A Speech delivered in London, 1940

I have come to-day, taking my life in my hands, to say what I can about the English people, a subject which always provokes much feeling. I think no more perilous undertaking could be imagined, especially as, from time to time, my candour may compel me to praise the English. This will distress both my Celtic hearers, who will think it offensive, and my English hearers, who will think it very bad taste. Still, I will try because, although people disagree a great deal about the English, the one thing they do seem to agree about is that the English are utterly and impenetrably mysterious.

For centuries foreigners have proclaimed that we were mad. Verrückte Engländer was always the German word for us. Even M. André Maurois, who knows and likes us, feels it necessary to warn the French visitor to England: “In thirty years you will begin to understand this simple, mysterious and noble country.” I have read books about the English by Frenchmen, Chinese, Czechs, Dutchmen, Scots, and, of course, Mr. Bernard Shaw, who is Irish. They earnestly explain us with more or less irritation and more or less ingenuity, and nearly always they succeed in missing the obvious. Americans, who have what I can only call the advantage of having started life as Englishmen, usually misunderstand us with that extra thoroughness that waits on family misunderstandings. The English themselves do not as a rule bother to explain themselves, though occasionally a J. B. Priestley comes along to shed a little light on us, and G. K. Chesterton has done his gallant best, and he is never, never wrong about his own countrymen.

Our refusal to explain is due, partly to our rooted and maddening conviction that it does not matter much what outsiders think, and also to a reasonable doubt whether explanations do not merely darken counsel. However, as there seems to be a general feeling that the English character is becoming a matter of some importance in the present world crisis, I shall do my best to peg down the elusive creature at a few salient points for better examination.

The first, most important thing to notice, and the one which gives the clue to all the rest, is that the English are mongrels; and that, alone of all nations upon earth, they pride themselves upon being mongrels. If ever you hear a man boast of his pure English blood, he may be a Bostonian, he may be a Jew; but whatever he is, he is not English. When Queen Elizabeth said that she was “mere English,” she meant that she had a Welsh surname, though she was a Londoner on the distaff side; when I say I am English, I mean that my mother’s family came from Hampshire, and that I have one Scotch and one Irish grandparent.

Ask a man of real English descent whether his people came over with William the Conqueror, and he will probably reply: “Good Heavens, no! We’re Saxon; there were Budgeries in the Manor of Budge when Billy the Conk arrived. Of course,” he will add, and all his subsequent qualifications will begin with “of course”—“of course, a good deal of Norman blood came into the family afterwards. We’re a pretty mixed lot, really. There’s a legend that old Sir Gilbert brought back a Saracen bride after the third Crusade. And there was Captain John Budgery, the one that sailed with Hawkins—he married a Red Indian—sort of Pocahontas business, you know. And, of course, there’s a lot of Scotch and Irish in me, though my mother’s grandfather was pure Huguenot. And I’ve sometimes fancied there might be a dash of the tar-brush somewhere—there was Robert Budgery who turned up as the missing heir from South America in the eighteenth century, nobody ever knew where his mother came from. The Cornish branch, of course, have a strong Spanish streak in them; the Armada, you know, and all that.” So he rambles on, unrolling the history of England along with his family tree, and getting more and more mongrel, and more and more pleased with himself, at every word.

We may disbelieve the legend about old Sir Gilbert and the Pocahontas romance; the important thing is that that is what the Englishman likes to believe about himself. And one thing we must remember: that before the Conquest there was no such thing as an Englishman. There were Angles and Saxons, Danes, various kinds of British Celt, and probably some people with traces of Roman descent, but the strange compound we call an Englishman had not yet appeared, any more than the English language. The basic Englishman is the compound of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French; and though he contains elements from both those main sources, his characteristic Englishry is neither of them, but the blend of the two.

In this, he is exactly like his own English language. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not written in English: it is written in Anglo-Saxon; the Tristan of Thomas is not written in English: it is written in Anglo-French. But the romances written in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are written in what, though antiquated and difficult, is quite definitely and increasingly recognisable as the English speech of to-day; and by the time we get to Chaucer, we are reading something that cannot possibly be called a variety of French or of Anglo-Saxon. It is English; a language in its own right, with its roots in two civilisations, and the most various, flexible, rich and expressive instrument of human speech since the days of Pericles. The well-meaning people who used to implore us to “return to our native Anglo-Saxon tongue”—to call an omnibus a folk-wain and remorse of conscience the againbite of inwit—were really asking us to abandon our English heritage altogether. English is rich and flexible because it is double-rooted; the whole business of the English writer is to know when to use his Saxon and when to use his French, and therefore his Latin, vocabulary; for the Latin runs readily along with the Saxon because the French words are there to give it passage. Look at this:

This my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

It is the thunder of the Latin polysyllables that makes the Saxon monosyllables so ominous and so terrific. As the language, so the nation. The strength of the English, their adaptability, their strange talent for improvisation, their disconcerting mixture of the practical and the visionary are the virtues of their mongrel breeding. It is not surprising that the English are dubious about Nordic blood and racial purity. In small and peaceable peoples they consider claims to purity of blood to be harmless and pretty, but rather childish and absurd; in large and ferocious peoples they consider them to be ugly and dangerous, but none the less childish and absurd. (For you will notice that the English, with their misguided and frivolous sense of humour, which is the despair of all earnest peoples, think a thing none the less funny because it may be dangerous; this is one of the things about them which earnest foreigners find misleading and tiresome.)

A direct result of the mongrel nature of the English, and a thing very noticeable about them, is that they have never in their lives been what the Germans still are, that is, a Volk . From the first beginnings of their Englishry, they have been, not a race, but a nation. The comparative absence of folk-music and folk-customs from England is remarkable, compared with their energetic survival in, say, the Highlands of Scotland; and the English have never had a folk-costume at all. The thing that ties them together is not a consciousness of common blood so much as a common law, a common culture, and a very long memory of national consciousness. The law, generally speaking, is Saxon; the culture, generally speaking, is continental.

This at once makes a distinction between us and, say, the Scots, whose law is, generally speaking, Roman, while their culture was, for a long time, largely racial. The English, on the whole, got their constitutional teething over remarkably early. They were already nationally conscious when, in Henry II’s reign, they objected to interference by the Pope, not on religious grounds, but because he was a foreign sovereign putting his finger in the English political pie. The Englishman’s offensive feeling of superiority over aliens is largely due to the recollection that England was a nation before other peoples had grown out of being tribes, or clans, or bits and pieces of the Roman Empire. The fact that, only the other day, an arrested man was required to be produced under Habeas Corpus, on the ground that his detention was “contrary to the Great Charter,” is the sort of thing that reminds the Englishman just how far his rights as a national go back. England is a nation; in essentials she has never, since the time that she could properly be called England, been anything else.

As a result of this, the arrogance and insolence of English people became proverbial at a surprisingly early date. Already somewhere about the fourteenth century, visiting observers are heard to remark plaintively that the English “do not like foreigners”; and somewhere about Queen Elizabeth’s time we hear the characteristic English compliment that so-and-so is “almost like an Englishman.” The national consciousness is fully established. I doubt whether any other nation uses the word “foreigner” and “alien” with such offensive intonations as the English. As a French observer has remarked: in France, the most thriving hotel in a town is often called: “Hôtel des Étrangers.” What English establishment could hope to do business under the title: “Aliens’ Hotel”?

Another result of this is the focusing of the political life of the Three Kingdoms about England. It is perfectly true that, ever since the Union, and, indeed, long before that, great posts in the executive and in the services have frequently been held by Scots, Irishmen, Welshmen and Jews. The Celtic members of the community continually point this out, and with very great justice. But the framework in which these men function is the English framework. Foreigners, especially enemy foreigners, make no mistake about this. “ Gott strafe England,” they say, and the legendary Scotsman who laboriously altered this to “ Gott strafe Britain” correctly recognised the compliment implied. It is England who is the object of hymns of hate: “Wir fahren gegen England.” The real enemy is England, and that peculiar English conception of the State which the rest of Britain has assimilated, and to which it so magnificently works.

The distinctive characteristic of this conception has been pointed out by Dr. Wingfield-Stratford. It is the quite peculiar notion of justice and liberty derived from Saxon Law, which has influenced English political thought since the time of King Alfred. English Law has never been codified; it is all case-law. It does not deal with right in the abstract, but with “my rights”; it is not concerned with “liberty,” but only with “our liberties.” The French Republic had as its motto (and will have again, please God) three abstract words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The framers of the Declaration of Independence committed themselves to a general proposition: “We take these things to be self-evident; that all men are born free and equal.”

English Law does not appear to be interested in any such philosophical speculations. Its characteristic utterance is that of the Great Charter: “To no man (i.e. to no individual Tom, Dick or Harry, never mind the rights of man in general) will we (the particular government in power at the time) deny, sell, or delay justice” (which, from the context, means clearly, not égalité as such, but an equitable decision in the courts as between man and man). The English Law is concerned with the rights of the individual man as against the State and as against his neighbour. Its aims are no more lofty than that; but it is quite determined that the rights and liberties of the individual shall not be obscured by, or subjected to, any doctrinaire notions about State machinery.

The common Englishman understands this perfectly. If you notice, you will never hear him coming into the courts clamouring for “justice”; what he wants is “my rights,” and he will claim them against all comers, including, and indeed, most of all, against the government. And, let us be clear about this, he claims them, not as an Englishman, the member of a superior race, but as an English subject, the member of a superior nation. He will, except at moments when his natural balance is disturbed by spy scares, or by an excessively high rate of unemployment, claim them just as fiercely for the naturalised stranger in his midst. If a person is an English citizen he “did ought to have” his English rights as an individual. The concept of race subdues the individual to one element, one unit, in a super-organism. The concept of nation encourages individual liberties, and the separate importance of the man, the family, the parish, the county. Above all, it encourages that separation of the judicature from the legislature which is the safeguard of the English courts and of the rights of the commoner against being bribed or browbeaten by the State. The violent opposition of Parliament to the attempt to set up special courts for political offences was a declaration that, even in a national emergency of the very gravest kind, the Englishman will not surrender that which he rightly looks upon as the corner-stone of his liberties.

Of course, this strong sense of national solidarity was only able to establish itself so early and develop itself so powerfully because of the English Channel. So long as the Scots could be kept from opening the back door to the Continent, the English could get along with their constitutional experiments without the disturbance caused by foreign invasion, and without anything like the same pressure from foreign influence that was exerted upon European countries with land frontiers. There were plenty of bad scares. Up to 1588 it was still possible that England might lose her individuality, and become a mere part of that Holy Roman Empire to which she had always paid, at any rate, a nominal allegiance (though it is true to say that all through those early years the English had rather taken the view that while, of course, they were part of the Roman Empire, they need not allow that consideration to influence their practical politics).

Still, in theory she was part of the Empire. I suppose that one might say that the conclusive proof that England had achieved full nationality was given when Philip of Spain, setting forth with the Pope’s blessing to reconquer England for Rome, was faced by the English fleet sailing under a Catholic Admiral. Whatever we may think about the Reformation, that was an omen that could not be mistaken. From that time, the world knew that England was a nation. But one man had known it earlier. Henry VIII, the most powerful despot that ever sat on the English throne, made his will and, like any feudal over-lord, left his kingdom, as his personal property, to his three children in succession. But, unlike any feudal over-lord, he knew that his was not the final word; he brought his will into the House of Commons, and had it ratified by the English Parliament. “This realm of England,” he said, “is an Empire.” By this he meant, not an empire in the modern sense of the word, but an Imperium—what we mean to-day when we speak of a Sovereign State.

And when Wolsey, with an instinct less sure than his to detect the changes in the wind of time, urged him to take certain measures, secure in an authority super-nationally derived, Henry found the retort which was to make English history: “We cannot do it; the Commons would not allow it.” England was a nation; and he knew it.

This sense of national solidarity, this sense of superiority and security, and this concentration on an island with a sea front worked, together with the mongrelism of the English, to produce that very thing which the foreigner finds so contradictory and inexplicable; the fact that along with the strong insularity of the English there goes the English passion for the exotic, the adventurous and the romantic, and the curious dreamy imagination which seems to go so strangely with the practical executive ability of the English. It is the assurance of one’s own position that promotes free expansion. The duke and the dustman can get on together far more easily than either can get on with the climber, because each of them knows where he stands and has nothing to lose. So the English, more and more secure in their internal solidarity and their insular position, could afford to encourage any fancies for adventure both of the mind and of the spirit. We are not a military nation, as has sometimes been said; and I doubt whether it is correct to call us a martial race; but we are an adventurous people. We are the magpies of Europe. We love to decorate ourselves with foreign spoils, mental and spiritual as well as material. We feel we are in no danger of losing our own individuality by decking ourselves in these borrowed plumes. Insecurity tends to turn the soul inwards upon itself, so that it keeps on reckoning itself up to see that it is all there, like M. Perrichon with his parcels; but security looks outward.

So the sea throughout our history has been not only our moat defensive, but also the high-road to adventure.

We run to the far ends of the earth collecting this and that, and are delighted with the strange things we can bring home to adorn our doggedly insular and obstinately English firesides. I do not know anything more characteristically English than the little house I visited a short time ago in the Isle of Wight. It was stuffy and Victorian to a degree, and its staple furniture was quite unbelievably insular and ugly; and it was so crowded with odd treasures that you could scarcely move without tripping over something rich and strange from some far quarter of the world. Pewter and silver, fossils, fragments of lost ships, exquisite pieces of china, musical-boxes, a pair of recorders, a bag of gold angels picked up on the shore, a whole drawer stuffed with the records and the flotsam and jetsam of ships wrecked off the Needles. All jumbled together without any attempt at artistic display, but with a kind of eccentric order quite intelligible to its owner.

England is an adventurer and a collector of unconsidered trifles. It would be true to say that she did not conquer her Empire; she did not even very deliberately acquire it in the interests of her trade; the fact is that she collected it casually, and almost accidentally, in a spirit of lighthearted adventure, as a sailor will collect monkeys and parrots, and, like the sailor, found herself committed to looking after the creature. The English, though they have done a good deal of conquering in this random kind of way, have never considered themselves to be a nation of conquerors, in the sense that Hitler understands the word, or even as a Cæsar would have understood it. We do not see ourselves as invaders of conquered territory. It is true that if you turn out the Englishman’s luggage you will find it full of bits of land of alien origin; but the possessor will explain, with perfect sincerity, and more truth than you might suppose, that he never had any idea of foreign conquest. He was just roving about the world doing a little business, when he came across something, the Elgin Marbles, or Cleopatra’s Needle, or an island or so, or possibly half a continent that nobody seemed to be looking after, and he just slipped it into his pocket to take care of it.

What is more, he does take care of it. Like the sailor with the parrot, he feels it his duty to feed it, make it comfortable, and teach it the English language, and will go to a surprising amount of trouble and expense to do the right thing by it. Incidentally, you will notice that, just as the Englishman thinks more of his rights and liberties than of right and liberty in the abstract, so with regard to his obligations. He does not, as more earnest people do, undertake to lay down the Whole Duty of Man; but he has, on the whole, a fairly clear notion of “my duties.” And he is sure that, having acquired any strange, outlandish thing, such as a parrot or an Empire, he has a duty to perform to it. But his aim is not, and never really has been, conquest. He is an explorer, an adventurer, a romantic, and above all, an individualist. Nearly all his acquisitions have been the result of some private adventure or other, tobacco planting in the West Indies, John Company in India, trapping in Hudson Bay. If you call him an invader, he will be both puzzled and shocked; but there is one opprobrious name you may call him that he will understand and rather like. You may call him pirate. When British sailors swarmed aboard the Altmark , crying: “The Navy’s here!” German propagandists looked round for an insult that would really infuriate the English . . . something even more offensive than usual. At the tops of their voices they yelled “Pirates!” The common Englishman was complimented beyond measure and went off to drink the healths of the modern descendants of Drake and Hawkins, convinced that all was well with the Fleet.

It is not surprising that the European should suspect a certain hypocrisy in this apparent contradiction between the Englishman’s repudiation of the idea of conquest and the plain fact that he has succeeded in laying hands on so much of the earth’s surface. Yet there is really no hypocrisy, and no true contradiction. Both things spring from the same root: the powerful sense of national solidarity which results from his being an island mongrel. His outward security has made it easy for him to go roaming about the world; his mixed blood has made a roaming life agreeable to him. Like Kipling’s cat, he walks in the wild woods, waving his wild tail, and all places are alike to him. By a happy physical accident, with which mongrel blood may have something to do, he can live anywhere. And his rovings are of the mind as well as the body. He is a handy-man, as sailors and roving men are. He is a magpie of other men’s customs. He will let his native Yule-log fall into disuse, while he picks up and appropriates Christmas Trees from Germany. He waits while other people make alarming experiments in political revolution, picks up useful tips for himself, and introduces them into his own social scheme, without caring whether they look appropriate, or consistent, so long as he can make them work.

While he is roving about, his imagination roves also. He is least great in the cosmopolitan arts, such as painting and music; he is most great—indeed, he is almost unsurpassed—in the most individual art of all, in lyric poetry and the lyric drama. He has few first-class theologians and few first-class philosophers, but in that strange borderland where religion and philosophy meet and mingle with the lyric imagination he is supreme. Here, two things stand him in good stead: his double tongue, and his passion for the concrete thing, that acquisitive love of colourful bits and pieces which belongs to his sea-going heritage.

This is not the time for a long discourse on English poetry; but here is a thing to notice, the peculiar quality given to it by the use of what I will call “the distinguished epithet.” English poetry is weakest, I suppose, where French poetry, for example, is strongest—in what the Week-End Book classifies as “State Poetry,” that is, formal verses upon generalised subjects of public, as distinct from personal interest. But, when you do get a good poem of this kind written in English, it gains a curiously individual quality from the use of adjectives which no Frenchman would ever have thought of using in that context.

The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings; Sceptre and crown Must tumble down,

So far, any Frenchman of the classical period might have written it, though he might hesitate over “tumble” and prefer a “nobler” word.

And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

There we part company with Latin Europe. A Frenchman, for whom I once translated this into French verse, paused over the equivalent of “crooked scythe.” “An odd adjective,” he said, “but then, of course, it’s an odd word in the original.” Among all the abstracts and generalisations, glory, blood and state, shadow, substance, death, icy hand, kings, fate, armour, sceptre, crown, the splendid and sonorous commonplaces of State poetry, came the sudden vivid, concrete, village picture of the actual shape of the scythe, “the poor crooked scythe.” The Frenchman recognised instantly that this was a thing insular and apart, the English lyric touch, the assertion of the concrete thing, the right of the poor crooked scythe and spade, and of the odd crooked word, to its individual personality and liberties.

To that we must come back. It is the key to the English mind. Here is another contradiction which it resolves. The English, the most arrogantly insular of all people in their conscious superiority to foreigners are, at the same time, the most astonishingly courteous to them. Sometimes, it is true, this suggests the maddening courtesy of God Almighty condescending to a blackbeetle, but that is not by any means the whole explanation. The Englishman does genuinely like people to be different from himself. He admires them for it, and if his admiration is tinged with compassion for a weaker vessel, at least one has to admit that he treats foreigners no worse in this respect than he treats his wife. He will painstakingly go out of his way to respect their feelings. The proper English word for a native of China is “Chinaman”; but if the Chinaman has taken a dislike to this perfectly correct form of speech, the Englishman will be at great trouble to avoid it, and to refer to him, in his presence, as “a Chinese,” though this is as much a mutilation of the English language as it would be to speak of a Dutch or a Spanish. “China” is, in fact, the ancient adjective, as you can see by “China teapot” or “all Lombard Street to a China orange”; but at all costs the Englishman will be polite. Similarly, in Scotland he will be particular to say “Scot” or “Scottish,” forms for which the inhabitants of that country have a wholly inexplicable preference, though “Scotch” is good Southern English, and has no necessary connection with whisky. On the other hand, though the spine of the average Englishman curls at being called a “Britisher,” he usually accepts this revolting act of mayhem upon his native tongue without protest.

He accepts also, not merely without protest, but with enthusiasm, the malformations of English accent and syntax indulged in by foreigners. You will never see on his face the expression of ill-suppressed anguish with which an Italian, for example, endures the efforts of the English to speak the Italian language. He thinks a French accent charming, he speaks of a pretty Irish brogue and finds it quaint and attractive of the Irish to use Erse syntactical constructions in the speaking of English. He will even listen patiently while people assure him that he cannot speak his own language, and will politely agree that the best English is spoken in Edinburgh or Dublin. He will adopt American expressions if he thinks them energetic and expressive; he is true to his mongrel strain, and is quite ready to believe that there is good to be got from all sources, however unlikely. He will join with sympathy and appreciation in other people’s national rejoicings, and do honour to their songs and emblems, even when the sole aim and object of them is to affront him in every possible way. He will read with interest accounts of the celebration of Independence Day in America. He will applaud while Scotsmen sing “Scots wha hae” or “Wi’ a hundred pipers and a’ and a’ We’ll gi’e the English a bla’ a bla’.” When Irishmen perform “The Wearing of the Green” in the street he will hang out of the window and throw them coppers. I know English people who take great pains to present their Celtic friends with shamrocks on St. Patrick’s Day and to turn on the wireless for them on St. Andrew’s night; but I must say I have never heard of a Celt who sought for the smallest rosebud for his English friends wherewith to celebrate the Feast of St. George. I am not complaining about this; I had not, in fact, noticed it until my attention was drawn to it in connection with this paper. I only mention it as a fact.

The English are also, and notoriously, tolerant of other people’s criticism. They are quite ready to agree that everything is ordered better in France, or any other country. It is true that they do not always believe this; but they are seldom offended at hearing it. They are also quite extraordinarily ready to criticise themselves; indeed, they spend most of their time doing it. This habit is misleading, and often leads to misunderstanding. It is taken either as a sign of weakness or of pure hypocrisy.

Actually, it is a sign, if not of strength, at least of colossal self-confidence. It is thus a danger to other nations, who are apt to take the criticisms at their face-value, and to proceed upon the assumption that England must be effete, degenerate, and at odds with herself, because the English are continually saying so. The fact that England has been saying so for some three centuries, without impairing her own powers of defence to any noticeable degree ought to warn them; but it does not.

The danger to ourselves is, that if we not only say these things, but begin really to take notice of other people’s comments and criticisms, a thing we never used to do, we may begin to doubt ourselves. Symptoms of this kind of thing have been observable among the semi-intellectuals recently, that curious little cosmopolitan crowd who have lost their English roots and wish to persuade us that Englishry is the last infirmity of Blimpish mind. However, these people have been singularly quiet since fighting started in earnest. It cannot be said of them that:

Their voice is heard through rolling drums That beat to battle where they stand.

Some of them, indeed, made no attempt to stand, but fled to the States while the going was good, where no doubt they are informing the trustful Americans that they have nothing to hope for from the British Navy.[1] 

Another danger to others from this English tolerance of rude criticism is that it is apt to mislead them about the peculiar quality of English patience. That patience, being rooted in self-confidence, will go a long time without breaking, but when it breaks, it does so without warning and completely. The Celt is much more swift to wrath than the Englishman, but, with him, the row starts simultaneously with the offence, and you know where you are. The Englishman will at all costs avoid the row. He will put up with cheating and insult for years. Then, without a word of explanation, he will suddenly sever all relations. Consider, for example, the way of the Scot and the way of the Englishman with a cheating shopkeeper. The Scot, at the first sign of something wrong with the bill, will go to the shop and complain. There will be a sumptuous uproar. Epithets will be exchanged. The family histories of both clans will be inquired into. The town will take sides, and the clash of battle will resound in every close. Eventually the shopkeeper will give way, the bill will be adjusted, and normal relations will be resumed, all the more cordially that each side respects the other’s strength. The Englishman, on the other hand, will say lazily: “Of course, I know So-and-so is an old scoundrel, and he’s probably cheating me at every turn, but I don’t want a row with him.” One day, however, he will exert himself to look into the matter, and if he is sufficiently annoyed by what he finds, he will pay the bill and silently transfer his custom elsewhere. Nobody will ever know why. No opportunity will be given for explanation or adjustment, and the shopkeeper will wonder what in the world has become of his most profitable customer, who seemed to be good for any amount.

The Englishman does not like rows. It is almost impossible to get him to disturb himself, unless you are fool enough to make him both afraid and angry. Because of his long historical security, his fear and his anger are very hard to rouse, but when they are roused, he is implacable. You will notice that Dr. Goebbels has found it necessary to change his tone since the defeat of France. Before, he laid stress upon the hopeless inefficiency and slackness of this rotten democracy; now, we are “the most obstinate of all opponents.” That means that even he has realised that the English have been seriously frightened, and are now very angry indeed. It is clear from Mein Kampf that Hitler did not want to frighten the English. His idea was to calm them with offers of friendship. He was to manage the east, while we were to have control over the west of Europe. England did not, of course, want the west of Europe. She is a coloniser, not a conqueror. But Hitler has never understood this. And he failed, as usual, and as our opponents have failed time and again, to understand what are the limits of English patience.

To understand the point at which the English patience breaks, we have only, I think, to remind ourselves what is the phrase most often heard in the English home. And that is: “Leave it alone!” “Tommy, leave the cat alone.” “Leave your little sister alone, can’t you.” “Oh, leave the boy alone; he’ll grow out of it.” “Leave the young people alone to fight their own battles.” And then: “Curse these government departments, why can’t they leave us alone?” And so, with rising irritation, as the Englishman looks at the world: “Here, you, leave those wretched Jews alone.” “Leave the Poles alone, I tell you.” And, finally, in quite unmistakable tones: “Now then, you blue-pencil bastard, you bloody well leave me alone, or I’ll knock your bleeding block off.”

The Englishman will interfere in the administration of the world, he will have his finger in every trade pie, he will collect countries as he collects junk, but he cannot bear to see things chivvied about, and he will not tolerate being chivvied himself. Leave the situation alone, don’t let’s have a revolution; it will probably work itself out to its own natural solution. Keep our domestic policy non-catastrophic; leave things alone. We, who are the least racial of all nations, who care least about folk-customs, are the most attached to tradition and old laws. Don’t chivvy things. I know only one constant exception to the rule against chivvying. The English people have always, incessantly and unmercifully, chivvied their governments: and for a very good reason. A government must be either servant or master. If you do not chivvy it, it may chivvy you. So the English chivvy the State as a bustling housewife chivvies her domestic staff. “Get on with your work, you slut,” says England to her government, “or take a week’s notice. And no back-answers, if you please.” “These people,” she confides to her neighbours, “if you aren’t everlastingly after them they get so lazy and uppish there’s no bearing with them.” The neighbours, hearing the sharp, scolding voice, go away and say that English housekeeping is clearly in the last stage of confusion, and surrender themselves more and more abjectly to the domination of their own footmen.

From all this, we may begin to see the outlines of the English brand of patriotism. It is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that it does not exist, merely because of the politeness extended to the patriotism of other nations, or because it is not vocal in times of prosperity, or because the English criticise themselves and their government and affect to admire the way things are done elsewhere; still more, to imagine that it depends upon vast extensions of the British Empire. The romantic love of extension from the centre depends upon the sanctity and security of that centre itself. When the Englishman says “England,” he does not think of armies and domination; he thinks of a lane, of a field, of a line of cliffs fronting the sea, of the ships sailing from Bristol Town and coming home to an English port. The word Britain stirs his pride, but it is the word England that stirs his heart. There is his real history, and there is his abiding home. It is useless for people to complain that the words “island fortress” show a merely “defensive spirit.” They are the words that move us. They take the English back over the long years of her history. England will never fight heartily or with conviction unless she feels the threat to English soil, English continuity, English things: “My rights, my liberties, my island, my church, my back garden, my back yard, my window-box.” The people who try to force England into some doctrinaire mould of continental theory are, I think, mistaken. They are perverting the course of history. England has never had but two doctrinaire rulers; she broke the heart of poor Mary Tudor; she brought Charles I to the block. She can govern an Empire, but only on condition that she may leave it alone to govern itself. She will never be at her best if she sets out to curry favour by conforming to alien doctrines, for she will do it with a bad grace, and her policy will be fumbling and uncertain. She does not want to be liked; she wants to be left alone. She is an individualist; she hates uniformity; the effort to unify her religious practice ended by producing 365 religions and an Establishment with a more bewildering variety of use than any in Christendom. Her attachments are local. In the day of the Armada, the men of Devon refused to aid in the defence of Tilbury, even to look after the Queen, who was down there addressing the troops; their duty, they said, was to their own Devon soil. The English have never cared for being foreign mercenaries, and never cared much about sending big armies abroad; but they will fight like death and hell for Devon and the Cinque Ports, for London or York, for the dullest suburb or the little pub on the corner.

Here is the England of 1914. It is taken from a letter written by Rupert Brooke about a friend of his.

“As he thought of ‘England and Germany’ the word England seemed to flash like a line of foam. With a sudden tightening of his heart he realized that there might be a raid on the English coast. He didn’t imagine any possibility of it succeeding, but only of enemies and warfare on English soil. The idea sickened him. He was immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him a quality, which . . . if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called holiness.”

And here is the England of 1940. It is from the account of an airman speaking about the battle of Dover:

“When I and the fellows in my Spitfire squadron see bombs being dropped on our own country it seems to give us an entirely different feeling from that we had over Dunkirk. It is not that we did not do our best in France but simply that now the bombs are falling on our own land. That makes all the difference. One becomes conscious of something like a new hatred for the enemy, and it expresses itself in our attack.”

That, clumsy but sincere, is the voice of the English anger, and it is the voice, not of world empire, but of a little, isolated, intensely individual country, the mongrel guarding his own door. Let the world have every liberty, so long as it leaves my liberties alone:

Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low; If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven, An’ drum them up the Channel as we drumm’d them long ago.



[1] This was said in 1940. Happily, it would seem, their voice was not heard. No doubt the drums were too much for them.