Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  “An almost cartesian desire for clarity!” Rymer smiled tolerantly.

  “Appeals to the conscience seldom fail especially with the English. The fact that it is the conscience to which appeal has been made is so reassuring, too! A political party so appealing must be a peculiarly moral party! One takes for granted that a man appealing to one’s good feeling, to one’s humanity, must surely himself be a good humane man—the majority at least are apt to draw this conclusion.”

  “You are saying I suppose that socialists are attempting to secure power disguised as men engaged in a moral mission?”

  “I am saying nothing of the sort. Nothing should be taken for granted. It is advisable to gain a clear idea of what is actually proposed, lest the conscience, working in the dark, mislead one. That is all.”

  “Are you saying,” Rymer enquired, “that a stupid person cannot possess a conscience?”

  “Obviously not so good a one as a wise man.”

  “Oh!” howled Rymer.

  “When a matter is beyond their understanding people cannot judge it morally any more than in any other way. But that is what I wanted to discuss. I am not as clear as I would like to be myself upon a number of points. But this is really a side-issue.”

  “No it isn’t,” he interrupted. “Your case stands or falls upon that.”

  “My own conscience feels clear, as I am quite sure yours does. I would like to check up on its functioning however. The way to do that is to test the validity of one or more of the main beliefs responsible for the clear feeling. I always suspect a clear conscience, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In giving my own conscience this overhaul I may assist you to discover whether your conscience is as sound and as clear as you think.”

  “Speak for your own conscience. Mine is all right.”

  “You think so. You may be mistaken. People often buy things in a shop and when they get them home find they do not like them at all.”

  “Short-sighted people usually.”

  “Why, exactly. What they thought they saw in the shop has changed into something else: into its real self. They have bought something they did not bargain for. Now the kind of socialism which people, in their woolly and hazy way, have fastened on their back, may be one of those things that look very different later on to what at first it seemed. As an indication of what I have in mind, there have been many things to cause misgivings in socialist behaviour (especially in the official class) since the Welfare State took over from free enterprise. In a word, those who have come to rescue us from Power have themselves displayed too patent an appetite for power. The old bosses are being economically liquidated. Too often it seems that Bossiness has come in their place. As this state-power grows more absolute, will not these disquieting symptoms develop? English socialism as we know it today is complex: in it what is desirable and what is undesirable do battle.”

  “Because a few officials misbehave…” Rymer waved his hand to dismiss such insignificant blemishes.

  “There should be an extremely searching debate upon the type of new society—‘collective’, as it is called—being thrust upon everyone in England with practically no debate—such as a parliamentary Opposition is supposed to provide. I am not against that new society: I am against the way it is being adopted. To confer such unheard-of powers (such as no feudal king in England has ever possessed) upon a group of politicians just because they say they are ‘socialist’, is absurd. In the mind of the majority ‘socialist’ signifies a selfless person dedicated to the welfare of mankind. Somebody may not like socialists, because he thinks they are too good and moral to suit him. But the moral status is taken for granted.”

  “Are you disputing the bonafides of socialism?” he asked me.

  “No,” I answered. “It is frightfully important that that moral essence of socialism should be a reality, that is all, and even more that it should stop a reality. I believe that some machinery should be invented to make certain that it does so stop. Finally there should be no blank cheque.”

  “You are too distrustful.”

  “You are too authoritarian. Are we for Authority, however corrupt or callous it may become? My conscience cries out for checks.”

  “That conscience of yours is dreadfully over-developed, isn’t it. I don’t remember ever hearing of one like it.” His face was furrowed in mock-concern.

  “I think it is yours that is under-developed,” I told him. “If it is as modest in size as I suspect, mine must, of course, seem enormous.”

  “An enlarged conscience is pathologic,” was how that bout ended, he nodding his head admonitorily as he spoke. “It is nothing to be proud of; I should keep it quiet if I were you.”

  We laughed humourlessly.

  IV

  In this talk we were having it was my idea to say just enough to oblige him to forsake some of his romantic conventions and to adopt a more realistic attitude: or come out and defend his obscurantist absolute. “I have been speaking,” I went on, “of socialism by consent. It is an odd phenomenon to occur in a country like England. But the English voted themselves into ‘Labour’ (which promptly transformed itself into ‘socialism’, of the toughest, the ‘total’, type). They would have voted themselves into anything that promised speedy demobilization. Six years of Churchillean Tory heroics had been too much. They knew Labour would turn them back into civilians much quicker than Churchill would. That was Aneurin Bevan’s explanation of the Labour landslide. It was, I think, the right one, in the main.”

  “You think that is all—an over-long war?” Rymer breathed a little crossly and sleepily.

  “Something the long war precipitated. The background was a hundred years of Liberalism. A hundred years rushed down in the 1945 landslide. The history of the nineteenth century in Great Britain recalls the thousand small steps of a Mayan pyramid, each step a liberation for some depressed class. So Britain mounted to the present pinnacle, a real live working-class Government, with teeth in it like an alligator. From Chartism to the Steel Bill is a long purposeful moral ascent. It is the moral foundation, deriving directly from the teaching of the Gospels, of this monumental progress culminating, in 1945, in the mass acceptance of ethical politics—it is this which is to be my theme.”

  “You will be preaching to the converted,” Rymer threw in.

  “The nature of the dynamism is obvious. That the working class played a part is a political fairy tale of course.”

  “Oh!”

  “The British working class is the reverse of socially ambitious. Always it has been the despair of the agitator, a mass as difficult to ignite as a rain-soaked mackintosh. It has been content to be an animal, fond of beer and of football, not envious of the well-to-do because it could only be envious in terms of beer and football, and Château-Yquem and golf fails to stir its pulse. It has been terribly easy to exploit and to ‘keep in its place’. It is unnecessary to add that ethics is not its strong point. The moral ascent in question was a middle-class phenomenon. The progressive levitation of the mass of manual workers is one of the miracles of Christ. It is on a spectacular scale the Raising of Lazarus.”

  Rymer was tying up his shoe. “Rot” was all he said.

  “The mere mass, the numbers, of the working class could have produced no such result. To argue that it could is like saying that a mountain must merely, because it is so large, submerge a village at its foot. And so it might if someone placed so tremendous an atomic charge within it as to blow it up.”

  “The working class is not inanimate,” Rymer growled.

  “You must have something more than mass, than numbers. The way workers have extricated themselves from underneath the middle-class is often likened to the manner in which the latter supplanted the aristocracy. There is in fact no analogy whatever. The vast colonial expansion of Great Britain and temporary industrial monopoly enriched and expanded so much the class of bankers, merchants, industrialists, that that class wrested the leadership from the land
ed society. What was responsible for this revolution was something with an action equivalent to atomic fission, namely money.”

  “The aristocracy were only business men. Money was nothing to do with it,” Rymer heckled automatically.

  “Now strangely enough the rise to power of the working class was only made possible by money too: not its own money, for it has none, nor for its thirst for power, for it was not interested in power. It was a purely middle-class money which has caused the artificial elevation of the working class at the expense of the middle class.”

  “How on earth do you make that out!” Rymer expostulated, lazily.

  “You see, even all the agitators, from the creator of Marxian socialism onwards, belong to the middle class. Lenin, for instance. Our Fabians, the Webbs, Shaw, or Cripps, have been typically of the middle class. H. G. Wells, who came from the working class, protested at the revolutionary zeal of his ‘betters’.”

  “Where does the money come in?”

  “Have you ever thought of the immense sum involved, in this century alone, on socialist propaganda? Money has always been forthcoming—millions and millions of it—to advertise the beauties of the Left Wing. It all came out of bourgeois bank accounts, where it was not straight political subsidy.”

  “Why should the middle class or any section of it spend so much money in order to have the middle class supplanted by the working class. Was it economic suicide?” Rymer was wearily withering.

  “Various explanations of this curious fact have been advanced. There may, of course, be several secondary interests involved. I am concerned exclusively with the major and essential impulse.”

  “Good! Gooood!” sang Rymer with bantering patronage.

  “The complete emergence of the working class from underneath the possessing class (which it abolishes—or which is abolished for it) is perhaps meaningless. Fifty, or a hundred million people cannot rule. What would they rule? They can only be told that they are ruling, which is another matter; and meanwhile of course they go on labouring just the same as before. The people who tell them they are ruling, those people are in fact the rulers. As we see in Russia, the majority must always toil. It is an age in which paper takes the place of bullion, and the verbal of the physical.”

  “It is a different thing working for yourself and being exploited by some boss,” Rymer interjected. “That is solid enough.”

  “There is always a boss. They have a different line of talk, that is all. And the abolition of the middle class is a disservice to the working class, it seems to me. The classless society has been proved a myth. If class we must have, then a trinity of classes is preferable to two classes. The natural class-arrangement is to have a middle class, involving the perpetual individual emergence and ascent of manual workers, passing into the middle sphere, the reverse constantly occurring too, duds dropping out of the middle class into the working class. This individual emergence should be facilitated. Complete ‘emancipation’ would signify everybody being relieved of the necessity to work, when they could divide their time between the football-field, the dog-track, and the cinema: which is absurd. In the last analysis, for one man to be slaving down in a coal-mine, and another man to be passing his time between august Downing Street and luxurious Checquers, is unjust: which is emotionally true but otherwise absurd.

  The present theoretic eminence of the working class is a piece of illusionism. It is pure Maskelyne and Devant. The situation today speaks for itself. Workers’ wages, after spectacular rises, are frozen in order to enable the devalued pound to push up the cost of living, so that the workers will be economically where they started, before the honeymoon. In the end all they will have gained is millions of free dental plates and pairs of spectacles. Even these retrospectively they will be made to pay for.”

  Rymer cleared his throat, and the new National Health Service dental plate stirred indignantly about. “The working class is no better off than it ever was then?” said he with mild derision.

  “I did not say that. The Socialists have not improved upon the Liberal achievement, that is the point.”

  “Give them time. And besides the advance has in fact been enormous. Ask them!”

  “A bogus inflationary advance, and a supply of ideologic stimulants. But the idea of a Glorious Working Class World has to be paid for and it costs billions of pounds. The actual workman has to pay for the advertisement of his imaginary self.”

  “The view of most people of course,” said Rymer, “is that the working man is over-privileged, is spoilt.”

  “Everybody, not only the manual worker, is taken in by the advertising, that is all. His prestige but not his pocket has benefited. It is the same as with Culture and the Arts. So much money is spent in advertising how artistic and cultivated we are that there is no money left for artists or for real culture. All the money goes in the salaries of officials, public relations men, promoters, and in official publications, large buildings, educational activities, entertainment, and so on. There are now millions of political administrative parasites on the back of the working class, and their numbers multiply hourly. Every working man has a petit bourgeois appointee on his back.”

  “How about the parasites that were there before?” came from Rymer in a sardonic shout.

  “The Liberal dream of ‘the just’ and the ‘fair’ and the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, people will live to regret in the rigours of the ‘total’ society.”

  “I thought utilitarian thinking had been sufficiently discredited,” Rymer broke in again. “Men are great idealists. That is what you forget. The negative satisfactions of ‘peace and plenty’ do not appeal to them.”

  “Etcetera!” I answered him a little sharply. “Every power-thirsty Führer endorses those arguments and is clamorously in favour of ‘heroism’, ‘living dangerously’, plain living (a little ‘mousetrap’ cheese and a glass of watery bitter beer). That shows a splendid spirit, they think. That people should be prepared to endure hardships makes them ever so enthusiastic—those who aspire to be their tyrants.”

  Rymer began tearing up a piece of paper into smaller and smaller fragments.

  “Then think—war after war: what could be more utterly unutilitarian than that—and the consequent debt that is heaped upon the unprotesting nations—more crushing debts at each fresh massacre. No greatest happiness of the greatest number there! England is finished, tomorrow America will be finished, riddled with war debts, rotted with inflation. All this accepted without a murmur! What heroes we are! What idealists! The wars of our time are the means by which men are being pushed towards total servitude.”

  “Or towards a free world.”

  “Certainly not that. Such freedom as man may enjoy is perhaps all in the past.”

  “Freedom to exploit!” heckled Rymer.

  “In any event, historians—unless such irresponsible snoopers into the past have to shut up shop—will marvel at the twelve decades in which the ‘liberal’ ferment was at work in English life. From such early steps up as the Cotton Factory Regulation Act they will see it at work, through thousands of measures of Christian legislation, up to such a climax as Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act. The present socialist government is, then, the most spectacular achievement of a truly idealizing cult—and it will be its last. The moralist politics of Protestant Christianity was violently anti-authoritarian, in contrast with the Catholic philosophy. This is its last Protest, as it were.”

  “Why its last?” asked Rymer dully.

  “Because it has given birth, now, to its opposite: to something tough and authoritarian. It must mean it is exhausted. Or perhaps, after all, it has achieved its end. Jesus said, you may recall, ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first’.”

  “I remember that.”

  “Nietzsche who described Christianity as a ‘slave religion’…”

  “That I remember too!”

  “… could have opened his argument by quoting those words. Today the
first are becoming the last and the last are loudly advertised as being the First. Liberalism has done its work? What do you say?”

  “What are your politics?” he enquired.

  “Liberal, really,” I laughed. “Liberal, yes.”

  “Oh. I never would have thought of you as a liberal.”

  “No? I experience some anxiety as to whither my idealism may lead us. It is my conscience. My liberal conscience.”

  He sighed. “That conscience again! How long have you suffered from conscience? However, it does not obtrude in every day life; in fact, no one would know you had one.”

  “You are less fortunate,” I told him. “It’s absence is all too apparent with you.”

  A cat at this point appeared from somewhere and rubbed itself against my leg. It was a thin cat, I could feel its ribs as it pressed its body against my trousers.

  “Fond of cats?” I asked.

  Rymer shook his head.

  “Not very. Pussy is anti-social.”

  I am not fond of cats, either, but I scratched its bony, independent head.

  “Having,” I said, “put my hand to the plough, I will just finish the furrow. The evidence is abundant and conclusive. That the sentimental conditioning of the English public by constant injections of a Christian ethical-political preparation is responsible for all we see. Without having soaked themselves (or been soaked, which shall we say?) as no other nation has, in burning sympathy for the oppressed, no surrender of India or Egypt—no sentimental enthusiasm for the ‘great Russian experiment’ (we should have noticed long ago it was an ugly despotism)—no conservative Opposition so full of trimmers as to make it appear merely a socialist right-wing. No mythical British ‘kindliness’, therefore, but Reformation Christianity in its Victorian and Edwardian swan-song laid the foundations of the Welfare State.