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 P?cuchet, 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
&nb
sp; 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 F?hrers 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 Eng
land 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