Fifty Orwell Essays Page 27

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