Present Concerns

by C. S. Lewis

  If they extend their power too long, or abuse it while it lasts, they will be more hated than any body of Englishmen have been hated by their compatriots since the time of Peterloo.2 Mr Low—or some successor of Mr Low—will imprint their image indelibly on our minds. It will not, of course, be Colonel Blimp this time. Perhaps it will be Mr Mares-Neste. He will be, I think, a retired business man who, having few brains, finds the time hanging heavy on his hands, and, being a bore, is the greatest nonentity in his neighbourhood. The cartoons almost draw themselves. We see Mr Mares-Neste rising, say, in the Home Guard. We see how endless and useless parades, which are an unspeakable nuisance to his more intelligent neighbours, are a perfect god-send to Mares-Neste: here is something to do, here is self-importance. We see him doing things which no officer in the real army would be allowed to do—parading the men without greatcoats in winter while he wears one himself, or practising ceremonial drill in wartime. We see him developing a disquieting tendency to theocracy and becoming fond of church parades, though he himself, perhaps, hardly knows his catechism.

  An outrageously false picture, you say? I hope with all my heart that it is. But any prolongation of our Masters’ authority beyond the necessary time, or any slightest abuse of it, will quickly bring this nation of freemen into a state of mind in which the picture will be accepted as true. And then the fat will be in the fire. All real and necessary measures for our security will be ‘sicklied o’er’ with the taint of Mares-Neste. The indignation which finally sweeps him away will, in its haste, reject any and every scheme of compulsory national service. If you want a man to refuse the nasty medicine that he really needs, there is no surer way than to ply him daily with medicines no less nasty which he perceives to be useless.

  The future of civilisation depends on the answer to the question ‘Can a democracy be persuaded to remain armed in peacetime?’ If the answer to that question is No, then democracy will be destroyed in the end. But ‘to remain armed’ here means ‘to remain effectively armed’. A strong navy, a strong air force, and a reasonable army are the essentials. If they cannot be had without conscription, then conscription must be endured. For the sake of our national existence we are ready to endure that loss of liberty. But we are not ready to endure it for anything less. A continued interference with our liberties which sets up, instead of a real army, some such ridiculous and (by itself) useless simulacrum as a permanent Home Guard officered by the Mares-Nestes—this, be sure, we will not tolerate. If we pay the price, we shall insist on getting the goods; if we do not get the goods, let no man dream that we shall go on paying the price. That is our present position. But the danger is that if you impose Mr Mares-Neste on us too long, you will make the very name of compulsion not only so hateful but so contemptible that our readiness to pay for real goods will disappear. Bad money drives out good. The Jack-in-Office discredits the fruitful authority. A permanent (or even prolonged) Home Guard will drive us into a frenzied anti-officialdom, and that frenzy into total disarmament, and that disarmament into the third war.3

  IX

  PRIVATE BATES

  The habit of taking dramatic characters out of their setting and writing their biographies as if they were real people is not one which, as a critic, I can commend. But I have at the moment a special reason—not a literary one—for thus extracting a character from Henry V. He will be Private Bates.

  In one respect Private Bates shared with the modern serviceman the good fortune of serving under a national leader of heroic mould and dazzling eloquence. Shakespeare’s Henry was as rousing a chief as our present Prime Minister.1 His ‘pep talks’ were about as good as Shakespeare could make them, which means they were about as good as that kind of thing can be. It will not be generally thought that the modern serviceman hears anything better.

  What effect this splendid propaganda had on John Bates, Shakespeare reveals very clearly. He had been told, on the eve of Agincourt, that the King would not wish himself anywhere but where he was. This cut no ice at all with Bates. He replied that, though it was a (blank) cold night, he didn’t mind betting that the (blank) King would rather be up to the neck in the Thames than mucking about in the lines at Agincourt, and he added a rider to the effect that if the King did really like mucking about in the said lines, he, John Bates, heartily wished the King could be left to get on with it by himself and let sensible chaps go home. He had also been told that the King’s ‘cause was just and his quarrel honourable’:2 in modern language, that we were fighting for civilisation against barbarism and to make the world safe for democracy.

  It was at this point that another private, one Williams, who had hitherto been just stamping his feet and staring, too ‘browned off’ to say anything at all, chipped in with what I take to be the Elizabethan equivalent of ‘Sez you’ or ‘Oh yeah’. His actual words were ‘That’s more than we know’.3 ‘That’s right,’ growled Bates, and anyway, he added, it was no (blank) business of theirs. They had to obey their (blank) orders; the rights and wrongs of the war were the King’s funeral. ‘And enough for him to be going on with, too,’ said Private Williams. Then the conversation drifted on to something like Post-War Policy and the ‘implementing’ of promises made to the fighting man. The King had promised that he would never be ransomed. ‘Yes, promised,’ said Williams with withering emphasis. ‘And if he does go and get ransomed after you’ve had your throat cut, a (blank) lot you’ll know about it. Promised!’ This infuriated the only person present who took the Government’s pep talks seriously, and a quarrel developed. But Bates wouldn’t stand for that. ‘Shut up, shut up!’ he said wearily. ‘Pair of bally fools. Ain’t ye got Frenchies enough to fight without fighting one another? Silly, I call it.’

  It would be a pity to leave the scene without noticing that there was another soldier present, Private Court. He said nothing. He is there for the very purpose of saying nothing. No front line conversation would be complete without that silent figure. He says nothing. He knows there is no good in saying anything. He stopped saying things years ago when the war was young and when his illusions were shattered: perhaps after the first promise of leave was broken, perhaps when he discovered that the state of the French army was quite different from what he had been led to expect, perhaps when, in the midst of a headlong retreat, he came across a newspaper which said we were advancing.

  Now of course Shakespeare knew no more than we do—perhaps less—about the English soldier in the time of Henry V. But he knew the Elizabethan soldier. This scene gives his answer to the question which has recently been agitating a number of people, the question of ‘what the soldier thinks’. And the answer, in the supposedly ‘spacious’ days of Elizabeth after the defeat of the Armada, was that the soldier thought everything his leaders said was ‘eyewash’. Whatever had been recently said in these columns about the scepticism or ‘cynicism’ of the modern soldier was, according to Shakespeare, at least equally true of the Elizabethan soldier. And Shakespeare does not seem to be specially disquieted by it; the scene occurs not in a satire, but in a heroic and patriotic play about a ‘famous victory’.

  The Shakespearian evidence suggests that our present disquiet about ‘what the soldier thinks’ is due not to any temporary deterioration in the soldier’s morale, still less to any malice or incompetence in the observers, but to the fact that the upheaval of war is permitting, and indeed forcing, members of the more educated (and credulous) classes to see close up what the great mass of the people in this country are, and always have been, like. What they see gives them a shock, because it is so very unlike what they expected. But it is not in itself very dreadful. It might be better: it might be worse.

  In the last few years I have spent a great many hours in third-class railway carriages (or corridors) crowded with servicemen. I have shared, to some extent, the shock. I found that nearly all these men disbelieved without hesitation everything that the newspapers said about German cruelties in Poland. They did not think the matter worth discussion: they said the one
word ‘Propaganda’ and passed on. This did not shock me: what shocked me was the complete absence of indignation. They believe that their rulers are doing what I take to be the most wicked of all actions—sowing the seeds of future cruelties by telling lies about cruelties that were never committed. But they feel no indignation: it seems to them the sort of procedure one would expect.

  This, I think, is disheartening. But the picture as a whole is not disheartening. It demands a drastic revision of our beliefs. We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia. It is they who read leading articles: the poor read the sporting news, which is mostly true. Whether you like this situation or not depends on your views. It is certainly hard on you if you are a Planner or a man with any panacea that demands a nation of united enthusiasts. Your ship will be wrecked on the immemorial, half-kindly, half-lazy, wholly ironic, incredulity of the English people. If you are not a Planner you may feel that this immovable scepticism, this humour, this disillusioned patience (an almost inexhaustible patience—‘How differs it from the terrible patience of God!’) is no very bad basis for national life. But I think the true conclusion is that the existence of Private Bates in his millions should both stifle your hopes and allay your fears. It is he who makes it improbable that anything either very bad or very good will ever happen in this island. And when all’s said and done, he did beat the French chivalry at Agincourt.

  X

  HEDONICS

  There are some pleasures which are almost impossible to account for and very difficult to describe. I have just experienced one of them while travelling by tube from Paddington to Harrow. Whether I can succeed in making it imaginable to you is doubtful; but certainly my only chance of success depends on impressing you, from the outset, with the fact that I am what used to be called a country cousin. Except for a short spell in a London hospital during the last war I have never lived in London. As a result I not only know it badly but also I have never learned to regard it as a quite ordinary place. When, on the return from one of my visits, I plunge underground to reach Paddington, I never know whether I shall strike daylight again at the staircase which comes up under the hotel or at a quite different place out near the end of the departure platforms. ‘All is fortune’ so far as I am concerned; I have to be prepared for either event as I have to be prepared for fog, rain, or sunshine.

  But of all London the most complete terra incognita is the suburbs. Swiss Cottage or Maida Vale are to me, if not exactly names like Samarkand or Orgunjé, at any rate names like Winnipeg or Tobolsk. That was the first element in my pleasure. Setting out for Harrow, I was at last going to burrow into that mysterious region which is London and yet wholly unlike the London that country cousins know. I was going to the places from which all the Londoners whom one met in streets and buses really came, and to which they all returned. For central London is, in one deep sense of the word, hardly inhabited. People stay there (there are, I gather, hotels) but few live there. It is the stage; the dressing-rooms, the green room, all the ‘behind the scenes’ world is elsewhere—and that was where I was going.

  Perhaps I must labour here to convince you that I am not being ironical. I beg you to believe that all these ‘vales’ and ‘woods’ and ‘parks’ which are so ordinary to Londoners are, to my ear, a kind of incantation. I have never been able to understand why the fact of living in the suburbs should be funny or contemptible. Indeed I have been trying on and off for years to complete a poem which (like so many of my poems) has never got beyond the first two lines—

  Who damned suburbia?

  ‘I,’ said Superbia.

  There is, indeed, only one way in which a Londoner can come to understand my feeling. If it gives him pleasure to see for a moment how London looks to me, then this pleasure—the pleasure of seeing a thing the wrong way round, which makes the magic of all mirrors—is the very same which I get from the mere idea of the suburbs. For to think of them is to think that something to me so unhomely as London is to other people simply home. The whole pattern turns inside out and upside down.

  It was early evening when my journey began. The train was full, but not yet uncomfortably full, of people going home. It is important to insist—you will see why in a moment—that I was under no illusion about them. If any one had asked me whether I supposed them to be specially good people or specially happy or specially clever, I should have replied with a perfectly truthful No. I knew quite well that perhaps not ten per cent of the homes they were returning to would be free, even for that one night, from ill temper, jealousy, weariness, sorrow, or anxiety, and yet—I could not help it—the clicking of all those garden gates, the opening of all those front doors, the unanalysable home smell in all those little halls, the hanging up of all those hats, came over my imagination with all the caress of a half-remembered bit of music. There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens. I intend no cheap sneer at one’s own domesticities. The pleasure is, once more, the mirror pleasure—the pleasure of seeing as an outside what is to others an inside, and realising that you are doing so. Sometimes one plays the game the other way round.

  Then other things come in. There was the charm, as we went on, of running out into evening sunlight, but still in a deep gulley—as if the train were swimming in earth instead of either sailing on it like a real train or worming beneath it like a real tube. There was the charm of sudden silence at stations I had never heard of, and where we seemed to stop for a long time. There was the novelty of being in that kind of carriage without a crowd and without artificial light. But I need not try to enumerate all the ingredients. The point is that all these things between them built up for me a degree of happiness which I must not try to assess because, if I did, you would think I was exaggerating.

  But wait. ‘Built up’ is the wrong expression. They did not actually impose this happiness; they offered it. I was free to take it or not as I chose—like distant music which you need not listen to unless you wish, like a delicious faint wind on your face which you can easily ignore. One was invited to surrender to it. And the odd thing is that something inside me suggested that it would be ‘sensible’ to refuse the invitation; almost that I would be better employed in remembering that I was going to do a job I do not greatly enjoy and that I should have a very tiresome journey back to Oxford. Then I silenced this inward wiseacre. I accepted the invitation—threw myself open to this feathery, impalpable, tingling invitation. The rest of the journey I passed in a state which can be described only as joy.

  I record all this not because I suppose that my adventure, simply as mine, is of any general interest, but because I fancy that something of the same sort will have happened to most people. Is it not the fact that the actual quality of life as we live it—the weather of the consciousness from moment to moment—is either much more loosely or else very much more subtly connected than we commonly suppose with what is often called our ‘real’ life? There are, in fact, two lives? In the one come all the things which (if we were eminent people) our biographers would write about, all that we commonly call good and bad fortune and on which we receive congratulations or condolences. But side by side with this, accompanying it all the way like that ghost compartment which we see through the windows of a train at night, there runs something else. We can ignore it if we choose; but it constantly offers to come in. Huge pleasures, never quite expressible in words, sometimes (if we are careless) not even acknowledged or remembered, invade us from that quarter.

  Hence the unreasonable happiness which sometimes surprises a man at those very hours which ought, according to all objective rules, to have been most miserable. You will ask me whether it does not cut both ways. Are there not
also grim and hideous visitors from that secondary life—inexplicable cloudings when all is going what we call ‘well’? I think there are; but, to be frank, I have found them far less numerous. One is more often happy than wretched without apparent cause.

  If I am right in thinking that others besides myself experience this occasional and unpredicted offer, this invitation into Eden, I expect to be right also in believing that others know the inner wiseacre, the Failer, who forbids acceptance. This Jailer has all sorts of tricks. When he finds you not worrying in a situation where worry was possible, he tries to convince you that by beginning to worry you can ‘do something’ to avert the danger. Nine times out of ten this turns out on inspection to be bosh. On other days he becomes very moral: he says it is ‘selfish’ or ‘complacent’ of you to be feeling like that—although, at the very moment of his accusation, you may be setting out to render the only service in your power. If he has discovered a certain weak point in you, he will say you are being ‘adolescent’; to which I always reply that he’s getting terribly middle-aged.

  But his favourite line, in these days, is to confuse the issue. He will pretend, if you let him, that the pleasure, say, in other people’s domesticities is based on illusion. He will point out to you at great length (evidence never bothers him) that if you went into any one of those houses you would find every sort of skeleton in every cupboard. But he is only trying to muddle you. The pleasure involves, or need involve, no illusion at all. Distant hills look blue. They still look blue even after you have discovered that this particular beauty disappears when you approach them. The fact that they look blue fifteen miles away is just as much a fact as anything else. If we are to be realists, let us have realism all round. It is a mere brute fact that patches of that boyhood, remembered in one’s forties at the bidding of some sudden smell or sound, give one (in the forties) an almost unbearable pleasure. The one is as good a fact as the other. Nothing would induce me to return to the age of fourteen: but neither would anything induce me to forgo the exquisite Proustian or Wordsworthian moments in which that part of the past sometimes returns to me.