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-simpl
ifying. 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
obso
lete 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