Fifty Orwell Essays Page 25

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