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
&
nbsp; 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
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