashed full on Ben's already battered
mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth, he crashed a flailing
left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)

* * *

It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled
and slid under his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a
giant cat in his swift and terrible onslaught.

He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a
moment Ben was simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben
was really a past-master of defence. He had many fine victories behind
him. But the Negro's rights and lefts crashed through openings that
hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)

* * *

Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing
down under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they
swapped punches. (FIGHT STORIES)

Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are
written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it
ought to be emphasized that on its level the moral code of the English
boys' papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty are never held up to
admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the American
gangster story. The huge sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that
there is a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers
seem able to produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in
America, it was interesting to see how promptly 'anti-Fascism' was
adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One
magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete
story, 'When Hell Game to America', in which the agents of a
'blood-maddened European dictator' are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with
death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to
sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women's backs and fling
them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in
which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with
knives to make them dance, etc., etc. The editor comments solemnly on all
this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up restrictions against
immigrants. On another page of the same paper: 'LIVES OF THE HOTCHA
CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes
of the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c.' 'HOW
TO LOVE. 10c.' 'FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c.' 'NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS. From
the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed.
Turn it around and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set
of 3 transfers 25c.,' etc., etc., etc. There is nothing at all like this
in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the process of
Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the
'he-man', the 'tough guy', the gorilla who puts everything right by
socking everybody on the jaw, now figures in probably a majority of boys'
papers. In one serial now running in the SKIPPER he is always portrayed
ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.

The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., as against the earlier
boys' papers, boils down to this: better technique, more scientific
interest, more bloodshed, more leader-worship. But, after all, it is the
LACK of development that is the really striking thing.

To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of
the SKIPPER and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET
and the GEM. The Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers,
lynch-law and other paraphernalia belonging to the eighties, is a
curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of this type
it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of
the earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on
Western prairies, in Chinese opium dens--everywhere in fact, except the
places where things really DO happen. That is a belief dating from thirty
or forty years ago, when the new continents were in process of being
opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure, the place
to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the
Great War, contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that
Americans are now admired instead of being laughed at, foreigners are
exactly the same figures of fun that they always were. If a Chinese
character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-smuggler of
Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912--no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a
Spaniard appears, he is still a 'dago' or 'greaser' who rolls cigarettes
and stabs people in the back; no indication that things have been
happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or are
barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a
little while, but it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain
versus Germany), with the real meaning of the struggle kept out of sight
as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is extremely
difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia
is mentioned at all it is usually in an information snippet (example:
'There are 29,000 centenarians in the USSR.'), and any reference to
the Revolution is indirect and twenty years out of date. In one story in
the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear, and as it is a Russian
bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky--obviously an echo of the 1917-23 period
and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia
rules the waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment,
dictatorships, purges or concentration camps.

And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is
somewhat less open than in the GEM and MAGNET--that is the most one can
possibly say. To begin with, the school story, always partly dependent on
snob-appeal, is by no means eliminated. Every number of a boys' paper
includes at least one school story, these stories slightly outnumbering
the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM and MAGNET
is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new
school is introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in
just those words that 'it was a very posh school'. From time to time a
story appears which is ostensibly directed AGAINST snobbery. The
scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes fairly frequent
appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one
of which considers itself more 'posh' than the other, and there are
fights, practical jokes, football matches, etc., always ending in the
discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at some of
these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has
crept into the boys' weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees
that they merely reflect the bitter jealousies that exist within the
white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the boy who goes to a
cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as 'posh' in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment
of school loyalty ('We're better than the fellows down the road'), a
thing almost unknown to the real working class, is still kept up. As
these stories are written by many different hands, they do, of course,
vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the
GEM and MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys
mentioned were titled.

Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics
(jokes about tramps, convicts, etc.), or as prize-fighters, acrobats,
cowboys, professional footballers and Foreign Legionaries--in other
words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts about
working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description.
Very occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say,
work in a coal-mine, but in all probability it will only be there as the
background of some lurid adventure. In any case the central character is
not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who reads
these papers--in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his
life working in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an
office--is led to identify with people in positions of command, above
all with people who are never troubled by shortage of money. The Lord
Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and wears a monocle but
is always to the fore in moments of danger, turns up over and over again.
(This character is a great favourite in Secret Service stories.) And, as
usual, the heroic characters all have to talk B.B.C.; they may talk
Scottish or Irish or American, but no one in a star part is ever
permitted to drop an aitch. Here it is worth comparing the social
atmosphere of the boys' weeklies with that of the women's weeklies, the
ORACLE, the FAMILY STAR, PEG'S PAPER, etc.

The women's papers are aimed at an older public and are read for the most
part by girls who are working for a living. Consequently they are on the
surface much more realistic. It is taken for granted, for example, that
nearly everyone has to live in a big town and work at a more or less dull
job. Sex, so far from being taboo, is THE subject. The short, complete
stories, the special feature of these papers, are generally of the 'came
the dawn' type: the heroine narrowly escapes losing her 'boy' to a
designing rival, or the 'boy' loses his job and has to postpone marriage,
but presently gets a better job. The changeling-fantasy (a girl brought
up in a poor home is 'really' the child of rich parents) is another
favourite. Where sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials, it
arises out of the more domestic type of crime, such as bigamy, forgery or
sometimes murder; no Martians, death-rays or international anarchist
gangs. These papers are at any rate aiming at credibility, and they have
a link with real life in their correspondence columns, where genuine
problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres's column of advice in the
ORACLE, for instance, is extremely sensible and well written. And yet the
world of the ORACLE and PEG'S PAPER is a pure fantasy-world. It is the
same fantasy all the time; pretending to be richer than you are. The
chief impression that one carries away from almost every story in these
papers is of a frightful, overwhelming 'refinement'. Ostensibly the
characters are working-class people, but their habits, the interiors of
their houses, their clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech
arc entirely middle class. They are all living at several pounds a week
above their income. And needless to say, that is just the impression that
is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-out
mother of five a dream-life in which she pictures herself--not actually
as a duchess (that convention has gone out) but as, say, the wife of a
bank-manager. Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set
up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is how working-class
people really DO live. The major facts arc simply not faced. It is
admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then
the dark clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of
un-employment as something permanent and inevitable, no mention of the
dole, no mention of trade unionism. No suggestion anywhere that there can
be anything wrong with the system AS A SYSTEM; there arc only individual
misfortunes, which are generally due to somebody's wickedness and can in
any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll
away, the kind employer raises Alfred's wages, and there are jobs for
everybody except the drunks. It is still the world of the WIZARD and the
GEM, except that there are orange-blossoms instead of machine-guns.

The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather
exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910. Yes, it
may be said, but what does it matter? And in any case, what else do you
expect?

Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny
dreadful into a realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story
must of its nature be more or less remote from real life. But, as I have
tried to make clear, the unreality of the WIZARD and the GEM is not so
artless as it looks. These papers exist because of a specialized demand,
because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians,
death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking
for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future
employers think suitable for them. To what extent people draw their ideas
from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are
influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial
stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst
books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones
that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many people who would
consider themselves extremely sophisticated and 'advanced' are actually
carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay. If that is so, the
boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff
that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very
large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including
many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with
it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as
hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.
All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into
them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist,
that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that
foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort
of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these
papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the
twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER
and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press,
which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more
than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are
closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This
in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were
not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically
vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in
which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy
doesn't?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to
people like Lord Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the
whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this
level no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such
thing as a left-wing boys' paper?

At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so
horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if
it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing
round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I
received was of the question-and-answer kind:

Q. 'Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?'
A. 'No, Comrade.'
Q. 'Why, Comrade?'
A. 'Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is
the symbol of tyranny and oppression,' etc., etc.

Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper
deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that
the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I have quoted
above, but does anyone doubt that they would be SOMETHING like it?
Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it
would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet
Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow
literature apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as
it is at all vigorously 'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist
paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At
this moment, therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time
likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something
almost beyond hoping for.

But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason
why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up with
snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in the
HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts; they are merely
adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine
the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a
paper as thrilling and lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and
'ideology' a little more up to date. It is even possible (though this
raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same
literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of
story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-class
life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the
last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of
left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their
social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no
doubt copies would still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they
were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their
inspiration was 'left'. If, for instance, a story described police
pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is
the Soviet film CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in
London. Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,
CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar
Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one
thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by
the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one)--a
performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise
the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there--heroic
fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses,
love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the Russian
Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the
Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a
lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the
other.

Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature
is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely
pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is
a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. ALL fiction from
the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the
interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the
blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or
other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only
unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no
impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe
nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.



CHARLES DICKENS (1940)


I

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the
burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you
come to think of it.

When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of
Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with
his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a
Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn
Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and
both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as
Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in
her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin
went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found
Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out
in the middle of a scene.

Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by
it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and
Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in
this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him
unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts
published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS
SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the
most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents
which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,
and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed
invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a
writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his
private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was
just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite
different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends
than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was
a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might
truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt
this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was
anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in
Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to
deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens
attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been
approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,
more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so
completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its
attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like
the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful
tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong
resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that
lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite
in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking
everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder
whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As
usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding
what he was NOT.

In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to
imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the
proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of
novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in
fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This
statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to
see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly
good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about
criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class
intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make
the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do
find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as
objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's
stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter
is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,
clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no
portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in
HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are
probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for
instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader
which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he
is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A
burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative
cross-section of the English working class.

Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a
'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner
soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will
be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is
worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much
better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.
He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but
important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the
existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon
this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.
Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting
them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that
society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'
that one begins to grasp his position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in
their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,
or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear
sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he
believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in
reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be
difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the
economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make
any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with
living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to
suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of
course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again
from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and
indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It
is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved
of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word
'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian
meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is
not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,
its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is
that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been
morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well
enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social
criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,
unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is
one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent.

Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of
authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens
figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's
early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not
necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a
superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising
his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out
of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a
pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or
Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the
first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it
is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this
character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier
books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same
figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.
Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the
middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one
who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT
EXPECTATIONS--GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on
patronage--and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by
Gradgrind after his reformation. The character reappears in a rather
different form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK
HOUSE--one might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in
these books the good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a
RENTIER. This is significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class,
he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for
him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the
Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's wages.
The seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens
wrote in the fifties is that by that time he had grasped the
helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society.
Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published
1864-5), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of
Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance,
but he is the usual DEUS EX MACHINA, solving everybody's problems by
showering money in all directions. He even 'trots', like the Cheerybles.
In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is a return to the earlier manner, and
not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens's thoughts seem to have come
full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for
everything.

One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child
labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books,
but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The
one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in
DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's
warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age
of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much
as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents,
and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.
Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:

It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so
easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and
with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt
bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made
any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old,
a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.

And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship...and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and
distinguished man crushed in my bosom.

Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens
himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography that he began
and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying
that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on
bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to be condemned
to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.
David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and
the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles
Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the
STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not
believe that any good can come out of Parliament--he had been a
Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning
experience--and he is slightly hostile to the most hopeful movement of
his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade unionism is represented as
something not much better than a racket, something that happens because
employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson
has pointed out, the apprentices' association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which
Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal
unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret assemblies, passwords and
so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but
there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own
hands, least of all by open violence.

As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two
novels, BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE it is a
case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780, though
they had religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more
than a pointless outburst of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of
thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his first idea was to
make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in
fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens
shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights in describing
scenes in which the 'dregs' of the population behave with atrocious
bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because
they show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he
describes can only have come out of his imagination, for no riots on
anything like the same scale had happened in his lifetime. Here is one of
his descriptions, for instance:

If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued
forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men
there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod
down human enemies, and wrenched them from their stalks, like savages who
twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the
air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the
skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were
restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On
the skull of one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon
the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came
streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head
like wax...But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or
sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage
of one man glutted.

You might almost think you were reading a description of 'Red' Spain by a
partisan of General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when
Dickens was writing, the London 'mob' still existed. (Nowadays there is
no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and the growth and shift of population
had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until
the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a thing
as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing
between shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In
A TALE OF TWO CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really
about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not entirely
different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book which
tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse of
time.

The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers
is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the
guillotine--tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads
bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch.
Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written
with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going.
But A TALE OF TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET
PIMPERNEL. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was
bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved
what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had
behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We
are constantly being reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed,
with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants
starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will
presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc.,
etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is
insisted upon in the clearest terms:

It was too much the way...to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it
were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been
sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had
led to it--as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of
the misused and perverted resources that should have made them
prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not
in plain terms recorded what they saw.

And again:

All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could
record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet
there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a
blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to
maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this
horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and
it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But
there is no perception here of what is now called historic necessity.
Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the causes, but he
thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is
something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the
French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have
turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no
Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no guillotine--and so much the better. This is
the opposite of the 'revolutionary' attitude. From the 'revolutionary'
point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and
therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is
playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the
nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as
meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is
begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own instruments. In
Sydney Carton's vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same
knife--which, in fact, was approximately what happened.

And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why
everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES; they
have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own nightmare. Again
and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution--the
mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the
frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob--the
description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the
grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in
the September massacres--outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The
revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages--in fact, as
lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative
intensity. He describes them dancing the 'Carmagnole', for instance:

There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing
like five thousand demons...They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison...
They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one
another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another, and spun around in
pairs, until many of them dropped...Suddenly they stopped again, paused,
struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public
way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped
screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.
It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once innocent,
delivered over to all devilry.

He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining
children. The passage I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It
and others like it show how deep was Dickens's horror of revolutionary
hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, 'with their heads low down and
their hands high up', etc., and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens's most successful
attempt at a MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply 'the new
oppressors who have risen in the destruction of the old', the
revolutionary courts are presided over by 'the lowest, cruellest and
worst populace', and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens
insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in
this he shows a great deal of prescience. 'A law of the suspected, which
struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good
and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people
who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing'--it would
apply pretty accurately to several countries today.

The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors;
Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them--and from a historical point of
view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of Terror was a much
smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he
gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in
reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was
a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and
the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister
vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.
Thanks to Dickens, the very word 'tumbril' has a murderous sound; one
forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the
average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of
severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy
with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should
have played a part in creating this impression.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only remedy
remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is
always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young
enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens's preoccupation with
childhood.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood
than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since,
in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated,
no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point
of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so
immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been
written BY A CHILD. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and
sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom
into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been
able to stand both inside and outside the child's mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according
to the age at which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in
which David Copperfield is unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops;
or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss
Havisham's house and finding himself completely unable to describe what
he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous lies--which, of
course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there.
And how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child's mind,
its visualizing tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of
impression. Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his dead
parents were derived from their tombstones:

The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was
a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and
turn of the inscription, 'ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE', I drew a
childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five
little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were
arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory
of five little brothers of mine...I am indebted for a belief I
religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with
their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in
this state of existence.

There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr.
Murdstone's hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his
back a placard saying, 'Take care of him. He bites.' He looks at the door
in the playground where the boys have carved their names, and from the
appearance of each name he seems to know in just what tone of voice the
boy will read out the placard:

There was one boy--a certain J. Steerforth--who cut his name very deep
and very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice,
and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles,
who I dreaded would make game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully
frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I fancied would
sing it.

When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were
exactly the pictures that those particular names would call up. The
reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words
(Demple--'temple'; Traddles--probably 'skedaddle'). But how many people,
before Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude
towards children was a much rarer thing in Dickens's day than it is now.
The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a child. In
Dickens's youth children were still being 'solemnly tried at a criminal
bar, where they were held up to be seen', and it was not so long since
boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of
'breaking the child's spirit' was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD
FAMILY was a standard book for children till late into the century. This
evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is
well worth reading in the original version. It gives one some idea of
the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr.
Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first
thrashes them, reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite'
between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon
beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. In
the earlier part of the century scores of thousands of children, aged
sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines
or cotton mills, and even at the fashionable public schools boys were
flogged till they ran with blood for a mistake in their Latin verses.
One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and which most of his
contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I
think this can be inferred from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as physical, and
though there is a fair number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are
generally scoundrels.

Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of
education then existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens's hands.
There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where little boys are blown up with
Greek until they burst, and the revolting charity schools of the period,
which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem
House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept by
Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even
today. Salem House is the ancestor of the modern 'prep school', which
still has a good deal of resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same stamp is carrying on at this
moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's
criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane;
on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is
coming up in the fifties and sixties, the 'modern' school, with its
gritty insistence on 'facts'. What, then, DOES he want? As always, what
he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing--the old
type of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not
quite so much Greek. Doctor Strong's school, to which David Copperfield
goes after he escapes from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem House
with the vices left out and a good deal of 'old grey stones' atmosphere
thrown in:

Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle's
as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on
a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honour and good
faith of the boys...which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a part
in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it--I am sure I did
for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any boy being
otherwise--and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit. We had
noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I
remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any
disgrace, by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor
Strong and Doctor Strong's boys.

In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens's utter lack
of any educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good
school, but nothing further. The boys 'learnt with a good will', but what
did they learn? No doubt it was Doctor Blimber's curriculum, a little
watered down. Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere
implied in Dickens's novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn that he
sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the
ordinary educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done
this because he was painfully conscious of being under-educated himself.
Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical learning.
Dickens had had little or no formal education, but he lost nothing by
missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong's, or, in real
life, than Eton, it was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather
different from the one Gissing suggests.

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always
pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is
hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to
any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and
his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's
school being as different from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two
things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and
Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a
'change of heart'--that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a
reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people
who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug,
except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries
away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that
Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be
just as 'revolutionary'--and revolution, after all, means turning things
upside down--as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at
this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding
of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like 'I wander through each
charted street' than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress
is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably
disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the
old--generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two
viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature
until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing
the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to
different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in
point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly
undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath
the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at
work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the
moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more
dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee.
The central problem--how to prevent power from being abused--remains
unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is
an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. 'If men would behave
decently the world would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds.

II

More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in
terms of his social origin, though actually his family history was not
quite what one would infer from his novels. His father was a clerk in
government service, and through his mother's family he had connexions
with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards he was
brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban
bourgeoisie, and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this
class, with all the 'points', as it were, very highly developed. That is
partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants a modern equivalent,
the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history
and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett
was essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a
midlander, with an industrial and noncomformist rather than commercial
and Anglican background.

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is
his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and
everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.
On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the
other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells's novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the
aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat,
and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people
he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners,
priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a
list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere
omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a common factor.
All of them are archaic types, people who are governed by tradition and
whose eyes are turned towards the past--the opposite, therefore, of the
rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.

Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was
really a rising class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than
Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future and has a rather sloppy
love of the picturesque (the 'quaint old church', etc.). Nevertheless his
list of most hated types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to
be striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class--has a sort
of generalized sympathy with them because they are oppressed--but he
does not in reality know much about them; they come into his books
chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At the other end of the
scale he loathes the aristocrat and--going one better than Wells in this
loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr.
Pickwick on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term
'aristocrat', for the type Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.

Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy, who
hardly enter into his books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging
dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureaucrats and
professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are
practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance.
One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise
there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock figure the 'good old squire')
and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens's sympathy because he is a
persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e.
officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges
and magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the
Circumlocution Office. The only officials whom Dickens handles with any
kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.

Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is
part of the English puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this
day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, was growing
suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up
mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically
impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either
interfered or persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition
of public service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes
us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is
their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of
individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community
exists. On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting
his duties, would have some vague notion of what duties he was
neglecting. Dickens's attitude is never irresponsible, still less does he
take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind there
is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is
unnecessary. Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the
Empire is simply Major Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is
simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply
Bumble and the Circumlocution Office--and so on and so forth. What he
does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and Doodle and
all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE
performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother
about.

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage
to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From
Dickens's point of view 'good' society is simply a collection of village
idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The
Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)! The
Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at
the same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic
class incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only succeeds with
this class when he depicts them as mental defectives. The accusation
which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he 'could not
paint a gentleman', was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that
what he says against the 'gentleman' class is seldom very damaging. Sir
Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet
type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES is better, but he would be only an ordinary
achievement for Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's thoughts hardly move
outside the 'gentleman' class, but Thackeray has the great advantage of
having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very
similar to Dickens's. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical
moneyed class against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The
eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in
the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR is a full-length
version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But by
origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the
class he is satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively
subtle types as, for instance, Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major
Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed
ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling
tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous
code they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a
dud cheque, for instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand
he would not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave
well on the field of battle--a thing that would not particularly appeal
to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching
respect for Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make
one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life on the
fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In
his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional
caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on 'good' society are rather
perfunctory. The aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books
chiefly as a kind of 'noises off', a haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the
wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he produces a really subtle
and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is
generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he
lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached
the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is
not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders.
One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of
any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago,
Froggy, Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser,
Yellowbelly--these are merely a selection. Any time before 1870 the list
would have been shorter, because the map of the world was different from
what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign races that had
fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and
especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English
attitude of patronage was so intolerable that English 'arrogance' and
'xenophobia' are still a legend. And of course they are not a completely
untrue legend even now. Till very recently nearly all English children
were brought up to despise the southern European races, and history as
taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one
has got to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what
boasting really is. Those were the days when the English built up their
legend of themselves as 'sturdy islanders' and 'stubborn hearts of oak'
and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman
was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-century novels
and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the 'Froggy'--a
small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always
jabbering and gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his
martial exploits, but generally taking to flight when real danger
appears. Over against him was John Bull, the 'sturdy English yeoman', or
(a more public-school version) the 'strong, silent Englishman' of Charles
Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are
moments when he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact
that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the English won the battle of
Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without coming upon some
reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like
most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English
are larger than other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than
most people), and therefore he is capable of writing passages like this:

I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money
that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height,
and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not
weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where
you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal--a
French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to
be so), etc. etc.

There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's works.
Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an
exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, and of
course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by
European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the 'island race', 'bulldog breed', 'right little,
tight little island' style of talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES
there is not a line that could be taken as meaning, 'Look how these
wicked Frenchmen behave!' The only place where he seems to display a
normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind
against cant. If Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet
Russia and come back to the book rather like Gide's RETOUR DE L'URSS. But
he is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as
individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does
not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and
not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which
obviously he does not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no
prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted (OLIVER
TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver of stolen goods will be a
Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the 'Jew joke',
endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear
in his books, and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very
convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.

Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real
largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative, rather
unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an Englishman but he is
hardly aware of it--certainly the thought of being an Englishman does
not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on
foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition.
Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small noncomformist tradesman
who looks down on the 'redcoats', and thinks that war is wicked--a
one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that
Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his
marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never
seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the
Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not strike
him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as
a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to
the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.

III

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in
spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special
prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a 'popular'
writer, a champion of the 'oppressed masses'. So he is, so long as he
thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney
at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed
masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to
see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the
spokesman of 'the poor', without showing much awareness of who 'the poor'
really are. To Chesterton 'the poor' means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, 'is the great symbol in English literature
of the populace peculiar to England'; and Sam Weller is a valet! The
other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror
of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes
of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of
the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:

The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people
half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many
cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon
the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and
filth, and misery, etc. etc.

There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the
impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond
the pale. In rather the same way the modern doctrinaire Socialist
contemptuously writes off a large block of the population as
'lumpenproletariat'.

Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect
of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of
crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken the law he
has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of
DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison where Latimer and
Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard
the horrible 'model' prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime
or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the 'I've always kept
myself respectable' habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the
attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is
extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude
towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is
actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. 'The
abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast', etc. etc. So far as one can discover
from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been
terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a
criminal and a convict. There is an even more 'kept-myself-respectable'
touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot
take Magwitch's money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has
been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's money and therefore
'tainted'. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either.
Psychologically the latter part of GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about the best
thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels 'Yes,
that is just how Pip would have behaved.' But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at
bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer
class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote--characters
who are more pathetic than the author intended.

When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent,
labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens's
attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like the Peggottys
and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them
as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments
(parts of this are given in Forster's LIFE), in which Dickens expresses
his feelings about the blacking-factory episode a great deal more
strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the
memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way 'made me cry,
after my eldest child could speak.' The text makes it quite clear that
what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced
contact with 'low' associates:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my
happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking warehouse
too...I soon became at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands
as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my
conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space
between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as 'the young
gentleman'. A certain man...used to call me 'Charles' sometimes in
speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we were very
confidential...Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the
'young-gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.

It was as well that there should be 'a space between us', you see.
However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to
resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could
hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities
may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The 'gentleman' and the
'common man' must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens
is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would
be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class
exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a
certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his
hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are
soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his
heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes--Nicholas Nickleby, Martin
Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John Harmon--are usually
of the type known as 'walking gentlemen'. He likes a bourgeois exterior
and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is
that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like
a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure
like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the JEUNE
PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B.B.C. This is so, even when it
involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest
childhood; actually he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at
least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie
Jupe, Oliver Twist--one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even Rachel
in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility
in her case.

One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the
class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex.
This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and consequently it is one
of the points at which the 'I'm-not-a-snob' pose tends to break down.

One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a
colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial attitude
('native' women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct) exists in a
veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter resentment on both
sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude
class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example
of 'class-conscious' reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF
CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed
up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man
to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite
different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle.
As he sees it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is
simply an 'entanglement' to be escaped from. Trollope's moral standards
are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen, but
the implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings do not
greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical
class-reaction by noting that the girl 'smells'. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING)
takes more the 'class-conscious' viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to
hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny Bolton) his attitude is much the same as
Trollope's; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY it is nearer to Meredith's.

One could divine a great deal about Trollope's social origin, or
Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the class-sex
theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is that he is
more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the
proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale
of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's manuscript in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the
implacable hatred of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to
approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD, where he is dealing with a typical
nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him
as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must
not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but
neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that
Steerforth has added to his offence by being the son of rich parents. The
Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but the Peggottys are not--not
even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if they were,
of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.

In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and
Lizzie Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias.
According to the 'Unhand me, monster!' tradition, Lizzie ought either to
'spurn' Eugene or to be ruined by him and throw herself off Waterloo
Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a hero resolved
upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is
frightened by Eugene's advances and actually runs away from him, but
hardly pretends to dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much
decency to attempt seducing her and dare not marry her because of his
family. Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except Mrs.
Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as
it might have happened in real life. But a 'class-conscious' novelist
would have given her to Bradley Headstone.

But when it is the other way about--when it is a case of a poor man
aspiring to some woman who is 'above' him Dickens instantly retreats into
the middle-class attitude. He is rather fond of the Victorian notion of a
woman (woman with a capital W) being 'above' a man. Pip feels that
Estella is 'above' him, Esther Summerson is 'above' Guppy, Little Dorrit
is 'above' John Chivery, Lucy Manette is 'above' Sydney Carton. In some
of these the 'above'-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social.
There is a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield
discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The
disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:

'Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground
my Agnes walks on.'

I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of
the fire, and running him through with it. It went from me with a shock,
like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of Agnes, outraged by so
much as a thought of this red-headed animal's, remained in my mind (when
I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)
and made me giddy...'I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above
you (David says later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations,
as the moon herself.'

Considering how Heep's general lowness--his servile manners, dropped
aitches and so forth--has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is
not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's feelings. Heep, of course,
is playing a villainous part, but even villains have sexual lives; it is
the thought of the 'pure' Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches
that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in
love with a woman who is 'above' him as a joke. It is one of the stock
jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE
is an example, John Chivery is another, and there is a rather ill-natured
treatment of this theme in the 'swarry' in PICKWICK PAPERS. Here Dickens
describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding
dinner-parties in imitation of their 'betters' and deluding themselves
that their young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes
him as very comic. So it is in a way, though one might question whether
it is not better for a footman even to have delusions of this kind than
simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.

In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the
nineteenth century the revolt against domestic service was just
beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over £500 a year. An
enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deals
with the uppishness of servants. For years PUNCH ran a series of jokes
called 'Servant Gal-isms', all turning on the then astonishing fact that
a servant is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of
thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they
are dishonest (GREAT EXPECTATIONS), incompetent (DAVID COPPERFIELD), turn
up their noses at good food (PICKWICK PAPERS), etc. etc.--all rather in
the spirit of the suburban housewife with one downtrodden cook-general.
But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he
wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is
recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are
all of them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the 'old family
retainer'; they identify themselves with their master's family and are at
once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and
Sam Weller are derived to some extent from Smollett, and hence from
Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been attracted
by such a type. Sam Weller's attitude is definitely medieval. He gets
himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and
afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick
still needs his services. There is a characteristic scene between them:

'Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin', Sam Veller,
as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what
may...'

'My good fellow', said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down again,
rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, 'you are bound to consider the
young woman also.'

'I do consider the young 'ooman, sir', said Sam. 'I have considered the
young 'ooman. I've spoke to her. I've told her how I'm sitivated; she's
ready to vait till I'm ready, and I believe she vill. If she don't, she's
not the young 'ooman I take her for, and I give up with readiness.'

It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in
real life. But notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a
matter of course to sacrifice years of his life to his master, and he can
also sit down in his master's presence. A modern manservant would never
think of doing either. Dickens's views on the servant question do not get
much beyond wishing that master and servant would love one another.
Sloppy in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, though a wretched failure as a character,
represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of
course, is natural, human, and likeable; but so was feudalism.

What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an
idealized version of the existing thing. He was writing at a time when
domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable evil. There
were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth.
It was an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient
houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement
kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the FACT of
servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller
and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles. If there
have got to be masters and servants, how much better that the master
should be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better
still, of course, if servants did not exist at all--but this Dickens is
probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical
development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to
show that it is not imaginable either.

IV

It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about
agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and London
is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the
centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply
civilized but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one
looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that, as nineteenth-century
novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way
things really happen. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue
and it needs some qualification.

Dickens had had vivid glimpses of 'low life'--life in a debtor's prison,
for example--and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about
ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the
nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas
a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel
is a novel about a novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a
decade or so in patient efforts to make contact with the 'common man',
his 'common man' finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow
at that. Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind of thing. He has
no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice,
vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about, however,
is work.

In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The
only one of his heroes who has a plausible profession is David
Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a novelist, like
Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living
is very much in the background. Pip, for instance, 'goes into business'
in Egypt; we are not told what business, and Pip's working life occupies
about half a page of the book. Clennam has been in some unspecified
business in China, and later goes into another barely specified business
with Doyce; Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not seem to get
much time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring directly
out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope
is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows
very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow.
What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his
money? How did Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could
never follow up the details of Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange
rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance,
industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is
the case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have
known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in
ORLEY FARM, for instance.

And this partly accounts for the needless ramifications of Dickens's
novels, the awful Victorian 'plot'. It is true that not all his novels
are alike in this. A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a very good and fairly simple
story, and so in its different ways is HARD TIMES; but these are just the
two which are always rejected as 'not like Dickens'--and incidentally
they were not published in monthly numbers. The two first-person
novels are also good stories, apart from their subplots. But
the typical Dickens novel, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, always exists round a framework of
melodrama. The last thing anyone ever remembers about the books is their
central story. On the other hand, I suppose no one has ever read them
without carrying the memory of individual pages to the day of his death.
Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them
always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of
society; that is to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his
greatest success is The PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a story at all,
merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development--the
characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of
eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action, the
melodrama begins. He cannot make the action revolve round their ordinary
occupations; hence the crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues,
murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. In the
end even people like Squeers and Micawber get sucked into the machinery.

Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague or merely
melodramatic writer. Much that he wrote is extremely factual, and in the
power of evoking visual images he has probably never been equalled. When
Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your
life. But in a way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is
missing. For, after all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always
sees--the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of
things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the
landscape. Wonderfully as he can describe an APPEARANCE, Dickens does not
often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in leaving
in one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things seen in leisure
moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or through the windows of a
stage-coach; the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass
door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses,
clothes, faces and, above all, food. Everything is seen from the
consumer-angle. When he writes about Cokestown he manages to evoke, in
just a few paragraphs, the atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly
disgusted southern visitor would see it. 'It had a black canal in it, and
a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of
buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all
day long, where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and
down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.'

That is as near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An
engineer or a cotton-broker would see it differently; but then neither of
them would be capable of that impressionistic touch about the heads of
the elephants.

In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical.
He is a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather than through his
hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not so sedentary as this
seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health and physique, he was
active to the point of restlessness; throughout his life he was a
remarkable walker, and he could at any rate carpenter well enough to put
up stage scenery. But he was not one of those people who feel a need to
use their hands. It is difficult to imagine him digging at a
cabbage-patch, for instance. He gives no evidence of knowing anything
about agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of game or
sport. He has no interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age
in which he was writing, it is astonishing how little physical brutality
there is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for
instance, behave with the most remarkable mildness towards the Americans
who are constantly menacing them with revolvers and bowie-knives. The
average English or American novelist would have had them handing out
socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all directions. Dickens
is too decent for that; he sees the stupidity of violence, and he also
belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the
jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards sport is mixed up with
social feelings. In England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport,
especially field-sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. English
Socialists are often flatly incredulous when told that Lenin, for
instance, was devoted to shooting. In their eyes, shooting, hunting,
etc., are simply snobbish observances of the landed gentry; they forget
that these things might appear differently in a huge virgin country like
Russia. From Dickens's point of view almost any kind of sport is at best
a subject for satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century
life--the boxing, racing, cock-fighting, badger-digging, poaching,
rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech's
illustrations to Surtees--is outside his scope.

What is more striking, in a seemingly 'progressive' radical, is that he
is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of
machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens
nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he
shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books
one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period.
LITTLE DORRIT, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late
twenties; GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals
with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries
which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the
breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first
appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books.
Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's
'invention' in LITTLE DORRIT. It is represented as something extremely
ingenious and revolutionary, 'of great importance to his country and his
fellow-creatures', and it is also an important minor link in the book;
yet we are never told what the 'invention' is! On the other hand, Doyce's
physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a
peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers.
After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one's memory; but, as usual,
Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.

There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty
but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this
stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he
speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of MORAL progress--men
growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good
as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap
between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest.
Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens's
unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it
does is to make any POSITIVE attitude more difficult for him. He is
hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the
industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning
Science, 'progress', and so forth), which hardly enters into his
thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no
definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he
attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet,
after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why
did he not indicate what a school MIGHT have been? Why did he not have
his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of
sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he
lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but
very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something
which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really
does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us--that he has no
idea of work.

With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens
himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who
is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a
living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate
interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is
not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a
doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the
DEUS EX MACHINA enters with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the
hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling 'This is what I came
into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this
even if it means starvation', which turns men of differing temperaments
into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and
revolutionaries--this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's
books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in
his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no
calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can
imagine this kind of devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough,
considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last
resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is
uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of the
elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for
politics--leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective
except to marry the heroine, settle down, live solvently and be kind.
And you can do that much better in private life.

Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imaginative
background. What did he think of as the most desirable way to live? When
Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby
had married money, when John Harman had been enriched by Boffin what did
they DO?

The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested
his wife's money with the Cheerybles and 'became a rich and prosperous
merchant', but as he immediately retired into Devonshire, we can assume
that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass 'purchased and
cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit.' That is the
spirit in which most of Dickens's books end--a sort of radiant idleness.
Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work (Harthouse,
Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation) it is
because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on
somebody else; if you are 'good', and also self-supporting, there is no
reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your
dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general
assumption of his age. The 'genteel sufficiency', the 'competence', the
'gentleman of independent means' (or 'in easy circumstances')--the very
phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a dream of COMPLETE
IDLENESS. Charles Reade conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending of
HARD CASH. Alfred Hardie, hero of HARD CASH, is the typical
nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school style), with gifts which
Reade describes as amounting to 'genius'. He is an old Etonian and a
scholar of Oxford, he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by
heart, he can box with prizefighters and win the Diamond Sculls at
Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of course, he
behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he
inherits a fortune, marries his Julia Dodd and settles down in the
suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as his parents-in-law:

They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred...Oh, you
happy little villa! You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can
be. A day came, however, when your walls could no longer hold all the
happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a lovely boy; enter two nurses
and the villa showed symptoms of bursting. Two months more, and Alfred
and his wife overflowed into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off;
and there was a double reason for the migration. As often happens after a
long separation, Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant
to play about their knees, etc. etc. etc.

This is the type of the Victorian happy ending--a vision of a huge,
loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the
same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. What is
striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it
implies. It is not even a violent idleness, like Squire Western's.

That is the significance of Dickens's urban background and his
non interest in the blackguardly-sporting military side of life. His
heroes, once they had come into money and 'settled down', would not only
do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope
with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home
in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a
blood-relation living exactly the same life:

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant,
was to buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and there came
gradually about him a group of lovely children, it was altered and
enlarged; but none of the old rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree
was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any association of
bygone times was ever removed or changed.

Within a stone's-throw was another retreat enlivened by children's
pleasant voices too; and here was Kate...the same true, gentle creature,
the same fond sister, the same in the love of all about her, as in her
girlish days.

It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted from Reade.
And evidently this is Dickens's ideal ending. It is perfectly attained in
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT and PICKWICK, and it is approximated
to in varying degrees in almost all the others. The exceptions are HARD
TIMES and GREAT EXPECTATIONS--the latter actually has a 'happy ending',
but it contradicts the general tendency of the book, and it was put in at
the request of Bulwer Lytton.

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a
hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a
sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is
safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown
churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away
before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the
children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside,
talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals,
the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the
Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever
happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a
genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The
thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him. This alone would
be enough to tell one that more than a hundred years have passed since
Dickens's first book was written. No modern man could combine such
purposelessness with so much vitality.

V

By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as
this, will probably be angry with me.

I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his 'message', and
almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially
every novelist, HAS a 'message', whether he admits it or not, and the
minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.
Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would
have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is
art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to
be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and,
above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why
does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?

That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic
preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by
non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary
criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens's case the
complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those
'great authors' who are ladled down everyone's throat in childhood. At
the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different
after-effects in later life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a
sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a
child, 'Ye Mariners of England', the 'Charge of the Light Brigade' and so
forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the
memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association
are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two of his books lying
about in an actual majority of English homes. Many children begin to know
his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the whole
Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A thing that is absorbed as early
as that does not come up against any critical judgement. And when one
thinks of this, one thinks of all that is bad and silly in Dickens--the
cast-iron 'plots', the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the
paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of 'pathos'. And then the
thought arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply mean that I like
thinking about my childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution?

If so, he is an institution that there is no getting away from. How often
one really thinks about any writer, even a writer one cares for, is a
difficult thing to decide; but I should doubt whether anyone who has
actually read Dickens can go a week without remembering him in one
context or another. Whether you approve of him or not, he is THERE, like
the Nelson Column. At any moment some scene or character, which may come
from some book you cannot even remember the name of, is liable to drop
into your mind. Micawber's letters! Winkle in the witness-box! Mrs. Gamp!
Mrs. Wititterly and Sir Tumley Snuffim! Todgers's! (George Gissing said
that when he passed the Monument it was never of the Fire of London that
he thought, always of Todgers's.) Mrs. Leo Hunter! Squeers! Silas Wegg
and the Decline and Fall-off of the Russian Empire! Miss Mills and the
Desert of Sahara! Wopsle acting Hamlet! Mrs. Jellyby! Mantalini, Jerry
Cruncher, Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman, Skimpole, Joe Gargery,
Pecksniff--and so it goes on and on. It is not so much a series of
books, it is more like a world. And not a purely comic world either, for
part of what one remembers in Dickens is his Victorian morbidness and
necrophilia and the blood-and-thunder scenes--the death of Sykes,
Krook's spontaneous combustion, Fagin in the condemned cell, the women
knitting round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this has
entered even into the minds of people who do not care about it. A
music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite recently) go on the
stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs. Gamp with a fair certainty of
being understood, although not one in twenty of the audience had ever
read a book of Dickens's right through. Even people who affect to despise
him quote him unconsciously.

Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point. In
genuinely popular literature--for instance, the Elephant and Castle
version of SWEENY TODD--he has been plagiarized quite shamelessly. What
has been imitated, however, is simply a tradition that Dickens himself
took from earlier novelists and developed, the cult of 'character', i.e.
eccentricity. The thing that cannot be imitated is his fertility of
invention, which is invention not so much of characters, still less of
'situations', as of turns of phrase and concrete details. The
outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the UNNECESSARY
DETAIL. Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not
particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as individual
as a fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer's party, is telling the
story of the child who swallowed its sister's necklace:

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated
himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had got through the
necklace--five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an
industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her
eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I
needn't say, didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at
dinner--baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it--the child, who
wasn't hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the
devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. 'Don't do that, my boy', says
the father. 'I ain't a-doin' nothing', said the child. 'Well, don't do it
again', said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise
began again, worse than ever. 'If you don't mind what I say, my boy',
said the father, 'you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a
pig's whisper.' He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such
a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. 'Why dam' me, it's IN the
child', said the father; 'he's got the croup in the wrong place!' 'No, I
haven't, father', said the child, beginning to cry, 'it's the necklace; I
swallowed it, father.' The father caught the child up, and ran with him
to the hospital, the beads in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with
the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the
cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. 'He's in the hospital
now', said Jack Hopkins, 'and he makes such a devil of a noise when he
walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for
fear he should wake the patients.'

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic
paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else
would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under
it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn't. It is
something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of
the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens
atmosphere is created. The other thing one would notice here is that
Dickens's way of telling a story takes a long time. An interesting
example, too long to quote, is Sam Weller's story of the obstinate
patient in Chapter XLIV of THE PICKWICK PAPERS. As it happens, we have a
standard of comparison here, because Dickens is plagiarizing, consciously
or unconsciously. The story is also told by some ancient Greek writer. I
cannot now find the passage, but I read it years ago as a boy at school,
and it runs more or less like this:

A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by his
physician that if he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him. The
Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of wine and immediately jumped off
the house-top and perished. 'For', said he, 'in this way I shall prove
that the wine did not kill me.'

As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story--about six lines. As Sam
Weller tells it, it takes round about a thousand words. Long before
getting to the point we have been told all about the patient's clothes,
his meals, his manners, even the newspapers he reads, and about the
peculiar construction of the doctor's carriage, which conceals the fact
that the coachman's trousers do not match his coat. Then there is the
dialogue between the doctor and the patient. ''Crumpets is wholesome,
sir,' said the patient. 'Crumpets is NOT wholesome, sir,' says the
doctor, wery fierce,' etc., etc. In the end the original story had been
buried under the details. And in all of Dickens's most characteristic
passages it is the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a
kind of weed. Squeers stands up to address his boys, and immediately we
are hearing about Bolder's father who was two pounds ten short, and
Mobbs's stepmother who took to her bed on hearing that Mobbs wouldn't eat
fat and hoped Mr. Squeers would flog him into a happier state of mind.
Mrs. Leo Hunter writes a poem, 'Expiring Frog'; two full stanzas are
given. Boffin takes a fancy to pose as a miser, and instantly we are down
among the squalid biographies of eighteenth-century misers, with names
like Vulture Hopkins and the Rev. Blewberry Jones, and chapter headings
like 'The Story of the Mutton Pies' and 'The Treasures of a Dunghill'.
Mrs. Harris, who does not even exist, has more detail piled on to her
than any three characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle of a
sentence we learn, for instance, that her infant nephew has been seen in
a bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with the pink-eyed lady, the Prussian
dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe Gargery describes how the robbers
broke into the house of Pumblechook, the corn and seed merchant--'and
they took his till, and they took his cashbox, and they drinked his wine,
and they partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they
pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpost, and they give him a
dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to prevent
his crying out.' Once again the unmistakable Dickens touch, the flowering
annuals; but any other novelist would only have mentioned about half of
these outrages. Everything is piled up and up, detail on detail,
embroidery on embroidery. It is futile to object that this kind of thing
is rococo--one might as well make the same objection to a wedding-cake.
Either you like it or you do not like it. Other nineteenth-century
writers, Surtees, Barham, Thackeray, even Marryat, have something of
Dickens's profuse, overflowing quality, but none of them on anything like
the same scale. The appeal of all these writers now depends partly on
period-flavour and though Marryat is still officially a 'boy's writer'
and Surtees has a sort of legendary fame among hunting men, it is
probable that they are read mostly by bookish people.

Significantly, Dickens's most successful books (not his BEST books) are
THE PICKWICK PAPERS, which is not a novel, and HARD TIMES and A TALE OF
TWO CITIES, which are not funny. As a novelist his natural fertility
greatly hampers him, because the burlesque which he is never able to
resist, is constantly breaking into what ought to be serious situations.
There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of GREAT
EXPECTATIONS. The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the
six-year-old Pip in the churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough,
from Pip's point of view. The convict, smothered in mud and with his
chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up among the tombs, grabs
the child, turns him upside down and robs his pockets. Then he begins
terrorizing him into bringing foal and a file:

He held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the stone,
and went on in these fearful terms:

'You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it and you
never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate.
Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with
me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears
the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself,
of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain
for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock
his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes
over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man
will softly creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that
young man from harming you at the present moment, but with great
difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your
inside. Now, what do you say?'

Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no starving
and hunted man would speak in the least like that. Moreover, although the
speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the way in which a child's mind
works, its actual words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It
turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him
through the child's eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book he
is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on which
the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As
usual, Dickens's imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details
were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are more of a
piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive
phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David
Copperfield's lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic.
'If I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy four thousand
double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present payment',
it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the
double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone;
he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is
struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much,
because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his
wholes. He is all fragments, all details--rotten architecture, but
wonderful gargoyles--and never better than when he is building up some
character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes his
characters behave inconsistently. Generally he is accused of doing just
the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere 'types', each
crudely representing some single trait and fitted with a kind of label by
which you recognize him. Dickens is 'only a caricaturist'--that is the
usual accusation, and it does him both more and less than justice. To
begin with, he did not think of himself as a caricaturist, and was
constantly setting into action characters who ought to have been purely
static. Squeers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher,[Note, below] Wegg, Skimpole,
Pecksniff and many others are finally involved in 'plots' where they are
out of place and where they behave quite incredibly. They start off as
magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a third-rate
movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger on a single sentence in which
the original illusion is destroyed. There is such a sentence in DAVID
COPPERFIELD. After the famous dinner-party (the one where the leg of
mutton was underdone), David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles
at the top of the stairs:

[Note: Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the
real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and
was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part.
But ANY action by such a character would seem incongruous. (Author's
footnote)]

'Traddles', said I, 'Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor fellow: but
if I were you I wouldn't lend him anything.'

'My dear Copperfield', returned Traddles, smiling, 'I haven't got
anything to lend.'

'You have got a name, you know,' I said.

At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little though
something of the kind was inevitable sooner or later. The story is a
fairly realistic one, and David is growing up; ultimately he is bound to
see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel. Afterwards, of
course, Dickens's sentimentality overcomes him and Micawber is made to
turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the original Micawber is never
quite recaptured, in spite of desperate efforts. As a rule, the 'plot' in
which Dickens's characters get entangled is not particularly credible,
but at least it makes some pretence at reality, whereas the world to
which they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just
here one sees that 'only a caricaturist' is not really a condemnation.
The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he
was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of
his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as
monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable
melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes
afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one
seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one
particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and
treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging
her husband's head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling
tracts while her children fall into the area--and there they all are,
fixed up for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox
lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and
infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by
the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer.
As Ruskin said, he 'chose to work in a circle of stage fire.' His
characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smollett's. But
there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is
only one test worth bothering about--survival. By this test Dickens's
characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly
think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they
exist.

But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about monsters. It
amounts to this, that it is only certain moods that Dickens can speak to.
There are large areas of the human mind that he never touches. There is
no poetic feeling anywhere in his books, and no genuine tragedy, and even
sexual love is almost outside his scope. Actually his books are not so
sexless as they are sometimes declared to be, and considering the time in
which he was writing, he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace in
him of the feeling that one finds in MANON LESCAUT, SALAMMBÔ, CARMEN,
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said
that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of
Dickens. There are whole worlds which he either knows nothing about or
does not wish to mention. Except in a rather roundabout way, one cannot
learn very much from Dickens. And to say this is to think almost
immediately of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why
is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than
Dickens's--why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more ABOUT
YOURSELF? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last
analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who
are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas
Dickens's are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's
people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy's,
but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of
furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens
character as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely
because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic
characters that you can imagine yourself talking to--Bloom, for
instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells's Mr. Polly. It is because
Dickens's characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing
that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about
anything else. They never learn, never speculate. Perhaps the most
meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and his thoughts are mush.
Does this mean that Tolstoy's novels are 'better' than Dickens's? The
truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in terms of 'better'
and 'worse'. If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should
say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run,
because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking
culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people,
which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens
can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to
choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes
barely intersect.

VI

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one
would now remember his name. Or at best a few of his books would survive
in rather the same way as books like FRANK FAIRLEIGH, MR. VERDANT GREEN
and MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES, as a sort of hangover of the
Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant little whiff of oysters and brown stout.
Who has not felt sometimes that it was 'a pity' that Dickens ever
deserted the vein of PICKWICK for things like LITTLE DORRIT and HARD
TIMES? What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall
write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would
write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is
not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward
curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid
competence of DUBLINERS and end with the dream-language of FINNEGAN'S
WAKE, but ULYSSES and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST are part of the trajectory.
The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was
not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was
simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of 'having
something to say'. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final
secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can CARE.
Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack
writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at
always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is
able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and
authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one
more custard pie.

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it
is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a
politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of
the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception
that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, 'Behave decently',
which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it
sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine
that everything can be put right by altering the SHAPE of society; once
that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any
other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of
his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is
not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression
on the human face.' Roughly speaking, his morality is the Christian
morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing he was essentially a
Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In
any case he cannot properly be described as a religious man. He
'believed', undoubtedly, but religion in the devotional sense does not
seem to have entered much into his thoughts [Note, below]. Where he is
Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against
the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog,
always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has
got to change sides when the underdog becomes an upper-dog, and in fact
Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the Catholic Church, for instance,
but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted (BARNABY RUDGE) he is on
their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as
they are really overthrown (the revolutionary chapters in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from this
emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending
of DAVID COPPERFIELD, in which everyone who reads it feels that something
has gone wrong. What is wrong is that the closing chapters are pervaded,
faintly but not noticeably, by the cult of success. It is the gospel
according to Smiles, instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The
attractive, out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a
fortune, Heep gets into prison--both of these events are flagrantly
impossible--and even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you
like, you can read Dora as Dickens's wife and Agnes as his sister-in-law,
but the essential point is that Dickens has 'turned respectable' and done
violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes is the most
disagreeable of his heroines, the real legless angel of Victorian
romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura.

[Note: From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): 'You will remember that
you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere
formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with
such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them.
You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress
upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from
Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you
humbly but heartily respect it...Never abandon the wholesome practice of
saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never
abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.' (Author's footnote)]

No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and
yet there does remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind
of anchor and nearly always keeps him where he belongs. It is probably
the central secret of his popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism
rather of Dickens's type is one of the marks of Western popular culture.
One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey
Mouse and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the
Giant-killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the popular
protests (always ineffective but not always a sham) against imperialism,
in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich
man's car runs over a poor man; it is the feeling that one is always on
the wrong side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the
strong. In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The
common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly
every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of
totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all
that Dickens stands for can be written off as 'bourgeois morality'. But
in moral outlook no one could be more 'bourgeois' than the English
working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never
entered, mentally, into the world of 'realism' and power-politics. They
may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as
the cab-horse. But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly
because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore
memorable form the native decency of the common man. And it is important
that from this point of view people of very different types can be
described as 'common'. In a country like England, in spite of its
class-structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through
the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the
Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is
only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society. The most
atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but
there are not many people who can regard these things with the same
indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers
from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.
Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally
to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on
the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is
difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working
people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature)
and buried in Westminster Abbey.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the
impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not
necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with
Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though
in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not
want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have.
Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of
Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of
about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a
touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the
face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in
the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY
ANGRY--in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free
intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little
orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.



CHARLES READE (1940)


Since Charles Reade's books are published in cheap editions one can
assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone
who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name seems to evoke, at
most, a vague memory of 'doing' THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH as a school
holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this particular
book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT. Reade wrote several dull
books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote
three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of
Meredith and George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such
as A JACK OF ALL TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.

What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one
finds in R. Austin Freeman's detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander
Gould's collections of curiosities--the charm of useless knowledge.
Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He
possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively
narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate
pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in
dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes,
junk-shop windows and back numbers of the EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of
mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just
what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you
can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his
work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled
his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he
collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his
'purpose'. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made
vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill,
private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an
attack on anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels
FOUL PLAY is too complicated to be summarized, but its central story is
that of a young clergyman, Robert Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of
forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in disguise, and is
wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,
Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best
fitted to write a desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of
course, are worse than others, but none is altogether bad when it sticks
to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive. A list of
the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is probably the surest
winner in fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years
after reading the book I can still remember more or less exactly what
things the three heroes of Ballantyne's CORAL ISLAND possessed between
them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a brass ring and a
piece of hoop iron.) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so
unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part
exists, becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe's efforts to make a
table, glaze earthenware and grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was
an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he was very well up in the
geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of man who
would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like
Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening
bread and, unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire
by rubbing sticks together.

The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade's heroes, is a kind of
superman. He is hero, saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist,
navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith and carpenter all rolled
into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade honestly
imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to
say, it is only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got
the desert island running like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the
island, when the last survivors of the wrecked ship are dying of thirst
in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by constructing a distilling
apparatus with a jar, a hot-water bottle and a piece of tubing. But his
best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island.
He himself, with a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but
the heroine, Helen Rollestone, who has no idea that he is a convict, is
naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to turn his 'great mind' to
this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly
where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch,
which is still keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and
watching its shadow Robert notes the exact moment of noon, after which it
is a simple matter to work out the longitude--for naturally a man of his
calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is equally natural that he
can determine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of the
vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside
world. After some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of
parchment made from seals' bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal
insects. He has noticed that migrant birds often use the island as a
stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest messengers,
because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem
often used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each
of their legs and lets them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks
takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are rescued, but even then the
story is barely half finished. There follow enormous ramifications, plots
and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.

In any of Reade's three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER
TOO LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the
technical detail. His power of descriptive writing, especially of
describing violent action, is also very striking, and on a serial-story
level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is
impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of
character or of probability, but he himself had the advantage of
believing in even the absurdest details of his own stories. He wrote of
life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same way: that is,
as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time.
Of all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is
perhaps the only one who is completely in tune with his own age. For all
his unconventionality, his 'purpose', his eagerness to expose abuses, he
never makes a fundamental criticism. Save for a few surface evils he sees
nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation of money and
virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing
gives one his measure better than the fact that in introducing Robert
Penfold, at the beginning of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar
and a cricketer and only thirdly and almost casually adds that he is a
priest.

That is not to say that Reade's social conscience was not sound so far as
it went, and in several minor ways he probably helped to educate public
opinion. His attack on the prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND
is relevant to this day, or was so till very recently, and in his medical
theories he is said to have been a long way ahead of his time. What he
lacked was any notion that the early railway age, with the special scheme
of values appropriate to it, was not going to last for ever. This is a
little surprising when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood
Reade. However hastily and unbalanced Winwood Reade's MARTYRDOM OF MAN
may seem now, it is a book that shows an astonishing width of vision, and
it is probably the unacknowledged grandparent of the 'outlines' so
popular today. Charles Reade might have written an 'outline' of
phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of human
history. He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little more
conscience than most, a scholar who happened to prefer popular science to
the classics. Just for that reason he is one of the best 'escape'
novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be good books to send to
a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare, for instance. There
are no problems in them, no genuine 'messages', merely the fascination of
a gifted mind functioning within very narrow limits, and offering as
complete a detachment from real life as a game of chess or a jigsaw
puzzle.



INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)


I

When Henry Miller's novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935, it was
greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases
by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the people who praised
it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra
Pound--on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment.
And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its
mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.

TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the
form of a novel, whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself
insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo and method of
telling the story are those of a novel. It is a story of the American
Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who
figure in it happen to be people without money. During the boom years,
when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low,
Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students,
dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world has
probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists
must actually have outnumbered the working population--indeed, it has
been reckoned that in the late twenties there were as many as 30,000
painters in Paris, most of them impostors. The populace had grown so
hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and
young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without
attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost
impossible to pick one's way between the sketching-stools. It was the age
of dark horses and neglected genii; the phrase on everybody's lips was
'QUAND JE SERAI LANCÉ'. As it turned out, nobody was 'LANCÉ', the slump
descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished,
and the huge Montparnasse cafés which only ten years ago were filled till
the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into darkened
tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this
world--described in, among other novels, Wyndham Lewis's TARR--that
Miller is writing about, but he is dealing only with the under side of
it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has been able to survive the
slump because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of
genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the paranoiacs who art always
'going to' write the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are
there, but they are only genii in the rather rare moments when they are
not scouting about for the next meal. For the most part it is a story of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men's hotels, of fights, drinking bouts,
cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary
jobs. And the whole atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a
foreigner sees them--the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the
bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green
waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the
crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro
stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the
Luxembourg Gardens--it is all there, or at any rate the feeling of it is
there.

On the face of it no material could be less promising. When TROPIC OF
CANCER was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and
Hitler's concentration camps were already bulging. The intellectual foci
of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin. It did not seem to be a
moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written
about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course
a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history,
but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the
moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere
account of the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most people would
probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over
from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that
it was nothing of the kind, but a very remarkable book. How or why
remarkable? That question is never easy to answer. It is better to begin
by describing the impression that TROPIC OF CANCER has left on my own
mind.

When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of
unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed.
Most people's would be the same, I believe. Nevertheless, after a lapse
of time the atmosphere of the book, besides innumerable details, seemed
to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later Miller's second
book, BLACK SPRING, was published. By this time? TROPIC OF CANCER was much
more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first read it. My
first feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it
is a fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet after
another year there were many passages in BLACK SPRING that had also
rooted themselves in my memory. Evidently these books are of the sort to
leave a flavour behind them--books that 'create a world of their own',
as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good
books, they may be good bad books like RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES
stories, or perverse and morbid books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE
WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS. But now and again there appears a novel which
opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing
what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance,
is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in
ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an
elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar
on to paper. He dared--for it is a matter of DARING just as much as of
technique--to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so
he discovered an America which was under everybody's nose. Here is a
whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature
incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is
to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human
being lives. When you read certain passages in ULYSSES you feel that
Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he
has never heard your name, that there some world outside time and space
in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce
in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller. Not
everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in
BLACK SPRING, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy
universe of the surrealists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and
you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as
from being UNDERSTOOD. 'He knows all about me,' you feel; 'he wrote this
specially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to
you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose,
merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you
have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized,
marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and
are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.

But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing
about the man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it
should be a street full of brothers. That is the penalty of leaving your
native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile
is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet,
because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and
narrow down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel
and the studio. On the whole, in Miller's books you are reading about
people living the expatriate life, people drinking, talking, meditating,
and fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and bringing up
children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of
activities as well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a wonderful
flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New York of the O.
Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the best, and, granted their utter
worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats of the cafes are
handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are
unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only
credible but completely familiar; you have the feeling that all their
adventures have happened to yourself. Not that they are anything very
startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a melancholy
Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a
cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in
Le Havre with his friend Collins, the sea captain, goes to the brothels
where there are wonderful Negresses, talks with his friend Van Norden,
the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in his head but
can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the
verge of starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry
him. There are interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries
to decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In
great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went to the
hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to urinate,
so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc., etc.
And after all, none of it is true, the widow doesn't even exist--Karl
has simply invented her in order to make himself seem important. The
whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous
trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is
deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these
things are happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody
has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the
REAL-POLITIK of the inner mind into the open. In Miller's case it is not
so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the mind as of owning
up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For the truth is that many
ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in just
the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the
characters in TROPIC OF CANCER talk is very rare in fiction, but it is
extremely common in real life; again and again I have heard just such
conversations from people who were not even aware that they were talking
coarsely. It is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is not a young man's
book. Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though since
then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this first
book had been lived with for years. It is one of those books that are
slowly matured in poverty and obscurity, by people who know what they
have got to do and therefore are able to wait. The prose is astonishing,
and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better. Unfortunately I cannot
quote; unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC
OF CANCER, get hold of BLACK SPRING and read especially the first hundred
pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late
date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken
language, but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of
the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its ten
years' exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in
it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and
snack-bar dialects that are now in fashion.

When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural that the
first thing people notice should be its obscenity. Given our current
notions of literary decency, it is not at all easy to approach an
unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked and disgusted, or
one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be
impressed. The last is probably the commonest reaction, with the result
that unprintable books often get less attention than they deserve. It is
rather the fashion to say that nothing is easier than to write an obscene
book, that people only do it in order to get themselves talked about and
make money, etc., etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is
that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly
uncommon. If there were easy money to be made out of dirty words, a lot
more people would be making it. But, because 'obscene' books do not
appear very frequently, there is a tendency to lump them together, as a
rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF CANCER has been vaguely associated
with two other books, ULYSSES and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, but in
neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with
Joyce is a willingness to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday
life. Putting aside differences of technique, the funeral scene in
ULYSSES, for instance, would fit into TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter
is a sort of confession, an exposé of the frightful inner callousness of
the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a novel, TROPIC OF
CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in
which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he
is attempting much more. He is exploring different states of
consciousness, dream, reverie (the 'bronze-by-gold' chapter),
drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing them all into a huge complex pattern,
almost like a Victorian 'plot'. Miller is simply a hard-boiled person
talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual
courage and a gift for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks
exactly like everyone's idea of an American businessman. As for the
comparison with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, it is even further from the
point. Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some sense
autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a
book-with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and
meaninglessness of modern life--actually, indeed, of LIFE. It is a cry
of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is
almost exactly the opposite. The thing has become so unusual as to seem
almost anomalous, but it is the book of a man who is happy. So is BLACK
SPRING, though slightly less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia.
With years of lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage,
dirt, failure, nights in the open, battles with immigration officers,
endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller finds that he is enjoying
himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel Céline with horror are the
ones that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the
very word 'acceptance' calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt
Whitman.

But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the
nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive
at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling
LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is 'I accept', and
there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then.
Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than
that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a
word. The democracy, equality, and comradeship that he is always talking
about arc not remote ideals, but something that existed in front of his
eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and
equal, WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a society
of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class
distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently
submerged class. Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the
knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without
bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain's Mississippi raftsmen and
pilots, or Bret Harte's Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than
the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free
human beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated
America of the Eastern states, the America of the LITTLE WOMEN, HELEN'S
BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life has a buoyant, carefree quality
that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly.
If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very
badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to
feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he
died too early to see the deterioration in American life that came with
the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant
labour.

Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone
who has read him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER ends with an
especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the
swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply
sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical
acceptance of thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first
place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every
grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not
an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and
regimentation. To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that
you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs,
aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux
belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, PROVOCATEURS, press censorship,
secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not
only those things, of course, but, those things among-others. And on the
whole this is Henry Miller's attitude. Not quite always, because at
moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia.
There is a long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of
the Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces
of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude not very
different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there
is an attack on modern American civilization (breakfast cereals,
cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates
industrialism. But in general the attitude is 'Let's swallow it whole'.
And hence the seeming preoccupation with indecency and with the
dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is only seeming, for the truth is
that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than
writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself 'accepted' a
great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not
only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes
the shattered skull of the suicide, the 'grey sick faces of onanists',
etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe,
is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was
writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world. The 'democratic
vistas' have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and
growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and
more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as
it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous
attitude and become a passive attitude--even 'decadent', if that word
means anything.

But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience. Miller
is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more
purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow
circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he
feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as
helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence
the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the
past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in
politics, with the result that there is now less room in it for the
ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can see
the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books
written about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of
1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at
any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and
badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them,
right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure
partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great
War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even
pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like ALL
QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, DEATH OF A HERO,
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON
THE SOMME were written not by propagandists but by VICTIMS. They are
saying in effect, 'What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can
do is to endure.' And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the
whole, about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller's attitude than the
omniscience which is now fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived
periodical of which he was part-editor, used to describe itself in its
advertisements as 'non-political, non-educational, non-progressive,
non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent,
non-contemporary', and Miller's own work could be described in nearly the
same terms. It is a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the
third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral,
passive man.

I have been using the phrase 'ordinary man' rather loosely, and I have
taken it for granted that the 'ordinary man' exists, a thing now denied
by some people. I do not mean that the people Miller is writing about
constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about proletarians.
No English or American novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And
again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER fall short of being ordinary to the
extent that they are idle, disreputable, and more or less 'artistic'. As
I have said already, this a pity, but it is the necessary result of
expatriation. Miller's 'ordinary man' is neither the manual worker nor
the suburban householder, but the derelict, the DÉCLASSÉ, the adventurer,
the American intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the
experiences even of this type overlap fairly widely with those of more
normal people. Milter has been able to get the most out of his rather
limited material because he has had the courage to identify with it. The
ordinary man, the 'average sensual man', has been given the power of
speech, like Balaam's ass.

It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of
fashion. The average sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with
sex and truthfulness about the inner life are out of fashion. American
Paris is out of fashion. A book like TROPIC OF CANCER, published at such
a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I
think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is
not the first. It is worth trying to discover just what, this escape from
the current literary fashion means. But to do that one has got to see it
against its background--that is, against the general development of
English literature in the twenty years since the Great War.

II

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means
that he is admired by people under thirty. At the beginning of the period
I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the
writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost
certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25,
Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy
to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the
whole of the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the
SHROPSHIRE LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or
less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced
into it; it might strike him as cheaply clever--probably that would be
about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to
recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier
generations had recited Meredith's 'Love in a Valley', Swinburne's
'Garden of Proserpine' etc., etc.

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a roselipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The roselipt girls arc sleeping
In fields Where roses fade.

It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the
bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take account of
the EXTERNAL conditions that make certain writers popular at certain
times. Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first
published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single
generation, the generation born round about 1900?

In the first place, Housman is a 'country' poet. His poems are full of
the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and
Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, 'on Wenlock Edge', 'in summer time on
Bredon', thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in
the pastures, the 'blue, remembered hills'. War poems apart, English
verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly 'country'. The reason no doubt was
that the RENTIER-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have
any real relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed
then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country
and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more an
agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries
began to spread themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most
middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it was
the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to them--the ploughing,
harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it himself
a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip,
milking cows with chapped teats at four o'clock in the morning, etc.,
etc. Just before, just after, and for that matter, during the war was the
great age of the 'Nature poet', the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W. H.
Hudson. Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester', the star poem of 1913, is nothing
but an enormous gush of 'country' sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit
from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem
'Grantchester' is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration
of what the thinking middle-class young of that period FELT it is a
valuable document.

Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the
week-ending spirit of Brooke and the others. The 'country' motif is there
all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the poems have a
quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in reality Strephon or
Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience
shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase,
'close to the soil') because they imagine them to be more primitive and
passionate than themselves. Hence the 'dark earth' novel of Sheila
Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that time a middle-class boy, with his 'country'
bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as he would never have
done with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of an
idealized ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a
wild, free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting,
horses, beer, and women. Masefield's 'Everlasting Mercy', another
valuable period-piece, immensely popular with boys round about the war
years, gives you this vision in a very crude form. But Housman's Maurices
and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield's Saul Kane could
not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of
Theocritus. Moreover all his themes are adolescent--murder, suicide,
unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible
disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock
facts' of life:

The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood has dried;
And Maurice among the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.

And again:

They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail
And whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men who die at morn.

It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. 'Ned
lies long in the churchyard and Tom lies long in jail'. And notice also
the exquisite self-pity--the 'nobody loves me' feeling:

The diamond drops adorning
The low mound on the lea,
These arc the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.

Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for
adolescents. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or
marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded
together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of women as
something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the same appeal for
girls I doubt. In his poems the woman's point of view is not considered,
she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature
who leads you a little distance and then gives you the slip.

But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were
young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was
his blasphemous, antinomian, 'cynical' strain. The fight that always
occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the
Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an
indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle
was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and
security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many
people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or earlier had carried
them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as
the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were
dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for
instance, was spectacular. For several years the old-young antagonism
took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had
crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the
slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing
under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman
appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance
against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless
old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and 'God save the Queen'
rather than steel helmets and 'Hang the Kaiser'. And he was satisfyingly
anti-Christian--he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, the
conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly
fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile
verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.

It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a
propagandist, an utterer of maxims and quotable 'bits'. Obviously he was
more than that. There is no need to under-rate him now because he was
over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for
saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that
kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to
remain long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer's
tendency, his 'purpose', his 'message', that makes him liked or disliked.
The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit
in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is
ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in
verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the
form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, Uke
Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.

After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears a group
of writers of completely different tendency--Joyce, Eliot, Pound,
Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey. So far as the
middle and late twenties go, these are 'the movement', as surely as the
Auden-Spender group have been 'the movement' during the past few years.
It is true that not all of the gifted writers of the period can be fitted
into the pattern. E. M. Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best
book in 1923 or thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not
seem in either of his phases to belong to the twenties. Others who were
still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas, had shot
their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a writer who
should be added to the group, though in the narrowly literary sense he
hardly 'belongs', is Somerset Maugham. Of course the dates do not fit
exactly; most of these writers had already published books before the
war, but they can be classified as post-war in the same sense that the
younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally, of course, you could
read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping
that these people are 'the movement'. Even more then than at most times
the big shots of literary journalism were busy pretending that the
age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire ruled the LONDON MERCURY
Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a
cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and
monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by
writing an article denouncing 'high-brows'. But all the same it was the
despised highbrows who had captured the young. The wind was blowing from
Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the beer-and-cricket school
naked, except for their knighthoods.

But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have
named above is that they do not look like a group. Moreover several of
them would strongly object to being coupled with several of the others.
Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic, Huxley worshipped
Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have looked
down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in
turn; indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks.
And yet there is a certain temperamental similarity, evident enough now,
though it would not have been so a dozen years ago. What it amounts to is
PESSIMISM OF OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to make clear what is meant by
pessimism.

If the keynote of the Georgian poets was 'beauty of Nature', the keynote
of the post-war writers would be 'tragic sense of life'. The spirit
behind Housman's poems for instance, is not tragic, merely querulous; it
is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy, though one ought to
make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But the Joyce-Eliot group come later in
time, puritanism is not their main adversary, they are able from the
start to 'see through' most of the things that their predecessors had
fought for. All of them are temperamentally hostile to the notion of
'progress'; it is felt that progress not only doesn't happen, but OUGHT
not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of course,
differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as
different degrees of talent. Eliot's pessimism is partly the Christian
pessimism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery, partly a
lament over the decadence of Western civilization ('We are the hollow
men, we are the stuffed men', etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of-the-gods
feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney Agonistes for instance, to
achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it
is. With Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism
mixed up with a taste for debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical
resignation, the stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of
Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine
Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic
writer, because, like Dickens, he is a 'change-of-heart' man and
constantly insisting that life here and now would be all right if only
you looked at it a little differently. But what he is demanding is a
movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going to
happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into
idealization of the past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze
Age. When Lawrence prefers the Etruscans (his Etruscans) to ourselves it
is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after all, it is a species
of defeatism, because that is not the direction in which the world is
moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing to, a life centring
round the simple mysteries--sex, earth, fire, water, blood--is merely a
lost cause. All he has been able to produce, therefore, is a wish that
things would happen in a way in which they are manifestly not going to
happen. 'A wave of generosity or a wave of death', he says, but it is
obvious that there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon.
So he flees to Mexico, and then dies at forty-five, a few years before
the wave of death gets going. It will be seen that once again I am
speaking of these people as though they were not artists, as though they
were merely propagandists putting a 'message' across. And once again it
is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for
instance, to look on ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror of modern
life, the 'dirty DAILY MAIL era', as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more
of a 'pure artist' than most writers. But ULYSSES could not have been
written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the
product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has
lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is 'Here is life without God. Just
look at it!' and his technical innovations, important though they are,
are primarily to serve this purpose.

But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what 'purpose'
they have is very much up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent
problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our
eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to
the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus--to everywhere
except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks
back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every
important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English
intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes
from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine
famine--about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy,
Dostoievsky, and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means
picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums--but not Black-shirts.
Germany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis--but not Hitler, of whom
hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In 'cultured' circles
art-for-art's-saking extended practically to a worship of the
meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the
manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the
unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked
on as a lapse of a taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny
jokes that PUNCH has produced since the Great War, an intolerable youth
is pictured informing his aunt that he intends to 'write'. 'And what are
you going to write about, dear?' asks the aunt. 'My dear aunt,' says the
youth crushingly, 'one doesn't write ABOUT anything, one just WRITES.'
The best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine,
their 'purpose' is in most cases fairly overt, but it is usually
'purpose' along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also, when translatable
into political terms, it is in no case 'left'. In one way or another the
tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative. Lewis, for
instance, spent years in frenzied witch-smellings after 'Bolshevism',
which he was able to detect in very unlikely places. Recently he has
changed some of his views, perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of
artists, but it is safe to bet that he will not go very far leftward.
Pound seems to have plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the
Italian variety. Eliot has remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's
point to choose between Fascism and some more democratic form of
socialism, would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the
usual despair-of-life, then, under the influence of Lawrence's 'dark
abdomen', tries something called Life-Worship, and finally arrives at
pacifism--a tenable position, and at this moment an honourable one, but
probably in the long run involving rejection of socialism. It is also
noticeable that most of the writers in this group have a certain
tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not usually of a kind that an
orthodox Catholic would accept.

The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no
doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just WHY the
leading writers of the twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why
always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning
after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after all,
BECAUSE these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch?
It is just in such times that 'cosmic despair' can flourish. People with
empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the
universe, for that matter. The whole period 1910-30 was a prosperous one,
and even the war years were physically tolerable if one happened to be a
non-combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the twenties, they
were the golden age of the RENTIER-intellectual, a period of
irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen. The war was
over, the new totalitarian states had not arisen, moral and religious
tabus of all descriptions had vanished, and the cash was rolling in.
'Disillusionment' was all the fashion. Everyone with a safe £500 a year
turned highbrow and began training himself in TAEDIUM VITAE. It was an
age of eagles and of crumpets, facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap
return tickets to the end of the night. In some of the minor
characteristic novels of the period, books like TOLD BY AN IDIOT, the
despair-of-life reaches a Turkish-bath atmosphere of self-pity. And even
the best writers of the time can be convicted of a too Olympian attitude,
a too great readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical
problem. They see life very comprehensively, much more so than those who
come immediately before or after them, but they see it through the wrong
end of the telescope. Not that that invalidates their books, as books.
The first test of any work of art is survival, and it is a fact that a
great deal that was written in the period 1910-30 has survived and looks
like continuing to survive. One has only to think of ULYSSES, OF HUMAN
BONDAGE, most of Lawrence's early work, especially his short stories, and
virtually the whole of Eliot's poems up to about 1930, to wonder what is
now being written that will wear so well.

But quite Suddenly, in the years 1930-5, something happens. The literary
climate changes. A new group of writers, Auden and Spender and the rest
of them, has made its appearance, and although technically these writers
owe something to their predecessors, their 'tendency' is entirely
different. Suddenly we have got out of the twilight of the gods into a
sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing. The
typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning
towards the Church, and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning
towards Communism. If the keynote of the writers of the twenties is
'tragic sense of life', the keynote of the new writers is 'serious
purpose'.

The differences between the two schools are discussed at some length in
Mr Louis MacNeice's book MODERN POETRY. This book is, of course, written
entirely from the angle of the younger group and takes the superiority of
their standards for granted. According to Mr MacNeice:

The poets of NEW SIGNATURES, [Note: Published in 1932.(Author's footnote)]
unlike Yeats and Eliot, are emotionally partisan. Yeats proposed to turn
his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other people's
emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity...The whole poetry, on
the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis implies that they have
desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things
ought to be desired and others hated.

And again:

The poets of NEW SIGNATURES have swung back...to the Greek preference
for information or statement. Then first requirement is to have something
to say, and after that you must say it as well as you can.

In other words, 'purpose' has come back, the younger writers have 'gone
into politics'. As I have pointed out already, Eliot & Co. are not really
so non-partisan as Mr MacNeice seems to suggest. Still, it is broadly
true that in the twenties the literary emphasis was more on technique and
less on subject matter than it is now.

The leading figures in this group are Auden, Spender, Day Lewis,
MacNeice, and there is a long string of writers of more or less the same
tendency, Isherwood, John Lehmann, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Edward Upward,
Alee Brown, Philip Henderson, and many others. As before, I am lumping
them together simply according to tendency. Obviously there are very
great variations in talent. But when one compares these writers with the
Joyce-Eliot generation, the immediately striking thing is how much easier
it is to form them into a group. Technically they are closer together,
politically they are almost indistinguishable, and their criticisms of
one another's work have always been (to put it mildly) good-natured. The
outstanding writers of the twenties were of very varied origins, few of
them had passed through the ordinary English educational mill
(incidentally, the best of them, barring Lawrence, were not Englishmen),
and most of them had had at some time to struggle against poverty,
neglect, and even downright persecution. On the other hand, nearly all
the younger writers fit easily into the public-school-university-Bloomsbury
pattern. The few who are of proletarian origin are of the kind that is
declassed early in life, first by means of scholarships and then by the
bleaching-tub of London 'culture'. It is significant that several of the
writers in this group have been not only boys but, subsequently, masters
at public schools. Some years ago I described Auden as 'a sort of
gutless Kipling'. As criticism this was quite unworthy, indeed it was
merely a spiteful remark, but it is a fact that in Auden's work,
especially his earlier work, an atmosphere of uplift--something rather
like Kipling's If or Newbolt's Play up, Play up, and Play the Game!--never
seems to be very far away. Take, for instance, a poem like 'You're
leaving now, and it's up to you boys'. It is pure scoutmaster, the exact
note of the ten-minutes' straight talk on the dangers of self-abuse.
No doubt there is an element of parody that he intends, but there is also
a deeper resemblance that he does not intend. And of course the rather
priggish note that is common to most of these writers is a symptom,
of release. By throwing 'pure art' overboard they have freed themselves
from the fear of being laughed at and vastly enlarged their scope.
The prophetic side of Marxism, for example, is new material for poetry
and has great possibilities.

We are nothing
We have fallen
Into the dark and shall be destroyed.
Think though, that in this darkness
We hold the secret hub of an idea
Whose living sunlit wheel revolves in future years outside.

(Spender, TRIAL OF A JUDGE)

But at the same time, by being Marxized literature has moved no nearer to
the masses. Even allowing for the time-lag, Auden and Spender are
somewhat farther from being popular writers than Joyce and Eliot, let
alone Lawrence. As before, there are many contemporary writers who are
outside the current, but there is not much doubt about what is the
current. For the middle and late thirties, Auden Spender & Co. ARE 'the
movement', just as Joyce, Eliot & Co. were for the twenties. And the
movement is in the direction of some rather ill-defined thing called
Communism. As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in
literary circles not to be more or less 'left', and in another year or
two there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of
opinions absolutely DE RIGUEUR on certain subjects, The idea had begun to
gain ground (VIDE Edward Upward and others) that a writer must either be
actively 'left' or write badly. Between 1935 and 1939 the Communist
Party had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under
forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had 'joined' as
it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable,
to hear that So-and-so had 'been received'. For about three years, in
fact, the central stream of English literature was more or less directly
under Communist control. How was it possible for such a thing to happen?
And at the same time, what is meant by 'Communism'? It is better to
answer the second question first.

The Communist movement in Western Europe began, as a movement for the
violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into
an instrument of Russian foreign policy. This was probably inevitable
when this revolutionary ferment that followed the Great War had died
down. So far as I know, the only comprehensive history of this subject in
English is Franz Borkenau's book, THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL. What
Borkenau's facts even more than his deductions make clear is that
Communism could never have developed along its present lines if any
revolutionary feeling had existed in the industrialized countries. In
England, for instance, it is obvious that no such feeling has existed for
years past. The pathetic membership figures of all extremist parties show
this clearly. It is, only natural, therefore, that the English Communist
movement should be controlled by people who are mentally subservient to
Russia and have no real aim except to manipulate British foreign policy
in the Russian interest. Of course such an aim cannot be openly admitted,
and it is this fact that gives the Communist Party its very peculiar
character. The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian
publicity agent posing as an international socialist. It is a pose that
is easily kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in moments of
crisis, because of the fact that the U.S.S.R. is no more scrupulous in
its foreign policy than the rest of the Great Powers. Alliances, changes
of front etc., which only make sense as part of the game of power
politics have to be explained and justified in terms of international
socialism. Every time Stalin swaps partners, 'Marxism' has to be hammered
into a new shape. This entails sudden and violent changes of 'line',
purges, denunciations, systematic destruction of party literature, etc.,
etc. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his
most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable
dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.
This has happened at least three times during the past ten years. It
follows that in any Western country a Communist Party is always unstable
and usually very small. Its long-term membership really consists of an
inner ring of intellectuals who have identified with the Russian
bureaucracy, and a slightly larger body of working-class people who feel
a loyalty towards Soviet Russia without necessarily understanding its
policies. Otherwise there is only a shifting membership, one lot coming
and another going with each change of 'line'.

In 1930 the English Communist Party was a tiny, barely legal organization
whose main activity was libelling the Labour Party. But by 1935 the face
of Europe had changed, and left-wing politics changed with it. Hitler had
risen to power and begun to rearm, the Russian five-year plans had
succeeded, Russia had reappeared as a great military power. As Hitler's
three targets of attack were, to all appearances, Great Britain, France,
and the U.S.S.R., the three countries were forced into a sort of uneasy
RAPPROCHEMENT. This meant that the English or French Communist was
obliged to become a good patriot and imperialist--that is, to defend the
very things he had been attacking for the past fifteen years. The
Comintern slogans suddenly faded from red to pink. 'World revolution' and
'Social-Fascism' gave way to 'Defence of democracy' and 'Stop Hitler'.
The years 1935-9 were the period of anti-Fascism and the Popular Front,
the heyday of the Left Book Club, when red Duchesses and 'broadminded'
deans toured the battlefields of the Spanish war and Winston Churchill
was the blue-eyed boy of the DAILY WORKER. Since then, of course, there
has been yet another change of 'line'. But what is important for my
purpose is that it was during the 'anti-Fascist' phase that the younger
English writers gravitated towards Communism.

The Fascism-democracy dogfight was no doubt an attraction in itself, but
in any case their conversion was due at about that date. It was obvious
that LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism was finished and that there had got to be
some kind of reconstruction; in the world of 1935 it was hardly possible
to remain politically indifferent. But why did these young men turn
towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should WRITERS be
attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible?
The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself
felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can
get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by
about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the
arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in.
The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and
'disillusionment' was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for
granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a
soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or
what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived
could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the
family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding,
honour, discipline--anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole
lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after
all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You
have not necessarily got rid of the need for SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN.
There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of
young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn
Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic
Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the
Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or
the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a
world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with
power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the
only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced
not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of
Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the
reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the
Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a
Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland
and--at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts--a Fuehrer. All the loyalties
and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come
rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion,
empire, military glory--all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader,
hero, saviour--all in one word, Stalin. God--Stalin. The devil--Hitler.
Heaven--Moscow. Hell--Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after
all, the 'Communism' of the English intellectual is something explicable
enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of
Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is
the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its
injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the
over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence
or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not
at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the
dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated
middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great
War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary
executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be
terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism BECAUSE they have no
experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this
extract from Mr Auden's poem 'Spain' (incidentally this poem is one of
the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):

To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in
the life of a 'good party man'. In the-morning a couple of political
murders, a ten-minutes' interlude to stifle 'bourgeois' remorse, and then
a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and
distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase
'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder
is at most a WORD. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It
so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men--I
don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some
conception of what murder means--the terror, the hatred, the howling
relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is
something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and
Stalins find murder necessary, but they don't advertise their
callousness, and they don't speak of it as murder; it is 'liquidation',
'elimination', or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden's brand of
amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always
somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought
is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is
hot. The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia gave themselves
up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of personal
immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where the military
service is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.

Towards the end of Mr Cyril Connolly's recent book, ENEMIES OF PROMISE,
there occurs an interesting and revealing passage. The first part of the
book, is, more or less, an evaluation of present-day literature. Mr
Connolly belongs exactly to the generation of the writers of 'the
movement', and with not many reservations their values are his values. It
is interesting to notice that among prose-writers her admires chiefly
those specialising in violence--the would-be tough American school,
Hemingway, etc. The latter part of the book, however, is autobiographical
and consists of an account, fascinatingly accurate, of life at a
preparatory school and Eton in the years 1910-20. Mr Connolly ends by
remarking:

Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be
called THE THEORY OF PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE. It is the theory that the
experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools are so intense
as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.

When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural impulse
is to look for the misprint. Presumably there is a 'not' left out, or
something. But no, not a bit of it! He means it! And what is more, he is
merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion. 'Cultured'
middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a
public-school education--five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery--can
actually be looked back upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the
writers who have counted during the thirties, what more has ever happened
than Mr Connolly records in ENEMIES OF PROMISE? It is the same pattern
all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London.
Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual
labour--hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known as 'the
right left people' found it so easy to condone the purge-and-trap side of
the Russian régime and the horrors of the first Five-Year Plan. They were
so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.

By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing
thought had narrowed down to 'anti-Fascism', i.e. to a negative, and a
torrent of hate-literature directed against Germany and the politicians
supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from the Press. The thing
that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such
violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but
the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere
of the Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over
their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight
back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies,
spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good
anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue
as though the intervening years had never happened. Before the end of the
Spanish war, and even before Munich, some of the better of the left-wing
writers were beginning to squirm. Neither Auden nor, on the whole,
Spender wrote about the Spanish war in quite the vein that was expected
of them. Since then there has been a change of feeling and much dismay
and confusion, because the actual course of events has made nonsense of
the left-wing orthodoxy of the last few years. But then it did not need
very great acuteness to see that much of it was nonsense from the start.
There is no certainty, therefore, that the next orthodoxy to emerge will
be any better than the last.

On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the
opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer
who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is
sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It
is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing--after a
fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that
'bourgeois' liberty of thought is an illusion. But when he has finished
his demonstration there remains the psychological FACT that without this
'bourgeois' liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future a
totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from
anything we can now imagine. Literature as we know it is an individual
thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship. And this is
even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a coincidence that
the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of
orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely
ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How
many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could
name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a
Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the
autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has
been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have
been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but
practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental
climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be
touched by the ZEITGEIST was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of
course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone
was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns
and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a
disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time
of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected
to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a
sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?')
was at work in nearly everyone's mind. It is almost inconceivable that
good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not
written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken
about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are NOT
FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.

III

If this were a likely, moment for the launching of 'schools' literature,
Henry Miller might be the starting-point of a new 'school'. He does at
any rate mark an unexpected swing of the pendulum. In his books one gets
right away from the 'political animal' and back to a viewpoint not only
individualistic but completely passive--the view-point of a man who
believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case
hardly wishes to control it.

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris
on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he
felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in
forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an
idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish
motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such
things FROM A SENSE OBLIGATION was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas
about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all
baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by
something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human--a
prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is
implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the
approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it
doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so far as I know,
he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so ago an
American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent out a questionnaire to
various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the
subject of war. Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an
individual refusal to fight, with no apparent wish to convert others to
the same opinion--practically, in fact, a declaration of
irresponsibility.

However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule,
writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical
process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can
ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough
to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize
that they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like 'The Scholar
Gipsy', with its railing against the 'strange disease of modern life' and
its magnificent defeatist simile is the final stanza. It expresses one of
the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing attitude
during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the
'progressives', the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping
forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future.
On the whole the writers of the twenties took the first line and the
writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of course,
there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don't
notice what is happening. Where Miller's work is symptomatically
important is in its avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither
pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back, but on the
other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes
in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the
majority of 'revolutionary' writers; only he does not feel called upon to
do anything about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike
the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face
towards the flames.

In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing passages
in which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking
about somebody else. The book includes a long essay on the diaries of
Anais Nin, which I have never read, except for a few fragments, and which
I believe have not been published. Miller claims that they are the only
true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may mean. But
the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin--evidently
a completely subjective, introverted writer--to Jonah in the whale's
belly. In passing he refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some
years ago about El Greco's picture, The Dream of Philip the Second.
Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look as
though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find
something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a 'visceral
prison'. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse
things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it dear that
he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon
what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing
that everyone, at least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks
of Jonah and the WHALE. Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a
fish, and was so described in the Bible (Jonah i. 17), but children
naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-talk is
habitually carried into later life--a sign, perhaps, of the hold that
the Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being
inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The
historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but
in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of
course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough
for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly
fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to
keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what
HAPPENS. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would
hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would
probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface
waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile
deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the
difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of
irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no
question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most
characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing
Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted--quite the contrary. In his
case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to
alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the
essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining
passive, ACCEPTING.

It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism,
implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to
mysticism. The attitude is 'JE M'EN FOUS' or 'Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him', whichever way you like to look at it; for practical
purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being 'Sit on your
bum'. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that
it is almost impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the
moment of writing, we are still in a period in which it is taken for
granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and
'constructive'. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with
titters. ('My dear aunt, one doesn't write about anything, one just
WRITES.') Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion that art
is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of
asserting that a book can only be 'good' if it is founded on a 'true'
vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that
they are in possession of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for
instance, tend to claim that books arc only 'good' when they are of
Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for
Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward ('A Marxist Interpretation
of Literature,' in the MIND IN CHAINS):

Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must...proclaim that no
book written at the present time can be 'good' unless it is written from
a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.

Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr
Upward italicizes 'at the present time' because, he realizes that you
cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET on the ground that Shakespeare was
not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very
shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out
of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in
the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and
in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet if is 'good' literature, if
survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a belief which
was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and
therefore stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther,
because it assumes that in any age there will be ONE body of belief which
is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of
the time will be more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such
uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for
instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly
resembled the left-right antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern
people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better
approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly
not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time
were puritans. And more than this, there exist 'good' writers whose
world-view would in any age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan
Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at
worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is
it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall
of the House of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been
written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they
are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own
peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write
successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees
the difference immediately if one compares Poe's TALES with what is, in
my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian
Green's MINUIT. The thing that immediately strikes one about MINUIT is
that there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen.
Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But
this is exactly what one does NOT feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal
logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the
drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one
knows exactly WHY he did it, even to the point of feeling that one would
have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a creative writer
possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
Even Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a
Marxist training. He also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a
matter of being able to care, of really BELIEVING in your beliefs,
whether they are true or false. The difference between, for instance,
Céline and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the
difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly
a pretence. And with this there goes another consideration which is
perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an 'untrue' belief is
more likely to be sincerely held than a 'true' one.

If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war
of 1914-18, one notices that nearly all that have remained readable after
a lapse of time are written from a passive, negative angle. They are the
records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a
void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth
about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun
barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here
was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was
likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance
than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective. As
for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them
were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and
tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr E. M. Forster has
described how in 1917 he read Prufrock and other of Eliot's early poems,
and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were
'innocent of public-spiritedness':

They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed
genuine because they were unattractive or weak...Here was a protest,
and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being o feeble...He who
could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny
drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.

That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred to
already, quotes this passage and somewhat smugly adds:

Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the
human heritage carried on rather differently...The contemplation of a
world of fragments becomes boring and Eliot's successors are more
interested in tidying it up.

Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice's book. What he
wishes us to believe is that Eliot's 'successors' (meaning Mr MacNeice
and his friends) have in some way 'protested' more effectively than Eliot
did by publishing Prufrock at the moment when the Allied armies were
assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just where these 'protests' are to be
found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster's comment and
Mr MacNeice's lies all the difference between a man who knows what the
1914-18 war was like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that
in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could
do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness,
even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a
soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of
Prufrock than THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio Bottomley's LETTERS
TO THE BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have felt, like Mr Forster, that by
simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was
carrying on the human heritage. What a relief it would have been at such
a time, to read about the hesitations of a middle-aged highbrow with a
bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the bombs and the
food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a relief!

But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an
almost continuous crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to
bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing
helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this reason that I think
that the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller's
work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people
OUGHT to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they
DO feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a
friendly American voice, 'innocent of public-spiritedness'. No sermons,
merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is
still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an
edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered
after it is read.

While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out.
It will either last several years and tear Western civilization to
pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another
war which will do the job once and for all. But war is only 'peace
intensified'. What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the
break-up of LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism and of the liberal-Christian
culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen,
because it was generally imagined that socialism could preserve and even
enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized
how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of
totalitarian dictatorships--an age in which freedom of thought will be
at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The
autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this
means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at
least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end
and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely
imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is
merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely
doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a man out of the common
because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before most of his
contemporaries--at a time, indeed, when many of them were actually
burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis had said years
earlier that the major history of the English language was finished, but
he was basing this on different and rather trivial reasons. But from now
onwards the all-important fact for the creative writers going to be that
this is not a writer's world. That does not mean that he cannot help to
bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process
AS A WRITER. For AS A WRITER he is a liberal, and what is happening is
the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the
remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more
or less along the lines that Miller has followed--I do not mean in
technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude
will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before.
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly
there is nothing left but quietism--robbing reality of its terrors by
simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale--or rather, admit you are
inside the whale (for you ARE, of course). Give yourself over to the
world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control
it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula,
that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt. A novel on more
positive, 'constructive' lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at
present very difficult to imagine.

But do I mean by this that Miller is a 'great author', a new hope for
English prose? Nothing of the kind. 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-pornographic ones
which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a genre of their
own, specializing in very 'low' 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 norm 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 parodied, 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 evidently 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 that 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 normal,
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
'low' 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 Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus,
Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-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 Führers 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
harmless 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 corner 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 modern 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 determine
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 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 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 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
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 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
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.

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 notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one
pretend that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a
year and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are
likely to have been offended because I have used the word 'England'
oftener than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London
and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of
its own.

One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point
first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel
themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for
instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see
the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands
by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the
British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.
Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our
own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two
Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a
foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English
and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the
Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a
stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the French',
recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it
is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney
and the 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
famous 'insularity' and 'xenophobia' of the English is far stronger in
the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are
more national than the rich, but the English working class are
outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are
obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every
Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a
foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the English working
class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely
possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years
on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The
insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is
a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time. But it
plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have
tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At bottom
it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist
and keeps out the invader.

Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out,
seemingly at random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the
lack of artistic ability. This is perhaps another way of saying that the
English are outside the European culture. For there is one art in which
they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also the
only art that cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry, and
lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no
value outside its own language-group. Except for Shakespeare, the best
English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The only poets
who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong reasons, and
Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy. And linked
up with this, though not very obviously, is the lack of philosophical
faculty, the absence in nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered
system of thought or even for the use of logic.

Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a
'world-view'. Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even
the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole
nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of
cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time
of the disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what
the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do:
first, to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent
invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous
action--and, then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided
nation that would have been exactly the moment for a big peace movement
to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the English will
always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will
tell them to do the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for
instance, we all did the wrong thing in perfect unison. We were as
single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can
say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.

It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes
appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the
unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the press, the
radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite name
for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does
unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much one may
hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the
National Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It
tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so
did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its natural leaders
were mediocrities.

In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly
certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain's
foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was
going on in Chamberlain's mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His
opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to
sell England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a
stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim lights. It is
difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of his policy, his
failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass
of the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of
war. And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that
were completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he
went to Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with Russia,
when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it, and when he
prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy
became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned
against its own lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people
picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able
to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. Later, perhaps, they
will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations can
fight effectively.

Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even a
reader of the DAILY TELEGRAPH could quite swallow that.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of
snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any
calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional
unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act
together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in
Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its
nationals into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a
year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising
the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets,
almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom
of speech than from a simple perception that these things don't matter.
It is safe to let a paper like PEACE NEWS be sold, because it is certain
that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it.
The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any normal time
the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck;
but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from
below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to
respond. The left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the ruling class
as 'pro-Fascist' are grossly over-simplifying. Even among the inner
clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful
whether there were any CONSCIOUS traitors. The corruption that happens in
England is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more in the nature of
self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand doeth.
And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious
in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal
times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their
advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over
news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be
straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third
Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought
over the counter like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in England
has never been OPENLY scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of
disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message,
nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it
resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black
sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has
rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are
horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the
source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are
generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible
uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private
language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it
closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control--that,
perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

iv.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,
but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One
of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a
century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class.

In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a
chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to
speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and
three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost
what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning
aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming
a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and
financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate
copies of themselves. The wealthy ship owner or cotton-miller set up for
himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right
mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that
purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from
parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and
considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any
rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able
rulers could be produced in some such way.

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring,
finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like
Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for
Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt.
He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England's domestic
problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British
foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world.
Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made
every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had
long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast
empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits
and spending them--on what? It was fair to say that life within the
British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions
lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was
full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in
the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system.
Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large
ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried
managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an
entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they
hardly knew where, the 'idle rich', the people whose photographs you can
look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always supposing that you want
to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They
were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a
dog.

By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930
millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could
not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they
done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for
them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down
opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a
class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the
duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first
and greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves true
patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was
only one escape for them--into stupidity. They could keep society in its
existing shape only by being UNABLE to grasp that any improvement was
possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing
their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going
on round them.

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of
country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the
more spirited workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the
public schools, which have barely altered since the eighties of the last
century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and again
startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has
engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the
situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale.
The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare
for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to
themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a
repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu
War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for
1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are
being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for
opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the
navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the
ruling-class orbit.

It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of
the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people
manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized,
it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police.
The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been.
Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were
fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As
people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE
standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were
preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had
long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack
from the outside.

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not
understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if
Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand
Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would
have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived
was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact
that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism
as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns--by ignoring
it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one
fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it
was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence
the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the
news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican
government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had
begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary
nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of
tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time
of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can
be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco
won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet
generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were
unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right
through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors,
consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the
'red' does not understand the theories the 'red' is preaching; if he did
his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less
pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is
hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the
ramifications of the underground parties.

The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that
Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a
Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or
democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the
whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The
natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come
to an agreement with Hitler. But--and here the peculiar feature of
English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national
solidarity, comes in--they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class
would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not
gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing
speeches about 'the duty of loyalty to our conquerors' are hardly to be
found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and
their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do
anything but make the worst of both worlds.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY
fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get
themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the
recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were
the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is
important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their
actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical
cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct
for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked;
they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone
will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living
in.

v.

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone
in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important
sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist
middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing
intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites--the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a
dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck--are
mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any
case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The
middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow
families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the
waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling
before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a
narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every
year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson,
Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern
British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in
the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits
and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left
forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and
Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced
to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper
and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over the Empire,
the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing
impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards
it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take
any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official
world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies
swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or
Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer
than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle
class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering
the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there
was any way of avoiding it.

But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole
British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly
the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that
had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in
some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E.
Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an 'intellectual' has
lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.
Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for
him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor
falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset
was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the
kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept
out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for
themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political
parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in
half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing
about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude,
their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is
little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never
been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked
characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world
of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many
intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for
war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the
people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most
defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so
many of the English intelligentsia--their severance from the common
culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized.
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of
standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always
anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a
real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they
were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual
sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and
the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than
it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed
forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class
must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism
hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during
the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a
by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and
they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one's country implies
'for better, for worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as
though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and
intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE and
publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you were an
intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical
courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention
cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is
as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford
either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together
again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar
kind of war, that may make this possible.

vi.

One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty
years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It
has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society
into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small
property-owners) almost obsolete.

England is a country in which property and financial power are
concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England OWN anything
at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry
have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being
destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the
same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along
without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and
technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in
turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers,
artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been
to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed
likely to do.

But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and
habits among the working class. The British working class are now better
off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly
due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of
physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow
limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding
rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its
boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical
advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds
of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for
example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other
people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of
good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and
probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been
meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing
to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has
become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and
the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen
to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life
have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and
improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes
of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than
they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still
has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been
done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The
modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller
than the stockbroker's villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of
house, which the farm labourer's cottage is not. A person who has grown
up in a council housing estate is likely to be--indeed, visibly is--more
middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced
by the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to demand less
muscular effort and therefore to leave people with more energy when their
day's work is done. Many workers in the light industries are less truly
manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits, manners
and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together.
The unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences diminish. The
old-style 'proletarian'--collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by
heavy labour--still exists, but he is constantly decreasing in numbers;
he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of the north of England.

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in
England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human
being in these islands could be 'placed' in an instant by his clothes,
manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the
case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor
cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs
of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial
roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes--everywhere,
indeed, on the outskirts of great towns--the old pattern is gradually
changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and
brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums
and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid
cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is
the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in
labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in
the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless,
cultureless life, centring round tinned food, PICTURE POST, the radio and
the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children
grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance
of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home
in and most definitely OF the modern world, the technicians and the
higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio
experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists.
They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions
are beginning to break down.

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing
class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to
continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England
will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are
crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a
change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply
tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The
intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be
disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the
reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the
suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster,
such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national
culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will
give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into
children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten,
but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into
the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to
change out of recognition and yet remain the same.


Part II

Shopkeepers at War

i.

I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second
chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun flashes are
lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the housetops, and London
Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a
map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are beaten
or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will.
But at this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been
brought there by follies which we are still committing and which will
drown us altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism that is, an
economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned
privately and operated solely for profit--DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver
the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past,
but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to
alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be
impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one
nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed
that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a
PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate
an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great
strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that
lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were
better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their
champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a
distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal
horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled
the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened
on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved
that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is
necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused
words, Socialism and Fascism.

Socialism is usually defined as "common ownership of the means of
production". Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns
everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that
people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture,
but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships
and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole
large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways
superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can
solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a
capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there
is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped
back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on
the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because
nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of
it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply
calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.
Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials.
Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful
thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient
quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the
moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that "common ownership
of the means of production" is not in itself a sufficient definition of
Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of
incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and
abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are
simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a
class system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the
mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some
kind of control over the government. "The State" may come to mean no more
than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can
return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that
borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for
war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a
Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still
capitalists and workers, and--this is the important point, and the real
reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with
Fascism--generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same
people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the
State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It
controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours,
wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical
purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a
State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere
EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is
obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the
world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that
which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state
of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for
granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the
Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the superiority of
Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.
Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent
Nazi professors have "proved" over and over again that only Nordic man is
fully human, have even mooted the idea that non Nordic peoples (such as
ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of
war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards
conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the
Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may
need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open
rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture
weapons for Hitler's forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis
aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main
castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At
the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people,
third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to
come the coloured peoples, the "semi-apes" as Hitler calls them, who are
to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because
it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world conquest, and
not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to
stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a
competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main
objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite
directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not
totally opposed to those of the State.

All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense
industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal
to the strain of preparing for war. To prepare for war on the modern
scale you have got to divert the greater part of your national income to
armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A bombing
plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor cars, or
eighty thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of bread.
Clearly you can't have MANY bombing planes without lowering the national
standard of life. It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But
in Chamberlain's England the transition could not be made. The rich would
not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still visibly
rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either. Moreover, so
long as PROFIT was the main object the manufacturer had no incentive to
change over from consumption goods to armaments. A businessman's first
duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it
pays better to manufacture motor cars. To prevent war material from
reaching the enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest market is
a business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were
tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber,
copper and shellac-and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was
going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling
somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was "good business".

And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was
rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was
coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would
begin. In September 1939 war broke out. EIGHT MONTHS LATER it was
discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely
beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way
desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles
against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even
enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the
regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even,
previously, been a shortage of uniforms--this in one of the greatest
woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a
change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism
and modern war. And false optimism was fed to the general public by the
gutter press, which lives on its advertisements and is therefore
interested in keeping trade conditions normal. Year after year the
Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO WAR,
and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothermere was describing
Hitler as "a great gentleman". And while England in the moment of
disaster proved to be short of every war material except ships, it is not
recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats,
gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone
pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public
necessity is not still continuing? England fights for her life, but
business must fight for profits. You can hardly open a newspaper without
seeing the two contradictory processes happening side by side. On the
very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the
seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defend, but
Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig,
Pond's Face Cream and Black Magic Chocolates.

But one thing gives hope--the visible swing in public opinion. If we can
survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one
of the great turning-points in English history. In that spectacular
disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section of the
business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism.
Before that the case against capitalism had never been PROVED. Russia,
the only definitely Socialist country, was backward and far away. All
criticism broke itself against the rat-trap faces of bankers and the
brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where's the money
to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their seats,
and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came something that
could not be laughed away, something that neither chequebooks nor
policemen were any use against-the bombing. Zweee--BOOM! What's that? Oh,
only a bomb on the Stock Exchange. Zweee--BOOM! Another acre of
somebody's valuable slum-property gone west. Hitler will at any rate go
down in history as the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong
side of its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were
uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there was
something wrong. It was a great step forward. From that time onwards the
ghastly job of trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a
planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in which the worst
man wins-that job will never be quite so ghastly again.

ii.

The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a
difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the
other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and
then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control.
Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new
men, new ideas--in the true sense of the word, a revolution.

I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the
patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes.
After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this. But it is
absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment has been fulfilled.
Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast
changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to
happen.

England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we
are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of
command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously
treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a cl