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Title
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last marked below.
CRITICAL ESSAYS
CRITICAL ESSAYS
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
LONDON
SECKER AND WARBURG
1946
First PubMed W46
THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN
COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE
AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARDS
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
MORRISON AND CIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH
CONTENTS
CHARLES DICKENS ...... 7
BOYS' WEEKLIES ...... 57
WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE . . .83
THE ART OF DONALD McGiLL . . . .89
?'
RUDYARD KIPLING, 4 v ' . . . . . 100
W. B. YEATS 114
BENEFIT or CLERGY : SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI . 120
ARTHUR KOESTLER ...... 130
BAFFLES AND Miss BLANDISH . . . . 142
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE . . . 156
NOTE
MOST of these essays have appeared in print before, and several
of them more than once. " Charles Dickens " and " Boys'
Weeklies " appeared in my book, Inside the Whale. " Boys'
Weeklies " also appeared in Horizon, as did " Wells, Hitler and
the World State," " The Art of Donald McGill ", " Rudyard
Kipling ", " W. B. Yeats " and " Raffles and Miss Blandish ".
The last-named essay also appeared in the New York monthly
magazine, Politics. A shortened version of " The Art of Donald
McGill " appeared in the Strand Magazine. " Arthur Koestler "
was written for Focus, but will probably not have appeared there
before this book is published. " In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse "
appeared in The Windmill. " Benefit of Clergy" made a
sort of phantom appearance in the Saturday Book for 1944.
The book was in print when its publishers, Messrs Hutchinsons,
decided that this essay must be suppressed on grounds of
obscenity. It was accordingly cut out of each copy, though
for technical reasons it was impossible to remove its title from
the table of contents. To the other periodicals which have
allowed me to reprint my contributions, the usual acknow-
ledgments are due.
These essays have been left almost exactly as they were first
written. A few very small changes have been made, mos%
corrections of misquotations, and a few footnotes have been
added. The latter are dated. The phrase " Great War ", when
it occurs in the earlier essays, refers to the war of 1914-18. It
still seemed great in those days.
G. 0.
CHARLES DICKENS
DICKENS is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.
Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species
of theft, if you come to think of it.
When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman
Edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to
credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medie-
valism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has
made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a bloodthirsty revolu-
tionary. The Marxist claims him as " almost " a Marxist, the
Catholic claims him as " almost " a Catholic, and both claim
him as a champion of the proletariat (or " the poor ", as Chesterton
would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in
her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life
Lenin went to see a dramatised version of The Cricket on the
Hearth, and found Dickens's " middle-class sentimentality " so
intolerable that he walked out in the middle of a scene.
Taking " middle-class " to mean what Krupskaya might be
expected to mean by it, this was probably a truer judgment than
those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing that
the dislike of Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual.
Plenty of people have found him unreadable, but very few seem
to have felt any hostility towards the general spirit of his work.
Some years ago Mr. Bechhofer Koberts published a full-length
attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (This Side Idolatry),
but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the most part
with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents
which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear
about, and which no more invalidate his work than the second-
best bed invalidates Hamlet. All that the book really demon-
strated was that a writer's literary personality has little orjiothing
to do with his private character. It is quite possible that in
private life Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that
Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him appear. But in his published
work there is implied a personality quite different from this, a
7
8 CRITICAL ESSAYS
personality which has won him far more friends than enemies.
It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was a
bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one
might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in
his work has felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the
writers on Dickens, was anything but a radical himself, and he
disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not
there, but it never occurred to him to deny it. In Oliver Twist,
Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English
institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.
Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,
more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him
so completely that he has become a national institution himself.
In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always
been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-
stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was
having Dickens ladled down my throat by schoolmasters in whom
even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. Creakle,
and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in
Serjeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home
Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody
and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder
whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon
society. Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally and
politically ? As usual, one can define his position more easily if
one starts by deciding what he was not.
In the first place he was not, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson
seem to imply, a " proletarian " writer. To begin with, he does
not write about the proletariat, in which he merely resembles
the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If
you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English
fiction, all you find is a hole. This statement needs qualifying,
perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to see, the agri-
cultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good
showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about
criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class intelli-
gentsia.' But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who
make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists.
When they do find their way between the covers of a book, it is
nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central
CHARLES DICKENS 9
action of Dickens's stories almost invariably takes place in
midcQe-class surroundings. If one examines his novels in detail
o'ne finds that "his real su eject-matter is the London commercial
bourgeoisie and their hangers-on lawyers, clerks, tradesmen,
innkeepers, small craftsmen and servants. He has no portrait of
an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in
Hard Times) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in Little
Dorrit are probably his best picture of a working-class family
the Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the working class
but on the whole he is not successful with this type of character.
If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian
characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to
mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar,
a valet and a drunken midwife not exactly a representative
cross-section of the English working class.
Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens
is not a " revolutionary " writer. But his position here needs
some defining.
Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-
corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that
the world will be perfect if you amend a few by-laws and abolish
a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade,
for instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than
Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated
the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a series
of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor
but important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp
that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be
remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag
it into the open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be
well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined
that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of
his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong some-
where at the root. It is when one asks " Which root ? " that one
begins to grasp his position.
The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost
exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive
suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parlia-
mentary government, the educational system and so forth,
10 CRITICAL E S S A V S
without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places.
Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a
satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is
no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown,
or that he believes it would make very much difference if it
were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society
as " human nature ". It would be difficult to point anywhere in
his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is
wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any
attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a
book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses
to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does
not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have
this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference
for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about
Bounderby's will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from
the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire
capitalism ; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It
is said that Macaulay refused to review Hard Times because he
disapproved of its " sullen Socialism ". Obviously Macaulay is
here using the word " Socialism " in the same sense in which,
twenty years ago, a vegetarian meal or a Cubist picture used to
be referred to as " Bolshevism ". There is not a line in the book
that can properly be called Socialistic ; indeed, its tendency
if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that
capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be re-
bellious. Bounderby is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has
been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system
would work well enough that, all through, is the implication.
And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract much
more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads
meanings into him. His whole " message " is one that at first
glance looks like an enormous platitude : If men would behave
decently the world would be decent.
Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of
authority and who do behave decently. Hence that recurrent
Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man. This character belongs
especially to Dickens's early optimistic period. He is usually
a " merchant " (we are not necessarily told what merchandise
CHARLES DICKENS 11
he deals in), and he is always a superhumanly kind-hearted old
gentleman who " trots " to and fro, raising his employees' wages,
patting children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and, in
general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a pure
dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or
Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that
anyone who was so anxious to give his money away would never
have acquired it in the first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance,
had " been in the city ", but it is difficult to imagine him making
a fortune there. Nevertheless this character runs like a con-
necting thread through most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the
Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge it is the same figure over
and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas. Dickens
does however show signs of development here. In the books of
the middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent.
There is no one who plays this part in A Tale of Two Cities, nor in
Great Expectations Great Expectations is, in fact, definitely an
attack on patronage and in Hard Times it is only very doubt-
fully played by Gradgrind after his reformation. The character
reappears in a rather different form as Meagles in Little Dorrit
and John Jarndyce in Bleak House one might perhaps add Betsy
Trotwood in David Copperfield. But in these books the good
rich man has dwindled from a " merchant " to a rentier. This
is significant. A rentier is part of the possessing class, he can
and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work
for him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the
Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's
wages. The seeming inference from the rather despondent books
that Dickens wrote in the 'fifties is that by that time he had
grasped the helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt
society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, Our Mutual
Friend (published 1864-65), the good rich man comes back in
full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by
origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual deu& ex
machina, solving everybody's problems by showering money in
all directions. He even " trots ", like the Cheerybles. In several
ways Our Mutual Friend is a return to the earlier manner, and
not an unsuccessful return either. Dickens's thoughts seem to
have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the
remedy for everything.
12 CRITICAL ESSAYS
One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about
is child labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children
in his books, but usually they are suffering in schools rather than
in factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he
gives is the description in David Copperjield of little David wash-
ing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's warehouse. This, of course,
is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of ten, had worked
jn Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he
describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his
parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after
they were married. Looking back on this period, he says in
David Copperjield :
" It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can
have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent
abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate,
and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody
should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made ; and
I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of
Murdstone & Grinby."
And again, having described the rough boys among whom he
worked :
" No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship . . , and felt my hopes of growing up to be a
learned and distinguished man crushed in my bosom."
Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is
Dickens himself. He uses almost the same words on the auto-
biography that he T)egan and abandoned a few months earlier.
Of ^cOHTse Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not
to work ten hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he
does not say is that no child ought to be condemned to such a
fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it. David
escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes
and the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles
Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness
that the structure of society can be changed. He despises politics,
does not believe that any good can come out of Parliament he
had been a Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt
CHARLES DICKENS 13
a disillusioning experience and he is slightly hostile to the
most hopeful movement of his day, trade unionism. In Hard
Times trade unionism is represented as something not much
better than a racket, something that happens because employers
are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr.
Jackson has pointed out, the apprentices' association in Barndby
Rudge, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the
illegal or barely legal unions of Dickens's own day, with their
secret assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he wants
the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he
wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of
all by open violence,
As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower
sense in two novels, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.
In Barndby Rudge it is a case of rioting rather than revolution.
The Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had religious bigotry as
a pretext, seem to have been little more than a pointless outburst
of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently
indicated by the fact that his first idea was to make the ring-
leaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum. He
was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is
in fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots
Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He
delights in describing scenes in which the " dregs " of the popula-
tion behave with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of
great psychological interest, because they show how deeply he
had brooded on this subject. The things he describes can only
have come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like
the same scale had happened in his lifetime. Here is one of his
descriptions, for instance :
" If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have
issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made.
There were men there who danced and trampled on the beds of
flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched
them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks.
There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered
them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with
deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water ; and others who
14 CRITICAL ESSAYS
were restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly
longing. On the skull of one drunken lad not twenty, by his
looks who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the
lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire,
white hot, melting his head like wax. . . . But of all the howling
throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these sights ;
nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted."
You might almost think you were reading a description of
" Red " Spain by a partisan of General Franco. One ought, of
course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the London
" mob " still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock.)
Low wages and the growth and shift of population had brought
into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until the
early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a
thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there
was nothing between shuttering your windows and ordering the
troops to open fire. In A Tale of Two Cities he is dealing with a
revolution which was really about something, and Dickens's
attitude is different, but not entirely different. As a matter of
fact, A Tale of Two Cities is a book which tends to leave a false
impression behind, especially after a lapse of time.
The one thing that everyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities
remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated
by the guillotine tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives,
heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting
as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters,
but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the
book is rather slow going. But A Tale of Two Cities is not a com-
panion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dickens sees clearly
enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and
that many of the people who were executed deserved what they
got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had
behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over
again. We are constantly being reminded that while " iny lord "
is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate
and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree
is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the
platform of the guillotine, etc. etc. etc. The inevitability of
the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the clearest
terms ;
CHARLES DICKENS 15
" It was too much the way ... to talk of this terrible Revolution
as if it were the only harvest over known under the skies that had
not been sown as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be
done, that had led to it as if observers of the wretched millions
in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should
have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they saw."
And again :
" All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagina-
tion could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine.
And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and
climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will
grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that
have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once
more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same
tortured forms."
In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own
graves. But there is no perception here of what is now called
historic necessity. Dickens sees that the results are inevitable,
given the causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been
avoided. The Revolution is something that happens because
centuries of oppression have made the French peasantry sub-
human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have turned
over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no Revolu-
tion, no jacquerie, no guillotine and so much the better. This
is the opposite of the " revolutionary " attitude. From the
" revolutionary " point of view the class-struggle is the main
source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the
peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part,
just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.
Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as
meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that
is begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own
instruments. In Sidney Carton's vision at the foot of the guil-
lotine, he foresees Defarge and the other leading spirits of the
Terror all perishing under the same knife which, in fact, was
approximately what happened.
And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That
is why everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A Tale
16 CRITICALESSAYS
of Two Cities ; they have the quality of nightmare, and it is
Dickens's own nightmare. Again and again he insists upon the
meaningless horrors of revolution the mass-butcheries, the
injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the frightful blood-
lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob the de-
scription, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round
the grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the
prisoners in the September massacres outdo anything in Barnaby
Rudge. The revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded
savages in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with
a curious imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing
the " Carmagnole," for instance :
" There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they
were dancing like five thousand demons. . . . They danced to the
popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a
gnashing of teeth in unison. . . . They advanced, retreated, struck
at one another's hands, clutched at one another's heads, spun round
alone, caught one another, and spun round in pairs, until many of
them dropped. . . . Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck
out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way,
and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped
screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this
dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport a something, once
innocent, delivered over to all devilry."
He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guil-
lotining children. The passage I have abridged above ought to
be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was Dickens's
horror of revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance, that
touch, " with their heads low down and their hands high up ", etc.,
and the evil vision it conveys. Madame Defarge is a truly dread-
ful figure, certainly Dickens's most successful attempt at a
malignant character. Defarge and others are simply " the new
oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old ", the
revolutionary courts are presided over by " the lowest, cruellest
and worst populace ", and so on and so forth. All the way
through Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a
revolutionary period, and in this he shows a great deal of pre-
science. " A law of the suspected, which struck away all security
for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent
person to any bad and guilty one ; prisons gorged with people
CHARLES DICKENS 17
who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing "
it would apply pretty accurately to several countries to-day.
The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimise
its horrors ; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them and from
a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated. Even
the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it
appear. Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of
a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole
of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke
compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody
knives and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind
a special, sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on
to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word
" tumbril " has a murderous sound ; one forgets that a tumbril
is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the average English-
man, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of
severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in
sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen
of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.
If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only
major remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past
praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human
being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly
accounts for Dickens's preoccupation with childhood.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about
childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has
accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now
comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same
power of entering into the child's point of view. I must have
been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield.
The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immedi-
ately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been
written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an
adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic
figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose
nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside
the child's mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild
burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one
reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in which David Copper-
field is unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops ; or the
2
18 CRITICAL US SAYS
scene in which Pip, in Great Expectations, coming back from
Miss Havisham's house and finding himself completely unable
to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous
lies which, of course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation
of childhood is there. And how accurately he has recorded the
mechanisms of the child's mind, its visualising tendency, its
sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in
his childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from
their tombstones :
" The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea
that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From
the character and turn of the inscription, ' ALSO GEOBQIANA, WIFE
or THE ABOVE ', I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was
freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot
and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their
grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine ... I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that
they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their
trouser-pookets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence."
There is a similar passage in David Copperfield. After biting
Mr. Murdstone's hand, David is sent away to school and obliged
to wear on his back a placard saying, " Take care of him. He
bites." He looks at the door in the playground where the boys
have carved their names, and from the appearance of each name
he seems to know in just what tone of voice the boy will read
out the placard :
" There was one boy a certain J. Steerforth who cut his name
very deep and very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather
strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy,
one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of it, and
pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third,
George Demple, who I fancied would sing it.'*
When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those
were exactly the pictures that those particular names would call
up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words
(Demple" temple " ; Traddles probably " skedaddle "). But
how many people, before Dickens, had ever noticed such things ?
A sympathetic attitude towards children was a much rarer thing
CHARLES DICKENS 19
in Dickens's day than it is now. The early nineteenth century
was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens's youth children
were still being " solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they
were held up to be seen ", and it was not so long since boys of
thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of
" breaking the child's spirit " was in full vigour, and The Fairchild
Family was a standard book for children till late into the century.
This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions,
but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives one
some idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes
carried. Mr. Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children
quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Doctor Watts's " Let
dogs delight to bark and bite " between blows of the cane, and
then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where
the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. In the earlier part of
the century scores of thousands of children, aged sometimes as
young as six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton
mills, and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged
till they ran with blood for a mistake in their Latin verses. One
thing which Dickens seems to have recognised, and which most
of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in
flogging. I think this can be inferred from David Copperfield and
Nicholas Nickleby. But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him
as much as physical, and though there is a fair number of ex-
ceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.
Except for the universities and the big public schools, every
kind of education then existing in England gets a mauling at
Dickens's hands. There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where
little boys are blown up with Greek until they burst, and the
revolting charity schools of the period, which produced specimens
like Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem House, and
Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept by
Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains
true even to-day. Salem House is the ancestor of the modern
" prep, school ", which still has a good deal of resemblance to it ;
and as for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, some old fraud of much the
same stamp is carrying on at this moment in nearly every small
town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's criticism is neither
creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy" of an educatiflttal
system founded oh the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane ;
20 CRITICAL ESSAT 8
on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that
is coming up in the 'fifties and 'sixties, the " modern " school,
with its gritty insistence on " facts ". What, then, does he want ?
As always, what he appears to want is a moralised version of the
existing thing the old type of school, but with no caning, no
bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek. Doctor
Strong's school, to which David Copperfield goes after he escapes
from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem House with the
vices left out and a good deal of " old grey stones " atmosphere
thrown in :
" Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr.
Creakle's as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously
ordered, and on a sound system ; with an appeal, in everything, to
the honour and good faith of the boys . . . which worked wonders.
We all felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and
in sustaining its character and dignity. Hence, we soon became
warmly attached to it I am sure I did for one, and I nevei knew,
in all my time, of any boy being otherwise and learnt with a good
will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and
plenty of liberty ; but even then, as I remember, we were well
spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance
or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong's
boys."
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens's
utter lack of any educational theory. He can imagine the moral
atmosphere of a good school, but nothing further. The boys
" learnt with a good will ", but what did they learn ? No doubt
it was Doctor Blimber's curriculum, a little watered down.
Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere implied
in Dickens's novels, it conies as rather a shock to learn that he
sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the
ordinary educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may
have done this because he was painfully conscious of being
under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by
his own love of classical learning. Dickens had had little or no
formal education, but he lost nothing by missing it, and on the
whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he was unable to
imagine a better school than Doctor Strong's, or, in real life, than
Eton, it was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather
different from the one Gissing suggests,
6HARLES DICKENS 21
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he
is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of
structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite
remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is
always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently
summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different
from Creakle's " as good is from evil ". Two things can be very
much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are
in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a
" change of heart " that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer,
a reactionary humbug. A " change of heart " is in fact the alibi
of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But
Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the
strongest single impression one carries away from his books is
that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not
in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all
certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just
as " revolutionary " and revolution, after all, means turning
things upside down as the politico-economic criticism which
is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but
there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society
in a poem like " I wander through each charter'd street " than
in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an
illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old
generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two
viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve
human nature until you have changed the system ? The other,
what is the use of changing the system before you have improved
human nature ? They appeal to different individuals, and they
probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The
moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one
another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath
the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers
are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow
Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come
back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to
22 CRITICALBSSAYS
an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem how to
prevent power from being abused remains unsolved. Dickens,
who had not the vision to see that private property is an ob-
structive nuisance, had the vision to see that. " If men would
behave decently the world would be decent " is not such a
platitude as it sounds.
More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be
explained in terms of his social origin, though actually his family
history was not quite what one would infer from his novels. His
father was a clerk in Government service, and through his mother's
family he had connections with both the Army and the Navy.
But from the age of nine onwards he was brought up in London
in commercial surroundings, and generally in an atmosphere of
struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban
bourgeoisie, and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen
of this class, with all the " points ", as it were, very highly
developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If
one wants a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells,
who ha had a rather similar history and who obviously owes
something to Dickens as a novelist. Arnold Bennett was essen-
tially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a
midlander, with an industrial and Nonconformist rather than
commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban
bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-
class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable
or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with
industry or the soil ; on the other, no contact with the governing
classes. Anyone who has studied Wells's novels in detail will
have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison, he
has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm
for the proletarian. His most-hated types, the people he believes
to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners,
priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first
sight a list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks
like a mere omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have
a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people who are
r H A R L K R DICK E X S 23
governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the
past the opposite, therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put
his money on the future and sees the past simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bour-
geoisie was really a rising class, he displays this characteristic
less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future
and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the " quaint old
church ", etc.). Nevertheless his list of most-hated types is like
enough to Wells 's for the similarity to be striking. He is vaguely
on the side of the working class has a sort of generalised sym-
pathy with them because they are oppressed but lie does not in
reality know much about them ; they como into his books
chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At the other end
of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and going one better than
Wells in this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sym-
pathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick on the upper side and Mr.
Barkis on the lower. But the term <c aristocrat ", for the type
Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy,
who hardly enter into his books, as their petty offshoots, the
cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureau-
crats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are
countless hostile sketches of these people, and hardly any that
are friendly. There are practically no friendly pictures of the
landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful
exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock ; otherwise there is only Mr.
Wardle (who is a stock figure the " good old squire ") and
Haredale in Barnaby Rudge, who has Dickens's sympathy because
he is a persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of
soldiers (i.e. officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his
bureaucrats, judges and magistrates, most of them would feel
quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The only officials
whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, signi-
ficantly enough, policemen.
Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman,
because it is part of the English puritan tradition, which is not
dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least
by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries
of obscurity. It had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of
contact with agriculture, and politically impotent ; government,
24 CRITICALE8SAY8
in its experience, was something which either interfered or
persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of
public service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now
strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the
nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility ; they see
everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any con-
sciousness that the community exists. On the other hand, a
Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting his duties, would
have some vague notion of what duties he was neglecting.
Dickens's attitude is never irresponsible, still less does he take
the money-grubbing Smilesian line ; but at the back of his
mind there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of
government is unnecessary. Parliament is simply Lord Goodie
and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply Major Bagstock
and his Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel Chowser and
Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply Bumble and the
Circumlocution Office and so on and so forth. What he does"
not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Goodie and Doodle
and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century
are performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin
would ever bother about.
And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great
advantage to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too
much. From Dickens's point of view " good " society is simply
a collection of village idiots. What a crew ! Lady Tippins !
Mrs. Gowan ! Lord Verisopht ! The Honourable Bob Stables !
Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler) ! The Tite Barnacles !
Nupkins ! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the
same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureau-
cratic class incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only
succeeds with this class when he depicts them as mental defec-
tives. The accusation which used to be made against Dickens
in his lifetime, that he " could not paint a gentleman ", was an
absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that what he says against
the " gentleman " class is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry
Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet
type. Harthouse in Hard Times is better, but he would be only
an ordinary achievement for Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's
thoughts hardly move outside the " gentleman " class, but
Thackeray has the great advantage of having a foot in two moral
CHARLES DICKENS 25
camps. In some ways his outlook is very similar to Dickeus's.
Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class
against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth
century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in the
person of the wicked Lord Steyne. Vanity Fair is a full-length
version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in Little Dorrit.
But by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be some-
what nearer to the class he is satirising. Consequently he can
produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance, Major
Pendennis and "Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennia is a shallow
old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who
sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling tradesmen ;
but what Thackeray realises is that according to their tortuous
code they are neither of them bud men. Major Pendennis would
not sign a dud cheque, for instance. Rawdon certainly would,
but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a tight
corner. Both of them would behave well 011 the field of battle
a thing that would not particularly appeal to Dickens. The
result is that at the end one is left with a kind of amused tolerance
for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect
for Rawdon ; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could
make one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying
life on the fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite
incapable of this. In his hands both Rawdon and the Major
would dwindle to traditional caricatures. And, on the whole,
his attacks on " good " society are rather perfunctory. The
aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books chiefly as a
kind of "noises off", a haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the
wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he produces a really
subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold
Skimpole, it is generally of some rather middling, unimportant
person.
One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering
the time he lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples
who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise
foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking
races are the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact
that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race, they
invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago, Froggy, Square-
head, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser, Yellowbelly
26 R I T T A L E S S A Y S
these are merely a selection. Any time before 1870 the list would
have been shorter, because the map of the world was different
from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign
races that had fully entered into the English consciousness. But
towards these, and especially towards France, the nearest and
best-hated nation, the English attitude of patronage was so
intolerable that English " arrogance " and " xenophobia " are
still a legend. And of course they are not a completely untrue
legend even now. Till very recently nearly all English children
were brought up to despise the southern European races, and
history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by
Kngland. But one has got to read, say, the Quarterly Review of
the 'thirties io know what boasting really is. Those were the
days when the English built up their legend of themselves as
" sturdy islanders " and " stubborn hearts of oak " and when it
was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman
was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-century
novels and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the
" Froggy " a small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a
pointed top-hat, always jabbering and gesticulating, vain,
frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but gener-
ally taking to flight when real danger appears. Over against
him was John Bull, the " sturdy English yeoman ", or (a more
public-school version) the " strong, silent Englishman " of
Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.
Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though
there are moments when he sees through it and laughs at it.
The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind is that
the English won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far
in his books without coming upon some reference to it. The
English, as he sees it, are invincible because of their tremendous
physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most
Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the
English are larger than other people (Thackeray, as it happened,
was larger than most people), and therefore he is capable of
writing passages like this :
" I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would
lay even money that you who are reading this are more than five
feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone ; while a Frenchman is
five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after
CHARLES DICKENS 27
his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are
a different and superior animal a French-beating animal (the
history of hundreds of years has shown you to be so),*' etc. etc.
There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's
works. Dickens would never be guilty of anything of the kind.
It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun
at foreigners, and of course, like nearly all nineteenth-century
Englishmen, he is untouched by European culture. But never
anywhere does he indulge in the typical English boasting, the
" island race ", " bulldog breed ", " right little, tight little island "
style of talk. In the whole of A Tale of Two Cities there is not
a line that could be taken as meaning, " Look how these wicked
Frenchmen behave ' " The one place where he seems to display
a normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of
Martin Chuzzlewit, This, however, is simply the reaction of a
generous mind against cant. If Dickens were alive to-day he
would make a trip to Soviet Eussia and come back with a book
rather like Gide's Retour de L'URRS. But he is remarkably free
from the idiocy of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom
even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does not exploit
the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and
not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made
jokes, which obviously he does not. It is perhaps more signi-
ficant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that
he takes it for granted (Oliver Twist and Great Expectations) that
a receiver of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was
probably justified. But the " Jew joke ", endemic hi English
literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear in his books,
and in Our Mutual Friend he makes a pious though not very
convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.
Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a
real largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative,
rather unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an English-
man, but he is hardly aware of it certainly the thought of being
an Englishman does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feeling,
no discernible views on foreign politics, and is untouched by the
military tradition. Temperamentally he is much nearer to the
small Nonconformist tradesman who looks down on the " red-
coats " and thinks that war is wicked a one-eyed view, but,
2 CRITICAL ESSAYS
after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable tliat Dickens hardly
writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous
powers of description, and of describing things he had never seen,
he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the
Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. Probably the subject would
not strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard
a battlefield as a place where anything worth settling could be
settled. It is one up to the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.
in
DICKENS had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified
of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from
the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim
him as a " popular " writer, a champion of the " oppressed
masses ". So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed ;
but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first
place, he is a south of England man, and a Cockney at that, and
therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses,
the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to
see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens
as the spokesman of " the poor ", without showing much aware-
ness of who " the poor " really are. To Chesterton " the poor "
means small shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says,
" is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar
to England " ; and Sam Weller is a valet ! The other point is
that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of
proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever
he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum -dwellers. His
descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised
repulsion :
" The ways were foul and narrow ; the shops and houses wretched ;
and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell,
and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets ; and the whole quarter
reeked with crime, and filth, and misery," etc. etc.
There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one
gets the impression of whole submerged populations whom he
regards as being beyond the pale. In rather the same way the
r R A K L K S l> 1 T K E N S 20
modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large
block of the population as " lumpenproletariat ". Dickens also
shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect
of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic
causes of crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once
broken the law he has put himself outside human society. There
is a chapter at the end of David Copperfield in which David visits
the prison where Littimer and Uriah Heep are serving their
sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard the horrible " model "
prisons, against which Charles Ileade delivered his memorable
attack in It is Never too Late to Mend, as too humane. He com-
plains that the food is too good ! As soon as he comes up against
crime or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the " I've
always kept myself respectable " habit of rnmd. The attitude
of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickons himself) towards
Magwitch in Great Expectations is extremely interesting. Pip is
conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so
of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that
the person who has loaded bun with benefits for years is actually
a transported convict, he falls into fronzies of disgust. " The
abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been
exceeded if he had been some terrible beast," etc. etc. So far as
one can discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was
a child he had been terrorised by Magwitch in the churchyard ;
it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is an
even more " kept-myself-respectable " touch in the fact that
Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot take Magwitch's
money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has been
honestly acquired ; but it is an ex-convict's money and therefore
" tainted ". There is nothing psychologically false in this, either.
Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the
best thing Dickens ever did ; throughout this part of the book
one feels " Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved ". But
the point is that in the matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies
with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish. The result is
that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as
Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote characters who are more
pathetic than the author intended.
When it is a question of the non-ciiminal poor, the ordinary,
30 CRITICAL ESSAYS
decent, labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous
in Dickens's attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people
like the Peggottys and the Plornishes. But it is questionable
( whether he really regards them as equals. It is of the greatest
interest to read Chapter XL of David Copper field and side by
side with it the autobiographical fragment (parts of this are given
in Forster's Life), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about
the blacking-factory episode a great deal more strongly than in
the novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the memory
was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way " made
me cry, after my eldest child could speak ". The text makes it
quite clear that what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect,
was the enforced contact with " low " associates :
" No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk
into this companionship ; compared these everyday associates with
those of my happier childhood. . . . But I held some station at the
blacking warehouse too. ... I soon became at least as expeditious
and as skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though
perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different
enough from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the men,
always spoke of me as ' the young gentleman '. A certain man . . .
used to call me ' Charles ' sometimes in speaking to me ; but I think
it was mostly when we were very confidential. . . . Poll Green
uprose once, and rebelled against the ' young-gentleman ' usage ;
but Bob Fagin settled him speedily."
It was as well that there should be u a space between us ", you
see. However much Dickens may admire the working classes,
he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins, and the
time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early
nineteenth century class-animosities may have been no sharper
than they are now, but the surface differences between class and
class were enormously greater. The " gentleman " and the
" common man " must have seemed like different species of
animal. Dickens is quite genuinely on the side of the poor
against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him
not to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. In one of
Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a certain village judge every
stranger who arrives from the state of his hands. If his palms
CHARLES DICK ENS . 31
are hard from work, they let him in ; if his palms are soft, out he
goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens ; all his-
heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes Nicholas Nickleby,
Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John
Harmon are usually of the type known as " walking gentle-
men ". He likes a bourgeois exterior and a bourgeois (not
aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is that he will
not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like a
working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic
figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent,
but the jeune premier always speaks the then equivalent of
B.B.C. This is so, even when it involves absurdities. Little
Pip, for instance, is brought up by people speaking broad Essex,
but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood ; actually
he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs.
Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe,
Oliver Twist one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even
Rachel in Hard Times has barely a trace of Lancashire accent,
an impossibility in her case.
One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings
on the class question is the attitude he takes up when class
collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied about,
and consequently it is one of the points at which the " I'm-not-
a-snob " pose tends to break down.
One sees that at its most obvious where a class- distinction is
also a colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial
attitude (" native " women are fair game, white women are
sacrosanct) exists in a veiled form in all-white communities,
causing bitter resentment on both sides. When this issue arises,
novelists often revert to crude class-feelings which they might
disclaim at other times. A good example of " class-conscious "
reaction is a rather forgotten novel, The People of Clopton, by
Andrew Barton. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed
up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a
rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, some-
thing quite different from her seduction by a man in her own
walk of life. Trollope deals with this theme twice (The Three
Clerks and The Small House at Allington) and, as one might
expect, entirely from the upper-class angle. As he sees it, an
affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is simply an
32 CRITICAL ESSAYS
" entanglement " to be escaped from. Trollope's moral standards
are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen,
but the implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings
do not greatly matter. In The Three Clerics he even gives the
typical class-reaction by noting that the girl " smells ". Meredith
(Rhoda Fleming) takes more the " class-conscious " viewpoint.
Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. In Pendennis (Fanny
Bolton) his attitude is much the same as Trollope's ; in A Shabby
Genteel Story it is nearer to Meredith's.
One could divine a good deal about Trollope's social origin, or
Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the class-
sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual,
is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class
than with the proletariat. The one incident that seems to con-
tradict this is the tale of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's
manuscript in A Tale of Two Cities. This, however, is merely
a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of Madame
Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. lu
David Copperfield, where he is dealing with a typical nineteenth-
century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him as
paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds
must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yar-
mouth sands, but neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even
Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his offence by
being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by
class-motives, but the Peggottys are not not even in the scene
between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty ; if they were, of
course, they would probably turn against David as well as against
Steerforth.
In Our Mutual Friend Dickens treats the episode of Eugene
Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam very realistically and with no appear-
ance of class bias. According to the <k unhand me, monster "
tradition, Lizzie ought either to " spurn " Eugene or to be ruined
by him and throw herself off Waterloo Bridge ; Eugene ought to
be either a heartless betrayer or a hero resolved upon defying
society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is frightened
by Eugene's advances and actually runs away from them, but
hardly pretends to dislike them ; Eugene is attracted by her,
has too much decency to attempt seducing her and dare not
marry her because of his family. Finally they are married and
CHARLEvS DICKENS 33
no one is any the worse, except perhaps Mr. Twemlow, who will
lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as it might
have happened in real life. But a " class-conscious " novelist
would have given her to Bradley Headstone.
But when it is the other way about when it is a case of a poor
man aspiring to some woman who is " above " him Dickens
instantly retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is rather
fond of the Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital
W) being " above " a man. Pip feels that Estella is " above "
him, Esther Summerson is " above " Guppy, Little Dorrit is
'* above " John Chivery, Lucy Manette is " above " Sydney
Carton. In some of these the " above "-ness is merely moral,
but in others it is social. There is a scarcely mistakable class-
reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is
plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The disgusting Uriah sud-
denly announced, that he is in love with her
44 * Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love
the ground my Agnes walks on.'
'" I believe L had the delirious id<M of .seizing tbo red-hot poker
out of the fire, and running him through with it. It went from ruo
with a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle : but the image of Agnes,
outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal's,
remained in my mind (when I looked at him, sitting all awry as
if his mean soul griped his body) and made me giddy. ... 4 1
believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you (David says later
on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as that moon
herself/ "
Considering how Heep's general lowness his servile manners,
dropped aitches and so forth has been rubbed in throughout
the book, there is not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's
feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even
villains have sexual lives ; it is the thought of the " pure "
Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches that really revolts
Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in love with a
woman who is " above " him as a joke. It is one of the stock
jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in
Bleak House is an example, John Chivery is another, and there
is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the " swarry "
in Pickwick Papers. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen
3
34 CRITICAL ESSAYS
as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding dinner-parties in imitation
of their " betters " and deluding themselves that their young
mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes him as
very comic. So it is, in a way, though one might question
whether it is not better for a footman even to have delusions
of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the
catechism.
In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his
age. In the nineteenth century the revolt against domestic
service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone
with over 500 a year. An enormous number of the jokes in
nineteenth-century comic papers deal with the uppishness of
servants. For years Punch ran a series of jokes called " Servant
Gal-isms ", all turning on the then astonishing fact that a servant
is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of
thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic
servants ; they are dishonest (Great Expectations), incompetent
(David Copperfield), turn up their noses at good food (Pickwick
Papers), etc. etc. all rather in the spirit of the suburban house-
wife with one downtrodden cook-general. But what is curious,
in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he wants to draw a
sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is recognisably
a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all
of them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the " old
family retainer " ; they identify themselves with their master's
family and are at once doggishly faithful and completely familiar.
No doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are deiived to some
extent from Smollett, and hence from Cervantes ; but it is
interesting that Dickens should have been attracted by such a.
type. Sam Welter's attitude is definitely medieval. He gets
himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the
Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get married because he feels
that Mr. Pickwick still needs his services. There is a
characteristic scene between them,:
" * Vages or no vages, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin',
Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by
you, come what may. . . .'
" ' My good fellow,' said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat
down again, rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, ' you are bound
to consider the young woman also.'
11 A It L K S D I C K E N S 35
u c
' I do consider the young 'ooman, sir,' said Sara. * I have
considered the young 'ooman. I've spoke to her. I've told her how
I'm sitivated ; she's ready to vait till I'm ready, and I believe she
vill. If she don't, she's not the young 'ooman I take her for, and
I give her up with readiness.' "
It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said
to this in real life. But notice the feudal atmosphere. Sam
Weller is ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years of life to
his master, and he can also sit down in his master's presence. A
modern manservant would never think of doing either. Diekens's
views on the servant question do not get much beyond wishing
that master and servant would love one another. Sloppy in
Our Mutual Friend, though a wretched failure as a character,
represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such
loyalty, of course, is natural, human and likeable ; but so was
feudalism.
What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for
an idealised version of the existing thing. He was writing at a
time when domestic service must have seemed a completely
inevitable evil. There were no labour-saving devices, and there
was huge inequality of wealth. It was an age of enormous
families, pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the
slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement kitchen
was something too normal to be noticed. And given the fact of
servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam
Weller and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than the
Cheerybles. If there have got to be masters and servants, how
much better that the master should be Mr. Pickwick and the
servant should be Sam Weller. Better still, of course, if servants
did not exist at all but this Dickens is probably unable to
imagine. Without a high level of mechanical development,
human equality is not practically possible ; Dickens goes to show
that it is not imaginable either.
IV
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about
agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney,
and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense
that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers,
36 f K I T I C A L E S S A Y S
of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. A
thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of
Dickens's books is that, as nineteenth-century novelists go, he is
rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way things
really happen. At first sight this statement looks flatly untrue,
and it needs some qualification.
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of " low life " life in a debtor's
prison, for example and he was also a popular novelist and able
to write about ordinary people. So were all the characteristic
English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home
in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hope-
lessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a
novelist. Even when Joyce, for instance, spends a decade or so
in patient efforts to make contact with the " common man ",
his " common man " finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a
highbrow at that. Dickens at least does not suffer from this kind
of thing. He has no difficulty in introducing the common motives,
love, ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does
not noticeably write about, however, is work.
In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens
off-stage. The only one of his heroes who has a plausible pro-
fession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and
then a novelist, like Dickens himself. With most of the others,
the way they earn their living is very mucji in the background.
Pip, for instance, " goes into business " in Egypt ; we are not
told what business, and Pip's working life occupies about half a
page of the book. Clennam has been in some unspecified business
in China, and later goes into another barely specified business
with Doyce. Martin Chuzzlewit is an architect, but does not
seem to get much time for practising. In no case do their ad-
ventures spring directly out of their work. Here the contrast
between Dickens and, say, Trollope is startling. And one reason
for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows very little about the
professions his characters are supposed to follow. What exactly
went on in Gradgrind's factories ? How did Podsnap make his
money ? How did Merdle work his swindles '? One knows that
Dickens could never follow up the details of Parliamentary
elections and Stock Exchange rackets as Trollope could. As
soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or politics he
takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is the case even with
C H A R L E 8 T) I C K E N S 37
legal processes, about which actually he must have known a
good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in
Orley Farm, for instance.
And this partly accounts for the needless ramifications of
Dickens's novels, the awful Victorian " plot ". It is true that
not all his novels are alike in this. A Tale of Two Cities is a very
good and fairly simple story, and so in its different way is Hard
Times ; but these are just the two which are always rejected as
"not like Dickens" and incidentally they were not published
in monthly numbers. 1 The two first-person novels are also good
stories, apart from their sub-plots. But the typical Dickens
novel, Nicholas Ntckleby, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Our
Mutual Friend, always exists round a framework of melodrama.
The last thing anyone ever remembers about these books is their
central story. On the other hand, I suppose no one has ever
read them without carrying the memory of individual pages to
the day of his death. Dickens sees human beings with the most
intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as
" characters ", not as functional members of society ; that is
to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his greatest success
is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a
series of sketches ; there is little attempt at development the
characters simply go 011 and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of
eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action,
the melodrama begins. He cannot make the action revolve round
their ordinary occupations ; hence the crossword puzzle of coin-
cidences, intrigues, minders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost
brothers, etc. etc. In the end even people like Squeers and
Micawber get sucked into the machinery.
Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague
or merely melodramatic writer. Much that he wrote is extremely
factual, and in the power of evoking visual images he has probably
never been equalled. When Dickens has once described something
you see it for the rest of your life. But in a way the concreteness
1 Hard Times was published as a serial in Household Words and Great
Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Hound. Forster says
that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it " much more difficult
to get sufficient interest into each ". Dickens himself complained of the
lack of " elbow-room ". In other words, he had to stick more closely to the
story.
38 CRITICAL ESSAYS
of his vision is a sign of what he is missing. For, after all, that
is what the merely casual onlooker always sees the outward
appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one
who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape.
Wonderfully as he can describe an appearance, Dickens does not
often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in
leaving in one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things
seen in leisure moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or
through the windows of a stage-coach ; the kind of things he
notices are inn-signs, brass door-knockers, painted jugs, the
interiors of shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above
all, food. Everything is seen from the consumer-angle. When
he writes about Coketown he manages to evoke, in just a few
paragraphs, the atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly
disgusted southern visitor would see it. " It had a black canal
in it, and a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast
piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and
a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-
engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness." That is as near as
Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An engineer
or a cotton-broker would see it differently ; but then neither of
them would be capable of that impressionistic touch about the
heads of the elephants.
In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely un-
physical. He is a man who lives through his eyes and ears rather
than through his hands and muscles. Actually his habits were
not so sedentary as this seems to imply. In spite of rather poor
health and physique, he was active to the point of restlessness ;
throughout his life he was a remarkable walker, and he could at
any rate carpenter well enough to put up stage scenery. But he
was not one of those people who feel a need to use their hands.
It is difficult to imagine him digging at a cabbage-patch, for
instance. He gives no evidence of knowing anything about
agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of
game or sport. He has no interest in pugilism, for instance.
Considering the age in which he was writing, it is astonishing
how little physical brutality there is in Dickens's novels. Martin
Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for instance, behave with the most
remarkable mildness towards the Americans who are constantly
CHARLES DICKENS 39
menacing them with revolvers and bowie-kriives. The average
English or American novelist would have had them handing out
socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all directions.
Dickens is too decent for that ; he sees the stupidity of violence,
and also he belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal
in socks on the jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards
sport is mixed up with social feelings. In England, for mainly
geographical reasons, sport, especially field-sports, and snobbery
are inextricably mingled. English Socialists are often flatly
incredulous when told that Lenin, for instance, was devoted to
shooting. In their eyes shooting, hunting, etc., arc simply
snobbish observances of the landed gentry ; they forget that
these things might appear differently in a huge virgin country
like Eussia. From Dickens's point of view almost any kind of
sport is at best a subject for satire. Consequently one side of
nineteenth-century life the boxing, racing, cockfighting, badger-
digging, poaching, rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully em-
balmed in Leech's illustrations to Surtees is outside his
scope.
What is more striking, in a seemingly " progressive " radical,
is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest
either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can
do. As Gissing remaiks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway
journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing
journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a
curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period.
Little Dorritj written in the middle 'fifties, deals with the late
'twenties ; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently
deals with the 'twenties and 'thirties. Several of the inventions
and discoveries which have made the modern world possible
(the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber,
coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime,
but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than
the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's " invention " in
Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious
and revolutionary, " of great importance to his country and his
fellow-creatures ", and it is also an important minor link in the
book ; yet we are never told what the " invention " is ! On the
other hand, Doyce's physical appearance is hit off with the typical
40 CKITITAL ESSAYS
Dickens touch ; lie has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a
way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly
anchored in one's memory ; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by
fastening on something external. -
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the
mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery.
Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little con-
sciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress
it is usually m terms of moral progress men growing better ;
probably he would never admit that men are only as good as
their technical development allows them to be. At this point
the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, II. G. Wells,
is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a
millstone, but Dickens's unscientific cast of mind is just as damag-
ing in a different way. What it does is to make any positive
attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal,
agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present.
Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science,
" progress " and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts.
Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no de-
finable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already,
he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice,
and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier
schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might
have been ? Why did he not have his own sons educated accord-
ing to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public
schools to be stuffed with Greek ? Because he lacked that kind
of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little
intellectual curiosity. Arid here one comes upon something
which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something
that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from
us that he has no ideal of work.
With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely
Dickens himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central
characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes
work in order to make a living and to marry the heroine, not
because they feel a passionate interest in one particular subject.
Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an
architect ; he might just as well be a doctor or a barrister. In
any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the deus ex machina enters
C H A R L E S P I C K K N $ 41
with a bag of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved
from further struggle. The feeling, " This is what I came into
the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this
even if it means starvation ", which turns men of differing
temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, ex-
plorers and revolutionaries this motif is almost entirely absent
from Dickens's books. He himself, as is well known, worked
like a slave and believed in his work as few novelists have ever
done. But there seems to be no calling except novel-writing
(and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of
devotion. And, after all, it is natural enough, considering his
rather negative attitude towards society. In the last resort
there is nothing ho admires except common decency. Science
is uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly (the heads of
the elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby.
As for politics leave that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there
is no objective except to marry the heroine, settle down, live
solvently and be kind. And you can do that much better in
private life.
Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imagina-
tive background. What did he think of as the most desirable
way to live ? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his
uncle, when Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John
Harmon had been enriched by Boffin what did they do ?
The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas
Nickleby invested his wife's money with tho Cheerybles and
" became a rich and prosperous merchant ", but as he immediately
retired into Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work
very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass " purchased and cultivated
a small farm, more for occupation than profit ". That is the
spirit in which most of Dickens's books end a sort of radiant
idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do
not work (Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Eichard Carstone, Wray-
burn before his reformation), it is because they are cynical and
immoral or because they are a burden on somebody else ; if you
are " good ", and also self-supporting, there is no reason why
you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your dividends.
Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general
assumption of his age. The " genteel sufficiency ", the " com-
petence ", the " gentleman of independent means " (or u in easy
42 CRITICAL ESS AYS
circumstances ") the very phrases tell one all about the strange,
empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle
bourgeoisie. It was a dream of complete idleness. Charles Reade
conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending of Hard Cash. Alfred
Hardie, hero of Hard Cash, is the typical nineteenth-century
novel-hero (public-school style), with gifts which Keade describes
as amounting to " genius ". He is an old Etonian and a scholar
of Oxford, he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by heart,
he can box with prize-fighters and win the Diamond Sculls at
Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of
course, he behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age
of twenty-five, he inherits a fortune, marries his Julia Dodd and
settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as
his parents-in-law :
" They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred. . . .
Oh, you happy little villa ! You were as like Paradise as any mortal
dwelling can be. A day came, however, when your walls could no
longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred with a
lovely boy ; enter two nurses and the villa showed symptoms of
bursting. Two months more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed
into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off ; and there was a
double reason for the migration. As often happens after a long
separation, Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another
infant to play about their knees ", etc. etc. etc.
This is the type of the Victorian happy ending a vision of a
huge, loving family of three or four generations, all crammed
together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed
of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered,
effortless life that it implies. It is not even a violent idleness,
like Squire Western's. That is the significance of Dickens's
urban background and his non-interest in the blackguardly-
sporting-military side of life. His heroes, once they had come
into money and " settled down ", would not only do no work ;
they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with
actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live
at home in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door
to a blood-relation living exactly the same life :
" The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous
merchant, was to buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and
CHARLES DICKENS 43
there came gradually about him a group of lovely children, it
was altered and enlarged ; but none of the old rooms were ever
pulled down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which
there was any association of bygone times was ever removed or
changed.
" Within a stone's-throw was another retreat enlivened by
children's pleasant voices too ; and here was Kate . . . the same
true, gentle creature, the same fond sister, the same in the love of all
about her, as in her girlish days.*'
It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted
from Reade. And evidently this is Dickens's ideal ending. It is
perfectly attained in Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and
Pickwick, and it is approximated to in varying degrees in almost
all the others. The exceptions are Hard Times and Great Expecta-
tions the latter actually has a " happy ending ", but it contra-
dicts the general tendency of the book, and it was put in at the
request of Bulwer Lytton.
The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like
this : a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty
of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no
work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic.
In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of
the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending hap-
pened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle
round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of
past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals,
the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-
pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff ;
but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The
curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens
is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence
is satisfying to him. This alone would be enough to tell one that
more than a hundred years have passed since Dickens's first book
was written. No modern man could combine such purposeless-
ness with so much vitality.
By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has
read as far as this, will probably be angry with me.
44 CRITICAL ESSAYS
1 have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his
" message ", and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But
every writer, especially every novelist, has a " message ", whether
he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are
influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens him-
self nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought
of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.
As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to
be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics
and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there
to steal ? Why does anyone care about Dickens ? Why do 7
care about Dickens ?
That kind of question is never easy to answer. Asa rule, an
aesthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so
corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether
the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug.
In Dickens's case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He
happens to be one of those " great authors " who are ladled down
everyone's throat in childhood. At the time this causes rebellion
and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life.
For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the
patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a- child, " Ye Mariners
of England ", the " Charge of the Light Brigade " and so forth.
What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the
memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of
association are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two
of his books lying about in an actual majority of English homes.
Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they
can even read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illus-
trators. A thing that is absorbed as early as that does not come
up against any critical judgment. And when one thinks of this,
one thinks of all that is bad and silly in Dickens the cast-iron
" plots ", the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the
paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of " pathos ". And
then the thought arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply
mean that I like thinking about my childhood ? Is Dickens
merely an institution ?
If so, he is an institution that there is no getting away from.
How often one really thinks about any writer, even a writer one
cares for, is a difficult thing to decide ; but I should doubt
C H A n L E a n I C K E N S 45
whether anyone who has actually read Dickens can go a week
without remembering him in one context or another. Whether
you approve of him or not, he is there, like the Nelson Column.
At any moment some scene or character, which may come from
some book you cannot even remember the name of, is liable to
drop into your mind. Micawber's letters ! Winkle in the witness-
box ! Mrs. Gamp ! Mrs. Wititterly and Sir Tumley Snuffim !
Todgers's ' (George Gissing said that when he passed the Monu-
ment it was never of the Fire of London that he thought, always
of Todgers's). Mrs. Leo Hunter ! Squeers ' Silas Wegg and the
Decline and Fall-off of the Russian Empire * Miss Mills and the
Desert of Sahara ! Wopsle acting Hamlet ' Mrs. Jellyby !
Mantalini, Jerry Cruncher, Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman,
Skimpole, Joe Gargcry, Pecksniff and so it goes on and on.
It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world. And
not a purely comic world either, for part of what one remembers
in Dickens is his Victorian morbidness and necrophilia and the
blood-and-tlmnder scenes the death of Sykes, Krook's spon-
taneous combustion, Fagin in the condemned cell, the women
knitting round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this
has entered even into the minds of people who do not care
about it. A music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite
recently) go on the stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs.
Gamp -with a fair certainty of being understood, although not
one in twenty of the audience had ever read a book of Dickens's
right through. Even people who affect to despise him quote him
unconsciously.
Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point.
In genuinely popular literature for instance, the Elephant and
Castle version of Sweeny Todd he has been plagiarised quite
shamelessly. What has been imitated, however, is simply a
tradition that Dickens himself took from earlier novelists and
developed, the cult of " character ", i.e. eccentricity. The thing
that cannot be imitated is his fertility of invention, which is
invention not so much of characters, still less of " situations ",
as of turns of phrase and concrete details. The outstanding,
unmistakable mark of Dickens 's writing is the unnecessary detail.
Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not
particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as in-
dividual as a fingerprint, Mr, Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer's.
46 CRITICAL ESSAYS
party, is telling the story of the child who swallowed its sister's
necklace :
" Next day, child swallowed two beads ; the day after that, he
treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week's time he had got
through the necklace five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister,
who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of
finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace ; looked high
and low for it ; but I needn't say, didn't find it. A few days after-
wards, the family were at dinner baked shoulder of mutton and
potatoes under it the child, who wasn't hungry, was playing about
the room, when suddenly there was heard the devil of a noise, like
a small hailstorm. ' Don't do that, my boy,' says the father. 1 1
ain't a-doin' nothing,' said the child. ' Well, don't do it again,'
said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began
again, worse than ever. ' If you don't mind what I say, my boy/
said the father, ' you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than
a pig's whisper.' He gave the child a shake to make him obedient,
and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. * Why,
dam' me, it's in the child,' said the father ; * he's got the croup
in the wrong place ! ' l No, I haven't, father,' said the child, be-
ginning to cry, ' it's the necklace ; I swallowed it, father.' The father
caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital, the beads
in the boy's stomach rattling all the way with the jolting ; and the
people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where
the unusual sound came from. 4 He's in the hospital now,' said Jack
Hopkins, ' and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about,
that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for fear he
should wake the patients.' "
As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-
century comic paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the
thing nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder
of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the
story ? The answer is that it doesn't. It is something totally
unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page ; only,
it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere
is created. The other thing one would notice here is that Dickens's
way of telling a story takes a long time. An interesting example,
too long to quote, is Sam Weller's story of the obstinate patient
in Chapter XLIV. of The Pickwick Papers. As it happens, we
have a standard of comparison here, because Dickens is plagiaris-
CHARLES DICKENS 47
ing, consciously or unconsciously. The story is also told by
some ancient Greek writer. I cannot now find the passage, but
I read it years ago as a boy at school, and it runs more or less
like this :
" A cert Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned
by his physician that if he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him.
The Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of wine and immediately
jumped off the house-top and perished. * For,' said he, * in this way
I shall prove that the wine did not kill me. 1 "
As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story about six lines.
As Sam Weller tells it, it takes round about a thousand words.
Long before getting to the point we have been told all about the
patient's clothes, his meals, his manners, even the newspapers
he reads, and about the peculiar construction of the doctor's
carriage, which conceals the fact that the coachman's trousers
do not match his coat. Then there is the dialogue between the
doctor and the patient. " ( Crumpets is wholesome, sir,' said
the patient. ' Crumpets is not wholesome, sir ', says the doctor,
wery fierce," etc. etc. In the end the original story has been
buried under the details. And in all of Dickens's most character-
istic passages it is the same. His imagination overwhelms every-
thing, like a kind of weed. Squeers stands up to address his boys,
and immediately we are hearing about Bolder's father who was
two pounds ten short, and Mobbs's stepmother who took to her
bed on hearing that Mobbs wouldn't eat fat and hoped Mr.
Squeers would flog him into a happier state of mind. Mrs. Leo
Hunter writes a poem, " Expiring Frog " ; two full stanzas are
given. Boffin takes a fancy to pose as a miser, and instantly
we are down among the squalid biographies of eighteenth-century
misers, with names like Vulture Hopkins and the Rev. Blew-
berry Jones, and chapter headings like " The Story of the Mutton
Pies " and " The Treasures of a Dunghill ". Mrs. Harris, who
does not even exist, has more detail piled on to her than any
three characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle
of a sentence we learn, for instance, that her infant nephew has
been seen in a bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with the pink-
eyed lady, the Prussian dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe
Gargery describes how the robbers broke into the house of Pumble-
chook, the corn and seed merchant " and they took his till,
48 CRITICAL ESSAYS
and they took his cashbox, and they drinked his wine, and they
partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled
his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpust, and they give him
a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to
perwent his crying out ". Once again the unmistakable Dickens
touch, the flowering annuals ; but any other novelist would only
have mentioned about half of these outrages. Everything is
piled up and up, detail on detail, embroidery on embroidery. It
is futile to object that this kind of thing is rococo one might as
well make the same objection to a wedding-cake. Either you
like it or you do not like it. Other nineteenth-century writers,
Surtees, Barharn, Thackeray, oven Marryat, have something
of Dickens's profuse, overflowing quality, but none of them on
anything like the same scale. The appeal of all these writers
now depends partly on period-flavour, and though Marryat is
still officially a " boys' writer " and JSurtees has a sort of legendary
fame among hunting men, it is probable that they are read mostly
by bookish people.
Significantly, Dickeus's most successful books (not his best
books) are The Pickwick Papers, which is not a novel, and Hard
Times and A Tale of Two Cities, which are not funny. As a
novelist his natural fertility greatly hampers him, because the
burlesque which he is never able to resist is constantly breaking
into what ought to be serious situations. There is a good example
of this in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. The escaped
convict, Magwitch, has just captured the six-year-old Pip in the
churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough, from Pip's
point of view. The convict, smothered in mud and with his
chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up among the
tombs, grabs the child, turns him upside down and robs his
pockets. Then he begins terrorising him into bringing food and
a file :
" He held me by the arms in an uprigfife position on the top of the
stone, and went on in these fearful terms :
" * You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them
wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder.
You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign
concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person
sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my
words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart
CHABLES DICKENS 49
and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alono, as
you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison
with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the
words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to him-
self, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in
wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man.
A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself
up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself com-
fortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep
his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man
from harming you at the present moment, but with great difficulty.
I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now,
what do you say ? ' "
Here Dickens lias simply yielded to temptation. To begin
with, no starving and hunted man would speak in the least like
that. Moreover, although the speech shows a remarkable know-
ledge of the way in which a child's mind works, its actual words
are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It turns Mag witch
into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through
the child's eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book
lie is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude,
on which the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this
speech. As usual, Dickens's imagination has overwhelmed him.
The picturesque details were too good to be left out. Even with
characters who are more of a piece than Magwitcli lie is liable
to be tripped up by some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for
instance, is in the habit of ending David Copperfield's lessons
every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. " If I go into
a cheesemonger's shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester
cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present payment," it always
begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the double-
Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murd-
stone ; he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every
time this note is struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that
it matters very much, because Dickens is obviously a writer
whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all
details rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles and never
better than when he is building up some character who will later
on bo forced to act/ inconsistently.
Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makea
4
50 CRITICAL ESSAYS
his characters behave inconsistently. Generally he is accused of
doing just the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere
" types ", each crudely representing some single trait and fitted
with a kind of label by which you recognise him. Dickens is
" only a caricaturist " that is the usual accusation, and it does
him both more and less than justice. To begin with, he did not
think of himself as a caricaturist, and was constantly setting
into action characters who ought to have been purely static.
Squeers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher, 1 Wegg, Skimpole, Pecksniff
and many others are finally involved in " plots " where they are
out of place and where they behave quite incredibly. They
start off as magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed
up in a third-rate movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger
on a single sentence in which the original illusion is destroyed.
There is such a sentence in David Copperfield. After the famous
dinner-party (the one where the leg of mutton was underdone),
David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles at the top
of the stairs :
" * Traddles,' said I, * Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor
fellow : but if I were you I wouldn't lend him anything.'
" ' My dear Copperfield,' returned Traddles smiling, 4 1 haven't
got anything to lend.'
" ' You have got a name, you know,' I said."
At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little, though
something of the kind was inevitable sooner or later. The story
is a fairly realistic one, and David is growing up ; ultimately he
is bound to see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel.
Afterwards, of couse, Dickens's sentimentality overcomes him
and Micawber is made to turn over a new leaf. But from then
on, the original Micawber is never quite recaptured, in spite of
desperate efforts. As a rule, the " plot " in which Dickens's
characters get entangled is not particularly credible, but at least
it makes some pretence at reality, whereas the world to which
they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just
1 Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real
woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was
bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part. But
any action by such a character would seem incongruous.
CHARLES DICKENS 51
here one sees that " only a caricaturist " is not really a con-
demnation. The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a
caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something
else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities
that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of
getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas. Their
first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces
it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always
to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one par-
ticular thing. Mrs. S queers is always ladling out brimstone and
treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is
always banging her husband's head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby
is always scribbling tracts while her children fall into the area
and there they all are, fixed for ever like little twinkling miniatures
painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible,
and yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable
than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the standards of
his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As
Ruskin said, he " chose to work in a circle of stage fire ". His
characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smollett's.
But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art
there is only one test worth bothering about survival. By this
test Dickens's characters have succeeded, even if the people who
remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They
are monsters, but at any rate they exist.
But 'all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about
monsters. It amounts to this, that it is only certain moods that
Dickens can speak to. There are large areas of the human mind
that he never touches. There is no poetic feeling anywhere in
his books, and no genuine tragedy, and even sexual love is almost
outside his scope. Actually his books are not so sexless as they
are sometimes declared to be, and considering the time in which
he was writing, he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace
in him of the feeling that one finds in Manon Lescaut, SalammM,
Carmen, Wuthering Heights. According to Aldous Huxley,
D. H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was " a gigantic dwarf ",
and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. There are whole worlds
which he either knows nothing about or does not wish to mention.
Except in a rather roundabout way, one cannot learn very much
from Dickens, And to sav this is to think almost immediatelv
52 CRITICAL ESSAYS
of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why
is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens's
why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about
yourself^ It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last
analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about
people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make
their souls, whereas Dickens's are already finished and perfect.
In my own mind Dickens's people are present far more often and
far more vividly than Tolstoy's, but always in a single unchange-
able attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture. You cannot
hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you
can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely because
of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters
that you can imagine yourself talking to Bloom, for instance,
or P^cuchet, or even Wells's Mr. Polly. It is because Dickens's
characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing that
they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about
anything else. They never learn, never speculate. Perhaps the
most meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and his
thoughts are rnush. Does this mean that Tolstoy's novels are
" better " than Dickens's ? Tlie truth is that it is absurd to make
such comparisons in terms of " better " and " worse ". If I were
forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that
Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because
Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking
culture ; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple
people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a
frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But
one is no more obliged to choose between them than between
a sausage and a rose. Their purposes barely intersect.
VI
If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that
no one would now remember his name. Or at best a few of his
books would survive in rather the same way as books like Frank
Fairleigh, Mr. Verdant Green and Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures,
as a sort of hangover of the Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant
little whiff of oysters and brown stout. Who has not felt some-
times that it was " a pity " that Dickens ever deserted the vein
CHARLES DICKENS 53
of Pickwick for things like Little Dorrit and Hard Times 1 What
people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write
the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who
would write the same book twice could not even write it once.
Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of
parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.
Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and
end with the dream-language of Finnegan's Wake, but Ulysses
and Portrait of the Artist are part of the trajectory. The thing
that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which h$ was
not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember
him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness
of " having something to say ". He is always preaching a sermon,
and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can
only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber
could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for some-
thing to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has
an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able
to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority,
and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always
room for one more custard pie.
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always
knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a
moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions,
not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking,
only an emotional perception that something is wrong. All he
can finally say is, " Behave decently ", which, as I suggested
earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolu-
tionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that every-
thing can be put right by altering the shape of society ; once
that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for
any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The
vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What
he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton
put it, " an expression on the human face ". Roughly speaking,
his morality is the Christian morality, but in spite of his Anglican
upbringing he was essentially a Bible-Christian, as he took care
to make plain when writing his will. In any case he cannot
properly be described as a religious man. He " believed ", un-
doubtedly, but religion in the devotional sense does not seem to
64 CRITICAL ESSAYS
have entered much into his thoughts. 1 Where he is Christian
is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the
oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the under-
dog, always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical con-
clusion one has got to change sides when the underdog becomes
an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes
the Catholic Church, for instance, but as soon as the Catholics
are persecuted (Barnaby Rudge) he is on their side. He loathes
the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as they are really
overthrown (the revolutionary chapters in A Tale of Two Cities)
his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from this
emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at
the ending of David Copperfield, in which everyone who reads it
feels that something has gone wrong. What is wrong is that
the closing chapters are pervaded, faintly but noticeably, by the
cult of success. It is the gospel according to Smiles, instead of
the gospel according to Dickens. The attractive, out-at-elbow
characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a fortune, Heep gets
into prison both of these events are flagrantly impossible and
even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you like, you
can read Dora as Dickens's wife and Agnes as his sister-in-law,
but the essential point is that Dickens has " turned respectable "
and done violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes
is the most disagreeable of his heroines, the real legless angel of
Victorian romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura.
No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his
limitations, and yet there does remain his native generosity of
mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always keeps
him where he belongs. It is probably the central secret of his
popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism rather of Dickens's
type is one of the marks of Western popular culture. One sees
1 From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868) : " You will remember that
you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere
formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with
such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them.
You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress
upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from
Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly
but heartily respect it. ... Never abandon the wholesome practice of
saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned
it myself, and I know the comfort of it.**
CHAELESDJOKEN 55
it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey
Mouse and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the
Giant-killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the
popular protests (always ineffective but not always a sham)
against imperialism, in the impulse that makes a jury award
excessive damages when a rich man's car runs over a poor man ;
it is the feeling that one is always on the side of the underdog,
on the side of the weak against the strong. In one sense ft is a
feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common man is still
living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern
intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism.
From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens
stands for can be written off as " bourgeois morality ". But in
moral outlook no one could be more " bourgeois " than the English
working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries
have never entered, mentally, into the world of " realism " and
power-politics. They may do so before long, in which case
Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-horse. But in his own
age and ours he has been popular chiefly because he was able to
express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the
native decency of the common man. And it is important that
from this point of view people of very different types can be
described as " common ". In a country like England, in spite
of its class-structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity.
All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French
Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea
of freedom and equality ; it is only an idea y but it has penetrated
to all ranks of society. The most atrocious injustices, cruelties,
lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are not many people
who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say,
a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague
sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly
everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotion-
ally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code
which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people
who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could
be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to
no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one
has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page.
56 CRITICAL ESSAYS
It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this
very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal,
Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what
these people looked like and do not want to know. What one
sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case
of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's
photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of
about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing,
with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity.
It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something,
but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a
man who is generously angry in other words, of a nineteenth -
century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred
by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending
for our souls. 1939.
BOYS' WEEKLIES
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town
without coming upon a small newsagent's shop. The general
appearance of these shops is always very much the same : a few
posters for the Daily Mail and the News of the World outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players,
and a dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts and festooned
from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny papers, most
of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these
shops hardly overlaps at all with that of the big newsagents.
Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the number
and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and
pastime cage-birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons,
home conjuring, philately, chess has at least one paper devoted
to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-keeping
must have at least a score between them. Then there are the
sporting papers, the radio papers, ' the children's comics, the
various snippet papers such as Tit-bits, the large range of papers
devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's
legs, the various trade papers, the women's story-papers (the
Oracle, Secrets, Peg's Paper, etc. etc.), the needlework papers
these so numerous that a display of them alone will often fill an
entire window and in addition the long series of " Yank Mags "
(Fight Stories, Action Stories, Western Short Stories, etc.), which
are imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence
halfpenny or threepence. And the periodical proper shades off
into the fourpenny novelette, the Aldine Boxing Novels, the
Boys' Friend Library, the Schoolgirls' Own Library and many
others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available
indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and
thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in docu-
mentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great
deal, but the novel is aimed almost exclusively at people above
the 4-a-week level. The movies are probably a very unsafe
guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a
'57
58 CRITICALESSAYS
monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public
at all closely. The same applies to some extent to the daily
papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialised subject-
matter. Papers like the Exchange and Mart, for instance, or
Cage-Birds, or the Oracle, or Prediction, or the Matrimonial
Times, only exist because there is a definite demand for them,
and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national
daily with a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys'
twopenny weeklies, often inaccurately described as " penny
dreadfuls ". Falling strictly within this class there are at present
ten papers, the Gem, Magnet, Modern Boy, Triumph and Champion,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the Wizard, Rover,
Skipper, Hotspur and Adventure, all owned by D. C. Thomson
& Co. What the circulations of these papers are, I do not know.
The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound
to fluctuate widely. But there is no question that the combined
public of the ten papers is a very large one. They are on sale
in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all
goes through a phase of reading one or more of them. The Gem
and Magnet, which are much the oldest of these papers, are of
rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently lost
some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many
boys now regard them as old fashioned and " slow ". Neverthe-
less I want to discuss them first, because they are more interesting
psychologically than the others, and also because the mere sur-
vival of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling
phenomenon.
The Gem and Magnet are sister-papers (characters out of one
paper frequently appear in the other), and were both started
more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with Chums
and the old B.O.P., they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them
carries every week a fifteen- or twenty-thousand-word school
story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected with
the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school
story carries one or more adventure serials. Otherwise the two
papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though
BOYS* WEEKLIES 59
the Magnet has always been the better known of the two, probably
because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy,
Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school
life, and the schools (Greyfriars in the Magnet and St. Jim's in
the Gem) are represented as ancient and fashionable foundations
of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters
are fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger
boys only appearing in very minor parts. Like Sexton Blake
and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and year
after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new
boy arrives or a minor character drops out, but in at any rate
the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely altered. All
the principal characters in both papers Bob Cherry, Tom
Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest
of them were at Greyfriars or St. Jim's long before the Great
War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same
kind of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect.
And not only the characters but the whole atmosphere of both
Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by means
of very elaborate stylisation. The stories in the Magnet are
signed " Frank Eichards " and those in the Gem, " Martin
Clifford ", but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the
work of the same person every week. 1 Consequently they have
to be written in a style that is easily imitated an extraordinary,
artificial, repetitive style, quite different from anything else now
existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will do as
illustrations. Here is one from the Magnet :
" Groan !
" ' Shut up, Bunter ! '
" Groan !
" Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter' s lino. lie seldom
shut up, though often requested to do so. On the present awful
occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut
up. And he did not shut up ! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
1 1945. This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout
the whole period of " Frank Richards " and " Martin Clifford ", who are
one and the same person ! See articles in Horizon, May 1940, and Summer
Pie, summer 1944.
60 CRITICAL ESSAYS
" Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His
feelings, in fact, were inexpressible.
" There were six of them in the soup ! Only one of the six
uttered sounds of woe and lamentation. But that one, William
George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party and a little
over.
" Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group.
They were landed and stranded, diddled, dished and done ! " etc.
etc. etc.
Here is one from the Gem :
1 Oh cwumbs ! '
' Oh gum ! *
' Oooogh ! '
* Urrggh ! '
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief
and pressed it to his damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for
breath. They looked at one another.
" ' Bai Jove ! This is a go, deah boy ! ' gurgled Arthur Augustus.
* I have been thwown into quite a fluttah ! Oogh ! The wottal !
The wuffians ! The feahful outsidahs ! Wow ! ' " etc. etc. etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical ; you would find
something like them in almost every chapter of every number,
to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that Anyone
would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first
of these two passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words
and could be compressed into about thirty), seemingly designed
to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious ex-
pressions are repeated over and over again ; " wrathy ", for
instance, is a great favourite, and so is " diddled, dished and
done ". " Oooogh ! ", " Grooo ! " and " Yaroo ! " (stylised
cries of pain) recur constantly, and so does " Ha ! ha ! ha f ",
always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a
column or thereabouts consists of " Ha ! ha ! ha ! " The slang
(" Go and eat coke ! ", " What the thump ! ", " You frabjous
ass ! ", etc. etc.) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition,
the various nicknames are rubbed in on every possible occasion.
Every few lines we are reminded that Harry Wharton & Co. are
B O Y 8* W E K K L I >S 61
" the Famous Five ", Bunter is always " the fat Owl " or u the
Owl of the Remove ", Vernon-Smith is always " the Bounder
of Greyfriars ", Gussy (the Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy)
is always " the swell of St. Jim's ", and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and
to make sure that every new reader learns immediately who is
who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St. Jim's into
an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot
be taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate
is not easily forgotten. By a debasement of the Dickens technique
a series of stereotyped " characters " has been built up, in several
cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one
of the best-known figures in English fiction ; for the mere number
of people who know him he ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan,
Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a
real public school. They run in cycles of rather differing types,
but in general they arc the clean-fun, knockabout type of story,
with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging
masters, fights, canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly
recurring story is one in which a boy is accused of some misdeed
committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The " good " boys are " good " in the clean-living
Englishman tradition they keep in hard training, wash behind
their ears, never hit below the belt, etc. etc. and by way of
contrast there is a series of " bad " boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder
and others, whose badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes
and frequenting public-houses. All these boys are constantly
on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of
personnel if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught
out in any really serious offence. Stealing, for instance, barely
enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the form
in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls
enter into the stories, and very rarely there is something ap-
proaching a mild flirtation, but it is always entirely in the spirit
of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides to-
gether that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance,
would be regarded as " soppy ". Even the bad boys are presumed
to be completely sexless. When the Gem and Magnet were started,
it is probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away
62 CRITICAL ESSAYS
from the guilty sex-ridden atmosphere that pervaded so much
of the earlier literature for boys. In the 'nineties the Boys' Own
Paper y for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full
of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like
St. Winifred's and Tom Brown's Schooldays were heavy with
homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully
aware of it. In the Gem and Magnet sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo ; in the whole thirty years'
issue of the two papers the word " God " probably does not
occur, except in " God save the King ". On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong " temperance " strain.
Drinking and, by association, smoking are regarded as rather
disgraceful even in an adult (" shady " is the usual word), but
at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of
substitute for sex. In their moral atmosphere the Gem and
Magnet have a great deal in common with the Boy Scout move-
ment, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake,
for instance, started off quite frankly as an imitation of Sherlock
Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly ; he has hawklike
features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a
dressing-gown when he wants to think. The Gem and Magnet
probably owe something to the school-story writers who were
flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath, Desmond Coke
and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models.
In so far as Greyfriars and St. Jim's are like real schools at all,
they are much more like Tom Brown's Rugby than a modern
public school. Neither school has an O.T.C., for instance, games
are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what
clothes they like. But without doubt the main origin of these
papers is Stalky & Co. This book has had an immense influence
on boys' literature, and it is one of those books which have a
sort of traditional reputation among people who have never even
seen a copy of it. More than once in boys' weekly papers I have
come across a reference to Stalky & Co. in which the word was
spelt " Storky ". Even the name of the chief comic among the
Greyfriars masters, Mr. Prout, is taken from Stalky & Co., and
so is much of the slang ; " jape ", " merry ", " giddy ", " bizney "
(business), " frabjous ", " don't " for " doesn't " all of them
out of date even when Gem and Magnet started, There are also
B"O Y S* W E E K L I E 8 63
traces of earlier origins. The name " Greyfnars " is probably
taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in the
Magnet, talks in an imitation of Dickens's dialect.
With all this, the supposed " glamour " of public-school life
is played for all it is worth. There is all the usual paraphernalia
lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects, cosy teas
round the study fire, etc. etc. and constant reference to the
" old school ", the " old grey stones " (both schools were founded
in the early sixteenth century), the " team spirit " of the " Grey-
friars men ". As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless.
Each school has a titled boy or two whose titles are constantly
thrust in the reader's face ; other boys have the names of well-
known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We are
for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A.
D'Arcy, son of Lord Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to " broad
acres ", that Hurree Jamset Bam Singh (nicknamed Inky) is
the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vernon-Snuth's father is a million-
aire. Till recently the illustrations in both papers always de-
picted the boys in clothes imitated from those of Eton ; in the
last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and flannel
trousers, but St. Jim's still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy
sticks to his top-hat. In the school magazine which appears
every week as part of the Magnet, Harry Wharton writes an
article discussing the pocket-money received by the " fellows in
the Remove ", and reveals that some of them get as much as
five pounds a week ! This kind of thing is a perfectly deliberate
incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing a
rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing
peculiar to England. So far as I know, there are extremely few
school stories in foreign languages. The reason, obviously, is
that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The
most definite dividing-line between the petite-bourgeoisie and
the working class is that the former pay for their education, and
within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between
the " public " school and the " private " school. It is quite
clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to
whom every detail of life at a " posh " public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic
world of quadrangles and house-colours, but they yearn after it,
day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.
64 CRITICAL ESSAYS
The question is, Who are these people ? Who reads the Gem and
Magnet ?
Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of
thing. All I can say from my own observation is this. Boys
who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally read
the Gem and Magnet, but they nearly always stop reading them
when they are about twelve ; they may continue for another
year from force of habit, but by that time they have ceased to
take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap
private schools, the schools that are designed for people who can't
afford a public school but consider the Council schools " common ",
continue reading the Gem and Magnet for several years longer.
A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself.
I found that not only did virtually all the boys read the Gem and
Magnet, but that they were still taking them fairly seriously
when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys were the sons
of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and profes-
sional men, and obviously it is this class that the Gem and Magnet
are aimed at. But they are certainly read by working-class boys
as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest quarters of
big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom
one might expect to be completely immune from public-school
" glamour ". I have seen a young coalminer, for instance, a lad
who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly
reading the Gem. Recently I offered a batch of English papers
to some British legionaries of the French Foreign Legion in North
Africa ; they picked out the Gem and Magnet first. Both papers
are much read by girls, 1 and the Pen Pals department of the Gem
shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by
Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, Malays, Arabs, Straits
Chinese, etc. etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to
be aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk
chocolate, postage stamps, water pistols, blushing cured, home
conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun King which
runs a needle into your friend's hand, etc. etc.) indicate roughly
the same age ; there are also the Admiralty advertisements,
1 There arc several corresponding girls' papers. The Schoolgirl is com-
panion-paper to the Magnet and has stories by " Hilda Richards ". The
character* arc interchangeable to some extent. Bessie Bunter, Billy
J3untc;r's sister, figures in the Schoolgirl.
BOY S* WEEKLIES 65
however, which call for youths between seventeen and twenty-
two. And there is no question that these papers are also read
by adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor
and say that they have read every number of the Gem or Magnet
for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a letter from a
lady in Salisbury :
" I can say of your splendid yarns of Harry Wharton & Co., of
Greyfriars, that they never fail to reach a high standard. Without
doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the market to-day,
which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to face
with Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have fol-
lowed the adventures of Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest.
I have no sons, but two daughters, and there's always a rush to be
the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too, was a
staunch reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away
from us."
It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the Gem and
Magnet, especially the Gem, simply to have a look at the corre-
spondence columns. What is truly startling is the intense interest
with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St. Jim's
are followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the questions
sent in by readers :
" What age is Dick Roy lance ? " " How old is St. Jim's ? "
" Can you give me a list of the Shell and their studies ? " " How
much did D'Arcy's monocle cost ? " " How is it fellows like Crooke
are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the
Fourth ? " " What are the Form captain's three chief duties ? "
" Who is the chemistry master at St. Jim's ? " (From a girl) " Where
is St. Jim's situated ? Could you tell me how to get there, as I would
love to see the building ? Are you boys just ' phoneys ', as I think
you are ? "
It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these
letters are living a complete fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will
write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight, chest and bicep
measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth
Form he most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the
studies on the Shell passage, with an exact account of who lives
in each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do every-
5
66 CRITICALESSAYS
thing in their power to keep up the illusion. In the Gem Jack
Blake is supposed to write the answers to correspondents, and in
the Magnet a couple of pages is always given up to the school
magazine (the Greyfriars Herald, edited by Harry Wharton),
and there is another page in which one or other character is
written up each week. The stories run in cycles, two or three
characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a
time. First there will be a series of rollicking adventure stories,
featuring the Famous Five and Billy Bunter ; then a run of
stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the make-up
wizard) in the star part ; then a run of more serious stories in
which Vernon-Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And
here one comes upon the real secret of the Gem and Magnet and
the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of
their obvious out-of-dateness.
It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost
every type of reader a character he can identify himself with.
Most boys' papers aim at doing this, hence the boy-assistant
(Sexton Blake's Tinker, Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures.
But in these cases there is only one boy, and usually it is much
the same type of boy. In the Gem and Magnet there is a model
for very nearly everybody. There is the normal, athletic, high-
spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly
rowdier version of this type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic
version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry
Wharton), and a stolid, " bulldog " version (Johnny Bull). Then
there is the reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith),
the definitely " clever ", studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Pen-
fold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but possesses
some special talent (Skinner, Wibley). And there is the scholar-
ship-boy (Tom Eedwing), an important figure in this class of
story because he makes it possible for boys from very poor homes
to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In
addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire
and Lancashire boys to play upon local patriotism. But the
subtlety of characterisation goes deeper than this. If one studies
the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably no
character in the Gem and Magnet whom some or other reader
does not identify with, except the out-and-out comics, Coker,
BOY S* WEEKLIES 67
Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grubbing American boy)
and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he
probably owed something to the fat boy in Pickwick, is a real
creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are
constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal
order which never turns up, have made him famous wherever
the Union Jack waves. But he is not a subject for day-dreams.
On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, " the swell of St. Jim's "), is
evidently much admired. Like everything else in the Gem and
Magnet, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He is the
" knut " of the early twentieth century or even the " masher "
of the 'nineties (" Bai Jove, deah boy ! " and " Weally, I shall
be obliged to give you a feahful thwashin' ! "), the rnonocled
idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And
his evident popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal
of this type is. English people are extremely fond of the titled
ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimsey) who always turns up trumps in the
moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy's girl
admirers :
" I think you're too hard on Gussy. I wonder he's still in existence,
the way you treat him. He's my hero. Did you know I write
lyrics ? How's this to the tune of ' Goody Goody ' ?
" Gonna get my gas-mask, join the A.R.P.
'Cos I'm wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench
Inside the garden fence ;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So that the tear gas can't get in ;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler : ' Don't disturb ! '
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That's soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the A.R.P.
" P.S. Do you get on well with girls ? "
I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting
as being probably the earliest mention of Hitler in the Gem. In
the Gem there is also a heroic fat boy, Fatty Wynn, as a set-off
68 CRITICALBSSAYS
against Bunter. Vernon-Smith, " the Bounder of the Remove ",
a Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another
great favourite. And even some of the cads probably have their
following. Loder, for instance, " the rotter of the Sixth ", is
a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic
things about football and the team spirit. The boys of the
Remove only think him all the more of a cad for this, but a
certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even
Racke, Crooke and Co. are probably admired by small boys who
think it diabolically wicked to smoke cigarettes. (A frequent
question in the correspondence column : " What brand of
cigarettes does Racke smoke ? ")
Naturally the politics of the Gem and Magnet are Conservative,
but in a completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In
reality their basic political assumptions are two : nothing ever
changes, and foreigners are funny. In the Gem of 1939 French-
men are still Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo,
the French master at Greyfriars, is the usual comic-paper Frog,
with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy,
though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the
comic babu of the Punch tradition. (" ' The rowfulness is not
the proper caper, my esteemed Bob/ said Inky. ' Let dogs
delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer
is the cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the
bush, as the English proverb remarks.' ") Fisher T. Fish is
the old-style stage Yankee ('V Waal, I guess ' ", etc.) dating
from a period of Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the
Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late, no doubt because
some of the Magnet's readers are Straits Chinese), is the nine-
teenth-century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat,
pigtail and pidgin-English. The assumption all along is not only
that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at,
but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects.
That is why in all boys' papers, not only the Gem and Magnet,
a Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the thing
you recognise him by, like the Frenchman's beard or the Italian's
barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that
when the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt
is made to describe the natives as individual human beings, but
as a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all
BOY S* WEEKLIES 69
alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following
patterns :
FRENCHMAN : Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
SPANIARD, MEXICAN, etc. : Sinister, treacherous.
ARAB, AFGHAN, etc. : Sinister, treacherous.
CHINESE : Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.
ITALIAN : Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, DANE, etc. : Kind hearted, stupid.
NEGRO : Comic, very faithful.
The working classes only enter into the Gem and Magnet as
comics or semi-villains (race-course touts, etc.). As for class-
friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism
and civil war not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty
years' issue of the two papers you might perhaps find the word
" Socialism ", but you would have to look a long time for it.
If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it will be
indirectly, in the word " Bolshy " (meaning a person of violent
disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning
to make their appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above.
The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression
to produce a story in which Mr. Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's
millionaire father, cashed in on the general panic by buying up
country houses in order to sell them to " crisis scuttlers ". But
that is probably as near to noticing the European situation as
the Gem and Magnet will come, until the war actually starts. 1
That does not mean that these papers are unpatriotic quite
the contrary ! Throughout the Great War the Gem and Magnet
were perhaps the most consistently and cheerfully patriotic
papers in England. Almost every week the boys caught a spy
or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the rationing
period " EAT LESS BREAD " was printed in large type on every
page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with
power-politics or " ideological " warfare. It is more akin to
family loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the
attitude of ordinary people, especially the huge untouched
block of the middle class and the better-off working class. These
people are patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do
1 This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the
end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper.-
70 CRITICALESSAYS
not feel that what happens in foreign countries is any of their
business. When England is in danger they rally to its defence
as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not interested.
After all, England is always in the right and England always
wins, so why worry ? It is an attitude that has been shaken
during the past twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes
supposed. Failure to understand it is one of the reasons why
Left Wing political parties are seldom able to produce an accept-
able foreign policy.
The mental world of the Gem and Magnet, therefore, is some-
thing like this :
The year is 1910 or 1940, but it is all the same. You are
at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-
made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove
passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an
odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study,
and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly
round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the
pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners
are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships
of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the
outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the
niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and
we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines,
crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall
sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and
discussing the team for next week's match against Rookwood.
Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will
be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the
atmosphere.
But now turn from the Gem and Magnet to the more up-to-
date papers which have appeared since the Great War. The truly
significant thing is that they have more points of resemblance
to the Gem and Magnet than points of difference. But it is better
to consider the differences first.
There are eight of these newer papers, the Modern Boy, Triumph,
Champion, Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur and Adventure. All
of these have appeared since the Great War, but except for the
Modern Boy none of them is less than five years old. Two papers
which ought also to be mentioned briefly here, though they are
BOYS' WEEKLIES 71
not strictly in the same class as the rest, are the Detective Weekly
and the Thriller, both owned by the Amalgamated Press. The
Detective Weekly has taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these
papers admit a certain amount of sex-interest into their stories,
and though certainly read by boys, they are not aimed at them
exclusively. All the others are boys' papers pure and simple,
and they are sufficiently alike to be considered together. There
does not seem to be any notable difference between Thomson's
publications and those of the Amalgamated Press.
As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical
superiority to the Gem and Magnet. To begin with, they have the
great advantage of not being written entirely by one person.
Instead of one long complete story, a number of the Wizard or
Hotspur consists of half a dozen or more serials, none of which
goes on for ever. Consequently there is far more variety and far
less padding, and none of the tiresome stylisation and facetious-
ness of the Gem and Magnet. Look at these two extracts, for
example :
'* Billy Bunter groaned.
" A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that
Bunter was booked for extra French.
" In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes ! But
every one of those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter.
They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.
" Looking at the clock in Class-room No. 10 the fat Owl could
hardly believe that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed
more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days !
" Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They
did not matter. Bunter did ! " (the Magnet).
" After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth
ice every step of the way up, Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the
Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to the face of an icy cliff,
as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.
" An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving
- the blinding snow into his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from
their handholds and dash him to death on the jagged boulders which
lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.
" Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers
who had done their best to shoot down Lionheart and his companion,
Constable Jim Rogers until the blizzard had blotted the two
Mounties out of sight from below." (the Wizard).
72 CRITICALESSAYS
The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the
first takes a hundred words to tell you that Bunter is in the
detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school
stories (in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates
in all these papers, except the Thriller and Detective Weekly), the
Wizard, Hotspur, etc., have far greater opportunities for sensa-
tionalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations of the papers
which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the
things I see. On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing
of an aeroplane in mid-air and shooting down another aeroplane
with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming for his life
down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming
after him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite
while a steel robot feels for him with its claws. On another a
man in airman's costume is fighting barehanded against a rat
somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked
man of terrific muscular development has just seized a lion by
the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an arena, with the
words, " Take back your blooming lion ! " Clearly no school
story can compete with this kind of thing. From time to time
the school buildings may catch fire or the French master may
turn out to be the head of an international anarchist gang, but
in a general way the interest must centre round cricket, school
rivalries, practical jokes, etc. There is not much room for bombs,
death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes, mustangs, octopuses,
grizzly bears or gangsters.
Examination of a large number of these papers shows that,
putting aside school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild
West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime (always from the
detective's angle), the Great War, (Air Force or Secret Service,
not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional
football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood,
Cavaliers and Roundheads, etc.) and scientific invention. The
Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red
Indian seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really
new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men,
robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely ;
here and there there are even far-off rumours of -psychotherapy
and ductless glands. Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from
Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc.,
BOY S* WEEKLIES 73
owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne,
is the father of " Scientifiction ". Naturally it is the magical,
Martian aspect of science that is most exploited, but one or two
papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples : " A Kauri tree
in Queensland, Australia, is over 12,000 years old " ; " Nearly
50,000 thunderstorms occur every day " ; " Helium gas costs
1 per 1000 cubic feet " ; " There are over 500 varieties of spiders
in Great Britain " ; " London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of
water annually," etc. etc.) There is a marked advance in in-
tellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand made on
the reader's attention. In practice the Gem and Magnet and the
post-war papers are read by much the same public, but the mental
age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years an
improvement probably corresponding to the improvement in
elementary education since 1909.
The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys* papers,
though not to anything like the extent one would expect, is
bully-worship and the cult of violence.
If one compares the Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern
paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is the absence of
the leader-principle. There is no central dominating character ;
instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on
an equality, with whom readers" of different types can identify.
In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead
of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the
reader of the Skipper, Hotspur y etc., is led to identify with a G--
man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan,
with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist at any rate
with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone
about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a
sock on the jaw. This character is intended as a superman, and
as physical strength is the form of power that boys can best
understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla ; in the Tarzan
type of story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet
high. At the same time the scenes of violence in nearly all these
stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is
a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty
English paper and the threepenny Yank Mags, Fight Stories,
Action Stories, etc. (not strictly boys' papers, but largely read by
74 CRITICAL ESSAYS
boys). In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory
descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style of fighting,
written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood
endlessly on violence. A paper like Fight Stories, for instance,
would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
You can see the comparative gentleness of the English civilisation
by the amateurish way in which prize-fighting is always described
in the boys' weeklies. There is no specialised vocabulary. Look
at these four extracts, two English, two American :
" When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily, and
each had great red marks on his chest. Bill's chin was bleeding,
and Ben had a cut over his right eye.
" Into their corners they sank, but when the gong clanged again
they were up swiftly, and they went like tigers at each other "
(Rover).
" He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face.
Blood spattered and I went back on my heels, but surged in and
ripped my right under the heart. Another right smashed full on
Sven's already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of
a tooth, he crashed a flailing left to my body " (Fight Stories).
" It waa amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His
muscles rippled and slid under his dark skin. There was all the
power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible onslaught.
" He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow.
In a moment Ben was simply blocking with his gloves as well as he
could. Ben was really a past-master of defence. He had many fine
victories behind him. But the Negro's rights and lefts crashed through
openings that hardly any other fighter could have found " (Wizard).
" Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest
monarchs crashing down under the ax hurled into the bodies of the
two heavies as they swapped punches " (Fight Stories).
Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts
sound. They are written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others
are not. Also, it ought to be emphasised that on its level the
moral code of the English boys' papers is a decent one. Crime
and dishonesty are never held up to admiration, there is none of
the cynicism and corruption of the American gangster story.
The huge sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that there is
BOY 8* WEEKLIES 75
a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers
seem able to produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major
emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly " anti-
Fascism " was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors
of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me
is given up to a long, complete story, " When Hell Came to
America ", in which the agents of a " blood-maddened European
dictator " are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with death-rays and
invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism,
scenes m which the Nazis tie bombs to women's backs and fling
them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others
in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod
them with knives to make them dance, etc. etc. The editor
comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening
up restrictions against immigrants. On another page of the
same paper : " LIVES OF THE HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals
all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of the famous
Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING is OMITTED. Price lOc."
" HOW TO LOVE. IQc." " FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c." " NAUGHTY
NUDIES TRANSFERS. From the outside of the glass you see a
beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around and look
through the glass and oh ! what a difference ! Set of 3 transfers
25c.," etc. etc. etc. There is nothing at all like this in any English
paper likely to be read by boys. But the process of Americanisa-
tion is going on all the same. The American ideal, the " he-man ",
the " tough guy ", the gorilla who puts everything right by
socking everybody else on the jaw, now figures in probably a
majority of boys' papers. In one serial now running in the
Skipper he is always portrayed, ominously enough, swinging a
rubber truncheon.
The development of the Wizard, Hotspur, etc., as against the
earlier boys' papers, boils down to this : better technique, more
scientific interest, more bloodshed, more leader- worship. But,
after all, it is the lack of development that is the really striking
thing.
To begin with, there is no political development whatever.
The world of the Skipper and the Champion is still the pre-1914
world of the Magnet and the Gem. The Wild West story, for
instance, with its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other para-
phernalia belonging to the 'eighties, is a curiously archaic thing.
76 CRITICAL ESSAYS'
It is worth noticing that in papers of this type it is always taken
for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the earth,
in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western
prairies, in Chinese opium dens everywhere, in fact, except the
places where things really do happen. That is a belief dating
from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents were in
process of being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really
want adventure, the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart
from the picturesque side of the Great War, contemporary history
is carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now
admired instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the
same figures of fun that they always were. If a Chinese character
appears, he is still the sinister pig-tailed opium-smuggler of Sax
Rohmer ; no indication that things have been happening in
China since 1912 no indication that a war is going on there,
for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is still a " dago " or
" greaser " who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back ;
no indication that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler
and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or are barely making their
appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little while,
but it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus
Germany), with the real meaning of the struggle kept out of sight
as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is ex-
tremely difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers.
When Russia is mentioned at all it is usually in an information
snippet (example : " There are 29,000 centenarians in the
U.S.S.R."), and any reference to the Revolution is indirect and
twenty years out of date. In one story in the Rover, for instance,
somebody has a tame bear, and as it is a Russian bear, it is nick-
named Trotsky obviously an echo of the 1917-23 period and
not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910.
Britannia rules the waves, and no one has heard of slumps,
booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or concentration
camps.
And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The
snobbishness is somewhat less open than in the Gem and Magnet
that is the most one can possibly say. To begin with, the school
story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means
eliminated. Every number of a boys' paper includes at least
one school story, these stories slightly outnumbering the Wild
BOY 8* WEEKLIES 77
Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the Oem and
Magnet is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous
adventure, but the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much
the same. When a new school is introduced at the beginning
of a story we are often told in just those words that " it was a
very posh school ". From time to time a story appears which is
ostensibly directed against snobbery. The scholar ship -boy (cf.
Tom Kedwing in the Magnet) makes fairly frequent appearances,
and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes presented
in this form ; there is great rivalry between two schools, one of
which considers itself more " posh " than the other, and there
are fights, practical jokes, football matches, etc., always ending
in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very super-
ficially at some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a
democratic spirit has crept into the boys' weeklies, but when
one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the bitter
jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real
function is to allow the boy who goes to a cheap private school
(not a Council school) to feel that his school is just as " posh "
in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of
school loyalty (" We're better than the fellows down the road "),
a thing almost unknown to the real working class, is still kept up.
As these stories are written by many different hands, they do,
of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free
from snobbishness, in others money and pedigree are exploited
even more shamelessly than in the Gem and Magnet. In one that
I came across an actual majority of the boys mentioned were titled.
Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as
comics (jokes about tramps, convicts, etc.), or as prize-fighters,
acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and Foreign Legion-
aries in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of
the facts about working-class life, or, indeed, about working life
of any description. Very occasionally one may come across a
realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but in all prob-
ability it will only be there as the background of some lurid
adventure. In any case the central character is not likely to be
a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who reads these papers
in nine cases out of ten a boy who is going to spend his life working
in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office
is led to identify with people in positions of command, above all
78 CRITICALESSAYS
with people who are never troubled by shortage of money. The
Lord Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and wears
a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of danger, turns
up over and over again. (This character is a great favourite in
Secret Service stories.) And, as usual, the heroic characters all
have to talk B.B.C. ; they may talk Scottish or Irish or American,
but no one in a star part is ever permitted to drop an aitch.
Here it is worth comparing the social atmosphere of the boys'
weeklies with that of the women's weeklies, the Oracle, the
Family Star, Peg's Paper, etc.
The women's papers are aimed at an older public and are read
for the most part by girls who are working for a living. Con-
sequently they are on the surface much more realistic. It is
taken for granted, for example, that nearly everyone has to live
in a big town and work at a more or less dull job. Sex, so far
from being taboo, is the subject. The short, complete stories,
the special feature of these papers, are generally of the " came
the dawn " type : the heroine narrowly escapes losing her " boy "
to a designing rival, or the " boy " loses his job and has to post-
pone marriage, but presently gets a better job. The changeling-
fantasy (a girl brought up in a poor home is " really " the child
of rich parents) is another favourite. Where sensationalism
comes in, usually in the serials, it arises out of the more domestic
type of crime, such as bigamy, forgery or sometimes murder ;
no Martians, death-rays or international anarchist gangs. These
papers are at any rate aiming at credibility, and they have a link
with real life in their correspondence columns, where genuine
problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres's column of advice
in the Oracle, for instance, is extremely sensible and well written.
And yet the world of the Oracle and Peg's Paper is a pure fantasy-
world. It is the same fantasy all the time ; pretending to be
richer than you are. The chief impression that one carries away
from almost every story in these papers is of a frightful, over-
whelming " refinement ". Ostensibly the characters are working-
class people, but their habits, the interiors of their houses, their
clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech are entirely
middle class. They are all living at several pounds a week above
their income. And needless to say, that is just the impression
that is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or
worn-out mother of five a dream-life in which she pictures herself
BOY S* WEEKLIES 79
not actually as a duchess (that convention has gone out) but as,
say, the wife of a bank-manager. Not only is a five-to-six-pound-
a-week standard of life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed
that that is how working-class people really do live. The major
facts are simply not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that
people sometimes lose their jobs ; but then the dark clouds roll
away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of unem-
ployment as something permanent and inevitable, no mention
of the dole, no mention of trade unionism. No suggestion any-
where that there can be anything wrong with the system as a
system ; there are only individual misfortunes, which are gener-
ally due to somebody's wickedness and can in any case be put
right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll away, the
kind employer raises Alfred's wages, and there are jobs for every-
body except the drunks. It is still the world of the Wizard and
the Gem, except that there are orange-blossoms instead of
machine-guns.
The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather
exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year
1910. Yes, it may be said, but what does it matter ? And in
any case, what else do you expect ?
Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called
penny dreadful into a realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An
adventure story must of its nature be more or less remote from
real life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the
Wizard and the Gem is not so artless as it looks. These papers
exist because of a specialised demand, because boys at certain
ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly
bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but
they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future em-
ployers think suitable for them. To what extent people draw
their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that
most people are influenced far more than they would care to
admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from
this point of view the worst books are often the most important,
because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.
It is probable that many people who would consider themselves
extremely sophisticated and " advanced " are actually carrying
through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay. If that is
80 CEITICALESSAYS
so, the boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance.
Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of
twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual
majority, of English boys, including many who will never read
anything else except newspapers ; and along with it they are
absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly
out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All
the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped
into them the conviction that the major problems of our time
do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capit-
alism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British
Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever.
Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that
this is unintentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing
(i.e. twelve including the Thriller and Detective Weekly) seven
are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is one of the
biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a
hundred different papers. The Gem and Magnet, therefore, are
closely linked up with the Daily Telegraph and the Financial
Times. This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions,
even if it were not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies
are politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of
a fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-
handed (and what boy doesn't ?), you can only have it by deliver-
ing yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord Camrose. For
there is no competition. Throughout the whole of this run of
papers the differences are negligible, and on this level no others
exist. This raises the question, why is there no such thing as a
left-wing boys' paper ?
At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick.
It is so horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper
would be like, if it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some
optimistic person handing round Communist tracts among a
crowd of public-school boys. The tract I received was of the
question-and-answer kind :
Q. " Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade ? "
A. " No, Comrade."
Q. " Why, Comrade ? "
A. " Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack,
which is the symbol of tyranny and oppression." Etc. etc.
BOY 8* WEEKLIES 81
Now, suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-
wing paper deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen.
I do not suggest that the whole of its contents would be exactly
like the tract I have quoted above, but does anyone doubt that
they would be something like it ? Inevitably such a paper would
either consist of dreary uplift or it would be under Communist
influence and given over to adulation of Soviet Russia ; in either
case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow literature
apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is
at all vigorously " left ", is one long tract. The one Socialist
paper in England which could live a week on its merits as a paper
is the Daily Herald : and how much Socialism is there in the
Daily Herald ? At this moment, therefore, a paper with a " left "
slant and at the same time likely to have an appeal to ordinary
boys in their teens is something almost beyond hoping for.
But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear
reason why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed
up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the
stories in the Hotspur and the Modern Boy are not Conservative
tracts ; they are merely adventure stories with a Conservative
bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the process being reversed. It is
possible, for instance, to imagine a paper as thrilling and lively
as the Hotspur, but with subject-matter and " ideology " a little
more up to date. It is even possible (though this raises other
difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same literary
level as the Oracle, dealing in -approximately the same kind of
story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-
class life. Such things have been done before, though not in
England. In the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was
a large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of them
evidently of anarchist origin. Unfortunately at the time when
they were appearing I did not see their social significance, and I
lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would
still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very
similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their
inspiration was " left ". If, for instance, a story described police
pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from
the point of view of the anarchists and not of the police. An
example nearer to hand is the Soviet film Chapaiev, which has
been shown a number of times in London. Technically, by the
6
82 OBITIOALESSAYS
standards of the time when it was made, Chapaiev is a first-rate
film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar Eussian background,
it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one thing that
lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by the
actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one) a
performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging.
Otherwise the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia
is there heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment,
shots of galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film
is in fact a fairly ordinary one, except that its tendency is " left ".
In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the Whites would
probably be angels and the Beds demons. In the Russian version
the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That also is a lie,
but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the other.
Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their
general nature is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss
them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in England, popular
imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never
begun to enter. All fiction from the novels in the mushroom
libraries downwards is censored in the interests of the ruling
class. And boys' fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff
which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden
in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if
one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression
behind. Lord Camrope and his colleagues evidently believe
nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.
1939.
WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE
" IN March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous
knockout blow at Britain. . . . What Hitler has to do it with, I
cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are
now probably not so very much greater than the Italians' before
they were put to the test in Greece and Africa."
" The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind th0
times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn
out."
" In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Be-
hind that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the
sort. . . . Yet our military ' experts ' discuss the waiting phantom.
In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible
in discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive * blow * through
Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans,
march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or * crush
Russia', or 'pour' over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass
and the phantom does none of these things for one excellent
reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate
guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from
it and fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to invade Britain. And
its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation
that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost."
THESE quotations are not taken from the Cavalry Quarterly but
from a series of newspaper articles by Mr. H. G. Wells, written
at the beginning of this year x and now reprinted in a book
entitled Guide to the New World. Since they were written, the
German Army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered
Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such time
as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia.
How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth
noticing that the German general staff, whose opinion is probably
worth something, would not have begun it if they had not felt
fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for
the idea that the German Army is a bogey, its equipment in-
adequate, its morale breaking down, etc. etc.
1 1945. i.e. at the beginning of 1941.
83
84 CRITICAL ESSAYS
What has Wells to set against the " screaming little defective
in Berlin " ? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the
Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted definition of funda-
mental human rights, or anti-totalitarian tendency. Except
that he is now especially concerned with federal world control
of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost
without interruption for the past forty years, always with an air
of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp
anything so obvious.
What is the use of saying that we need federal world control
of the air ? The whole question is how we are to get it. What is
the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable ? What
matters is that not one of the five great military powers would
think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades
past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells
says ; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many
cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal
lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes
in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great
nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then
to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense,
essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward,
hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before
you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you
have got to eliminate Hitler, which means -bringing into being a
dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but
probably quite as unacceptable to " enlightened " and hedonistic
people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year ?
In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but
chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of
the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners.
For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing
intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had
succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the
London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians
fighting like tigers against the German invasion ? In part, per-
haps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but
chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the " sacred soil of the Father-
land ", etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly
altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs
WELLS, HITLJfiK AWL) THE WOKLD STATE 85
from emotions racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief,
love of war which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off
as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so
completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively,
the Holy Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the
intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he
is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously.
All that this idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of
English life. The Left Book Club was at bottom a product
of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace Pledge Union is a product of
the Navy. One development of the last ten years has been the
appearance of the " political book ", a sort of enlarged pamphlet
combining history with political criticism, as an important literary
form. But the best writers in this line Trotsky, Rauschning,
Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others have none
of them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been
renegades from one or other extremist party, who have seen
totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile
and persecution. Only in the English-speaking countries was it
fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that
Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made
of cardboard. Mr. Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I
have given above, believes something of the kind still. I do not
suppose that either the bombs or the German campaign in Greece
have altered his opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands
between him and an understanding of Hitler's power.
Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle
class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the
throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold.
He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swash-
buckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent
propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his Outline
of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks
through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty
years one finds the same idea constantly recurring : the supposed
antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a
planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore
a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets,
the* antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the
86 CRITICAL ESSAYS
one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes,
steel, concrete, hygiene : on the other side war, nationalism,
religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses.
History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific
man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assum-
ing that a " reasonable ", planned form of society, with scientists
rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail sooner or later,
but that is a different matter from assuming that it is just round
the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting
controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at
the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill
of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks
being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing
that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and
scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself
would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks,
however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks
may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to
regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They
were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints,
which, like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military des-
potism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception
reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis.
Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into
one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from
the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately.
But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense
does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked
forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly
been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact.
Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far
more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked
for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning,
the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the
aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate
to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition.
But obviously it is imposible for Wells to accept this. It would
contradict the world- view on which his own works are based.
The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense
World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart
WELLS, HITLEE AND THE WORLD STATE 87
does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery
and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a
Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-
eight) to find fault with H. G. Wells ? Thinking people who were
born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's
own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and
especially a " popular " writer whose work takes effect quickly,
is questionable, but I doubt whether anyone who was writing
books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language,
influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and
therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if
Wells had never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the
one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate
thinker now. When Wells was young, the antithesis between
science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-
minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men,
dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but
had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable
and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to
be all on the same side ; there was need of someone who could
state the opposite point of view. Back in the nineteen-hundreds
it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells.
There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers,
with your future employers exhorting you to " get on or get out ",
your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your
dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags ; and
here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the in-
habitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who
knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people
imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically
feasible Wells knew that within a little while men would be able
to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to be able to fly,
and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would
continue. On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a
time when the Wright brothers had actually lifted their machine
off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
88 CRITICAL ESSAYS
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given
us wings. Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet.
In physical details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled
to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a
non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous
strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by
fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of
understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal
loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would
describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come
marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any
rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people
who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either
those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist
streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written
nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than
either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one
had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a writer who
could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling,
who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military " glory ".
Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that
matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be.
Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession
of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement
stopped short at the other war and never really began again,
and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper
dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to
squander. * 1941.
THE ART OF DONALD McGILL
WHO does not know the " comics " of the cheap stationers'
windows, the penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their
endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and
their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-
sparrow's egg tint and Post Office red ?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is a curious fact
that many people seem to be unaware of the existence of these
things, or else to have a vague notion that they are something
to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or pepper-
mint rock. Actually they are on sale everywhere they can be
bought at nearly any Woolworth's, for example and they are
evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series constantly
appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other
types of comic illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones
dealing with puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, sub-porno-
graphic ones which exploit the love-affairs of children. They
are a genre of their own, specialising in very " low " humour,
the mother-in-law, baby's nappy, policemen's boots type of joke,
and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no artistic
pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them,
though the people who draw them seem not to be numerous at
any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald
McGill because he is not only the most prolific and by far the best
of contemporary post card artists, but also the most repre-
sentative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill
is, I do not know. He is apparently a trade name, for at least
one series of post cards is issued simply as " The Donald McGill
Comics ", but he is also unquestionably a real person with a style
of drawing which is recognisable at a glance. Anyone who
examines his post cards in bulk will notice that many of them
are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere dilet-
tantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value.
A comic post card is simply an illustration to a joke, invariably
a " low " joke, and it stands or falls by its ability to raise a
laugh. Beyond that it has only " ideological " interest. McGill
is a clever draughtsman with a real caricaturist's touch in the
90 CRITICALESSAYS
drawing of faces, but the special value of his post cards is that
they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the
norm of the comic post card. Without being in the least imita-
tive, they are exactly what comic post cards have been any time
these last forty years, and from them the meaning and purpose
of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGnTs if
you pick out from a pile the ones that seem to you funniest, you
will probably find that most of them are McGnTs and spread
them out on a table. What do you see ?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is
quite apart from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also
from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter lowness
of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of
the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant
quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are
full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them,
every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces
grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with
bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression, however,
is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you
of ? What are they so like ? In the first place, of course, they
remind you of the barely different post cards which you probably
gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are
really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a
sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-
in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness. Not
that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves
less often than the joke columns in reputable magazines, but
their basic subject-matter, the kind of joke they are aiming ^jb,
never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish
style. Examples :
" I like seeing experienced girls home.'*
" But I'm not experienced ! "
" You're not home yet ! "
"I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you
get yours ? "
" I left off struggling."
THE ART OP DONALD MOGILL 91
JUDGE : " You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not
sleep with this woman ? "
CO-RESPONDENT : " Not a wink, my lord ! "
In general, however, they are not witty but humorous, and it
must be said for McGill's post cards, in particular, that the
drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke beneath it.
Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic post cards
is their obscenity, and I must discuss that more fully later. But
I give here a rough analysis of their habitual subject-matter,
with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed :
Sex. More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are
sex jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable.
First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical
captions : " Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's
feeding-bottle ? " " She didn't ask me to the christening, so
I'm not going to the wedding." Also newly weds, old maids,
nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are
ipso facto funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a
laugh. The cuckoldry joke is very seldom exploited, and there
are no references to homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke :
(i) Marriage only benefits the women. Every man is plotting
seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No
woman ever remains unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-
preserved and good-looking people beyond their first
youth are never represented. The amorous honey-
mooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and
shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no inter-
mediate stage being allowed for.
Home life. Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite
joke. Typical caption : " Did they get an X-ray of your wife's
jaw at the hospital ? " " No, they got a moving picture instead."
Conventions :
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage,
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument.
92 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Drunkenness. Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso
facto funny.
Conventions :
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions,
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men.
Drunken youths or women are never represented.
W. C. jokes. There is not a large number of these. Chamber-
pots are ipso facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical
post card, captioned " A Friend in Need ", shows a man's hat
blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies'
lavatory.
Inter-working-class snobbery. Much in these post cards suggests
that they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer
middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms,
illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum-
dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-
charwoman type exchanging " unladylike " abuse. Typical
repartee : "I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon ! " A
certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the
anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps,
beggars and criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly
frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc. ; but there are
no anti Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with
much over or much under 5 a week is regarded as laughable.
The " swell " is almost as automatically a figure of fun as the
slum-dweller.
Stock figures. Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief
locality joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The
lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman always a nervous
idiot who says the wrong thing. The " knut " or " masher "
still appears, almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date-
looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or even with spats
and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of
the big jokes of the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be re-
linquished. She has reappeared, unchanged in physical appear-
ance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature
of the last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post
cards. The " Jew joke ", always somewhat more ill-natured
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL 93
than the " Scotch joke ", disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
Politics. Any contemporary event, cult or activity which
has comic possibilities (for example, " free love ", feminism,
A.K.P., nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards,
but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The
implied political outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about
the year 1900. At normal times they are not only not patriotic,
but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about " God
save the King ", the Union Jack, etc. The European situation
only began to reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and
first did so through the comic aspects of A.R.P. Even at this
date few post cards mention the war except in A.R.P. jokes (fat
woman stuck in the mouth of Anderson shelter : wardens neglect-
ing their duty while young woman undresses at window she has
forgotten to black out, etc. etc.). A few express anti-Hitler
sentiments of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGnTs,
shows Hitler, with the usual hypertrophied backside, bending
down to pick a flower. Caption : " What would you do, chums ? "
This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is
likely to attain. Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic
post cards are not the product of any great monopoly company,
and evidently they are not regarded as having any importance
in forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any
attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature
of comic post cards their obscenity. It is by this that everyone
remembers them, and it is also central to their purpose, though
not in a way that is immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the
woman with the stuck-out behind. In perhaps half of them, or
more than half, even when the point of the joke has nothing to
do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump " voluptu-
ous " figure with the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin
and with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised, according
to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these
pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural
enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim
to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the McGill
94 CRITICALESSAYS
post card and this applies to all other post cards in this genre is
not intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on
pornography. The Hottentot figures of the women are caricatures
of the Englishman's secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one
examines McGnTs post cards more closely, one notices that his
brand of humour only has meaning in relation to a fairly strict
moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire, for instance, or La
Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the back-
ground of the McGill post card is marriage. The four leading
jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly
married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really
dissolute or even " sophisticated " society. The post cards
dealing with honeymoon couples always have the enthusiastic
indecency of those village weddings where it is still considered
screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for
example, a young bridegroom is shown getting out of bed the
morning after his wedding night. " The first morning in our
own little home, darling ! " 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 some-
thing 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 that 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-differ-
ences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England
is that the working classes age very much earlier. They do not
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL 95
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 every-
where, 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 general-
isation 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.
J have said that at least half 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 demon-
strating, 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
96 CRITICAL ESSAYS
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 specialising 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 per-
forming.
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 smack-
ing 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 char-
acteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently
it corresponds to something enduring in our civilisation, 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
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL 97
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 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 to wear them-
selves 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
fiihrers 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
7
98 CRITICALESSAYS
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 Chris-
tian 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 lowness, 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 newlyweds 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 ten-
dency 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 :
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL 99
" there is a just man that perishes in his righteousness, and there
is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not
righteous over much ; 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
McGnTs 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 there-
abouts, 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. 1941.
RUDYARD KIPLING
IT was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive
in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's
poetry, 1 but it was not to be avoided, because before one can
even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that
has been created by two sets of people who have not read his
works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a by-
word for fifty years. During five literary generations every
enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that
time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and
Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily
explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar
charge that Kipling is a " Fascist ", he falls into the opposite
error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use
pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted
or even forgiven by any civilised person. It is no use claiming,
for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating
a " nigger " with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him,
he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve
what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in
Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct
on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over
and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.
Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that,
and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the
refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.
And yet the " Fascist " charge has to be answered, because the
first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically,
is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was further from being
one than the most humane or the most " progressive " person
is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in
which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt
to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from
" Recessional ", " Lesser breeds without the Law ". This line
1 A Choice of Kipling's Verse, made by T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber,
8s. 6d.).
100
RUDYARD KIPLING 101
is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed
as a matter of course that the " lesser breeds " are " natives ",
and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith
helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is
almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase " lesser breeds "
refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-
German writers, who are " without the Law " in the sense of
being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole
poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a
denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two
stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as
poetry) :
" If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law
Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget lest we forget !
" For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord ! "
Much of Kipling's phraseology is taken from the Bible, and
no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from
Psalm cxxvii. : " Except the Lord build the house, they labour
in vain that build it ; except the Lord keep the city, the watch-
man waketh but in vain." It is not a text that makes much
impression on the post-Hitler jnind. No one, in our time, believes
in any sanction greater than military power ; no one believes
that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force.
There is no " law ", there is only power. I am not saying that
that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern
men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either
intellectual cowards, or power- worshippers under a thin disguise,
or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in.
Kipling's outlook is pre-Fascist. He still believes that pride
comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not
102 CRITICAL ESSAYS
foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret
police, or their psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about
Kipling's jingoism and brutality ? No, one is merely saying
that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern
gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very
definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its
aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having
learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He
was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase
(even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light that
Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the
unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army
which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his
bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no
Fascist or near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt
it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that
accounted for this. Somehow history had not gone according
to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain
was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite
acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes
he idealised, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire
to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand
what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the
economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable
that Kipling does not seem to realise, any more than the average
soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a
money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of
forcible evangelising. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of
unarmed " natives ", and then you establish " the Law ", which
includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee,
therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into
existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive,
for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for
rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed
over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarian know what
they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know
what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages,
but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the
RUDYARD KIPLING 103
other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an
artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the " box-
wallah " and often lives a lifetime without realising that the
" box-wallah " calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he
does possess one thing which " enlightened " people seldom or
never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-
class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and
vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialised
countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their
business to fight against something which they do not really
wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the
same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which
those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic
coolies, and those of us who are " enlightened " all maintain that
those coolies ought to be set free ; but our standard of living,
and hence our " enlightenment ", demands that the robbery
shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and
Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of
his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit
oif the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in
the phrase, " making mock of uniforms that guard you while
you sleep ". It is true that Kipling does not understand the
economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and
the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly
in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie
he sees the Indian Civil Servant ; but even on that plane his
grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees
clearly that men can only be highly civilised while other men,
inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
How far does Kipling really identify himself with the adminis-
trators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings ? Not so
completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very
widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a
brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak
in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the
active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-
Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any
rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was
evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to
104 CRITICAL ESSAYS
look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India
with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could
have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves
in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook
had been that of, say, E. M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow
though it is, Kipling's is the only literary picture that we possess
of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it
because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep
his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not
greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several
private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were
Kipling's contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They
said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on
the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a
highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with " the wrong "
people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly
suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his develop-
ment is traceable to his having been born in India and having
left school early. With a slightly different background he might
have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall
songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort
of publicity agent for Cecil Ehodes ? It is true, but it is not
true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days,
if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that
what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views
in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that
" unpopular " means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it
is a fact that Kipling's " message " was one that the big public
did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the
people, in the 'nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the
Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling's official
admirers are and were the " service " middle class, the people
who read Blackwood's. In the stupid early years of this century,
the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be
called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal,
and some of his more sententious poems, such as "If ", were
given almost Biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the
blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they
have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not
possibly approve. Few people who have criticised England
RUDYARD KIPLING 105
from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this
gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he
is attacking, but not always. That phrase about " the flannelled
fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal " sticks like
an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow
match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote
about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their
subject-matter goes. " Stellenbosch ", which must have been
written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry
officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.
Kipling's romantic ideas about England and the Empire might
not have mattered if he could have held them without having
the class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one
examines his best and most representative work, his soldier
poems, especially Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that what
more than anything else spoils them is an underlying air of
patronage. Kipling idealises the army officer, especially the
junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private
soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is
always made to speak in a sort of stylised Cockney, not very
broad but with all the aitches and final " g's " carefully omitted.
Very often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recita-
tion at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact
that one can often improve Kipling's poems, make them less
facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and
transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech. This
is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly lyrical
quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the
other about a wedding) :
" So it's knock out your pipes and follow me !
And it's finish up your swipes and follow me !
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow- me follow me home ! "
and again :
' Cheer for the Sergeant's wedding
Give them one cheer more !
Grey gun -horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore ! "
106 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have
known better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines
of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that
ought to have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-
man's accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant
speak the same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is
looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of
poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled for " follow me J ome "
is much uglier than " follow me home ". But even where it makes
no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney
dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud
than read on the printed page, and most people instinctively
make the necessary alterations when they quote him.
Can one imagine any private soldier, in the 'nineties or now,
reading Barrack-Room Ballads and feeling that here was a writer
who spoke for him ? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier
capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that
Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in
an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the
soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready
admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen.
Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but
" What have I done for thee, England, my England ? " is essen-
tially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would
follow it up immediately with " What has England done for me ? "
In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to " the
intense selfishness of the lower classes " (his own phrase). When
he is writing not of British but of " loyal " Indians he carries
the " Salaam, sahib " motif to sometimes disgusting lengths.
Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common
soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most
of the " liberals " of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier
is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by
the people whose incomes he safeguards. " I came to realise ",
he says in his posthumous memoirs, " the bare horrors of the
private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured/' He
is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in
the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football
match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry,
Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic.
BUDYARD KIPLING 107
He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified,
that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or
what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield,
and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away :
"I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man,
Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see,
Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran,
An' I thought I knew the voice an' it was me ! "
Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of
one of the debunking , war books of the nineteen- twenties. Or
again :
" An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must ;
So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow."
Compare this with :
" Forward the Light Brigade !
Was there a man dismayed ?
No ! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered."
If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth
were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due
to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at
least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives
are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous
pension.
How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the
long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century ?
One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-
century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the
only literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense
amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal
tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his
picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is
because any middle-class English person is likely to know enough
to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on Kipling
that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to
108 CRITICAL ESSAYS
publish, 1 I was struck by the number of things that are boringly
familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American.
But from the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to
emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old
pre-machine-gun army the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or
Lucknow, the red coats, the* pipeclayed belts and the pillbox
hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions,
the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horse-piss, the bellowing
sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes,
invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-
stricken camps, the " native " concubines, the ultimate death
in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a
patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one
of Zola's gorier passages, but from it future generations will be
able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was
like. On about the same level they will be able to learn something
of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators
were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have
had better books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore,
or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's opportunities.
That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not
possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book
like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life,
such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was
necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitive-
ness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate
contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it
seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a
few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still
is demilitarised to a degree which continental observers find
almost incredible. Civilised men do not readily move away from
the centres of civilisation, and in most languages there is a great
dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a very
improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's
gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee
pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple
bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself
was only half civilised.
1 1946. Published in a volume of Collected Essays, The Wound and
the Bow. (Seeker & Warburg.)
RUDYARD KIPLING 109
Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added
phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we
take over and use without remembering their origin do not
always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance,
to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers
as " robots ", thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech
democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid
hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling
which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or over-
hears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name.
It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in
common :
" East is East, and West is West.
The white man's burden.
What do they know of England who only England know ?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld."
There are various others, including some that have outlived their
context by many years. The phrase " killing Kruger with your
mouth ", for instance, was current till very recently. It is also
possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word
" Huns " for Germans ; at any rate he began using it as soon as
the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed
above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which
one utters semi-derisively (as it might be " For I'm to be Queen
o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May "), but which
one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could
exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for
Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the
New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the
Dane-geld ? l The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar
1 1945. On the first page of his recent book, A dam and Eve, Mr. Middleton
Murry quotes the well-known lines :
" There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right."
He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known
as *a " Freudian error ". A civilised person would prefer not to quote
Kipling i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed
his thought for him.
110 CRITICAL ESSAYS
wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness
into a few words (" Palm and Pine " " East of Suez " " The
Koad to Mandalay "), is generally talking about things that are
of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view,
that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on
the other side of the fence from him. " White man's burden "
instantly conjures up a real problem, 'even if one feels that it
ought to be altered to " black man's burden." One may disagree
to the middle of one's bones with the political attitude implied
in The Islanders, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude.
Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent.
This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-
writer.
Mr. Eliot describes Kipling's metrical work as " verse " and not
" poetry ", but adds that it is " great verse ", and further qualifies
this by "saying that a writer can only be described as a " great
verse- writer " if there is some of his work " of which we cannot
say whether it is verse or poetry ". Apparently Kipling was a
versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a
pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The
trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgment on Kipling's
work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive
to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I
think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling,
is that most of Kipling's verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives
one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate
music-hall performer recite " The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu " with
the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that
is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry
means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like
" Gunga Din " or " Danny Deever ", Kipling is almost a shameful
pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly
carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has
the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet
unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a
liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could
get any pleasure out of such lines as :
" For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they
say,
* Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay ! ' "
RUDYARD KIPLING 111
and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as " Felix
Randal " or " When icicles hang by the wall " are poetry. One
can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling
with the words " verse " and " poetry ", if one describes him
simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher
Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this
kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be
vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the
age we live in.
There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it,
I should say, subsequent to 1790, Examples of good bad poems
I am deliberately choosing diverse ones are " The Bridge of
Sighs ", " When all the World is Young, Lad ", " The Charge
of the Light Brigade ", Bret Harte's " Dickens in Camp ", " The
Burial of Sir John Moore ", " Jenny Kissed Me ", " Keith of
Ravelston ", " Casabianca ". All of these reek of sentimentality,
and yet not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this
kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see
clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized
anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant
fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth
reprinting. It is no use pretending that in an age like our own,
" good " poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and
must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the
arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of quali-
fication. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass
of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can
see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still
possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for
instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words
that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a
civilisation in which the very word " poetry " evokes a hostile
snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people
feel when they hear the word " God ". If you are good at playing
the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public
bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes.
But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you
suggested reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance ?
Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising
audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand.
112 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting
dough's " Endeavour " in one of his broadcast speeches. I
listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be
accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse
into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But
not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted
anything much better than this.
In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been
and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his
poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public,
beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout singsongs,
limp-leather editions, poker work and calendars, and out into the
yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot
thinks it worth while to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which
others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The
fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of
the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but
only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all
the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem ? A
good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records
in memorable form for verse is a mnemonic device, among other
things some emotion which very nearly every human being
can share. The merit of a poem like " When all the world is
young, lad " is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment
is " true " sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find
yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later ; and
then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your
mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind
of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry
is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling
will do :
" White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel ;
Tenderest voices cry ' Turn again ! '
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel :
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone."
There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be
true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner
RUDYARD KIPLING 113
or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest
who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and,
as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once
heard this line, you will remember it.
One reason for Kipling's power as a good bad poet I have
already suggested his sense of responsibility, which made it
possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened
to be a false one. Although he had no direct connection with
any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does
not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conserva-
tives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.
He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the
opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even
disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a
certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with
the question, " In such and such circumstances, what would
you do ? ", whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsi-
bility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and
pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought
deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with
a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by
events, for Utopia never arrives and " the gods of the copybook
headings ", as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling
sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotion-
ally. This warped his political judgment, for the British ruling
class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of
folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage
from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsi-
bility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not
witty, not " daring ", has no wish to epater ks bourgeois. He
dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of plati-
tudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies
seem less shallow and less irritating than the " enlightened "
utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the
collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.
1942.
W. B. YEATS
ONE thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is
to trace the connection between " tendency " and literary style.
The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in
sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some
such connection there must be. One knows, for instance, that a
Socialist would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist
like Bernard Shaw, though how one knows it is not easy to say.
In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection
between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his
rather sinister vision of life. Mr. Menon 1 is chiefly concerned
with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats's work, but the
quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book
serve to remind one how artificial Yeats's manner of writing was.
As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is
even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but
in fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in
which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech. To
take the nearest example :
" Grant me an old man's Frenzy,
My self must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call."
The unnecessary " that " imports a feeling of affectation, and
the same tendency is present in all but Yeats's best passages.
One is seldom long away from a suspicion of " quaintness ",
something that links up not only with the 'nineties, the Ivory
Tower and the " calf covers of pissed-on green ", but also with
Rackham's drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the Peter Pan
never-never land, of which, after all, The Happy Townland is
merely a more appetising example. This does not matter,
because, on the whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining
1 The Development of William Butler Yeate, by V. K. Narayana Menon
(Oliver & Boyd, 8s. 6d.).
114
W. B. YEATS 115
after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (" the
chill, footless years ", " the mackerel-crowded seas ") which
suddenly overwhelm one like a girl's face seen across a room.
He is an exception to the rule that poets do not use poetical
language :
" How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness ? "
Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like " loveli-
ness ", and after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful
passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort of
raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams
and polemical poems. For instance (I am quoting from memory)
the epigram against the critics who damned The Playboy of the
Western World :
" Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by ;
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh."
The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy
ready made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line,
but even in this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary
words. It would probably have been deadlier if it had been
neater.
Mr. Menon's book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats,
-but he is above all interested in Yeats's philosophical " system " ,
which in his opinion supplies the subject-matter of more of
Yeats's poems than is generally recognised. This system is set
forth fragmentarily in various places, and at full length in A
Vision, a privately printed book which I have never read but
which Mr. Menon quotes from extensively. Yeats gave con-
116 CRITICAL ESSAYS
flicting accounts of its origin, and Mr. Menon hints pretty broadly
that the " documents " on which it was ostensibly founded were
imaginary. Yeats's philosophical system, says Mr. Menon,
" was at the back of his intellectual life almost from the beginning.
His poetry is full of it. Without it his later poetry becomes
almost completely unintelligible." As soon as we begin to read
about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus
of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, dis-
embodied spirits, astrology and what-not. Yeats hedges as to
the literalness with which he believed in all this, but he certainly
dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in earlier life had made
experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under explana-
tions, very difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon,
the central idea of his philosophical system seems to be our old
friend, the cyclical universe, in which everything happens over
and over again. One has not, perhaps, the right to laugh at
Yeats for his mystical beliefs for I believe it could be shown
that some degree of belief in magic is almost universal but
neither ought one to write such things off as mere unimportant
eccentricities. It is Mr. Menon's perception of this that gives
his book its deepest interest. " In the first flush of admiration
and enthusiasm ", he says, " most people dismissed the fantastical
philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious
intellect. One did not quite realise where he was heading. And
those who did, like Pound and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand
that he finally took. The first reaction to this did not come, as
one might have expected, from the politically minded young
English poets. They were puzzled because a less rigid or artificial
system than that of A Vision might not have produced the great
poetry of Yeats's last days." It might not, and yet Yeats's
philosophy has some very sinister implications, as Mr. Menon
points out.
Translated into political terms, Yeats's tendency is Fascist.
Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever
heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by
the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the
modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress
above all, of the idea of human equality. Much of the imagery
of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether
free from ordinary snobbishness. Later these tendencies took
W. B. YEATS 117
clearer shape and led him to " the exultant acceptance of authori-
tarianism as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny are
not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and
good, would become perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. . . .
Everything must come from the top. Nothing can come from
the masses." Not much interested in politics, and no doubt
disgusted by his brief incursions into public life, Yeats never-
theless makes political pronouncements. He is too big a man to
share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells
in a justly famous passage (" The Second Coming ") the kind of
world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to
welcome the coming age, which is to be " hierarchical, masculine,
harsh, surgical ", and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by
various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new civilisation
which he hopes and believes will arrive : " an aristocratic civilisa-
tion in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical,
every great man's door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great
wealth everywhere in a few men's hands, all dependent upon a
few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a
greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality
made law." The innocence of this statement is as interesting
as its snobbishness. To begin with, in a single phrase, " great
wealth in a few men's hands ", Yeats lays bare the central reality
of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to
cover up. The merely political Fascist claims always to be
fighting for justice : Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that Fascism
means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason. But at
the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian civilisa-
tion, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he means by
aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck
faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats
and murdering gangsters. Others who have made the same
mistake have afterwards changed their views, and one ought
not to assume that Yeats, if he had lived longer, would necessarily
have followed his friend Pound, even in sympathy. But the
tendency of the passage I have quoted above is obvious, and its
complete throwing overboard of whatever good the past two
thousand years have achieved is a disquieting symptom.
How do Yeats's political ideas link up with his leaning towards
occultism ? It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy
118 CRITICAL ESSAYS
and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together.
Mr. Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible
to make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilisation
moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the
concept of human equality. If it is true that " all this ", or some-
thing like it, " has happened before ", then science and the modern
world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever
impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are
getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning
to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook.
If the universe is moving round on a wheel, the future must be
foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail. It is merely a question
of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astronomers
discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult
not to believe in astrology or some similar system. A year before
the war, examining a copy of Gringoire, the French Fascist weekly,
much read by army officers, I found in it no less than thirty-
eight advertisements of clairvoyants. Secondly, the very concept
of occultism carries with it the idea that knowledge must be a
secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the same
idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of
universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought,
emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection
towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism
and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian
ethical code.
No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different
times many different opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr.
Menon repeats for him Eliot's claim that he had the longest
period of development of any poet who has ever lived. But there
is one thing that seems constant, at least in all of his work that I
can remember, and that is his hatred of modern Western civilisa-
tion and desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps to the
Middle Ages. Like all such thinkers, he tends to writ$jn praise
of ignorance. The Fool in his remarkable play, The Hour-Glass,
is a Chestertonian figure, " God's fool " the " natural born
innocent ", who is always wiser than the wise man. The
philosopher in the play dies on the knowledge that all his
lifetime of thought has been wasted (I am quoting from memory
again) :
W. B. YEATS 119
" The stream of the world has changed its course,
And with the stream my thoughts have run
Into some cloudy, thunderous spring
That is its mountain-source ;
Ay, to a frenzy of the mind,
That all that we have done's undone
Our speculation but as the wind."
Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and
reactionary ; for if it is really true that a village idiot, as such,
is wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better if the alphabet
had never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past is
partly sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor
do not praise poverty. Before you can despise the machine, the
machine must set you free from brute labour. But that is not
to say that Yeats's yearning for a more primitive and more
hierarchical age was not sincere. How much of all this is traceable
to mere snobbishness, product of Yeats's own position as an
impoverished offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question.
And the connection between his obscurantist opinions and his
tendency towards " quaintness " of language remains to be
worked out ; Mr. Menon hardly touches upon it.
This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr.
Menon go ahead and write another boojc on Yeats, starting where
this one leaves off. " If the greatest poet of our times is exultantly
ringing in an era of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing
symptom ", he says on the last page, and leaves it at that. It
is a disturbing symptom, because it is not an isolated one. By
and large the best writers of our time have been reactionary in
tendency, and though Fascism does not offer any real return to
the past, those who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner
than its probable alternatives. But there are other lines of
approach, as we have seen during the past two or three years.
The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia
badly needs investigating, and Yeats might well be the starting-
point. He is best studied by someone like Mr. Menon, who can
approach a poet primarily as a poet, but who also knows that a
writer's political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be
laughed away, but something that will leave their mark even on
the smallest detail of his work. 1943.
BENEFIT OF CLERGY :
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI
AUTOBIOGRAPHY is only to be trusted when it reveals something
disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is
probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is
simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly
dishonest book (Frank Harris's autobiographical writings are an
example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author.
Dali's recently published Life l comes under this heading. Some
of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been re-
arranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but
the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out.
Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his auto-
biography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight.
But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has
been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali's life, from his
earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are
imaginary hardly matters : the point is that this is the kind of
thing that Dali would have liked to do.
When he is six years old there is some excitement over the
appearance of Halley's comet :
" Suddenly one of my father's office clerks appeared in the drawing-
room doorway and announced that the comet could be seen from the
terrace. . . . While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little
three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway.
I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the
head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried
away with a ' delirious, joy ' induced by this savage act. But my
father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his
office, where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time."
A year earlier than this Dali had " suddenly, as most of my
ideas occur ", flung another little boy off a suspension bridge.
Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including
(this was when he was twenty-nine years old) knocking down
1 The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (the Dial Press, New York).
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI 121
and trampling on a girl " until they had to tear her, bleeding,
out of my reach ".
When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which
he puts into a tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is
almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it.
He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in
half.
When he is adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him.
He kisses and caresses her so as to excite her as much as possible,
but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up for five
years (he calls it his " five-year plan "), enjoying her humiliation
and the sense of power it gives him. He frequently tells her
that at the end of five years he will desert her, and when the time
comes he does so.
Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation,
and likes to do this, apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For
ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears, till the age of thirty
or so. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly
tempted to push her off a precipice. He is aware that there is
something that she wants him to do to her, and after their first
kiss the confession is made :
" I threw back Gala's head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling
with complete hysteria, I commanded :
" * Now tell me what you want me to do with you ! But tell me
slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously
erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame ' !
" ... Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expres-
sion of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered :
" * I want you to kill me ! ' "
He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely
what he wanted to do already. He contemplates throwing her
off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from
doing so.
During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides,
and makes a trip to Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn
towards the aristocracy, frequents smart salons, finds himself
wealthy patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte
de Noailles, whom he describes as his " Maecenas ". When the
European War approaches he has one preoccupation only : how
122 CRITICAL ESSAYS
to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can
make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux,
and duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays
in Spain long enough to pick up a few anti-red atrocity stories,
then makes for America. The story ends in a blaze of respect-
ability. Dali, at thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband,
is cured of his aberrations, or some of them, and is completely
reconciled to the Catholic Church. He is also, one gathers,
making a good deal of money.
However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the
pictures if his Surrealist period, with titles like " The Great
Masturbator ", " Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano ", etc.
There are reproductions of these all the way through the book.
Many of Dali's drawings are simply representational and have a
characteristic to be noted later. But from his Surrealist paintings
and photographs the two things that stand out are sexual per-
versity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols some of
them well known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper,
others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by
Dali himself recur over and over again, and there is a fairly
well-marked excretory motif as well. In his painting, " Le Jeu
Lugubre ", he says, " the drawers bespattered with excrement
were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the
whole little Surrealist group was anguished by the question :
Is he coprophagic or not ? " Dali adds firmly that he is not,
and that he regards this aberration as " repulsive ", but it seems
to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops.
Even when he recounts the experience of watching a woman
urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she misses her
aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to
have all the vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual,
but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions
as anyone could wish for.
However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia.
He himself freely admits to this, and claims to have been cured
of it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur fairly frequently
in his pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make
countless reappearances. One photograph shows an exhumed
corpse, far gone in decomposition. Another shows the dead
donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which formed part of
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI 123
the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on
these donkeys with great enthusiasm.
" I ' made up ' the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of
sticky glue which I poured over them. Also I emptied their eye-
sockets and made them larger by hacking them out with scissors.
In the pame way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows
of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws
to each mouth, so that it would appear that although the donkeys
were already rotting they were vomiting up a little more of their
own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of
the black pianos."
And finally there is the picture apparently some kind of
faked photograph of " Mannequin rotting in a taxicab ". Over
the already somewhat bloated face and breast of an apparently
dead girl, huge snails are crawling. In the caption below the
picture Dali notes that these are Burgundy snails that is, the
edible kind.
Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more
than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an
unfair account of its moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It
is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a
physical stink off its pages, this one would a thought that might
please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time
rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung
boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that
Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to
judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very
hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is
not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the
people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings.
And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question
which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real
discussion.
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault
on sanity and decency ; and even since some of Dali's pictures
would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic post-
card on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined
is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency
of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea.
124 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they
can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord
Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader-writers who
exult over the " eclipse of the highbrow " in fact, to any
" sensible " art-hating English person it is easy to imagine
what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse
to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only
unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be sesthetic-
ally right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall
pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary.
And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present,
when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put
power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush
every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.
Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in
this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce,
Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Bali's merits,
the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If
you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty
little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you
say that you don't like rotting corpses, and that people who do
like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you
lack the aesthetic sense. Since " Mannequin rotting in a taxicab "
is a good composition (as it undoubtedly is), it cannot be a dis-
gusting, degrading picture ; whereas Noyes, Elton, etc., would
tell you that because it is disgusting it cannot be a good com-
position. And between these two fallacies there is no middle
position ; or, rather, there is a middle position, but we seldom
hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschevismus : on
the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) " Art for
Art's sake ". Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss
honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be
shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the
relationship between art and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming
is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the
moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce
the magic word " Art ", and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI 125
with snails crawling over them are O.K. ; kicking little girls on
the head is O.K. ; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. 1 It is also
O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle
off like a rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can
paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary
crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether
exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of
irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would
say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder,
nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however
gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls
in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it
on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And,
after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones.
By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as
much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought
to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that
Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The
one does not invalidate or, in a sense, aifect the other. The first
thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it
stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it
serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the
world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration
camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, " This is a
good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman ". Unless one can say that, at least in imagina-
tion, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist
is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures,
ought to be suppressed. Short of the dirty post cards that used
to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy
to suppress anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful
light on .the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly
needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as
1 Dali mentions I? Age, d'Or and adds that its first public showing was
broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about.
According to Henry Miller's account of it, it showed among other things
some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating.
126 CRITICAL ESSAYS
he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that he is a
diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged
conversion, since genuine penitents, or people who have returned
to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent way.
He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing
is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horse-
whipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be
questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set
of aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those
I myself am not competent to examine. But I can point to one
clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the
old-fashioned, over-ornate, Edwardian style of drawing to which
Dali tends to revert when he is not being Surrealist. Some of
Dali's drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one (p. 113) seems to
show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the
Edwardian one. When I opened the book for the first time and
looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I was haunted
by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I
fetched up at the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of
Part I. (p. 7). What did this remind me of ? Finally I tracked
it down. It reminded me of a large, vulgar, expensively got-up
edition of Anatole France (in translation) which must have been
published about 1914. That had ornamental chapter headings
and tailpieces after this style. Dali's candlestick displays at one
end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it
seems to be based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other
is the burning candle. This candle, which recurs in one picture
after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the
same picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those
phoney electric lights done up as candlesticks which are popular
in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design
beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality.
As though to counteract this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of
ink all over the page, but without avail. The same impression
keeps popping up on page after page. The design at the bottom
of page 62, for instance, would nearly go into Peter Pan. The
figure on page 224, in spite of having her cranium elongated into
an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI 127
books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might
be illustrations to James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified
drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and elsewhere convey the
same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take
away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia,
and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie,
Rackham, Dunsany and W here the Rainbow Ends.
Curiously enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in
Bali's autobiography tie up with the same period. When I read
the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the
little sister's head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance.
What was it ? Of course ! Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes,
by Harry Graham. Such rhymes were very popular round about
1912, and one that ran :
" Poor little Willy is crying so sore,
A sad little boy is he,
For he's broken his little sister's neck
And he'll have no jam for tea ",
might almost have been founded on Dali's anecdote. Dali, of
course, is aware of his Edwardian leanings, and makes capital
out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an
especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every orna-
mental object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, mad-
ness, perversity, etc. Pastiche, however, usually implies a real
affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the rule,
at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be
accompanied by a non-rational, even childish urge in the same
direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in planes and
curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of
mucking about with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who
enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos and the smell of oil.
A psychiatrist usually has a leaning towards some sexual aber-
ration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he
was a country gentleman and fond of animals. It may be,
therefore, that Dali's seemingly perverse cult of Edwardian
things (for example, his " discovery " of the 1900 subway
entrances) is merely the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious
affection. The innumerable, beautifully executed copies of text-
book illustrations, solemnly labelled le rossignol, une montre and
128 CRITICAL ESSAYS
BO on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant
partly as a joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with
a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect period piece. But perhaps
these things are also there because Dali can't help drawing that
kind of thing, because it is to that period and that style of drawing
that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are
a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two
qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing
and an atrocious egoism. " At seven ", he says in the first
paragraph of his book, " I wanted to be Napoleon. And my
ambition has been growing steadily ever since." This is worded
in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially
true. Such feelings are common enough. " I knew I was a
genius ", somebody once said to me, " long before I knew what
I was going to be a genius about." And suppose that you have
nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes
no higher than the elbow ; suppose that your real gift is for a
detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real
metier to be an illustrator of scientific text-books. How then do
you become Napoleon ?
There is always one escape : into wickedness. Always do the
thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little
boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip
and break his spectacles or, at any rate, dream about doing
such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead
donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always
feel yourself original. And after all, it pays ! It is much less
dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable
suppressions in Dali's autobiography, it is clear that he has not
had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an
earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-
twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and
every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers
who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising
the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money
back. A phobia for grasshoppers which a few decades back
would merely have provoked a snigger was now an interesting
" complex " which could be profitably exploited. And when
that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America
SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI 129
was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conver-
sion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance
from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham's bosom.
That, perhaps, is the essential outline of Dali's history. But
why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and
why it should be so easy to " sell " such horrors as rotting corpses
to a sophisticated public those are questions for the psychologist
and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way
with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are " bourgeois
decadence " (much play is made with the phrases " corpse
poisons " and " decaying rentier class "), and that is that. But
though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a con-
nection. One would still like to know why Dali's leaning was
towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the
rentiers and the aristocrats should buy his pictures instead of
hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral
disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought
one to pretend, in the name of " detachment ", that such pictures
as " Mannequin rotting in a taxicab " are morally neutral. They
are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to stait
out from that fact. 1944.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
ONE striking fact about English literature during the present
century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners
for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound
and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national
prestige and examine our achievement in the various branches
of literature, you would find that England made a fairly good
showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special
class of literature that has arisen out of the European political
struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels,
autobiographies, books of " reportage ", sociological treatises
and plain pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them
having a common origin and to a great extent the same emotional
atmosphere.
Some of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are
Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler
himself. Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but
they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the
text-books and bed about in the newspapers. Also they are all
alike in being continental Europeans. It may be an exaggeration,
but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book
dealing with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still
seems worth reading six months after publication, it is a book
translated from some foreign language. English writers, over
the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of
political literature, but they have produced almost nothing of
aesthetic value, and very little of historical value either. The
Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936.
How many of its chosen volumes can you even remember the
names of? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Spain, Abyssinia,
Austria, Czechoslovakia all that these and kindred subjecta
have produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest
pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole and then
spewed up again, half digested, and a very few reliable guide-
books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for
130
ARTHUR KOESTLER 131
instance, Fontamara or Darkness at Noon, because there is almost
no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism
from the inside. In Europe, during the past decade and more,
things have been happening to middle-class people which in
England do not even happen to the working class. Most of the
European writers I mentioned above, and scores of others like
them, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage in
politics at all ; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in
street-battles, many have been in prison or the concentration
camp, or fled across frontiers with false names and forged pass-
ports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in
activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what
one might call concentration-camp literature. The special world
created by secret police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and
frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent
disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact.
One result of this is that there exists in England almost no
literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There
is the attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude
of uncritical admiration, but very little in between. Opinion
on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but
divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were
guilty. Few people were able to see that, whether justified or
not, the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English dis-
approval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing,
turned on and off like a tap according to political expediency.
To understand such things one has to be able to imagine oneself
as the victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon
would be as unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Koestler's published work really centres about the Moscow
trials. His main theme is the decadence of revolutions owing to
the corrupting effects of power, but the special nature of the
Stalin dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far
removed from pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how
many books he has written in all. He is a Hungarian who usually
writes in German, and five books have been published in England :
Spanish Testament, The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon, The Scum
of the Earth, and Arrival and Departure. The subject-matter of
all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more
132 CRITICAL ESSAYS
than a few pages from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five
books, the action of three takes place entirely or almost entirely
in prison.
In the opening months of the Spanish Civil War Koestler was
the News Chronicle's correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937
he was taken prisoner when the Fascists captured Malaga. He
was nearly shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned
in a fortress, listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch
after batch of Republicans was executed, and being most of the
time in acute danger of execution himself. This was not a chance
adventure which " might have happened to anybody ", but was
in accordance with Koestler 's life style. A politically indifferent
person would not have been in Spam at that date, a more cautious
observer would have got out of Malaga before the Fascists arrived,
and a British or American newspaper man would have been
treated with more consideration. The book that Koestler wrote
about this, Spanish Testament, has remarkable passages, but
apart from the scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it
is definitely false in places. In the prison scenes Koestler success-
fully establishes the nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak,
his patent, but the rest of the book is too much coloured by the
Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even
look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the
Left Book Club. At that time Koestler still was, or recently
had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the complex
politics of the Civil War made it impossible for any Communist
to write quite honestly about the internal struggle on the Govern-
ment side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards
is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-
totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not
feel free to say so. He came much nearer to saying it
indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so in
his next book, The Gladiators, which was published about a
year before the war and for some reason attracted very little
attention.
The Gladiators is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is
about Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves'
rebellion in Italy round about 65 B.C., and any book on such a
subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with Salammbd.
In our own age it would not be possible to write a book like
ARTHUR KOESTLER 133
Salammbfi even if one had the talent. The great thing about
Salammbd, even more important than its physical detail, is its
utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into the stony
cruelty of antiquity, because in the mid-nineteenth century one
still had peace of mind. One had time to travel in the past.
Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be
escaped from, and if one bothers with history it is in order to find
modern meanings there. Koestler makes Spartacus into an
allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian dictator.
Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of the
imagination, to make his mercenaries truly pre-Christian, Sparta-
cus is a modern man dressed up. But this might not matter if
Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolu-
tions always go wrong that is the main theme. It is on the
question of why they go wrong that he falters, and his uncertainty
enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic and
unreal.
For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful.
Their numbers swell to a hundred thousand, they overrun great
areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive expedition after
another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that time
were the masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to
work to build a city of their own, to be named the City of tfye Sun.
In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and above all,
they are to be happy : no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no
floggings, no executions. It is the dream of a just society 'which
seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and in all
ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless
society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once
existed in the past and from which we have degenerated. Need-
less to say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner have they
formed themselves into a community than their way of life turns
out to be as unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other.
Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to be revived for the
punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes when
Spartacus finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest
and most faithful followers. After that the City of the Sun is
doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last
fifteen thousand of them being captured and ^ ified in one
batch.
134: CRITICAL ESSAYS
The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of
Spartacus himself are never made clear. The Roman lawyer
Fulvius, who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler, sets
forth the familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve
nothing unless you are willing to use force and cunning, but in
using them you pervert your original aims. Spartacus, however,
is not represented as power-hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a
visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force which
he does not understand, and he is frequently in two minds as to
whether it would not be better to throw up the whole adventure
and flee to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves'
republic is in any case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the
struggle for power. The slaves are discontented with their
liberty because they still have to work, and the final break-up
happens because the more turbulent and less civilised slaves,
chiefly Gauls and Germans, continue to behave like bandits after
the republic has been established. This may be a true account
of events naturally we know very little about the slave rebellions
of antiquity but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed
because Crixus the Gaul cannot be prevented from looting and
raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If
Spartacus is the prototype of the modern revolutionary and
obviously he is intended as that he should have gone astray
because of the impossibility of combining power with righteous-
ness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather
than acting, and at times not convincing. The story partly fails
because the central problem of revolution has been avoided or,
at least, has not been solved.
It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler's
masterpiece, Darkness at Noon. Here, however, the story is not
spoiled, because it deals with individuals and its interest is
psychological. It is an episode picked out from a background
that does not have to be questioned. Darkness at Noon describes
the imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Eubashov,
who first denies and ultimately confesses to crimes which he is
well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the lack
of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the
story is told, show the advantage, when one is handling a theme
of this kind, of being a European. The book reaches the stature
of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most
ARTHUR KOESTLER 135
have made it into a polemical tract. Koesfcler has digested his
material and can treat it on the aesthetic level. At the same time
his handling of it has a political implication, not important in
this case but likely to be damaging in later books.
Naturally the whole book centres round one question : Why
did Rubashov confess ? He is not guilty that is, not guilty of
anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin regime.
The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have
engaged are all imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or
not very severely. He is worn down by solitude, toothache,
lack of tabacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous
questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to
overcome a hardened revolutionary. The Nazis have previously
done worse to him without breaking his spirit. The confessions
obtained in the Russian State trials are capable of three ex-
planations :
(1) That the accused were guilty.
(2) That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by
threats to relatives and friends.
(3) That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy
and the habit of loyalty to the Party.
For Koestler's purpose in Darkness at Noon (1) is ruled out,
and though this is not the place to discuss the Russian purges,
I must add that what little verifiable evidence there is suggests
that the trials of the Old Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one
assumes that the accused were not guilty at any rate, not guilty
of the particular things they confessed to then (2) is the
common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for (3),
which is also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his
pamphlet Cauchemar en URRS. Rubashov ultimately confesses
because he cannot find in his own mind any reason for not doing
so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any
meaning for him. For decades he has been simply the creature
of the Party, and what the Party now demands is that he shall
confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he has had
to be bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his
decision to confess. He feels superior to the poor Czarist officer
who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov by tapping
on the wall, The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that
136 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Rubashov intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his " bour-
geois " angle, everyone ought to stick to his guns, even a Bol-
shevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right.
" Honour is to be useful without fuss ", Rubashov taps back ;
and he reflects with a certain satisfaction that he is tapping with
his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is tapping with
a monocle.
Like Bukharin, Rubashov is " looking out upon black dark-
ness ". What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion
of good and evil, for the sake of which he can defy the Party and
endure further torment ? He is not only alone, he is also hollow.
He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now
being perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy
of the Party in Nazi Germany, he has got rid of disobedient
followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough,
if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of
his boyhood when he was the son of a landowner. The last thing
he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the leaves of the
poplar trees on his father's estate. Rubashov belongs to the
older generation of Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the
purges. He is aware of art and literature, and of the world out-
side Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young G.P.U.
man who conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical
" good party man ", completely without scruples or curiosity, a
thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have
the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank
sheet when the party got hold of it. His superiority to the other
is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.
One cannot, I think, argue that Darkness at Noon is simply a
story dealing with the adventures of an imaginary individual.
Clearly it is a political book, founded on history and offering an
interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be Trotsky,
Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure
among the Old Bolsheviks. If one writes about the Moscow
trials one must answer the question, " Why did the accused
confess ? " and which answer one makes is a political decision.
Koestler answers, in effect, " Because these people had been
rotted by the Revolution which they served ", and in doing so
he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature
bad, If one assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were
ARTHUR KOESTLER 137
made to confess by means of some kind of terrorism, one is only
saying that one particular set of revolutionary leaders has gone
astray. Individuals, and not the situation, are to blame. The
implication of Koestler's book, however, is that Rubashov in
power would be no better than Gletkin : or rather, only better
in that his outlook IL still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution,
Koestler seems to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into
the Revolution and you must end up as either Rubashov or
Gletkin. It is not merely that " power corrupts " : so also do
the ways of attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate
society by violent means lead to the cellars of the Ogpu. Lenin
leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble Stalin if he had
happened to survive.
Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and
perhaps is not altogether conscious of it. He is writing about
darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon. Part of
the time he feels that things might have turned out differently.
The notion that So-and-so has " betrayed ", that things have
only gone wrong because of individual wickedness, is ever present
in left-wing thought. Later, in Arrival and Departure, Koestler
swings over much further towards the anti-revolutionary position,
but in between these two books there is another, The Scum of the
Earthy which is straight autobiography and has only an indirect
bearing upon the problems raised by Darkness at Noon. True
to his life style, Koestler was caught in France by the outbreak
of war and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly
arrested and interned by the Daladier Government. He spent
the first nine months of war mostly in a prison camp, then, during
the collapse of France, escaped and travelled by devious routes
to England, where he was once again thrown into prison as an
enemy alien. This time he was soon released, however. The
book is a valuable piece of reportage, and together with a few
other scraps of honest writing that happened to be produced
at the time of the debacle, it is a reminder of the depths that
bourgeois democracy can descend to. At this moment, with
France newly liberated and the witch-hunt after collaborators
in full swing, we are apt to forget that in 1940 various ob-
servers on the spot considered that about 40 per cent, of the
French population was either actively pro-German or completely
apathetic. Truthful war books are never acceptable to
138 CRITICAL ESSAYS
combatants, and Koestler 's book did not have a very good reception.
Nobody came well out of it neither the bourgeois politicians,
whose idea of conducting an anti- Fascist war was to jail every
left-winger they could lay hands on, nor the French Communists,
who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the
French war effort, nor the common people, who were just as
likely to follow mountebanks like Doriot as responsible leaders.
Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow-
victims in the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like
most middle -class Socialists and Communists, he had never made
contact with real proletarians, only witli the educated minority.
He draws the pessimistic conclusion : " Without education of
the masses, no social progress ; without social progress, no
education of the masses." In The Scum of the Earth Koestler
ceases to idealise the common people. He has abandoned
Stalinism, but he is not a Trotskyist either. This is the book's
real link with Arrival and Departure, in which what is normally
called a revolutionary outlook is dropped, perhaps for good.
Arrival and Departure is not a satisfactory book. The pre-
tence that it is a novel is very thin ; in effect it is a tract purport-
ing to show that revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of
neurotic impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book
begins and ends with the same action a leap into a foreign
country. A young ex-Communist who has made his escape from
Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter the
service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against
Germany. His enthusiasm is somewhat cooled by the fact that
the British consulate is uninterested in him and almost ignores
him for a period of several months, during which his money runs
out and other astuter refugees escape to America. He is succes-
sively tempted by the World in the form of a Nazi propagandist,
the Flesh in the form of a French girl, and after a nervous
breakdown the Devil in the form of a psycho-analyst. The
psycho-analyst drags out of him the fact that his revolutionary
enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in historical neces-
sity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in
early childhood to blind his baby brother. By the time that he
gets an opportunity of serving the Allies he has lost all reason
for wanting to do so, and he is on the point of leaving for America
his irrational impulses seize hold of him again. In practice
ARTHUR KOESTLER 139
he cannot abandon the struggle. When the book ends, he is
floating down in a parachute over the dark landscape of his
native country, where he will be employed as a secret agent of
Britain.
As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this
is insufficient. Of course it is true in many cases, and it may be
true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the result of
personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society
are, on the whole, those who have reason to dislike it, and normal
healthy people are no more attracted by violence and illegality
than they are by war. The young Nazi in Arrival and Departure
makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with
the left-wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after
all, this does not invalidate the Socialist case. Actions have
results, irrespective of their motives. Marx's ultimate motives
may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that
his conclusions were false. In making the hero of Arrival and
Departure take his final decision from a mere instinct not to shirk
action and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a sudden loss
of intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him,
he would be able to sec that certain things have to be done,
whether our reasons for doing them are " good " or " bad ".
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be
pushed that way by neurotics. In Arrival and Departure Peter's
idols are overthrown one after the other. The Russian Revolu-
tion has degenerated, Britain, symbolised by the aged consul
with gouty fingers, is no better, the international class-conscious
proletariat is a myth. But the conclusion (since, after all,
Koestler and his hero " support " the war) ought to be that
getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while objective, a necessary
bit of scavenging in which motives are almost irrelevant.
To take a rational political decision one must have a picture
of the future. At present Koestler seems to have none, or rather
to have two which cancel out. As an ultimate objective he
believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladi-
ators set out to establish, and which has haunted the imagination
of Socialists, anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of
years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise
is receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead
of us is bloodshed, tyranny and privation. Recently he described
140 CRITICAL ESSAYS
himself as a " short- term pessimist ". Every kind of horror is
blowing up over the horizon, but somehow it will all come right
in the end. This outlook is probably gaining ground among
thinking people : it results from the very great difficulty, once
one has abandoned orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on
earth as inherently miserable, and on the other hand, from the
realisation that to make life liveable is a much bigger problem
than it recently seemed. Since about 1930 the world has given
no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a
welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our
present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering
into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man's
major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable !
Who is there who dares to look at the world of to-day and say
to himself, " It will always be like this : even in a million years
it cannot get appreciably better " ? So you get the quasi-
mystical belief that for the present there is no remedy, all political
action is useless, but that somehow, somewhere in space and time,
human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is.
The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who
regards this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few
thinking people now believe in life after death, and the number
of those who do is probably diminishing. The Christian churches
would probably not survive on their own merits if their economic
basis were destroyed. The real problem is how to restore the
religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only
be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is
happiness. It is most unlikely, however, that Koestler would
accept this. There is a well-marked hedonistic strain in his
writings, and his failure to find a political position after breaking
with Stalinism is a result of this.
The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler's life,
started out with high hopes. We forget these things now, but a
quarter of a century ago it was confidently expected that the
Russian Revolution would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has
not happened. Koestler is too acute not to see this, and too
sensitive not to remember the original objective. Moreover,
from his European angle he can see such things as purges and
mass deportations for what they are ; he is not, like Shaw or
Laski, looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope.
ARTHUR KOESTLER HI
Therefore lie draws the conclusion : This is what revolutions
lead to. There is nothing for it except to be a " short-term
pessimist ", i.e. to keep out of politics, make a sort of oasis within
which you and your friends can remain sane, and hope that
somehow things will be better in a hundred years. At the basis
of this lies his hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthly
Paradise as desirable. Perhaps, however, whether desirable or
not, it isn't possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is in-
eradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is
always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not
to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions
are failures, but they are not all the same failure. It is his un-
willingness to admit this that has led Koestler's mind temporarily
into a blind alley and that makes Arrival and Departure seem
shallow compared with the earlier books. 1944.
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH
NEARLY half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, " the
amateur cracksman ", is still one of the best-known characters
in English fiction. Very few people would need telling that he
played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany
and burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest.
Just for that reason he and his exploits make a suitable back-
ground against which to examine a more modern crime story such
as No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Any such choice is necessarily
arbitrary I might equally well have chosen Arsene Lupin, for
instance but at any rate No Orchids and the Raffles books l
have the common quality of being crime stories which play the
limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For socio-
logical purposes they can be compared. No Orchids is the 1939
version of glamorised crime, Raffles the 1900 version. What
I am concerned with here is the immense difference in moral
atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular
attitude that this probably implies.
At this date, the charm of Raffles is partly in the period atmo-
sphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories.
Horaung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able
writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his
work. However, the truly dramatic thing about Raffles, the thing
that makes him a sort of byword even to this day (only a few
weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner
as " a Raffles in real life "), is the fact that he is a gentleman.
Raffles is presented to usand this is rubbed home in countless
scraps of dialogue and casual remarks not as an honest man
who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone
astray. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social ;
he has disgraced " the old school ", he has lost his right to enter
" decent society ", he has forfeited his amateur status and become
1 Raffles, A Thief in the Night and Mr. Justice Raffles, by E. W. Hornung.
The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true
Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually
with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful book in rather
the same vein as Raffles is Stingarce.
14*
BAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH 143
a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all
strongly that stealing is wrong in itself, though Raffles does once
justify himself by the casual remark that " the distribution of
property is all wrong anyway ". They think of themselves not
as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral
code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel
his situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End club
man who is really a burglar ! That is almost a story in itself,
is it not ? But how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was
really a burglar ? Would there be anything inherently dramatic
in that ? No although the theme of the " double life ", of
respectability covering crime, is still there. Even Charles Peace
in his clergyman's dog-collar seems somewhat less of a hypocrite
than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.
Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly
fitting that his chosen game should be cricket. This allows not
only of endless analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler
and his cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact
nature of his crime. Cricket is not in reality a very popular game
in England it is nowhere near so popular as football, for instance
but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English
character, the tendency to value " form " or " style " more
highly than success. In the eyes of any true cricket-lover it is
possible for an innings of ten runs to be " better " (i.e. more
elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs : cricket is also one
of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the pro-
fessional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic
changes of fortune, and its rules are so ill-defined that their
interpretation is partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for
instance, practised body-line bowling in Australia he was
not actually breaking any rule : he was merely doing some-
thing that was " not cricket ". Since cricket takes up a lot of
time and is rather an expensive game to play, it is predominantly
an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is bound up
with such concepts as " good form ", " playing the game ", etc.,
and it has declined in popularity just as the tradition of " don't
hit a man when he's down " has declined. It is not a twentieth-
century game, and nearly all modern-minded people dislike it.
The Nazis, for instance, were at pains to discourage cricket,
which had gained a certain footing in Germany before and after
144 CRITICAL ESSAYS
the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a burglar,
Hormmg was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise ;
he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was
able to imagine.
Raffles, no less than Great Expectations or Le Rouge et le Noir,
is a story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the pre-
cariousness of Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would
have made the " gentleman burglar " a member of the peerage,
or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class
origin and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his
personal charm. " We were in Society but not of it ", he says to
Bunny towards the end of the book ; and " I was asked about
for my cricket ". Both he and Bunny accept the values of
" Society " unquestioningly, and would settle down in it for
good if only they could get away with a big enough haul. The
ruin that constantly threatens them is all the blacker because
they only doubtfully " belong ". A duke who has served a
prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town,
if once disgraced, ceases to be " about town " for evermore.
The closing chapters of the book, when Raffles has been exposed
and is living under an assumed name, have a twilight of the gods
feeling, a mental atmosphere rather similar to that of Kipling's
poem, " Gentleman Rankers " :
" Yes, a trooper of the forces
Who has run his own six horses ! " etc.
Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the " cohorts of the damned ".
He can still commit successful burglaries, but there is no way
back into Paradise, which means Piccadilly and the M.C.C.
According to the public-school code there is only one means of
rehabilitation : death in battle. Raffles dies fighting against the
Boers (a practised reader would foresee this from the start), and
in the eyes of both Bunny and his creator this cancels his crimes.
Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious
belief, and they have no real ethical code, merely certain rules
of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively. But it is
just here that the deep moral difference between Raffles and
No Orchids becomes apparent. Raffles and Bunny, after all,
are gentlemen, and such standards as they do have are not to
be violated. Certain things are " not done ", and the idea of doing
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDtSfl 145
them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospit-
ality. He will commit a burglary in a house where he is staying
as a guest, but the victim must be a fellow-guest and not the host.
He will not commit murder, 1 and he avoids violence wherever
possible and prefers to carry out his robberies unarmed. He
regards friendship as sacred, and is chivalrous though not moral
in his relations with women. He will take extra risks in the name
of " sportsmanship ", and sometimes even for aesthetic reasons.
And above all, he is intensely patriotic. He celebrates the
Diamond Jubilee (" For sixty years, Bunny, we've been ruled
over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen ")
by despatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold
cup which he has stolen from the British Museum. He steals,
from partly political motives, a pearl which the German Emperor
is sending to one of the enemies of Britain, and when the Boer
War begins to go badly his one thought is to find his way into the
fighting line. At the front he unmasks a spy at the cost of re-
vealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer
bullet. In this combination of crime and patriotism he resembles
his near-contemporary Arsene Lupin, who also scores off the
German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past by enlisting
in the Foreign Legion.
It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles's
crinxes are very petty ones. Four hundred pounds' worth of
jewellery seems to hirn an excellent haul. And though the stories
are convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little
sensationalism very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex
crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind. It seems to be
the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels,
has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty
years. Some of the early detective stories do not even contain
a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all
murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable
crime. So also with the John Thorndyke stories, while of the
1 1945. Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously
responsible for the death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners
and have .behaved in a very reprehensible manner. He also, on one occa-
sion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer^ It is, however, a fairly well-
established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer
" doesn't count ".
10
146 CfctTICAt ESSAYS
Max Carrados stories only a minority are murders. Since 1918,
however, a detective story not containing a murder has been a
great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment
and exhumation are commonly exploited. Some of the Peter
Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid
interest in corpses. The Raffles stories, written from the angle
of the criminal, are much less anti-social than many modern
stories written from the angle of the detective. The main im-
pression that they leave behind is of boyishness. They belong
to a time when people had standards, though they happened to
be foolish standards. Their key-phrase is "not done ". The
line that they draw between good and evil is as senseless as a
Polynesian taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it has the advantage
that everyone accepts it.
So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. No
Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, was published
in 1939, but seems to have enjoyed its greatest popularity in 1940,
during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. In its main outlines
its story is this :
Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by
some gangsters who are almost immediately surprised and killed
off by a larger and better organised gang. They hold her to
ransom and extract half a million dollars from her father. Their
original plan had been to kill her as soon as the ransom-money
was received, but a chance keeps her alive. One of the gang is
a young man named Slim, whose sole pleasure in life consists in
driving knives into other people's bellies. In childhood he has
graduated by cutting up living animals with a pair of rusty
scissors. Slim is sexually impotent, but takes a kind of fancy to
Miss Blandish. Slim's mother, who is the real brains of the gang,
sees in this the chance of curing Slim's impotence, and decides
to keep Miss Blandish in custody till Slim shall have succeeded
in raping her. After many efforts and much persuasion, including
the flogging of Misa Blandish with a length of rubber hosepipe,
the rape is achieved. Meanwhile Miss Blandish's father has
hired a private detective, and by means of bribery and torture
the detective and the police manage to round up and exterminate
the whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss Blandish and is killed
after a final rape, and the detective prepares to restore Miss
Blandish to her family. By this time, however, she has developed
R A F F L K S A X" D Ml S S B L A N r T) I S H 147
such a taste for Slim's caresses l that she feels unable to live
without him, and she jumps out of the window of-a sky-scraper.
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the
full implications of this book. To begin with, its central story
bears a very marked resemblance to William Faulkner's novel,
Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product
of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly
a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere. Thirdly, the whole
book, recit as well as dialogue, is written in the American language ;
the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been in
the United States, seems to have made a complete mental trans-
ference to the American underworld. Fourthly, the book sold,
according to its publishers, no less than half a million copies.
I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is
much more sordid and brutal than this suggests. The book
contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of
casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful
reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture
of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act,
a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the
same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers
(there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably
of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being
knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption
and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour. The detec-
tive, for instance, is almost as great a rogue as the gangsters,
and actuated by nearly the same motives. Like them, he is
in pursuit of " five hundred grand ". It is necessary to the
machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish should be anxious to
get his daughter back, but apart from this, such things as affec-
tion, friendship, good nature or even ordinary politeness simply
do not enter. Nor, to any great extent, does normal sexuality.
Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole
story : the pursuit of power.
It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense
pornography. Unlike most books that deal in sexual sadism,
it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure.
1 1945. Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean
merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have
given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality of the book.
14S CRITICAL ESSAYS
Slim, the ravisher of Miss Blandish, has " wet, slobbering lips " :
this is disgusting, and it is meant to be disgusting. But the
scenes describing cruelty to women are comparatively per-
functory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed
by men upon other men : above all, the third-degreeing of the
gangster, Eddie Schultz, who is lashed into a chair and flogged
on the windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by fresh blows
as be breaks loose. In another of Mr. Chase's books, He Won't
Need It Now, the hero, who is intended to be a sympathetic and
perhaps even noble character, is described as stamping on some-
body's face, and then, having crushed the man's mouth in,
grinding his heel round and round in it. Even when physical
incidents of this kind are not occurring, the mental atmosphere
of these books is always the same. Their whole theme is the
struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak.
The big gangsters wipe out the little ones as mercilessly as a pike
gobbling up the little fish in a pond ; the police kill off the
criminals as cruelly as the angler kills the pike. If ultimately
one sides with the police against the gangsters, it is merely
because they are better organised and more powerful, because,
in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime. Might is right :
VCB metis.
As I have mentioned already, No Orchids enjoyed its greatest
vogue in 1940, though it was successfully running as a play till
some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to
console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the
war the New Yorker had a picture of a little man approaching
a news-stall littered with papers with such headlines as " Great
Tank Battles in Northern France ", " Big Naval Battle in the
North Sea ", " Huge Air Battles over the Channel ", etc. etc.
The little man is saying " Action Stories, please ". That little
man stood for all the drugged millions to whom the world of the
gangsters and the prize-ring is more " real ", more " tough ",
than such things as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and
pestilences. From the point of view of a reader of Action Stories,
a description of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the
European underground parties, would be " sissy stuff ". On the
other hand, some puny gun-battle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps
half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely " tough ". This
habit of mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls
BAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH 149
in a muddy trench, with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot
or two overhead, and whiles away his intolerable boredom by
reading an American gangster story. And what is it that makes
that story so exciting ? Precisely the fact that people are shoot-
ing at each other with machine-guns ! Neither the soldier
nor anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is taken
for granted that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a
real one.
The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a
passive victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of
oneself as being at the centre of events. But there is more to it
than that. Here it is necessary to refer again to the curious fact
of No Orchids being written with technical errors, perhaps,
but certainly with considerable skill in the American language.
There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less
the same stamp as No Orchids. Quite apart from books, there is
the huge array of " pulp magazines ", graded so as to cater for
different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same
mental atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography,
but the great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and
masochists. Sold at threepence a copy under the title of Yank
Mags, 1 these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in
England, but when the supply dried up owing to the war, no
satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English imitations
of the " pulp magazine " do now exist, but they are poor things
compared with the original. English crook films, again, never
approach the American crook film in brutality. And yet the
career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the American influence has
already gone. Not only is he himself living a continuous fantasy-
life in the Chicago underworld, but he can count on hundreds
of thousands of readers who know what is meant by a " clipshop "
or the-" hotsquat ", do not have to do mental arithmetic when
confronted by " fifty grand ", and understand at sight a sentence
like " Johnnie was a rummy and only two jumps ahead of the
nut-factory ". Evidently there are great numbers of English
people who are partly Americanised in language and, one ought
to add, in moral outlook. For there was no popular protest
1 They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast, which
accounted for their low price and crumpled appearance. Since the war
the ships have been ballasted with something more useful, probably gravel.
150 CRITICAL ESSAYS
against No Orchids. In the end it was withdrawn, but only
retrospectively, when a later work, Miss Callaghan Comes to
Grief, brought Mr. Chase's books to the attention of the author-
ities. Judging by casual conversations at the time, ordinary
readers got a mild thrill out of the obscenities of No Orchids, but
saw nothing undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people,
incidentally, were under the impression that it was an American
book reissued in England.
The thing that the ordinary reader ought to have objected to
almost certainly would have objected to, a few decades earlier
was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is implied through-
out No Orchids that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the
sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman pays better, but
there is no moral difference, since the police use essentially
criminal methods. In a book like He Won't Need It Now the
distinction between crime and crime-prevention practically dis-
appears. This is a new departure for English sensational fiction,
in which till recently there has always been a sharp distinction
between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue
must triumph in the last chapter. English books glorifying crime
(modern crime, that is pirates and highwaymen are different)
are very rare. Even a book like Raffles, as I have pointed out,
is governed by powerful taboos, and it is clearly understood that
Kaffles's crimes must be expiated sooner or later. In America,
both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to
admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more
marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it
possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have
been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone
from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord North-
cliffe and all the rest of the " log cabin to White House " brigade.
And switching back eighty years, one finds Mark Twain adopting
much the same attitude towards the disgusting bandit Slade,
hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desper-
adoes generally. They were successful, they " made good ",
therefore he admired them.
In a book like No Orchids one is not, as in the old-style crime
story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world
of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual
perversion, No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH 151
Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time
the English attitude towards crime is not so superior to the
American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is mixed up
with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the
last twenty years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar
Wallace, especially in such typical books as The Orator and the
Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-
story writers to break away from the old tradition of the private
detective and make his central figure a Scotland Yard official.
Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his problems without
the help and even, in the earlier stories, against the opposition
of the police. Moreover, like Dupin, he is essentially an intel-
lectual, even a scientist. He reasons logically from observed
fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the
routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this
slur, as he considered it, on Scotland Yard, and in several news-
paper articles he went out of his way to denounce Holmes by
name. His own ideal was the detective inspector who catches
criminals not because he is intellectually brilliant but because
he is part of an all-powerful organisation. Hence the curious
fact that in Wallace's most characteristic stories the " clue "
and the " deduction " play no part. The criminal is always
defeated either by an incredible coincidence, or because in some
unexplained manner the police know all about the crime before-
hand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace's
admiration for the police is pure bully- worship. A Scotland
Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he can
imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw
against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves
in the Roman arena. His policemen behave much more brutally
than British policemen do in real life they hit people without
provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so
on and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism.
(For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the villain
is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But it is
sadism after the English fashion : that is to say, it is unconscious,
there is not overtly any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds
of the law. The British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and
gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials : but still
that is better, on any count, than tolerating or admiring crime,
152 CRITICAL ESSAYS
If one must worship a bully, it is better that he should be a police-
man than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some extent
by the concept of " not done ". In No Orchids anything is
" done " so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers are
down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse
symptom than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is
worse than boxing, or Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.
In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only
took the plot ; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not
similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this par-
ticular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolises is
the vulgarisation of ideas which is constantly happening, and
which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has
been described as " Faulkner for the masses ", but it would be
more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a
popular writer there are many such in America, but they are
still rarities in England who has caught up with what it is now
fashionable to call " realism ", meaning the doctrine that might
is right. The growth of " realism " has been the great feature of
the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so
is a complicated question. The interconnection between sadism,
masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism and
totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been
scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat in-
delicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind,
I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic
element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this
probably has some connection with Shaw's admiration for
dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but
nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most
slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the count-
less English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not
different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler
or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached
" punch ", " drive ", " personality " and " learn to be a Tiger
man " in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation
of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed
down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping
power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that
the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and
BAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH 153
wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired
if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and " the end
justifies the means " often becomes, in effect, " the means justify
themselves provided they are dirty enough ". This idea colours
the outlook of all sympathisers with totalitarianism, and accounts,
for instance, for the positive delight with which many English
intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only
doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral,
and for that reason to be admired ; the explanations of it, which
were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the
English-speaking peoples have been stories in which the hero
fights against odds. This is true all the way from Robin Hood
to Pop-eye the Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western
world is Jack the Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this
should be renamed Jack the Dwarf-killer, and there already
exists a considerable literature which teaches, either overtly or
implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the
little man. Most of what is now written about foreign policy
is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several decades
such phrases as " Play the game ", " Don't hit a man when he's
down " and " It's not cricket " have never failed to draw a snigger
from anyone of intellectual pretensions. What is comparatively
new is to find the accepted pattern according to which (a) right
is right and wrong is wrong, whoever wins, and (b) weakness must
be respected, disappearing from popular literature as well. When
I first read D. H. Lawrence's novels, at the age of about twenty,
I was puzzled by the fact that there did not seem to be any
classification of the characters into " good " and " bad ".
Lawrence seemed to sympathise with all of them about equally,
and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost
my bearings. To-day no one would think of looking for heroes
.and villains in a serious novel, but in lowbrow fiction one still
expects to find a sharp distinction between right and wrong and
between legality and illegality. The common people, on the
whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from
which the intellectuals have long since escaped. But the popu-
larity of No Orchids and the American books and magazines to
which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of " realism "
is gaining ground,
154 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Several people, after reading No Orchids, have remarked to
rne, " It's pure Fascism ". This is a correct description, although
the book has not the smallest connection with politics and very
little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same
relation to Fascism as, say, Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-
century capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totali-
tarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is present-
ing, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene,
in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of
hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution
without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in
cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics,
treachery, bribery and quislingism are normal and morally
neutral, even admirable when they are done in u large and bold
way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and
when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be
translated into a simple story about individuals. He can take
an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U.
and the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which
they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships
Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al
Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord
Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a
difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook.
Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in
common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols
of the English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively
sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one
hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other,
there is a similar gulf.
One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's
books. It is possible that it is an isolated phenomenon, brought
about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war. But if
such books should definitely acclimatise themselves in England,
instead of being merely a half-understood import from America,
there would be good grounds for dismay. In choosing Raffles
as a background for No Orchids I deliberately chose a book which
by the standards of its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, as
I have pointed out, has no real moral code, no religion, certainly
uo social consciousness, All he has is a set of reflexes the
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH 155
nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp
tap on this reflex or that (they are called " sport ", " pal ",
" woman ", " king and country " and so forth), and you get a
predictable reaction, In Mr. Chase's books there are no gentle-
men and no taboos. Emancipation is complete, Freud and
Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing the
schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and
corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness,
like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a
social point of view has been underrated. 1944.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE
WHEN the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium
in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things,
Mr. P*. G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early
part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have
realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As
he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked,
" Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was placed
for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent
statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way,
German officers in the neighbourhood frequently " dropping in
for a bath or a party ".
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that
Wodehouse had been released from internment and was living
at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the public
was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts
of a " non-political " nature over the German radio. The full
texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain at this date, but
Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June
and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again.
The first broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi
radio but took the form of an interview with Harry Flannery,
the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which
still had its correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published
in the Saturday Evening Post an article which he had written
while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's
experiences in internment, but they did include a very few com-
ments on the war. The following are fair samples :
" I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work
up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel bel-
ligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go
out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."
" A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the
right idea ; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I
have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for
internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up
156
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE 157
with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away
from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take
along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side."
" In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud
of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months
resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure. . . .
The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a
loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to
look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am pre-
pared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to
reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator.
This offer holds good till Wednesday week."
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wode-
house was also censured for using (in the interview with Flannery)
the phrase " whether Britain wins the war or not ", and he did
not make things better by describing in another broadcast the
filthy habits of some Belgian prisoners among whom he was
interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast and repeated
it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks
very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about
the discomforts of internment but to remark that " the internees
at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually
win ". The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he
had not been ill treated and bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England.
There were questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments
in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly
all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it
would be better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that
Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was doing. On
15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by " Cassandra " of the Daily Mirror, accusing
Wodehouse of " selling his country ". This postscript made free
use of such expressions as " Quisling " and " worshipping the
Ftihrer ". The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed
to do German propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the
internment camp.
" Cassandra's " Postscript caused a certain amount of protest,
but on the whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling
against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous lending
158 CRITICAL ESSAYS
libraries withdrew Wodehouse's books from circulation. Here is
a typical news item :
" Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of
Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist, Portadown (North Ireland)
Urban District Council banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their
public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra's broad-
cast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer."
(Daily Mirror.)
In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the
air and was still doing so a couple of years later. As late as
December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that Wode-
house should be put on trial as a traitor.
There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of
it will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather
peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that Wode-
house's talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them)
showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological
sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to
the press claimed that " Fascist tendencies " could be detected
in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try
to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment,
but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not
convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really
interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid. When
Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still under guard) at
the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he was dealing
with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their
broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some
exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication
slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase " whether England
wins or not " did get through. Soon after the interview Wode-
house told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi
radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special
significance. Flannery comments : x
" By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of
the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human
angle. . . . Plack (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near
1 Assignment to Berlin, by Harrv W. Fiannery. (Michael Joseph, 1942.)
IK DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE 159
Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely
without political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse
that in return for being released from the prison camp he write a
series of broadcasts about his experiences ; there would be no
censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making
that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that
Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and that he
seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the period
about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it
meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster,"
The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and
Plack seems to be merely Flannery 's own interpretation. The
arrangement may have been of a much less definite kind, and to
judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse's main idea
in making them was to keep in touch with his public and the
comedian's ruling passion to get a laugh. Obviously they are
not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or
John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding
the nature of Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned
Wodehouse that it would be unwise to broadcast, but not very
forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast
he refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself
as an American citizen. He had contemplated naturalisation,
but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even used, to
Flannery, the phrase, " We're not at war with Germany ".
I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works.
It names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete.
It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that
there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a
third of the total which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy
to read the whole output of a popular writer who is normally
published in cheap editions. But I have, followed his work fairly
closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well
acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere an atmosphere
which has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but
shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from
Flannery's book which I quoted above there are two remarks
which would immediately strike any attentive reader of Wode-
house. One is to the effect that Wodehouse " was still living in
the period about which he wrote ", and the other that the Nazi
160 CRITICAL ESSAYS
Propaganda Ministry made use of him because he " made fun
of the English ". The second statement is based on a miscon-
ception to which I will return presently. But Flannery's other
comment is quite true and contains in it part of the clue to Wode-
house's behaviour.
A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's
novels is how long ago the better-known of them were written.
We think of him as in some sense typifying the silliness of the
nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes
and characters by which he is best remembered had all made
their appearance before 1925. Psmith first appeared in 1909,
having been foreshadowed by other characters in earlier school-
stories. Blandings Castle, with Baxter and the Earl of Emsworth
both in residence, was introduced in 1915. The Jeeves- Wooster
cycle began in 1919, both Jeeves and Wooster having made brief
appearances earlier. Ukridge appeared in 1924. When one looks
through the list of Wodehouse's books from 1902 onwards, one
can observe three fairly well-marked periods. The first is the
school-story period. It includes such books as The Gold Bat,
The Pothunters, etc., and has its high-spot in Mike (1909). Psmith
in the City, published in the following year, belongs in this category,
though it is not directly concerned with school life. The next
is the American period. Wodehouse seems to have lived in the
United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a while showed
signs of becoming Americanised in idiom and outlook. Some
of the stories in The Man with Two Left Feet (1917) appear to
have been influenced by 0. Henry, and other books written
about this time contain Americanisms (e.g. " highball " for
" whisky and soda ") which an Englishman would not normally
use in propria persona. Nevertheless, almost all the books of
this period Psmith, Journalist ; The Little Nugget ; The Indis-
cretions of Archie ; Piccadilly Jim and various others depend
for their effect on the contrast between English and American
manners. English characters appear in an American setting,
or vice versa : there is a certain number of purely English stories,
but hardly any purely American ones. The third period might
fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-
twenties Wodehouse must have been making a very large income,
and the social status of his characters moved upwards accordingly,
though the Ukridge stories form a partial exception. The typical
IN DEFENCE OP P. G. WODEHOUSE 161
setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an
expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier
books fades out, cricket and football giving way to golf, and the
element of farce and burlesque becomes more marked. No doubt
many of the later books, such as Summer Lightning, are light
comedy rather than pure farce, but the occasional attempts at
moral earnestness which can be found in P smith, Journalist ;
The Little Nugget ; The Coming of Bill ; The Man with Two Left
Feet and some of the school stories, no longer appear. Mike
Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not
a very startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable
things about Wodehouse is his lack of development. Books like
The Gold Bat and Tales of St. Austin's, written in the opening
years of this century, already have the familiar atmosphere.
How much of a formula the writing of his later books had become
one can see from the fact that he continued to write stories of
English life although throughout the sixteen years before his
internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.
Mike, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged
form, must be one of the best " light " school stories in English.
But though its incidents are largely farcical, it is by no means
a satire on the public-school system, and The Gold Bat, The
Pothunters, etc., are even less- so. Wodehouse was educated at
Dulwich, and then worked in a bank and graduated into novel-
writing by way of very cheap journalism. It is clear that for
many years he remained " fixated " on his old school and loathed
the unromantic job and the lower- middle-class surroundings in
which he found himself. In the early stories the "glamour"
of public-school life (house matches, fagging, teas round the study
fire, etc.) is laid on fairly thick, and the " play the game " code
of morals is accepted with not many reservations. Wrykyn,
Wodehouse's imaginary public school, is a school of a more
fashionable type than Dulwich, and one gets the impression that
between The Gold Bat (1904) and Mike (1909) Wrykyn itself has
become more expensive and moved farther from London. Psycho-
logically the most revealing book of Wodehouse's early period is
Psmith in the City. Mike Jackson's father has suddenly lost his
money, and Mike, like Wodehouse himself, is thrust at the age
of about eighteen into an ill-paid subordinate job in a bank.
Psmith is similarly employed, though not from financial necessity.
II
162 ORITIOALBSSAYS
Both this book and Psmith, Journalist (1915) are unusual in thai
they display a certain amount of political consciousness. Psmith
at this stage chooses to call himself a Socialist in his mind, and
no doubt in Wodehouse's, this means no more than ignoring class
distinctions and on one occasion the two boys attend an open-
air meeting on Clapham Common and go home to tea with an
elderly Socialist orator, whose shabby-genteel home is described
with some accuracy. But the most striking feature of the book
is Mike's inability to wean himself from the atmosphere of school.
He enters upon his job without any pretence of enthusiasm, and
his main desire is not, as one might expect, to find a more in-
teresting and useful job, but simply to be playing cricket. When
he has to find himself lodgings he chooses to settle at Dulwich,
because there he will be near a school and will be able to hear
the agreeable sound of the ball striking against the bat. The
climax of the book comes when Mike gets the chance to play in
a county match and simply walks out of his job in order to do
so. The point is that Wodehouse here sympathises with Mike :
indeed he identifies himself with him, for it is clear enough that
Mike bears the same relation to Wodehouse as Julien Sorel to
Stendhal. But he created many other heroes essentially similar.
Through the books of this and the next period there passes a
whole series of young men to whom playing games and " keeping
fit " are a sufficient life-work. Wodehouse is almost incapable
of imagining a desirable job. The great thing is to have money
of your own, or, failing that, to find a sinecure. The hero of
Something Fresh (1915) escapes from low-class journalism by
becoming physical-training instructor to a dyspeptic millionaire :
this is regarded as a step up, morally as well as financially.
In the books of the third period there is no narcissism and no
serious interludes, but the implied moral and social background
has changed much less than might appear at first sight. If one
compares Bertie Wooster with Mike, or even with the rugger-
playing prefects of the earliest school stories, one sees that the
only real difference between them is that Bertie is richer and
lazier. His ideals would be almost the same as theirs, but he
fails to live up to them. Archie Moffam, in The Indiscretions of
Archie (1921), is a type intermediate between Bertie and the
earlier heroes : he is an ass, but he is also honest, kind-hearted,
athletic and courageous. From first to last Wodehouse takes the
IN DEFENCE OP P. G. WODEHOUSE 163
public-school code of behaviour for granted, with the difference
that in his later, more sophisticated period he prefers to show
his characters violating it or living up to it against their will :
" Bertie ! You wouldn't let down a pal ? "
" Yes, I would."
" But we were at school together, Bertie. "
" I don't care."
" The old school, Bertie, the old school ! "
" Oh, well dash it ! "
Bertie, a sluggish Don Quixote, has no wish to tilt at windmills,
but he would hardly think of refusing to do so when honour calls.
Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic
characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles,
but very few of them could be described as immoral. Even
Ukridge is a visionary rather than a plain crook. The most
immoral, or rather un-moral, of Wodehouse' s characters is Jeeves,
who acts as a foil to Bertie Wooster's comparative high-minded-
ness and perhaps symbolises the widespread English belief that
intelligence and unscrupulousness are much the same thing.
How closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be
seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything
in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous sacrifice for a
farcical writer to make. Not only are there no dirty jokes, but
there are hardly any compromising situations : the horns-on-the-
forehead motif is almost completely avoided. Most of the full-
length books, of course, contain a " love interest ", but it is always
at the light-comedy level : the love affair, with its complications
and its idyllic scenes, goes on and on, but, as the saying goes,
" nothing happens ". It is significant that Wodehouse, by nature
a writer of farces, was able to collaborate more than once with
Ian Hay, a serio-comic writer and an exponent (vide Pip, etc.)
of the " clean-living Englishman " tradition at its silliest.
In Something Fresh Wodehouse had discovered the comic
possibilities of the English aristocracy, and a succession of ridi-
culous but, save in a very few instances, not actually contemptible
barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the
rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, out-
side England, as a penetrating satirist of English society. Hence
Flannery's statement that Wodehouse " made fun of the English ",
which is the impression he would prDbably make on a German
164 CRITICAL ESSAYS
or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts
from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist
who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that
Wodehouse had gone over to the enemy, which from his own
point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me
was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer
who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy
in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very
difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of
the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their
finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear
enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper
class either. On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbish-
ness is perceptible all through his work. Just as an intelligent
Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James
Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an
English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hilde-
brand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-
Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking
the social hierarchy. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised
titles would write of them so much. Wodehouse's attitude
towards the English social system is the same as his attitude
towards the public-school moral code a mild facetiousness
covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is
funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie
Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because
the servant ought not to be superior to the master. An American
reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile
caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and
they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent
aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the
traditional stage Englishman. But, as any English reader would
see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and Wode-
house's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as
much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain
problems are consistently avoided. Almost without exception
his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not
avaricious : their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his
own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing
everyone as " Comrade ".
IN DEFENCE OP P. G. WODEHOUSE 165
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster :
his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie
really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the " knut "
of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as " Gilbert the
Filbert " or " Reckless Reggie of the Regent's Palace ". The
kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of
the " clubman " or " man about town ", the elegant young man
who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his
arm and a carnation, in his buttonhole, barely survived into the
nineteen-twenties. It is significant that Wodehouse could publish
in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wear-
ing spats at that date ? They had gone out of fashion quite ten
years earlier. But the traditional " knut ", the " Piccadilly
Johnny ", ought to wear spats, just as the pantomime Chinese
ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not obliged to
keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wode-
house continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no
doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during
the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of
English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naive,
traditional arid, at bottom, admiring picture. Nor did he ever
become genuinely Americanised. As I have pointed out, spon-
taneous Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period,
but Wodehouse remained English enough to find American slang
an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He loves to thrust
a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English
(" With a hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me
and went out into the night "), and expressions like " a piece of
cheese " or " bust him on the noggin " lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any
American contacts, and his use of garbled quotations is a common
device of English writers running back to Fielding. As Mr. John
Hayward has pointed out, 1 Wodehouse owes a good deal to
his knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare.
His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience,
but at an audience educated along traditional lines. When, for
instance, he describes somebody as heaving " the kind of sigh
that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped
1 P. O. Wodehouse, by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942.) I
believe this is the only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse.
166 CRITICAL ESSAYS
in for its lunch ", he is assuming that his readers will know some-
thing of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he
admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W.
Jacobs, Kipling and F. Anstey, and he has remained closer to
them than to the quick-moving American comic writers such as
Ring Lardner or Damon Ilunyan. In his radio interview with
Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether " the kind of people
and the kind of England I write about will live after the war ",
not realising that they were ghosts already. " He was still living
in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery, meaning,
probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the
Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed
round about 1915.
If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea
that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine
becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He may have been
induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was
due for release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday),
but he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging
to British interests. As I have tried to show, his moral outlook
has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the
public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unfor-
givable of all the sins. But how could he fail to grasp that what
he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and
would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head ?
To answer this one must take two things into consideration.
First, Wodehouse's complete lack so far as one can judge from
his printed works of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk
of " Fascist tendencies " in his books. There are no post-1918
tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy
awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not un-
friendly references to Socialism. In The Heart of a Goof (1926)
there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems
to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the
U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely
frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That
is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so
far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I
know, does he so much as use the word " Fascism " or " Nazism ".
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE 167
In left-wing circles, indeed in " enlightened " circles of any kind,
to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis
whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before
the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been
developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against
Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember,
remained anaesthetic to that struggle until late into 1940.
Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia the long
series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their con-
sciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among
foreigners and " not our business ". One can gauge the general
ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought
of " Fascism " as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered
when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is
nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better
informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of
his readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse
happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war
reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now, but
until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably
tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain
government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting
that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as
possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over
the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards,
of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty
extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone,
the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain
was to be " reduced to degradation and poverty ". By the middle
of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and
feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But
Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and
his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had
missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still
reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several
occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British
soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at
least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no attention,
however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
168 CRITICAL ESSAYS
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had
done.
But why ? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks
by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry ? One has
to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of
propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is
almost certainly significant the date. Wodehouse was released
two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a
time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known
that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to
keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact,
about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did
become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans
could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in
combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly and
presumably they expected to do so the Americans might never
intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move,
but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists.
He was well known in the United States, and he was or so the
Germans calculated popular with the Anglophobe public as a
caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his
spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted
to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release
would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew
how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was
the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broad-
casting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to
expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations
were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British
morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only
a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to
win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by
their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a
social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism
and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind,
and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association
tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and " Cassandra's " articles
in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic pro-
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE 169
paganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse
made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the
rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse as " Cassandra " vigor-
ously pointed out in his broadcast was a rich man. But he
was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity
and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To
denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook,
A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be,
is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches 50,000
a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He
is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune usually a very
temporary fortune like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep.
Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good propaganda
opening. It was a chance to " expose " a wealthy parasite with-
out drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.
In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable
to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing
him three or four years later and more, to let an impression
remain that he acted with conscious treachery is not excusable.
Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than
the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely
the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds
of petty rats police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women
who have slept with German soldiers are hunted down while
almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the
fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives
who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who
were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the
wretched Wodehouse just because success and expatriation had
allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age became
the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that
it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is
caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the
effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of
years ; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to
retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship,
we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile,
if we really want to punish the people who weakened national
morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are
nearer home and better worth chasing. 1945.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
MORRISON AND GIBB LTD ,
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
W 754
THE WOUND AND THE BOW
Edmund Wilson
k ' The subjects of these * seven studies in literature '
ate : Dickens, Kipling, Casanova, Edith Wharton,
Hemingway, Joyce's ' Finnegan's Wake,' and the Philoc-
tetes of Sophocles.
" His (Mr. Wilson's) critical perspective, his integrity,
and what might be called his delving insight make him
the most valuable critic alive to-day.
" Mr. Wilson's capacity for following a hard trail is
seen at its best in the opening essay on Dickens . . .
the first critic to do justice to the uneasy Dickens, to
trace conflict behind a brilliant restlessness of creation.
" The third essay on ' Finnegan's Wake ' makes
discoveries where discovery is certainly needed. Mr.
Wilson has succeeded where others have failed and
experienced the triumph of reaching that last sentence
which can only be completed by starting again on
page 1.
"The remaining essays deal, more briefly, with
Casanova, Edith Wharton, and Hemingway. The first
takes the right line by raising Casanova out of roguery
into literature, but does not get far. I can't judge the
second : the Hemingway piece is a gem. One can't
think of much to say about Hemingway after reading
Mr. Wilson. Most of his criticism starts the reader on
journeys which will keep him going for weeks. But
this essay on Hemingway shuts the door and turns the
key in the lock."
Extracts from G. W. Stonier's review in the New
Statesman, 18th April 1942.
Demy 8v0. 15s. net
