Foreign News: ARCHANGELS IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

“The most remarkable thing about the character of the English,” said an Indian writer, reviewing the years of British rule in his home country, “is their zeal for writing essays about the English character. This launches one straightway into the melancholy conjecture that self-admiration is the primary British failing . . .”

“So be it,” answers the Literary Supplement of the Times of London in a recent book review, “but then, no other nation has so much in itself to admire.” Whereupon, using a collection of essays (The Character of England, Oxford; Clarendon Press) as a point of departure, the Times proceeds to write a forceful essay of its own on the British.

The Pirates. “What sort of people are they,” asks the Times, “the oldest of the Old Powers, the youngest—indeed the unborn—of the Newest Powers, starting to challenge Fate again?” There are, it believes, “one or two obvious facts” about themselves which the British tend to ignore: “their ruthlessness, for example. The English in America exterminated one race, the Red Indians, almost completely, and imported another race, the Negroes, as slaves, on whom they inflicted unspeakable brutalities. The English in Australia carried extermination even further … a good deal of it by the simple use of arsenic, though there were other ways, more horrible and straightforward . . . Some of the English achievements in the late war, notably the burning of Hamburg, make the blood run cold.”

Among other British traits unrecognized at home, says the Times, is their habit of piracy, “of dropping honest work and taking to simple, bluff, hearty plunder,” and their “propensity for endless aggressive warfare.” There is no use, it insists, in Britons assuming a cloak of false modesty about these many talents. “These are very necessary traits . . . nowadays, not at all to be apologized for.” In the world’s present state, “there is nothing more dangerous than the current cant phrase, ‘We must gather together all the peace-loving nations.’ Unless the peace-loving nations can induce one or two war-loving nations to join the club, it is simply an invitation to be plundered. The larger the assembly of sheep the more it appeals to the wolves.”

The Artists. “The English,” the Times believes, “are, in fact, a violent and savage race with a faculty beyond all other people of ignoring their neighbors . . . They have a power of poetry which is the despair of all the rest of the world. They produce from time to time personalities transcending ordinary limitations. Then they drive other nations to a frenzy by patronizing these archangels who have come among them, and by indicating that any ordinary Englishman could do better if he liked to take the trouble.” Nonetheless, the Englishman “likes to think of himself as a sheep; and so great is his artistry . . . that he frequently deceives not only himself but others . . .

“The English carry into almost every department of modern life their great unwillingness to admit facts, their power of pretending that things are not so … [They] live in cities but they are not citified . . . They are urbane without being urban . . . They can dwell in the midst of 20 miles of paving stones and pretend, with the aid of a back green or even of a flowerpot, that they are in a hamlet on the Downs.” Yet this self-deception is not all lost. “Modern England,” the Times points out, is “a series of city streets . . . Nine out of ten Englishmen anywhere are born in the towns and bred in the streets. Yet out of these streets came the men who could outlast the Arabs in the desert, who could outfight the Japanese in the forests, who flew above the birds and dived below the whales …”

The Future. Now, says the Times, “these quick, tremendous, inventive, bold people are to be tested once more.” For the third time in history their empire is on the rocks. It broke up once when Joan of Arc smashed the Anglo-French alliance. It abandoned the Channel and reformed across the ocean, only to come to grief again at the hands of George Washington’s men. The question facing Britons now, says the Times, “is whether, and, if so, in what shape, it will reform . . . Very few societies have done this trick twice. None, except perhaps the Greek, with Athens, Alexandria and Byzantium to its credit, has done it a third time. The English have to do it a third time or perish.”

Yes, says the Times, “or perish. There is no middle way. The structure is too tall, too boldly conceived to be dismantled arch by arch and beam after beam. It must stand or crash . . . The English at present are sleeping as a sailor sleeps after a storm, cast up on the beach, in the sun. But in their dreams they know . . . they will have to rise and goforth . . . One of the great epics of the world is to be played out before us, and played out now.”