Quietly, quickly, softly, everything is done, and we are landed. There is a strange absence of something, an absentness is felt in everything and in everybody. I think, in the ordinary come-and-go of life, only the Englishman is really civilized. So, the soft, quiet, vague landing, the vague looking at the luggage, the vague finding oneself in the hotel in Plymouth. Everything soft, vague, with the quiet of accomplished civilization. Accomplished, that is, in these matters of landing from a ship and finding oneself in an hotel.
And it is the first night ashore, in the curious stillness. I cannot say wherein lies the almost deathly sense of stillness one gets, returning to England from the west. Landing in San Francisco gave me the feeling of intolerable crackling noise. But London gives me a dead muffled sense of stillness, as if nothing had any resonance. Everything muffled, or muted, and no sharp contact, no sharp reaction anywhere. As if all the traffic went on deep sand, heavily, straining the heart, and hushed.
I must confess, this curious mutedness of my native land frightens me more than the noise of New York or of Mexico City. Since the sparking of the Land’s End light, and the great strong beaming of the lighthouse overhead, tall overhead like a great tree, at the entrance to the Sound, I have not had one single sharp impression in England. Everything seems sand-bagged, like when a ship hangs bags of sand over her side to deaden the bump with the wharf. So it is here. Every impact, every contact is sand-bagged, deadened. Everything that everybody says is modified beforehand, to prevent any kind of bump. Everything that everybody feels is keyed down, and muted, so as not to impinge on anybody else’s feelings.
And this, in the end, becomes a madness. One sits in the breakfast car in the train, coming to London. There is a strange tension. What is the curious unease that holds the car spell-bound? In America the Pullmans, being much heavier, don’t shake like our cars. And there seems more room, inside and out, morally and physically. It is possible the American manners are not so good, though I doubt if I agree, even there. The silent bad manners of the Englishman when he happens to decide that he is not among his own ‘sort,’ take a lot of beating. But of course, he never says or does anything, so he is perfectly safe and proper in his circumstance.
But there one sits in a breakfast car on the Great Western. The train shakes terribly. The waiters are quick and soft and attentive, but the food isn’t very good, and one feels as if one were some sort of ghost being waited on by men who have long ago gone to sleep, and are serving one in their sleep. The place feels tight: one would like to smash something. Outside, a tight little landscape goes by, just unbelievable, with sunshine like thin water, a horizon half a mile away, and everything crowded forward into one’s face till one gasps for space and breath, and tries to jerk one’s head back, as one does when someone pushes his face right under one’s hat-brim. Too horribly close!
Inside, we eat kippers and bacon. The place is full. The other people, mostly men, all keep themselves modified and muted, as if they didn’t want their aura to stray beyond the four legs of their chair. Inside this charmed circle of their self-constraint they seem to sit and smile with pleasant English faces. And, of course, they are all trying to be a bit ‘grander’ than they really are: to give the impression that they have more servants in the kitchen than they really have, and so on. That is part of the English naïveté! If they have two servants, they want to give the impression of four: not less than four.
Essentially, however, and apart from being ‘grand,’ each one of them sits complacent inside a crystal bubble, smiling and eating and sprinkling sugar on porridge, and then half-furtively glancing through the transparency of their bubble, to see if there is anything outside. They will never allow anything outside: except, of course, other bubbles of varying ‘grandness.’
In the small things of life, the Englishman is the only perfectly civilized being. But God save me from such civilization. God in heaven deliver me. The trick lies in tensely withholding oneself, tensely withholding one’s aura, till it forms a perfect and transparent little globe around one. At the centre of this little globe sits the Englishman, his own little god unto himself, terribly complacent, and at the same time, terribly self-deprecating. He seems to say: My dear man, I know I am no more than what I am. I wouldn’t trespass on what you are, not for worlds. Oh, not for worlds! Because when all’s said and done, what you are means nothing to me. I am god inside my own crystal world, the strictly limited domain of myself, which after all no one can deny is my own. I am only god within the bubble of my own self-contained being, dear sir; but there, god I am, so how could I possibly desire to trespass? I only urge that all other people shall be as self-contained and as little inclined to trespass. And they may be gods inside their own bubbles if they like.
Hence the feeling of intolerable shut-in-edness. One enters from the open sea, to the Channel: first box. Into Plymouth Sound: second box. Into the customs place: third box. Into the hotel: fourth. Into the dining car of the train: fifth. And so on and so on, like those Chinese boxes that fit one inside the other, and at the very middle is a tiny porcelain figure half an inch long. That is how one feels. Like a tiny porcelain figure shut in inside box after box of repeated and intensified shut-in-edness. It is enough to send one mad.
That is coming home, home to one’s fellow countrymen! In one sense – the small ways of life – they are the nicest and most civilized people in the world. But there they are: each one of them a perfect little accomplished figure, enclosed first and foremost within the box, or bubble, of his own self-contained ego, and afterwards in all the other boxes he has made for himself, for his own safety.
At the centre of himself he is complacent, and even ‘superior.’ It strikes one very hard, coming home, that every Englishman sits there feeling subtly ‘superior.’ He wouldn’t impose anything on anybody, dear me no. That is part of his own superiority. He is too superior to make any imposition of himself in any way. But like a pleased image, there he sits at the centre of his own bubble, and feels superior. Superior to what? Oh, nothing in particular, don’t you know. Just superior. And well – if you press him – superior to everything. Just damn superior to everything. There inside the bubble of his own self-constraint, his own illusion, the strange germ of his unnatural conceit.
This is my own, my native land.
He seems to have accomplished the trick of being at his ease, the gentleman in the breakfast car, sprinkling sugar on his porridge. He knows he has a pretty way of sprinkling sugar on porridge: he knows he can put the spoon back prettily into the sugar-bowl: he knows his voice is cultured and his smile charming, compared to the rest of the world. It is quite obvious he means no one ill. Surely it is obvious he would like to give every man the best that man could have. If it were his, to give, which it isn’t. And finally he knows he is able to contain himself. He is an Englishman and he is himself, he is able to contain and to constrain himself, and to live within the unbroken bubble of his own self-constraint, without letting his aura stray and get at cross-purposes with other people’s auras. The dear, dangerless patrician!
Yet something does stray out of him. Look into his nice, bright, apparently-smiling English eyes. They are not smiling. And look again at his nice fresh English face, that seems so pleased with life. It also is not smiling, any more than Mr Lloyd George is really smiling. The eyes are not really at ease, and the nice, fresh face is not at ease either. At the centre of the eyes, where the smile twinkles, there is fear. Even at the middle of this amiable and all-tolerant English complacency, there is fear. And the smile-wrinkles on the fresh, pleased face, they give odd quivers, and look like spite wrinkles. There strays out of him, in spite of all his self-constraining, the faint effluence of fear, and the sense of impotence, and a quiver of spite, of subdued malice. Underneath the soft civilizedness of him, fear, impotence, and malice.
Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned
As home his wandering steps he turned
From travelling in a foreign land.<
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That’s how one finds the Englishman at home. And then one understands the bitterness of Englishmen abroad in the world, especially Englishmen in responsible positions.
There is no denying this: that since the war, England’s prestige has declined terribly, all over the world. Ah, says the Englishman, that’s because America has the dollars. And there you hear the voice of England’s own downfall.
England’s prestige wasn’t based on money. It was based on the imagination of men. England was supposed to be proud, and at the same time, free. Proud in her freedom, and free, to a certain extent generous, truly generous, in her pride.
This was the England that led the world. Myself, I think this was a true conception of England at her best. This was how the other nations accepted her: at her best. And the individual Englishman got his certain honour, in the world, on the strength of it.
Now? Now he still receives the remnants of honour, but mockingly, as poor Russian counts receive a little mocking distinction, now that they have to sell newspapers. The real English pride has gone, and ‘superiority’ takes its place: a really imbecile superiority, which the world laughs at.
As far as the wide world is concerned, England is anything but superior. She is just humiliated. From day to day she makes a more humiliated spectacle of herself in the eyes of the world. Weak, vacillating, without purpose or policy, without even the last vestige of pride, she continues to apologize and deprecate on the platform of the world.
And of course individual Englishmen abroad feel it. You rarely meet an Englishman far from home, but he is burning with impatience, disgust, and even contempt, of home. Home seems a shoddy place. And when you get here, it’s even shoddier than it seems from afar.
If, abroad, you meet an Englishman in office, he is speechless, almost cynical with rage. ‘What can I do!’ he says. ‘What can I do, against the orders from home. I get orders that I must give no loop-hole for offence against America. All I have to do is to guard against giving offence, above all to America. I must be on my knees all the time, in front of America, begging her not to take offence, when she hasn’t the faintest intention even of taking offence.’
This is from a man who has lived out in the world, and who knows that the moment you go down on your knees to a man, he spits on you: and quite right too. Men have no business on their knees.
‘I have an Englishman wants to go into the United States: Washington has given him a visa, and said: Yes, you can enter whenever you like. Comes a cable from London: Prevent this man from crossing into the United States, Washington might not like it. What can one do?’
The same story everywhere. A man is building a railway with nigger labour. Some insolent Jamaica nigger – British subject, larger than life – brings a charge against his boss. Solemn trial by the British, influence from the government, the Englishman is reprimanded, and nigger smiles and spits in his face.
Long live the bottom dog! May he devour us all.
Same story from India, from Egypt, from China. At home, a lot of queer, insane, half-female-seeming men, not quite men at all, and certainly not women! The women would be far braver. Then abroad, a few Englishmen still struggling.
England seems to me the one really soft spot, the rotten spot in the empire. If ever men had to think in world terms, they have to think in world terms today. And here you get an island no bigger than a back garden, chock-full of people who never realize there is anything outside their back garden, pretending to direct the destinies of the world. It is pathetic and ridiculous. And the ‘superiority’ is bathetic to lunacy.
These poor ‘superior’ gentry, all that is left to them is to blame the Americans. It amazes me, the rancour with which English people speak of Americans. Just because the republican eagle of the west doesn’t choose to be a pelican for other people’s convenience. Why should it?
After all, rancour is a bad sign in a superior person. It is a sign of impotence. The superior Englishman feels impotent against the American dollar, so he is wildly rancorous, in private, when America can’t hear him.
Now I am an Englishman. And I know that if my countrymen still have a soul to sell, they’ll sell it for American dollars, and drive a hard bargain.
Which is what I call being truly superior to the dollar.
This is my own, my native land.fn1
It was such a brave country, for so many years: the old brave, reckless, manly England. Even a man with dyed whiskers, like Palmerston. Too brave and reckless to be treacherous. My England.
Look at us now. Not a man left inside all the millions of pairs of trousers. Not a man left. A host of would-be-amiable cowards shut up each in his own bubble of conceit, and the whole lot within box after box of safeguards.
One could shout with laughter at the figures inside these endless safety boxes. Except that one is still English, and therefore flabbergasted. My own, my native land just leaves me flabbergasted.
Art and Morality (1925)
It is a part of the common claptrap that ‘art is immoral.’ Behold, everywhere, artists running to put on jazz underwear, to demoralize themselves; or, at least, to débourgeoiser themselves.
For the bourgeois is supposed to be the fount of morality. Myself, I have found artists far more morally finicky.
Anyhow, what has a water-pitcher and six insecure apples on a crumpled tablecloth got to do with bourgeois morality? Yet I notice that most people, who have not learnt the trick of being arty, feel a real moral repugnance for a Cézanne still-life. They think it is not right.
For them, it isn’t.
Yet how can they feel, as they do, that it is subtly immoral?
The very same design, if it was humanized, and the tablecloth was a draped nude and the water-pitcher a nude semi-draped, weeping over the draped one, would instantly become highly moral. Why?
Perhaps from painting better than from any other art we can realize the subtlety of the distinction between what is dumbly felt to be moral, and what is felt to be immoral. The moral instinct in the man in the street.
But instinct is largely habit. The moral instinct of the man in the street is largely an emotional defence of an old habit.
Yet what can there be in a Cézanne still-life to rouse the aggressive moral instinct of the man in the street? What ancient habit in man do these six apples and a water-pitcher succeed in hindering?
A water-pitcher that isn’t so very much like a water-pitcher, apples that aren’t very appley, and a tablecloth that’s not particularly much of a tablecloth. I could do better myself!
Probably! But then, why not dismiss the picture as a poor attempt? Whence this anger, this hostility? The derisive resentment?
Six apples, a pitcher, and a tablecloth can’t suggest improper behaviour. They don’t – not even to a Freudian. If they did, the man in the street would feel much more at home with them.
Where, then, does the immorality come in? Because come in it does.
Because of a very curious habit that civilized man has been forming down the whole course of civilization, and in which he is now hard-boiled. The slowly formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.
You may say, the object reflected on the retina is always photographic. It may be. I doubt it. But whatever the image on the retina may be, it is rarely, even now, the photographic image of the object which is actually taken in by the man who sees the object. He does not, even now, see for himself. He sees what the Kodak has taught him to see. And man, try as he may, is not a Kodak.
When a child sees a man, what does the child take in, as an impression? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth of teeth, two straight legs, two straight arms: a sort of hieroglyph which the human child has used through all the ages to represent man. At least, the old hieroglyph was still in use when I was a child.
Is this what the child actually sees?
If you mean by seeing, consciously registering, then this is what the child actually sees. The photographic image may be there all right, upon the ret
ina. But there the child leaves it: outside the door, as it were.
Through many ages, mankind has been striving to register the image on the retina as it is: no more glyphs and hieroglyphs. We’ll have the real objective reality.
And we have succeeded. As soon as we succeed, the Kodak is invented, to prove our success. Could lies come out of a black box, into which nothing but light had entered? Impossible! It takes life to tell a lie.
Colour also, which primitive man cannot really see, is now seen by us, and fitted to the spectrum.
Eureka! We have seen it, with our own eyes.
When we see a red cow, we see a red cow. We are quite sure of it, because the unimpeachable Kodak sees exactly the same.
But supposing we had all of us been born blind, and had to get our image of a red cow by touching her, and smelling her, hearing her moo, and ‘feeling’ her? Whatever should we think of her? Whatever sort of image should we have of her, in our dark minds? Something very different, surely!
As vision developed towards the Kodak, man’s idea of himself developed towards the snapshot. Primitive man simply didn’t know what he was: he was always half in the dark. But we have learned to see, and each of us has a complete Kodak idea of himself.
You take a snap of your sweetheart, in the field among the buttercups, smiling tenderly at the red cow with a calf, and dauntlessly offering a cabbage-leaf.
Awfully nice, and absolutely ‘real.’ There is your sweetheart, complete in herself, enjoying a sort of absolute objective reality: complete, perfect, all her surroundings contributing to her, incontestable. She is really a ‘picture.’
This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture. That is, he is a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest is just setting, background. To every man, to every woman, the universe is just a setting to the absolute little picture of himself, herself.
Life with a Capital L Page 23