(1943)

We are being drenched with books and pamphlets about the British people—in particular, about the collapse of national morale between the wars and the astonishing recovery after Dunkirk. Denunciations of our policy and politicians between 1918 and 1940—their stupidity, timidity, hypocrisy and vacillation—are severe, and on the whole justified. These things caused bewilderment at home and abroad. Nobody understands why, after being so far gone, we did not go altogether. Still less does anybody understand why, having betrayed Europe and ourselves, we should look for respect or confidence from anybody. Yet the explanation is not really far-fetched or obscure. It depends upon one plain fact which has been stated over and over again, but which nobody takes seriously.

The staggeringly, quite childishly simple thing about the British people is that they want to be good.

I do not mean that they are all Platonic philosophers, cherishing a lofty ideal of Abstract Perfection. Most of them are not interested in philosophy at all; and they all detest the Abstract. But they want to be good, in the most naïve and nursery sense of the word. They want to feel that their conduct is such that Our Father in Heaven can be pleased with it. If they can be assured of this parental approval, they do not greatly care what the next-door neighbours think of them. But if they feel themselves to be naughty and in disgrace, they lose self-confidence and develop inferiority psychoses; everything they do goes wrong. The more they try to be good, the more hot water they seem to get into. There are days like that in the nursery, when, inexplicably, nothing one does can please the grown-ups. The Twenty-Years’ Armistice was just one of those days. We tried to do as we were told, and blundered from one catastrophe to another.

When I think back to that time, I seem to hear, shrill above the mutter and growl of the troubles brewing up in Central Europe, a loud, monotonous and angry voice, perpetually admonishing and scolding. The voice spoke through many mouths, but it was recognisably one voice. I shall call it the Voice of Enlightenment—for indeed most of the doctrine it preached was the outcome of that era of “Enlightenment,” technically so called, which is the source of so many present-day heresies and denials. It is true that for twenty years Britain was false to herself, false to her faith, false to her friends, false to her trust. But it is only fair to remember that, throughout that time, the Voice of Enlightenment never ceased dinning into her ears that everything she had believed in, everything she had been accustomed to do, everything that for her own sake and the world’s she needed to do, was naughty .

Take, for instance, the whole question of war. Britain has never liked war, but she had always supposed that war in a just cause was right and seemly. Now, at the victorious conclusion of the most exhausting struggle in her history, the Voice of Enlightenment informed her that the whole thing had been, not merely useless (“War settles nothing”), but naughty . A just war was as wicked as an unjust war. War itself must be outlawed and abolished. So said the Voice, reinforcing itself with all the numinous authority of the Sermon on the Mount and all the persuasive reasonableness of Progressive Humanism. Britain listened, and tried to be good.

She had a dim feeling that, in a world full of conflicting interests and jarring ambitions, power might be needed to keep the peace. But power in itself was naughty. Her own power of intervention, and indeed her very existence, depended upon the Navy which she proudly loved; but Navies were naughty. She had a great Empire, girt together physically by the sea-routes and spiritually by strangely tangled bonds of sentiment, self-interest, and a sense of duty to one’s belongings; but Empire was naughty, belongings of every kind were naughty, self-interest was naughty—the Voice of Enlightenment taught her to be ashamed of her Empire. As for sentiment, Enlightenment poured scorn on all that: to be sentimental was naughty.

Then there was the whole business of the Peace Terms and of Britain’s relations with Germany. The last time Britain had made peace had been in South Africa. On that occasion, she had been told that her war was a naughty war—not because it was war, but because the cause was unjust. Thinking it over, the British came to the conclusion that it had not been altogether just; they made a peace remarkable for its generosity, took the vanquished into an equal partnership, and found that this worked very well. The peace made with Germany was of another kind. The issues were confused, but eventually two voices made themselves heard. One said that the vanquished had been insufficiently crushed and that the elaborate network of armed restraints by which it was sought to enclose them was insufficiently powerful for security. The other said that the terms had been too harsh and that it was time to bring the vanquished into partnership with the victors. Listening to them, one could scarcely help coming to the conclusion that the second of the two was the Voice of Enlightenment, for it was saying all the enlightened things. For once, it appeared, Enlightenment and British experience were in agreement. Restraints imposed by power sounded too much like power-politics and the “balance of power in Europe”—things which Enlightenment had been earnest in condemning. Free and equal partnership and co-operation was precisely the thing that Enlightenment most approved. Besides, it had worked before.

Of course, when one takes a former foe into partnership, it is because one is convinced that he, too, “wants to be good.” Germany, it now seems, did not want to be good, and Britain ought to have known it. But all the good and intellectual people who preached Progressive Humanism had been proclaiming for years that nobody ever wants to be naughty. There were no sinful men; indeed, there was no such thing as sin. There were only fundamentally good and perfectible men thwarted by oppressive circumstances. Take away the unfavourable environment, and everybody would at once be good and co-operate for the happiness of all. And it cannot be doubted that defeat, impoverishment, and a strong coalition to keep one in that state, form an unfavourable environment for any nation. The British were undoubtedly credulous, but according to their rights they genuinely tried to be good. Their error was in not seeing through Progressive Humanism and the Perfectibility of Man. They should have used more intelligence; but since Enlightenment had been engaged for some time in leading the Flight from Reason and stigmatising intelligence as highbrow, one should not, perhaps, blame them too much.

A period of great confusion followed. The enlightened principle which the British had thoroughly absorbed was that war of any kind was naughty. Armaments, as constituting both a cause and a recognition of war, were supremely naughty. On the other hand, it became clear that Japan in China and Italy in Abyssinia were doing naughty things, and that there was a sad outbreak of naughtiness in Spain. The same wise adults who proclaimed that armaments were naughty were also raising an enlightened voice urging Britain to interfere and prevent these wicked goings-on. Socialist Auntie exhorted her to stop bad Benito and atrocious Adolf from pulling the cat’s tail, while Pacifist Mamma took away her stick and told her that ladies didn’t use their fists. Britannia could only scream and scold while Benito cocked snoots at the whole family and nasty rough Adolf proceeded to catch the Jewish cat and skin it alive. Enlightenment then suggested that poor Adolf had a complex, because naughty Britannia had taken away his kittens and added them to her family of Imperial lion-cubs. Perhaps he would feel better and kinder if she presented him with the whole litter. Britannia was stubborn about this, and was universally called a selfish little girl. In her defence, she could only protest that her cubs had grown attached to her and didn’t want to go.

And here again there was a difficulty. The enlightened spirit which had brooded upon the Ark of the Covenant had revealed, as a Divine Law, the doctrine of self-determination for small nationalities; great trouble had been taken to parcel out territory in such a way that people in Europe who spoke the same language and shared the same ideas should be made independent of rulers with other languages and ideas. The British Empire was, of course, a horrid example of disobedience to this Law. Nobody was quite ready to coerce Britain into giving away her colonies, dependencies and scattered strong-points; they only nagged and sneered, and made her feel naughty about them, so that she became tearful and apologetic and did not like to administer or defend her possessions properly. There was, for example, Ireland. Eire demanded self-determination, and Enlightenment said she ought to have it. But Northern Ireland also wanted self-determination, and was determined to remain with England. Accordingly, the two bits of Ireland were allowed to determine themselves along the lines adopted in settling Europe. Eire was annoyed, and it was uncomfortable for everybody; but the stubborn fact remained that for England to coerce Eire, or for Eire to coerce Northern Ireland, would have been equally unenlightened. A problem of a similar kind, but more complicated, arose in India. History and tradition made Britain hold on—but fumblingly, because the perpetual cries of “Naughty, naughty!” were unnerving. So, in one sphere after another, action stultified itself.

And then Hitler started.

It has never, I think, been shown quite clearly enough just how Hitler’s demands presented themselves to a Britain who was trying to be good, and had already obediently accepted the propositions that nothing was so naughty as war, and that the way to cure the psychosis of the defeated was to indulge the patient. For Hitler founded his demands upon the enlightened principles laid down by the League of Nations. He said that his German-speaking minorities all over the world had the right to self-determination, even if this meant breaking up political and territorial units such as Czecho-Slovakia. An older and less enlightened Britain would have said instantly that to concede this would break down defensive frontiers and upset the Balance of Power. But clearly, since war was naughty, frontiers were naughty—and as for the Balance of Power, there were no words for its naughtiness. She had been made to feel that to defend either of these things was to defend the indefensible. Everybody has demanded indignantly why Britain sacrificed Czecho-Slovakia and then boggled over Poland. The answer, I think, is quite simply that so long as Hitler was demanding the German-speaking Austrians and the Sudeten Germans, he was demanding something to which Enlightenment had taught her he had a right. She was uneasy—her whole historic tradition urged her to oppose these proceedings. But when Hitler went further and demanded peoples and places that by no stretch of imagination could be said to be German, or even to want to be German, then Britain came to the conclusion that—Humanism or no Humanism—Germany was really being wicked. It followed—there was no help for it—that she must be wicked too and declare war.

The war, says Miss Odette Keun,[1] “had a most peculiar effect on England. Contrary to its usual rule of provoking activity, it sent her straight from a twenty-years’ sleep into what was, considering the circumstances, a catalepsy of seven months.” Miss Keun appears to be surprised, but that is because she, like other Continental critics, has never understood the mind of England during those twenty years. She sees it as an inexplicable lethargy of the public conscience, accompanied by orgies of perversity and deliberate betrayal by the people at the top. Actually, it was a period of that anguished and meticulous heart-searching which is known to experienced priests as “scrupulosity”; when every action, from the most important to the most trivial, appears to the sufferer to be so infected by sin that no decision can be fully endorsed by the conscience. To do anything at all produces an intolerable conviction of guilt; action is inhibited at the source; and if something does not intervene to break up this unnatural condition, the end may be religious melancholia.

Britain went to war feeling herself in disgrace. Not to wage war was wicked; to wage war was more wicked still; the sacrifice she was called on to make was not redemptive, for the theology of Enlightenment has no doctrine of redemption. Never must she forget that she was committed to the unforgivable sin. No trumpets, no flags, no parades, no martial music were permitted by enlightened opinion; she must crawl into battle in a white sheet. Nor might she tell the world that she thought herself worth fighting for; that would be propaganda, and propaganda was naughty—besides, she was expected to confess that her constitution was rotten, her way of life unsound, her Empire an outrage, her social services contemptible. War aims and peace aims she must declare, but they must be the war and peace aims dictated by the Voice of Enlightenment, not those that were native to her tradition. Tradition, indeed! What had Progressive Humanism to do with tradition, or with history, if it came to that? The apostle of get-on-or-get-out had proclaimed that history was bunk. The cosmopolitan intelligentsia had laid down that English History was a jingoist and hypocritical lie, and that all Britain’s past stank like a cesspool. Colonel Blimp, Jerry Mander, Captain Kidd, Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Stiggins were the only real figures in her spiritual ancestry. English history had been debunked, and the less said about it the better.

What was the English tradition? “Grab,” said a voice from the land of the Almighty Dollar; “England and France had their backs to the wall like two old gentlemen defending their money-bags.” “English policy,” said the voice from Germany (and the quisling governments echoed it in turn) “has always been to prevent the unification of Europe. What else is she doing now? And why does she do it?” To which England might have replied, in the tradition, “Because the unification of Europe always means in practice a tyranny like yours.” Which would have been all very well, had not the Voice of Enlightenment insisted that Europe must be unified, and that the Peace Aims of Britain should include a European federation under a centralised and authoritarian control. There was nothing to say.

Nagged and scolded from all sides, deprived of arms and self-confidence, Britain slunk into war, with her tail between her legs, ground down by a vivid sense of her irredeemable naughtiness, forbidden to explain herself, forbidden even to look cheerful about it, and (because all talk about armaments had been banished from enlightened conversation as a solecism) entirely unaware of what she was up against.

Things went badly, and she was scolded again. Why did she scuttle out of Norway? Why did she not send men and planes to Poland? To Finland? Why did she not immediately drop bombs on Germany instead of leaflets? She was not properly equipped? Not fully mobilised? Disgraceful! Why not? And why did she not know that Hitler was about to invade Norway? Denmark? Holland? Belgium, without excuse or warning? Had she been asleep or merely selfish and complacent? Why?

The British, if they had not by now been rendered almost speechless by self-consciousness, might well have replied: “Because we tried to be good. We made no arms, because Enlightenment said it was naughty. Our conscription was too little and too late because Labour rigidly opposed it, and we had been carefully taught that Labour was Enlightened and the working man always right. We didn’t drop bombs because we might have hurt some civilians, and everybody would have said it was naughty and that we had only ourselves to blame if there were reprisals. And we couldn’t believe that Hitler was really wicked (in spite of what some people said) because we had become too enlightened to believe in sin.”

When I look back, I do not wonder that Britain was “cataleptic.” I only wonder that she had not become blind, deaf, dumb, paralytic and imbecile, without hope of recovery. Fortunately, she has not a hysterical temperament. But the mainspring of her action had been left unwound, and the effect was exactly as though it had been broken.

Then the miracle happened. Hitler scooped up Norway, swallowed Denmark alive, bombed and blazed his path across Holland, battered Belgium to a mummy, tossed the British Army into the sea, blew France to fragments and smashed through to the Channel Ports. The world stood still. And Britain, stripped naked in the arena to await the pounce of the beast, was aware of a strange quality in the silence. The scolding had stopped.

Nobody who is not British or, being British, was not in Britain at that time, can quite understand the enormous sense of relief, the uplifting of spirits, that we then experienced. True, we were terrified—whoever says we were not is a boaster and a fool. But we need no longer obey enlightened and incomprehensible orders. We need no longer rush round commending ourselves by apologies for our existence. There was no more barracking. The amphitheatre was holding its breath, and for the first time in twenty years our performance had the sympathy of the house. Indeed, a few onlookers were already snuffling into their handkerchiefs over the prospect of our imminent decease—a gesture we thought rather silly, since we did not intend to die. (Though we may have had the defiant feeling—very familiar in the nursery—that if we did die, then perhaps the grown-ups would be sorry.) But anyhow, there it was; nobody was scolding us—we were not naughty any more.

“In that enormous silence, tiny and——” No, “tiny” is scarcely the word; but “unafraid” is right. Another voice addressed us. It was as though a peevish new-fangled and semi-educated governess had departed and we had been left in charge of Old Nurse—tart, solid, bustling and comfortable—who knew our family ways. When half-gods go, the gods arrive.

There was nothing vaguely ideological about the new voice: it came attached to a corporeal and particular person. Winston Churchill had always been obstinately unenlightened. He was English and aristocratic, and had the bad taste not to be ashamed of his origins. His theology (though by no means elaborate) was coarse and Christian enough to allow for sin and the devil, and sufficiently Pelagian (in the English manner) to admit the possibility of salvation by works. He had always stubbornly affirmed that some things were worse than war. He thought the Empire a good thing, and said so; as good as—perhaps even better than—other people’s empires, to which, for some reason, Enlightened Opinion had never seen fit to object. He believed in History—even English history. He affronted the highbrows with vulgar outmoded virtues, such as patriotism, courage, honour, loyalty, cheerfulness and high spirits; he defied the plain, practical low-brows by using the sort of language which a Raleigh would not have thought unbecoming. He not only was, in a symbolic and spiritual manner, a bulldog; by one of those extravagant pieces of luck so frequently showered upon the undeserving English, he looked like a bulldog—the cartoonist’s delight, an endearing mascot. He contrived to present the war, not as a cold, passionless, punitive measure to be meted out sad-eyed, to the refrain of “this hurts me more than it hurts, you” (which at the time it only too obviously did), but as an adventure combining the exaltation of martyrdom with the thrill of a gorilla-hunt. He lived in the present, according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, instead of in the next era but two, according to the Gospel of St. Marx. He was unregenerate; he was unenlightened; he was England. And he never scolded. He did not tell us that we were as good as gold; he assumed it. Indeed, I cannot for the moment recollect that he told us anything at all; he merely took it for granted that we were all his sort of person, and told the Axis so.

Now I should not dream of asserting that we were, are, or ever shall be as good as gold. All men are sinners, and the British are no exception. But I do say that we tried to be good. Our worst betrayals, our most flagrant stupidities resulted from our efforts to obey the contradictory orders of the silliest nursery governess ever foisted on a well-meaning bunch of children. I have no use whatever for Enlightened Opinion, whose science is obsolete, its psychology superficial, its theology beneath contempt and its history nowhere besides, it is a craven thing. When it saw what the results of its mischief-making were likely to be, it packed up its loud-speaker and hared for cover. When the storm seemed to be over, out it popped again, talking more briskly than ever. I hope we shall pay no attention to it.

But the future is not now my concern. I am concerned only to interpret the riddle of the English during the decades of disaster. The answer is, I think, that we wanted to be good and tried to be good, but that the sincerest efforts after virtue produce only chaos if they are directed by a ramshackle and incoherent philosophy. We were persuaded that God hated us, and that we ought to go into the garden and eat worms. If a nation is well-meaning and not very clear-headed, it is easily persuaded of these things by people who talk as though they had God in their pocket. I warn these people that if they start tinkering again (as they will undoubtedly try, so soon as Britain seems sufficiently secure to be envied), they may really succeed next time in breaking the mainspring. If that happens, it will be useless to scuttle for shelter behind the uncovenanted virtues of the British. They must look to their Enlightened God to help them, God help them.



[1] And Hell Followed , p. 85.