Politics Needs Literature
with a Foreword and a few interpolations by Ian Robinson
This little Tract was written during a year spent at Brock University in 1985 and was dedicated by the Author and the Publisher, without permission but in the hope that he would find something something congenial in it, to GEORGE GRANT. Grant died in 1988.
It was originally published by the Brynmill Press, of which Ian Robinson was the founder, main shareholder and managing director. Robinson died in 2020—the Press dying with him—and Maskell wants to get this and other essays online before he dies too.
FOREWORD
Mr Maskell, on the strength of an indebtedness he was kind enough to acknowledge to a lecture I gave on Heart of Darkness, and out of some experience of the difficulty I have in letting texts pass through my hands without ‘improving’ them after the manner of eighteenth-century transcribers of music, invited me to put my name on the title page as joint author. I declined this honour partly because the work is substantially his, whatever finger I have had in the pie, partly because I am not in total agreement with him about Heart of Darkness itself. It seems to me that the worse the plight of the language, the more explicit one has to be about affirming the good. Even if Mr Maskell is right in thinking that by “deliberate belief” Marlow means nothing explicit or credal—and that seems to me to be pushing interpretation rather far—I can say that things have not improved since Conrad was writing, and I cannot now be as happy as Mr Maskell to derive a sense of the good tacitly from the common language and its fine peak, the literature.
Being however in hearty general sympathy with Mr Maskell’s case, I have made considerable use of the freedom he granted me to alter his text, and such are the exigencies of periodical publication and the slowness of the post between Canada and England that I have had to do so without in every case getting his concurrence. I report the fact not because I imagine in my wildest nightmares I expect anyone to start the who-wrote-what game with any Brynmill production, but to accept final responsibility for this text. Mr Maskell has a happy faculty of provoking to thought which sometimes takes the form of goading to fury. If there is any fury about on the present occasion it had better in the first place descend on me.
As a starter I could say that my difference from Mr Maskell puts me far closer than he will like to T. S. Eliot—the Eliot moreover of that fine, much-maligned work After Strange Gods. For it seems to me that what Mr Maskell is up against in liberalism—a word he shares with one of his heroes, Newman—is nothing less, but also nothing more, than a heresy. And what he is putting against it is really an orthodoxy. I agree with nine tenths of his argument and almost all his judgements, but I think his case is incomplete without this recognition of what it really is. This, however, is not the place to work out the comment.
This work was one upshot of Mr Maskell’s sojourn as an Englishman in Canada, and it was at my suggestion he provided a list of dramatis personae or list of Canadian notables whose fame has not crossed the Atlantic. Whether this makes things clearer for them, British readers (perhaps also readers in Nova Scotia or Alberta) will judge. Singular Maskell! would that thou couldst utter thy true thoughts in a form! less droll! How will the solemn politicians and academics of England attend to thee? But it is in vain to remonstrate; the Paper Bags keep coming (very late and very bulky) across the Atlantic, and what can this English Editor do but present them only a little tidied to the Great English Public and hope for the best?
April 1985 Ian Robinson
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank McMaster University and Sudbury University for kindly inviting me to to give earlier versions of this essay as lectures.
D. M.
CHARACTERS
CANADIANS
Mr Mulroney: supposed to be Prime Minister of Canada but actually a successful television commercial called The Boy from Baie Comeau. (Baie Comeau: a small town in Quebec, famous as the setting of a successful tv commercial.) He leads the thoughtfully named Progressive Conservatives and is in favour of a smaller deficit, jobs, and the Dignity of Man. The P.C.s, under Diefenbaker (see Grant, Lament for a Nation, below), used to want the Americans out. Now they want them in, to ensure a smaller deficit &c.
Mr Turner: an unsuccessful tv commercial and leader of the Liberals. In favour of a smaller deficit (than the one he left Mr Mulroney) and jobs, but only so-so on the Dignity of Man. The “Grits” used to want the Americans in, now they want them out (a bit).
Mr Broadbent: Offstage but not forgotten: leader of the New Democrats. Also in favour of jobs, but not much else, except abortion: wants to open up a nation-wide chain of drive-thru abortion outlets.
Mr Miller: an ex-car-salesman who’s been bought a blue serge suit.
George Whalley, C.D., M.A., Ph.D., LI.D., D.C.L. (1915–1983), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (London), and of the Royal Society of Canada: musician, brave sailor and perfect scholar: Educated at Bishop’s University, Quebec, Oriel College, Oxford—where he was a Rhodes Scholar—and King’s College, London. Served throughout the Second World War in the Royal Navy, in the North Atlantic, the Arctic and at Normandy. He saw much action and retired from the Canadian active Reserve, with the rank of Commander, in 1956. In 1941 awarded the medal of the Royal Humane Society for saving life at sea. He was born in Kingston, Ontario, and for most of his life lived there, teaching at Queen’s University, Kingston, where he was John Cappon Professor of English and, for eight years, head of department. A long list of publications includes an edition of Coleridge’s Marginalia, The Legend of John Hornby and a collection of essays, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, to be published later this year. He was deservedly much honoured in Canada and in England (so much the worse for England) is quite unknown.
George Grant, the protagonist and dedicatee: Educated at Queen’s University and at Oxford—where he was a Rhodes Scholar. For many years Professor of Religion at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, then Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia; now retired. His publications include Lament for a Nation, Philosophy in a Mass Age and Technology and Empire. Like George Whalley, much honoured in Canada and unknown in England. (But for a brief account see John Ferns, “Necessary Criticism: the Achievement of George Grant”, The Gadfly vii. 3–4, August–November, 1984.)
Mr Trudeau (“Pierre”): ex-Quebecer, ex-Canadian, ex-small-time-astrologist (in Federalism and the French Canadians, 1962, prophesied that Canada would disappear in a puff of historical logic); spoke German at televised international news-conferences and was on the pay-roll of the North-South Dialogue and East-West Relations.1
Brock: a small university in St Catharine’s, Ontario, which I will be sorry to leave. (Has a soft-hearted Chairman of its English Department—“Mother Mac”—who will do your night classes for you if you ask him.)
McMaster: a big university in Hamilton, Ontario (in Grant’s phrase, “a multiversity”).
Dr Morgenthaler: a heavily bearded feminist and Pro-Choice—it doesn’t matter what, but, other things being equal, abortion.
Timmins, Saskatoon, Queen Charlotte Sound, Eskimo Point: places Hitler never heard of.
BRITISH
Winston Churchill: last-but-one English winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Thatcher, Kinnock, Heath &c: Molly Maids.
POLITICS NEEDS LITERATURE
Has politics any need of literature? It obviously has need of economics. Obviously, I mean, if you go by newspapers and by politicians themselves. For economics is the staple of politics, it almost is politics. Mr Mulroney and Mrs Thatcher, and Mr Turner and Mr Kinnock, even if they don’t have to be economists, do have to be surrounded by them, and be able, at a pinch, to imitate them, at the news conference and the interview. They also have to make a show of economics to look plausible as politicians. Mrs Thatcher makes it plain that statistics counts for a lot in politics. She makes it just as plain that literature counts for nothing. Mr Kinnock does offer to be an orator, especially at party conferences, where, as leader, he is routinely expected to be inspiring, but the more he aspires to anything like literature the more truly like literature seems Mrs Thatcher’s statistics.
So politicians need economists and statisticians. But that they need critics on their staffs or to make a show of being well read? The idea is bizarre. What part of politics is it to sound like a cultivated man or woman or even moderately well educated? It’s more important to look well dressed. Mr Mulroney knows that. Mr Miller acts on it. The first thing his “aides” got him to do on his being elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario, and hence Provincial Prime Minister, was to give up his sports jackets and slacks for a dark blue serge suit. There was an election in the offing and he had to look “Prime Ministerial”. He had to look the part. He now not only looks as well as sounds like a used car salesman, but makes a political virtue out of it. It’s what got him elected.2
Modern politics has plenty of use for economics, statistics, the law, the board room and the used-car lot, but what modern political party would know what to do with a writer or critic, someone who merely knew what things were worth? What conceivable use could any English political party ever have made of Leavis? (His unique appearance, on the same platform as Jeremy Thorpe, and from which he had to make his escape as soon as the candidate he had hoped to support opened his mouth, is a mere oddity, as was the meeting with R. H. S. Crossman which also seems to have been socially disastrous.) What conceivable use could any Canadian party have made of George Whalley or make still of George Grant? Ontario Conservatives voted for Mr Miller on the grounds, apparently, that he likes fast cars and can give proof, in the most tangible form, of his shrewdness as a businessman. But nothing could do more to prove to them—or, in Mr Mulroney’s case, to prove to Canadians generally—that they had made the most awful mistake with him than his calling into his cabinet someone like George Grant—a declaration that thought mattered to him and that it would be his guide. (Mr Wilson’s summoning of C. P. Snow into his government was more like a determination to be guided by cliché, hardly more of a devotion to thought than Mr Heath’s penchant for the Think Tank.) And because Mr Miller, and even more Mr Mulroney, can be expected to know their business—and because, as you can see from the television, Mr Mulroney at least does know his—there is perhaps no mistake they are less likely to make than getting a Grant in the cabinet.3 And what’s true of them is no less true of Mrs Thatcher. I don’t suppose she would ever think of anyone within letters for any sort of office or use. But she and her advisors must be constantly looking over lists of lawyers, businessmen, scientists, statisticians, economists, for someone who might be useful in some way or other. And so the representative of “thought” in her cabinet is Sir Keith Joseph, and outside, Mr Rhodes Boyson. And whatever might have caught Mr Reagan for Mr Mondale, it certainly wouldn’t have been a literary critic.
It’s not merely that politicians don’t employ men of letters any more but that they don’t, as far as you can tell, read them either. Modern political leaders hardly ever seem to be people educated in their own, or anyone else’s, literature. In Britain the only Prime Minister since Churchill with anything of literature in him has been Macmillan. And in him what literature amounted to was a certain sort of country-house wit and a reputed liking (unlikely here to be a sign of good taste) for Jane Austen: literature surviving in politics, just, but as social manner, polish, what helps you get the better of Kruschev when he bangs the table with his shoe. Then with Heath and Wilson, and now Thatcher and Kinnock (Kinnock replacing Foot), English literature and English letters disappear from English politics just about altogether. Enoch Powell is recognisably an educated man and a man of letters as well as a politician, but the literature in him is one that scarcely gets beyond the eighteenth century (leaving out of account the sub-Housman verses which seem not to touch the politician at all), as if Addison and Johnson, along with Burke, can be influences on him but not Blake or Dickens or Eliot or Lawrence. As if, for him, there is room in politics for literature, but only for some, for what can be enlisted in support of his version of conservatism.
Michael Foot has written a good book on Swift, but even that confirms how little politics and letters have to do with one another in modern England. For no-one—no-one who wasn’t independently interested in Swift—would know that Mr Foot had written such a book or whether it was any good or not. No-one would know from observing the part played in English political life by Mr Foot. It is taken for granted—even, so far as one can tell, by Mr Foot himself—that his book has no more political significance than the shape of his nose. Less, for the latter would show up on television. Mr Foot’s jacket and his walking-stick—in contrast with his book on Swift—were potent political facts at the last general election. The British people might have had a leader who wore a workman’s donkey-jacket and who hobbled—on television! That was too much. It was also much that his rival, Mrs Thatcher, was the daughter of a grocer who, even if she has now risen into the class that shops at and approves of Marks & Spencer, could be expected to know about profit and loss and the price of bacon. It was very much that she had got a degree in chemistry, in science. Business and Science, Science and Business, for the sake of better business! And embodied—as Burke says our institutions should be—in a person, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration or attachment. And by comparison with that, Mr Foot’s mere good book on Swift passed for nothing (nothing there to love, venerate, admire or attach yourself to) not even in a country with a difficult Irish province to govern and needing, you’d have thought, whatever wisdom about Ireland and the Irish it could lay hands on. To cap it all, Mr Foot’s book passed for no more, politically, with Mr Foot than with anyone else. And if Mr Foot can’t make count as a political fact a book he has written, why on earth should Mrs Thatcher or Mr Mulroney be expected to make count books they had only read?
The Thatcher government’s attitude to literature is perfectly shown by its handling of the recent vacancy (1984) of the poet laureateship. Gossip ran in the “serious” papers for months, books were run, soundings taken from “distinguished” members of the London Literary World—and then an appointment was made that expressed final mutual contempt between politics and literature. Mr Hughes is known as a poet of genuine talent and is still capable of effective nature poetry which, also a possible qualification for the laureateship, he gives the impression of being able to produce by the galley. But when he insists on being prophetic he produces Crow. In one primitive sense Crow is conservative, for the hero wishes, always and only, to conserve himself.4 Like Falstaff, but without Falstaff’s panache, Crow is set simply on continuing to keep alive. A Conservative government that made any connection between literature and its own thinking could not conceivably have appointed the poet of Crow. On his side, had Mr Hughes had any minimal respect for the establishment he was invited to join, he must surely have declined. In the event he not only accepted but gave us a foretaste of how he intends to keep up the office by sending to The Observer what purported to be a poem celebrating the birth of Prince Harry. It was not a poem and not about the happy event, but presumably (setting aside the possibility that there was some mistake, the wrong bit or the wrong side of paper printed, or the like) a scrap out of Mr Hughes’s files. Absolute contempt from both sides!
Mrs Thatcher is, within the circle of her own customary thought, an intelligent woman, someone who can frame an argument and organise a train of consequences. She also gives the impression of meaning what she says. She has qualities of character that plainly make her a formidable person to deal with, difficult to best (look what she did to Sir Robin Day during the last election campaign—squashed him). But you could never carry away from her the impression that she cared for thought for its own sake or that she read—read anything that wasn’t either narrowly political or else just light relief. For all you can tell, as far as literature goes, she might be a complete ignoramus. She may read, perhaps she does, but if so she has apparently no way of making it felt in her politics—it has no way of making itself felt. What she thinks, and feels drawn to say, bears upon nothing remoter—and seems to have bearing upon it nothing remoter—than the common stuff of the journalism of her own immediately surrounding time and place. And she is the rule, not the exception, for,
The fact is that in the world of triumphant modernity, the world of power-centres from which the quantity-addicted machinery of civilisation is controlled, directed and exploited, literature in the old sense has ceased to matter. —F. R. Leavis, The Living Principle, p. 11
Does anyone think Mr Reagan has a book in him? Is there poetry in Mr Schultz? Does Mr Mulroney read? anything but advertisements and political speeches modelled upon advertisements? What idea of Canada has he? Mr Trudeau’s idea of Canada was that Canada was, like any other nation, a mere epiphenomenon of history, an accident of historical transition, probably once useful and still widely thought indispensable but bound (thank goodness) by the logic of history to disappear. (How odd then to want to be the Prime Minister of an epiphenomenon! Well, Mr Trudeau really didn’t, and has now very consistently followed his logic into the supranational stratosphere also inhabited by such bodies as Herr Willy Brandt and Mr Edward Heath.) Mr Mulroney goes one better. His idea is to treat Canada as if it has already disappeared, as if Trudeau’s Ideal were his Fact: Canada as a cycle of production and consumption, Canada spinning after the faster cycle to the South, Canadians as creatures who consume and who produce, who produce to consume, who consume to produce. And where Mr Mulroney will lead them to is greater production and greater consumption still. He is going to make Canada prosperous again. Prosperous ! One of the two or three richest countries in the world. So rich that, if you go there from Britain (as these things go, a pretty rich country itself), you feel poor. The size, the numerousness of the products! A land overwhelmed by products. Not just cars, refrigerators, stereos, washing machines and dish-washers, but domestic tractors and snow-blowing machines, central-heating boilers with integral air-conditioning, humidifying and electronic dust-collecting units attached, which, in combination with insulation and double- and triple-glazing, aim to recreate on earth the ideal, sealed atmosphere of a space station; and not just built-in, central vacuum-cleaning pipes but, for the lawn, underground hose-pipes! Production shall be that labour may not: yet in some neighbourhoods no-one cuts his own grass or clears his own drive any more, and many don’t do their own housework because the Garden Appraisal Experts and the Molly Maids do it all for them (what, a domestic grass-cutting industry?) And what is it that these, immensely, rich folk lack? Prosperity! And what will they pay to get it? Under Mr Mulroney, evidently, any price. He is going to break down the barriers between Canada and Prosperity—by breaking them down between Canada and the Land of Prosperity to the South. He is going to open up Canada to foreign investment. Not American investment or American money but, euphemistically, foreign investment. And he’s going to be pragmatic not ideological (which are thought to be the possible alternatives). Or, “We’ll take their money and ask no questions.” And Canada welcomes rich Hong-Kong Chinese escaping from communism.
It’s different from England, of course, but in essentials exactly the same. The South of England has the prosperity the North of England wants. Canada has the prosperity the South of England wants. America has the prosperity the Canadians want. And the Americans, what do they want? Prosperity. And that’s why they re-elect Mr Reagan, because he looks the likeliest to give it to them. And if you look in Canada for any alternative to this delusive prosperity, you find just the same alternative that’s available in England: prosperity for us or prosperity for all. That’s how far our imaginations and our generosity stretch—as far as our purses—to make a gigantic Southern Ontario or South East England or, better still, a California of the whole world. To make the Ethiopians as prosperous and deluded as ourselves.
There is something fairly obviously wrong with all this, and even commonly known to be wrong. What is not so well known is that the one thing needed to put right what is wrong with our politics is our literature.
It was a feebleness in English political life that it could find no room or welcome in it for Leavis (was he so much lesser a man than Burke?); it is a feebleness of Canadian politics that it has been unable to make anything of George Grant and his avowed belief in “a British North America”. Isn’t that a belief that ought to have more than a buried—or aborted—life in Canadian politics? Especially when he makes it clear, as he does in the Carleton Library edition of Lament for a Nation, that the Britain he has in mind for North America is no mere imitation of the one we have made for ourselves in the British Isles? In the Introduction he says that the Britain he believes in is—to paraphrase him—every bit as invisible in Britain as in Canada, brought to an end in both countries by other things as unquestionably British as itself. Now, to want to maintain, or to create, in North America, a continuity with a British past which Britain herself has broken—that has surely, if anything has, the character of the political, and surely too (in Ontario if not in Quebec or Manitoba) the character of the possible, and even the desirable? Nor need it be a wish obviously threatening dissension or disunity of a kind that couldn’t be coped with by politics. The offer to create in Canada a Britain that should not imitate the Britain of the British Isles but which, in some very important respects, should oppose it, is not an offer by any means absolutely threatening to Italians, Ukrainians or Chinese in Canada—certainly not a threat to someone who, by his going there, has already tacitly undertaken to give up his own language for English. If it threatens anything Canadian at all what it threatens is that Canada which comes closest to merely reproducing British Britain, reproducing it as social veneer, the sort of thing Grant sums up when he says, “Today, the British tradition means that Mr Taylor, who has given his life to integrating this country into the capitalist empire [south of the border], still in the 1970s finds it impossible to pronounce the words ‘Kentucky Derby’ in the proper American fashion.” And didn’t Lawrence, when he was unable to imagine his England in an educated Englishman, imagine it in an Italian, a gypsy, a gamekeeper or a miner who emigrates to Canada? Grant’s two questions, in paraphrase, “What is Canada, English-speaking Canada, if not British?” and “What might British be if not the British of Britain?” are ones which, I would have thought, never could be dead for Canadians, certainly not in Ontario. How could Canadian politics ever have any depth to it without striving to answer them? How could it otherwise be a politics worthy of the name?
Well, it isn’t. Canadians don’t have a politics. What they have instead is a consensus, a consensus not very unlike the British one. What all Canadian, like most British, politicians agree on is Prosperity and Multiculturalism, the one to be brought about by “access to a larger market” (for Mr Mulroney the word America—saving the loss of a little idealistic afflatus—means just what Europe does for Mr Heath), the other epitomised by the hoarding inviting us, without intending a joke, to Have a Multicultural Christmas. It’s what a nation makes of its politics when its politics can’t make sense of the nation. This is the simple result of the loss by politics of literature—politics cut off from literature and letters becoming, literally, senseless; politics losing its grasp of the meaning of the words that comprise its own essential vocabulary.
But if, for the moment, we push contemporary politics—Mr Mulroney and Mrs Thatcher, Mr Turner and Mr Kinnock, and everything that surrounds them and is of a piece with them in parliament and out—out of our minds, and try to imagine a different twentieth-century politics, in which literature and letters have a place, is it so hard to do so? We might even remark, as a sign of something the matter with politics, that politics has no use for literature. What! Politicians who haven’t faced up to Dickens’s scepticism about education, to Lawrence’s about efficiency of production, to Conrad’s about commerce or politics itself? What, politicians who, not having read Carlyle, trust to machinery and the elaboration of machinery to accomplish the business of politics! Politicians who, not having read Arnold, can’t see that politics needs criticism! Who don’t know that criticism is essential to politics in a way that mere economics never could be! Who don’t conduct themselves as if under the eye of the best thought and said even in their own age! Remarking that, we might remark upon it as a decadence or even the end of politics. But we don’t. On the contrary. If we remark upon it at all, we do so as upon the most natural state of affairs in the world.
But . . . has Conrad’s picture of European commercial civilisation at work in Africa, and Europe, in Heart of Darkness nothing for politics, nothing an intelligent politician could learn from? Has it no bearing on the Common Market and Mr Heath’s conception of “Europe”? Is there nothing for politics in Lawrence’s picture of Gerald Crich and all that “go” of his that goes into the perfect mechanisation of the coal industry in Women in Love and then has nowhere to go next? (Except, eventually, like Nostromo, into suicide.) Or in Dickens’s picture of Gradgrind’s school in Hard Times? Or of the wickedness Melville shows in Claggart’s combination of respectability and method in Billy Budd?5 It’s not hard to imagine politics not merely learning from literature but conducting itself as if subject to the judgement of literature. There’s nothing intrinsic to the nature of each, at least, to prevent that. What seems obvious from the viewpoint of the actual and familiar—that politics should have nothing to do with literature—from the viewpoint of the readily imaginable seems mysterious.
Politics having become what it has, it is easy to see why it prefers economics to letters. Economics may be merely made use of as letters never can; economics can never judge politics; to judge is what letters does. Politics is comfortable with economics. Literature has no place in politics not because it has no bearing on it—quite the opposite—because of the particular bearing it always has tacitly and sometimes explicitly. If, for instance, we imagined some representative and successful modern politician—Mr Mulroney, say, or Mrs Thatcher—reading Women in Love or Heart of Darkness and bringing to the reading all his customary hopes and wishes for his country—hopes and wishes not necessarily or in all forms and circumstances contemptible or meretricious—that it become more prosperous by becoming more efficient, better organised and so on—what are we to imagine him making of it? Could he fail to see it as a prediction and judgement of himself and of modern politics in general? That satirical conversation Ursula and Gudrun have about Gerald Crich, for instance, could Mrs Thatcher fail to recognise herself in it?
“I know Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is making all kinds of latest improvements,” said Ursula.
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.
“Of course,” she said, “that’s quite inevitable.”
“Quite,” laughed Ursula. “He is several generations of youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of the neck, and fairly flings them along. He’ll have to die soon, when he’s made every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve. He’s got go, anyhow.”
“Certainly, he’s got go,” said Gudrun. “In fact, I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?”
“Oh I know,” said Ursula. “It goes in applying the latest appliances!”
“Exactly,” said Gudrun.
Gerald Crich’s “go” goes where Mrs Thatcher wants to send the whole of England’s—into organisation, efficiency, production— “everything run,” as Lawrence says, “on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men in control everywhere”. And supposing Mrs Thatcher felt the force of that judgement—of the inadequacy of efficiency, productiveness, organisation, as ends (for individuals or nations), what can we imagine her (as a successful politician, as a politician who has become a success precisely by advocating these ends, as if they were sufficient) doing—or being able to do—with or about it? How can we imagine her making that judgement part of her politics, making it tell as a new understanding of the national life, in politics? It’s a judgement that condemns just the world she is striving earnestly and not without success to bring into existence. If she really felt the force of the judgement, with the new apprehension it gave her of what, at least, her country didn’t need, and with it a new apprehension perhaps of her own unworthiness, could she responsibly do anything else but give up politics? Or, if she felt sufficiently changed by what she had learned, perhaps she might stay on to change politics. But either thought is fantastic.
What would happen is that she would not see what she read as having any bearing on politics—on “practical politics” as the phrase goes, the only kind she knows. And she would feel justified in thinking so by the self-evidence of the truth that nothing Lawrence has to say could be made to count in English politics as she knows it (and what else is it but what she knows it as?). She might even (there is no need to suppose otherwise) find some truth in Women in Love without finding any political truth in it: it’s literature, a novel. After all Women in Love looks more like a denial or repudiation of politics than a part of it.
But not only can we imagine things being different; they once were different, and not so very long ago. English political and literary culture used to be one, and we don’t have to go all the way back to Elizabethan England and Sir Walter Raleigh to find them one. The eighteenth century isn’t so foreign to us after all, and yet it is in this regard. Eighteenth-century English politics incorporated the best thought and writing of its day as if it were naturally part of itself—that is, it was: Defoe, Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Sheridan, Johnson, Burke. How, then (could you imagine anything like it now?) could a great political magnate like Rockingham find a Burke invitingly before him and not snap him up? And what could say more about the difference between their politics and ours than that a Burke would want to be snapped up?
A little later it was as the author of Waverley, not as a practising Tory politician, that Scott was able to play a quite important part in cementing the union of England and Scotland. English political and literary culture continued still a single culture further into the nineteenth century. This might be illustrated—within “letters”—by the various connections that run through George Eliot and join the Brontës, at one extreme, through Mrs Gaskell to, at the other, by way of the Westminster Review, Mill and Bentham. It is illustrated by the Mills, father and son, and the latter’s (albeit imperfect) friendship with Carlyle. It is illustrated by Macaulay. It is illustrated by the friendship between Carlyle and Dickens. It is particularly well illustrated by a connection between Coleridge and Gladstone. The author of “The Ancient Mariner” was also the author of On the Constitution of Church and State. And Coleridge’s subject in the latter work is the present one, the relation to politics of literature and religion. His strong conviction is that politics—far from being a self-contained and self-sufficient activity—depends on literature and religion, and as they are present, moreover, not merely in politicians but in the whole populace: “We must be men in order to be citizens,” he says; and, “a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite [is a mere] animal endowed with a memory of appearances and facts . . . the man [has] vanished.”
It is said that the Prime Minister to whom Coleridge’s work was addressed was baffled by it; but it is thereby implied that he did try. Any contemporary Prime Minister faced by a similar missive from a man of letters would know exactly what to do with it, and the instant fate of the wastepaper basket would also surely be anticipated by any such man of letters. Gladstone not only admired Coleridge’s work—he called it “a masterly sketch” with a “beautiful and profound” argument; under its influence he wrote a book on the same subject, The State in its Relations with the Church. Is it conceivable that anything remotely similar should occur today?—that a poet should write on such a topic (well, C. H. Sisson might) or that if he did a future Prime Minister should not only read and admire but imitate him? (Mr Tebbit?) Poet and politician as rivals and collaborators, but not in poetry and not in politics, just in thought, in a style of thought common to both, unspecialised, subject to the one common standard of judgement, addressed to a common readership which, it could be taken for granted, was at home not only with this sort of thing but with poetry and politics too, an educated public—the same one public with the same one standard for both poet and politician. Each answerable to each and to all. Haven’t we there a glimpse of what a healthy politics and a healthy literature is; and a glimpse too of what we have lost?
That Coleridge and Gladstone wrote these books seems to me even more remarkable testimony to what could once be taken for granted but has now become quite unimaginable than Disraeli’s being a novelist (a worse one than John Fowles or Margaret Atwood?) or than Gladstone’s being someone who read Italian poetry and wrote Homer and the Homeric Age.
Churchill was the last important English politician in whom politics and literature went together as if each was necessary to the other. And his case illustrates how literature is not something merely useful to politics—as statistics might be useful, something to be picked up and put down as convenient—but essential to it, something without which politics isn’t itself. Churchill was the last important British politician who was also a not slight or unimportant writer (at any rate he’s another British Prime Minister whom I’d rather read than John Fowles or Margaret Atwood). And he couldn’t have been the war-time political leader he was without having in him the measure of English literature he did. He couldn’t have led as he did without being someone who could speak as he did, not only to the British people and parliament, but to the French, to the U.S. Congress, to the Canadian parliament. It was to a Canadian parliament he made his triumphant joke—and what other way in 1941 except in a joke could he triumph?—about the chicken and its neck. What his leadership consisted in very essentially was not organising and administering—though that no doubt came into it, as a derivative of what it did essentially consist in—but in making sense of the war. He made sense of the war for the British in a way that no-one else was capable of making sense of it. And first of course it had to make sense for him. He had to believe in it. And could he have done so, made sense of continuing the war in 1940, after Dunkirk and the fall of France without being, as he was, a man educated in his own literature? A literature which made sense of the nation and the national history? Could he have moved the British to believe in the war if he had never himself been moved by the great patriotic speeches he found in Shakespeare? Without his renewing the life of those speeches in 1940 would the British have been brought to believe in the war as far as they did believe in it? Had Churchill never existed, how easy would it have been to bring them to believe in the war’s opposite, in peace in our time, peace with or without honour but peace anyway, the obvious, prudent, commonsensical, thing—could it not also have been made to seem inevitable? Say someone else had made alive and potent not Henry’s voice but Falstaff’s? Would the English then, could they, have kept the war going without being able to make any sense of doing so? What can we infer about that from Churchill’s big defeat in the post-war election? That the British without a Churchill to lend them his belief would nevertheless have had it for themselves? In 1954, in a speech at Westminster, on his eightieth birthday, he said, with a proper and becoming modesty, while obviously still rejoicing in what he obviously still felt as the nation’s triumph and his own, “It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” (Not everyone, of course, could have roared when called.) If it was so, that the nation and the race was a lion (and it may well have been that, of the race around the globe, it was the English themselves who had least of that character to them) would it ever have known itself to be so without hearing itself roar? Was it Stalin who asked, scornfully, “How many divisions has the Pope?” How many divisions, from throughout the English-speaking world, by the end of the war, were Churchill’s speeches worth? Words, air, the mere scutcheon, but mysteriously potent, and without which the big battalions can be mysteriously impotent.
And perhaps the reason that the First World War was so much more traumatic than the second both for countless individuals and for more than one European nation is that the politicians of the First World War were unable either to make any good sense of it or to put a decent end to it. Where Churchill had something of English Literature in him, Lloyd George had a good deal too much hwyl. Was it worth all the horror and death? How can it have been when nobody was able to say so with a sincere and authentic voice? The response of our best writers, too, was either apocalyptic or defeatist and not to this day has there been anything in English about that trauma at all like August, 1914.
And without literature politics no longer is politics, however much that helps it become a “subject”, an object even, for academic study: without literature politics is impotent. Not because what literature in politics is potent for is necessarily the good. It may be potent for good or ill, as Churchill’s case perhaps also illustrates. He made Henry V’s speech before Agincourt and John of Gaunt’s speech on his deathbed politically, militarily potent 350 years after they were written. But though we may not question that it was the good they were potent for in 1940, when they kept Britain in the war, we might question whether it was at all similarly the good they were potent for in 1944–5, when they helped to make peace impossible without Germany’s unconditional surrender. “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival,” may very well have been one thing in 1940 when Britain was alone and beset and a quite different thing four or five years later when her enemy was. We might well say that the literature that was alive in Churchill and made him a great leader wasn’t enough or of the best. And that it was a sure and sound instinct in the British people to get rid of him in 1945. It marked a proper—and properly prudent—distrust not of literature in politics but of the domination of politics by one particular, patriotic literature. It was a sound piece of practical criticism—criticism in practice.
But without literature, politics is impotent or nugatory—as I believe modern politics is, impotent even to accomplish its own purposes, let alone those of literature, impotent to make the sense of our lives it is its special business to make. What we find in present-day politics is that the sense it makes of our lives is none of the many vivifying senses we find in literature but the one monotonous stupefying sense we get from advertising. If we say that in the eighteenth century politics and literature were one, shouldn’t we have to say that today it’s politics and advertising that are one? In 1765 Rockingham got Burke to help him; in 1983 Mrs Thatcher got Saatchi & Saatchi. In 1985 Mr Miller gives up his sports jacket and slacks for a dark suit, in order to look like a Prime Minister. How else should we know he was one, really?
The particular lessons politicians might learn from literature are not so important as something into which they shade: a whole language of true judgement in which alone politics can have its right place.
A phrase current amongst English Conservatives is “the wealth-creating sector”, said not just respectfully but reverently,6 and implying that everyone else—those in the “public sector”, the antithetical category—teachers, for instance—are mere Marxian secondary effects. The reality is wealth-creation. Everything else depends from or stands on that: first the economy, then culture (it’s where socialism and commercialism find themselves in agreement). And, as everyone recognises, though no-one bothers to say so, by wealth is meant not wealth in any of its many spiritual forms, but wealth as pelf, money, money and the equivalent of money, purchasable goods.
The odd thing about this usage is that it betrays contradictory intentions or states of mind. On the one hand there’s the wish to honour money-making (and why shouldn’t it be given its due?), on the other there’s the effect of dishonouring it by being fearful of speaking of it plainly, betraying that what is to be honoured is also something to be ashamed of. Before you can honour it—so strong is the disposition of the common language not to honour it—you have to disguise what you are honouring. So O.B.E.’s are awarded for services to industry not to money and Queen’s Awards are made to industry not money. This is a tacit admission that the language—the experience and the judgement of the race—denies the honour in such honours.
And here’s why present-day politics can have no room in it for literature. For literature is a kind of epitome of the common language, and the weight of the language is against the materialism and selfishness that contemporary politics venerates, and venerates so peculiarly, too, that it asks us to accept as public virtues what in private life we always and naturally judge to be vices. Literature as the accuser and judge of politics: how could politics have any use for it?
From the point of view of modern politics the trouble with literature is that the judgement literature passes on it isn’t made only explicitly and locally, here and there, as in that quotation from Women in Love and throughout the chapter called “The Industrial Magnate”. That might be something politics could put up with. But that same judgement which is concentrated and made explicit there is diffused and implicit everywhere in literature’s language—a language formed under the influence of Christianity. The habits of speech of our literature—everywhere it is literature—never leave off threatening a judgement of politics and the language of politics.
The activity which Mrs Thatcher tries to ennoble—against the grain of the language—in the phrase “wealth creators”, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, when he meets it in the whited sepulchre of Brussels—the epitome of wealth-creation even more now than then—calls, speaking with the grain of the language, with the engrained habits of the language prompting and justifying him, “making no end of coin by trade”. When he comes into contact with it he is made uneasy: “There was something ominous in the atmosphere. It was as though I had been let into some conspiracy.”
Where contemporary politics says “wealth-creation”, literature—in obedience to the moral habit of the language—says, “making no end of coin”; where politics says “a sector”, literature—speaking for the whole language—says, “a conspiracy”; where one says “prosperity”, “growth”, “efficiency”, “technology”, “productivity” the other says, satirically, “all kinds of the latest improvements”, “where does his go, go to?” “applying the latest appliances”.
In Heart of Darkness Marlow, explaining to himself what it is someone needs to resist the temptation Kurtz gives way to, says:
But he must be at least as much of a man as those on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No, you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well, I hear, I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil, mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.
To that last assertion, that Marlow has the speech that cannot be silenced, we readily assent, but not because the “fiendish row” from the jungle can’t silence him—or not because of that alone—but because Kurtz’s eloquence can’t silence him— “it was eloquent,” Marlow says, “vibrating with eloquence, but too high strung”—and because the cant of the company can’t either:
These were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.
What saves Marlow—from both nightmares, as he calls them, Kurtz’s on the one side, the company men’s on the other—is not so much a deliberated belief (not at least one that is ever stated) as his secure and convinced possession of the common language and of the sanity and wisdom embodied in it. If it is a belief that saves Marlow, it’s not so much a belief statable in language as a belief in the language itself. And what it saves him from is not, of course, anything African—“savagery”—but something European, a European commercialism and a self-deluding European philanthropism that repudiates what is best and deepest in European civilisation, which repudiates even European, or at least English, common sense, and which does indeed issue, in Kurtz, in a kind of un-scrupulousness of which we have no grounds for accusing the “savages” but of which there are plenty of examples from the European history of our own century. Marlow is the active conscience of Europe, judging the worst of Europe by a standard itself European, Europe’s own best standard, as knowable in English—an English formed under the influence of nearly 2000 years of Christianity. Not a best that’s the property of only a few, but a best that couldn’t be commoner, the common sense of the language : the common sense of the words enemy, criminal, rebel, worker, turned satirically against the hypocritical sense given them by what Marlow always calls—again satirically—“the pilgrims”, a common sense which insists on murder, torture, slavery being recognised simply as murder, torture, slavery and not merely “unsound business methods” (unsound because not in the long term profitable). Marlow’s conscience is, of course, his, but it’s not merely his and couldn’t have been authoritative as Conrad makes it if it were; it’s as much public as private, verifiable as conscience by anyone who speaks the language, whether avowedly Christian or not. Marlow’s speech is an epitome of what language in literature always is, the (to echo Coleridge talking about the relation of the church to the state) sustaining, correcting, befriending Opposite of politics, that opposite and corrective which, if politics in our time only knew what did sustain and befriend it, would do so. But as it is, given what politics has become—something that justifies, venerates what the best part of the language condemns—how could it have any use for literature?
Politics is one thing and literature another not because they are so by necessity but because we make them so. The divide we find in practice—it’s politicians who practise politics, writers who write—we first make in thought. And the “we” who make it are firstly the professional thinkers in the Literature and Politics departments of universities.
As a matter of fact, you can’t do either of these subjects without simultaneously doing the other. As a matter of fact you can’t do any of the central Arts subjects without simultaneously doing all the others. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of History and Politics. How could you possibly think of history without politics or vice versa? But it applies equally to the study of literature. How far can you get with thinking about Julius Caesar or Nostromo unless you have an intelligent and informed interest in politics? How to think about Richard II or Old Mortality if you can take no intelligent and informed interest in history? Middlemarch without psychology and The Clerk’s Tale without theology? This is not to say there are no differences between the “subjects” or that it need always be wrong to conduct separate examinations in them. Every real subject has its own special methods or a body of special knowledge, of varying size. The special knowledge demanded of the literary critic is probably more extensive than that demanded of the economist (some knowledge of grammatical and rhetorical terms for the one, some knowledge about theories of value, work &c. for the other). If Economics had to stick to its own small core of special knowledge it couldn’t possibly be stretched into a university first degree course. In practice the special economic knowledge has to go with acuteness about politics, psychology—about how people are likely to act. (Which is why reputable economists can give politicians opinions as opposed as those of literary critics on the same book: when they advise politicians economists are not practising an exact science or even applying a science.)
In a healthy state of the language an Arts specialism is just a concentration, from one point of view and using one way of thinking, upon something whole—one particular refinement of a sense of a whole language which presupposes some capacity to judge the whole range. Which is why in turn there is no need to invoke the dreaded word interdisciplinary: we are not to be polymaths but to recognise that we are standing on common land, which if it is enclosed becomes something else, on which we somehow can’t stand at all.
Just as judgement in economics is not purely economic judgement so judgement in literature is never merely literary. To complete the judgement of a work of literature is to go over the boundary of the purely literary (assuming you can draw it) and into judgements about life or about the whole language.
But “letters” surely does have to aspire to judgement of a whole people or language as economics needn’t.
The idea of “pure literature” (which doesn’t allow literature to be itself) seems to have come in at about the same time as the university specialism. “Although there have been critics [including Matthew Arnold] who place Edmund Burke at the summit of English prose writers, it is hardly to be gainsaid that he belongs more to the history of politics and to the history of thought, than to that of pure literature.” This, from the Introduction (p. v) to the Everyman edition of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (1910) is put by that series into its class of Essays and Belles Lettres. But it is still not pure literature, only thought—and politics.
The common danger is that the specialist will try to use the authority of his specialism to enforce a common judgement in which his specialism is not authoritative, as when an economist tells us we must do so-and-so for the sake of the commonwealth, and that only another economist would be competent to disagree, but without deriving his must from economic theory. Glaring cases arise in literary studies. So many teachers have thought that the study of literature in itself confers authority in morals, and lay down a moral law they then try in vain to derive from the pure study of literature.7
True judgement in literature (or by literature) is judgement by or in the common language and authoritative to the extent that it is so.
In the case in point Politics has its little special core of knowledge, but if it forbids itself the political thought to be found in literature it is so impoverished as to be not really the study of politics. The idea that any political theorist in the language has as good a grasp of politics (republican as well as monarchic) as Shakespeare will not bear much examination.
But within the universities there isn’t any common ground between the Politics and Literature departments. It is no good hoping for practising politicians to feel any obligation to letters when their academic counterparts don’t.
The thing immediately the matter with us is that specialisation is second nature to us. To be educated is to regard it as being in the nature of things that literature and politics should be specialisms. If we belong to universities we think it only natural that nobody in the department of the one should be answerable to anybody in the department of the other, any more than anybody in either could be answerable to somebody in a third—Philosophy, shall we say, or History, or Theology. Literature and Politics are two things, two “fields”, not aspects of one; and nobody outside any properly established and specialised “field” can count in it. That, in practice, is the way we think of thinking, and the way it is organised in the universities. Literature is one thing, Politics something else, like Physics or Computer Science, not-literature. Imagine Politics and Literature departments petitioning Senates to be merged, or the redundant staff of one department taken into the other! And imagine the results if these things happened! What conceivable sense could a joint Department of Politics and Literature make—to anyone except the Marxists on either side? Such a department would be either Marxist or chaotic. But if so may not we get an inkling of why the work done by departments both of Politics and Literature is generally speaking so much of a nonentity?
Even our material arrangements declare our belief that the two things have nothing to do with each other. At Newcastle Polytechnic, Politics goes with Economics, Business Studies, Management & Administration, and Sociology & Psychology in the middle of the campus, next to the Science and Engineering—and the Building and Allied Trades—blocks. Literature is on an extremity along with Dance, Drama, Music and Sport. At Brock University in Ontario Politics and Literature do share a corridor, but that’s all they share. They don’t even share the coffee room in the middle.
There was a conference on literature and politics at McMaster University last November which illustrated just how far the university is from believing that the two things belong together even when they are put together. For, as the list of speakers made plain, it was a literary occasion. Literature and politics brought together, but by just one of them, to suit the purposes of just one of them; and rightly, for if the other were there too wouldn’t it get in the way? The two are brought together not because we really believe they belong together—that each suffers apart from the other—but because we have decided to bring them together. We might have decided to bring together some other pair, Literature and History say, as the British conference of Higher Education Teachers of English did last year (this year, sticking to its specialism, the same conference was to hear three papers including in their title the word intertextuality)—but we didn’t; this time we decided on this pair, Literature and Politics, for two days insisting on a connection which for the rest of the year (actually during the two days too) is invisible to us.
If the idea, coming from the English side, of a conference on literature and politics ought to be called something like “Politics in Literature” or “Politics Seen through Literature”, something at any rate that declares that our interest in literature is uppermost, the politics not amounting to much more than material or grist, then what idea of such a conference would a Politics department have? Wouldn’t it just have to be political ideas or situations found in novels, with no time for the literary questions about why the novelist had to make them in this and no other way? Wouldn’t it, last year, have had to be Nineteen Eighty-Four, not any work existing in its own right as a classic of the imagination? As for Literature and History, we suffer from that at the hands of historians who ransack imaginative works indiscriminately for information without noticing that any information worth having from them is internally related to our judgement of their value as art. And about the absence of Literature from History I have said something already.8
And of course this division we see in universities and in the circles of government isn’t something we see only there. It’s just the same with the newspapers. Political journalists are one sort, and write on certain pages—the important ones, front and middle (it’s the equivalent of being in the middle of the campus next to Science and Engineering and Building & Allied Trades); the literary journalists are another set who write on other pages, the Arts pages, perhaps in a separate pull-out supplement like Sport. (Why, once upon a time The Observer officially apologised after a reviewer referred, not in the political bit, to the Suez affair as the War of Eden’s Ego!) So, the thing that’s wrong is not limited to just the academy—though perhaps nowhere else does it go so deep because nowhere else is it so bound up with self-interest. In the academy, career prospects and publications lists are at risk if the specialisation is threatened. Heaven help us! without specialisation, academics might have to address the common reader!
There is a general falsifying of life that goes with the making and multiplying of specialist activities, if they are content to remain specialist activities. It goes with the conceiving of activity as naturally specialised and—the two go together—technical. Politics practised as if it were a specialism, politics thought about as if it were a specialism—a specialism in which there is no room for literature, that being another specialism again. We couldn’t, then, be dissatisfied with the way politics is divided from literature without being dissatisfied with ourselves and the way we divide our own thought about one from our thought about the other. We make politics what it is.
Without being incomprehensibly paradoxical an Englishman might say, along with George Grant, “I believe in a British Britain, but not the one actually existing in the British Isles today.” And then the question for him, as for Mr Grant, would be, of course, “Where is it then, this Britain which isn’t to be found either in North America or the British Isles (or presumably Australia either)? Where is it, this figment?” And to that there is only one answer possible.
“It’s in our literature. The only Britain worth believing in, for Canada or Britain, is the one lived under the judgement of its literature.” That’s the meaning of the tie there used to be between English politics and English letters: the politics of the day, however ordinarily corrupt or unwise, subjecting itself to the judgement—the various possibilities of judgement—found in the literature, that is, in the best recorded language; the politics of the day conducted under the judgement of the best thought and said in the language. And that’s the meaning, too, of the present separation of politics from literature (the meaning for politics, that is; there is of course a bad meaning for literature too): politics conducted as if subject to no judgement but its own, and its own reflected in journalism and advertising, making the worst politics of all, inviting the worst dangers, a much worse kind of political badness than any mere corruption of earlier days. It was to guard against what we presently have that men of the past—Coleridge for instance—have said that it’s not politics but the Bible that statesmen should study—the statesman’s manual—to ensure that politics should be answerable to something better than itself.
But it is easy to imagine someone saying in rebuttal,
But this is a travesty. Not just a partial truth exaggerated, but a positive untruth. Not only is it not the case that contemporary politics derives from nothing better than contemporary advertising and contemporary journalism, it never could be the case, no matter how undereducated (or underbred?) contemporary politicians might seem. The thought of the past not only inevitably makes its way into the present, if not as thought then as practice, but we see it visibly doing so. George Grant himself says, on page x of that very same Introduction to Lament for a Nation, “The American liberalism we had to oppose, itself came out of the British tradition—the liberalism of Locke and Adam Smith,—which was also to become dominant in England as well as in the U.S.” There you have it: English letters, literature in the wide sense, Locke and Adam Smith, not merely traceable in modern politics, but forming it. It is not that English letters can’t be traced in English politics, that politics—practised, after all, even in a modern democratic state, by the educated—has somehow, incomprehensibly, become illiterate, but that a certain tradition in English letters has in English politics triumphed over all the others.
There would be no denying the truth of that. But there is no need to deny it, for there is something in that tradition of English letters (which, if it includes Locke and Adam Smith, also includes Hume, Ricardo, Malthus, the Mills and Bentham) which, even when not actively hostile to literature, and to the common language of which literature is the epitome, as it is in Locke and Bentham, is unfriendly to literature and unable to recognise as literature—or even as sense—what doesn’t resemble itself. There are, no doubt, distinctions to be made within that tradition: Hume and Smith are of the earlier eighteenth century and still in touch with a wider literary culture; Bentham reads like a man of no culture at all, like someone unlanguaged; John Stuart Mill, like Louisa Gradgrind, knows he has been banished from somewhere, and would like to find his way back, but where he has been banished from or what back would mean he does not know. And Locke, though his opinions are thoroughly Lockean, can’t help expressing them, because he is writing at a time scarcely more distant from Shakespeare than we ourselves are from Lawrence, in a way that’s often very unLockean indeed. (He is at a later point on the same line as Shakespeare’s contemporary Hobbes, who denounced metaphors with such richness of metaphor, and who fell so violently in love with the passionless certainties of mathematics.) These are still distinctions within something having a single character and integrity, as Grant calls it, a tradition. The greatest difference between Hume and Bentham is only a magnification of the difference between the Mills father and son. They all belong to one family, a family of—in a special sense—highly literate men, whose bequest to their posterity, us, has been a special kind of illiteracy, an illiteracy of the educated compared with which that of the uneducated is benign, but against which that of the uneducated is an only partly effective prophylactic, the only sure one being a greater literacy still.
The emphasis Grant has in mind at that point is clear from other phrases which he associates with “liberalism”: “capitalist individualism”, “the individualism of the American capitalist dream”, “individual capitalist greed”, over against which, as the good he speaks on behalf of, he puts “a sense of the common good” and “a community which has a stronger sense of the common good and of public order”. But elsewhere his emphasis is different: not the licence liberalism gives to the individual to do as he likes in defiance of the common good but the licence it gives technique to do what it can in defiance of any moral order at all: “The only living morality of our society is faith in technique. . . . In North America the theology of technique goes by the name of liberalism.” (Introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age, 1966, p. iv) The two emphases are connected, of course, by licence. The essential character of liberalism isn’t found in any particular political belief—not even in a preference for private over public goods; liberalism can speak for both—and not even in any bias it gives to political thought, to left or to right or in between (liberalism is just as strong on the left as the right, perhaps stronger, there being no Burke there to oppose it)—but in the commonsense meaning of the word itself: freedom, to do and to believe, to be what one pleases, as if one might be anything.
The transvaluation of all values Nietzsche demanded was already being undertaken by liberalism (though not quite as he would have wished): to make oneself free to do as one pleases one must remake the language. Liberalism has faced that necessity.
In Heart of Darkness Conrad’s Europeans permit themselves to enslave Africans by calling them workmen and employees, and to murder and torture them by calling them enemies, criminals and rebels, and by—if they condemn slavery, torture and murder—condemning them not as slavery, torture and murder but as “unsound business methods”. Dr Morgenthaler, the Canadian abortionist and crusader for abortion (who has in common with Jesus Christ both moral absolutism, for he has an absolute moral passion for abortion, and that he is kindly mentioned in churches as someone persecuted for righteousness’ sake) doesn’t try to justify abortion, he just speaks of it in a new way. He doesn’t say that a woman has the right to kill her unborn baby (how could he?) or even to kill a foetus that hasn’t yet come to full term. What he defends is a woman’s rights—well, not quite as a patient to medical treatment: more like her rights as a customer, doing as she likes with her own body, her rights “of access” to a medical service. Who dare bar a customer from a shop? What a fine sense of the permissible he shows! And Mrs Thatcher—and Mr Mulroney—and Mr Turner—justify mammonism by calling it wealth- or job-creation, growth and prosperity. But while such ways of talking are only opportunistic and occasional, and while they go against the commonsense of the language and of common usage, they are helpless to mean as they want to. They mean, but only as euphemisms, as examples of the mockable. But if the language were ever to lose its common sense, if there no longer were a common sense pictured in common usage to be appealed to, there would be no mockable and no earnest either; any meaning would be as plausible as any other. Confusions of sense would become systematic, and unrecognisable as confusions.9 The common pursuit of true judgement would become impossible. Judgement would become impossible. This would not quite be the inversion Macbeth’s witches attempt with “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” for even that recognises fairness and foulness as meaningful to common judgement. Fair would be fair still, but no more so than foul.
Isn’t this to a very considerable extent what has happened under the aegis of liberalism? Dr Morgenthaler is—a sign of the times—a perfectly disinterested and passionate abortionist. He believes in abortion. He is a man with a cause, and his cause is a noble one, like job-creation. The language, now, permits him to think so, except in so far as words like noble have at the same time gone ironical, impossible to use straight. Abortion is no longer plainly and unequivocally the name of a species of man-killing but also the name of—if not yet a medical treatment—a perfectly respectable medical service, like cosmetic surgery. And for that word to have changed, other words have had to change too, registering and making changes in things and in us. The meaning of marriage and family changes. A marriage becomes something you can make with the intention of unmaking if it suits you. You can make a trial marriage or even a homosexual marriage; broken families become single-parent families; the verb to parent and the skill of parenting are invented; children don’t play, they interact; bonding replaces love between parent and child and relationships love between men and women—especially, of course, in North America, where the transvaluation of the old values, the replacement of what used to be the common forms, has gone on faster and more thoroughly than anywhere else. And for all this to have changed—in matters that are, for most of us, the making or breaking of us—everything, the whole language, must have changed or be changing. To the extent that the change has been complete, English has become a different language, we a different people. But the change is not complete and can still be seen. The Bible is felt by the new liberals to be unintelligible, and so is newly translated for the liberal age and transvalued in the process—but yet the English Bible is still wonderfully accessible and it effortlessly consigns to oblivion the New English Bible and all its worse successors. Shakespeare is said to be unintelligible to the young and rephrased versions are beginning to appear: but Shakespeare is regularly still performed, even on the B.B.C. or to audiences of schoolchildren, and Shakespeare still tells us what to think of (I will say “Pinter” but the reader can supply a contemporary name almost ad. lib.—Hughes again, if you like). Insofar as this has come about by will and design, it is liberalism—in and out of politics, in and out of letters—that has made the great change. It is liberalism that has made the language in which alone anything that counts as political thinking can take place, whether the politics is of left, right or centre—that language in which it seems only natural for economics to have an important place in politics and literature and religion to have no place at all. Anyone who does not make the assumptions of liberalism is ruled out of the court of our politics: the liberal tradition Grant speaks of is the tradition within English letters which has expelled English literature from English politics. It is a case of literature and thought turned destructively against themselves.
There is a lot to be said for looking at this tradition at its crassest, for it is there that the direction of its influence is most plainly visible. It is no anomaly of thought in Locke that he despises poetry. What he says about language in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is just a reasoned expansion of what he says about poetry in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:
If these may be . . . reasons against children’s making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say, and of more weight, against their making verses of any sort: for, if he has no genius to poetry, it is the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child, and waste his time about that which can never succeed; and, if he have a poetic vein, it is to me the strangest thing in the world, that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business: which is not yet the worst of the case; for if he proves a successful rhymer, and gets once the reputation of a wit, I desire it may be considered what company and places he is likely to spend his time in, nay, and estates too: for it is very seldom seen, that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus. It is a pleasant air, but a barren soil; and there are very few instances of those who have added to their patrimony by anything they have reaped from thence. Poetry and gaming, which usually go together, are alike in this too, that they seldom bring any advantage, but to those who have nothing else to live on. (§17)
Dislike of poetry and of ordinary speech is the beginning and the end of what he has to say about language in the Essay. His ambition for all that part of language where the key terms of politics are to be found—words like government, liberty, property, justice—is to have it model itself on mathematics:
By what steps we are to proceed . . . is to be learned in the schools of the mathematicians, who, from very plain and easy beginnings, by gentle degrees, and a continued chain of reasonings, proceed to the discovery and demonstration of truths that appear at first sight beyond human capacity. (Essay, IV. xii. 7)
From the successes of the mathematicians and the similarity he thinks there is between mathematical terms and abstract words, Locke concludes that “morality” may eventually be placed “amongst the sciences capable of demonstration; wherein I doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences, as incontestible as these in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.” (iv. iii. 18) But first, of course, you must—as Locke wants to—remake ordinary language to unfit it for its ordinary purposes.10
Hume thinks very similarly. In that prophetically titled essay “That Politics may be Reduced to a Science”, he says :
So great is the force of laws and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humours and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them as any which mathematical sciences afford us.
He goes further (all the way to Ayer) in the last paragraph of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Hume’s cocksure idea of what counts as sophistry and illusion may be gathered from his remarks about the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in The Natural History of Religion (section xii):
Averroes, the famous Arabian, who, no doubt, had heard of the Egyptian superstitions, declares, that, of all religions, the most absurd and nonsensical is that, whose votaries eat, after having created, their deity.
I believe, indeed, that there is no tenet in all paganism, which would give so fair a scope to ridicule as this of the real presence: For it is so absurd, that it eludes the force of all argument. There are even some pleasant stories of that kind, which, though somewhat profane, are commonly told by the Catholics themselves . . . . [He tells a few, and concludes:] Such are the doctrines of our brethren the Catholics. But to these doctrines we are so accustomed, that we never wonder at them: Though in a future age, it will probably become difficult to persuade some nations, that any human, two-legged creature could ever embrace such principles.
Sir Cocksure Two-Legs—the Wag of the Scottish Enlightenment! With the wisdom of a “bright” schoolboy. But not as bright as all that, for isn’t the following, of Newman’s (from the Apologia, 1873 edition, near the start of chapter 5), a squasher?
But for myself, I cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell how it is; but I say, “Why should it not be? What’s to hinder it? What do I know of substance or matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and that is nothing at all;”—so much is this the case, that there is a rising school of philosophy now, which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of our knowledge in physics. The Catholic doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena go; on the contrary, it says that they remain; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what no one on earth knows any thing about, the material substances themselves.
You even gain from Newman a much more vivid idea of what it is to disbelieve. But how could it not be so? He can see both sides of the line dividing belief from unbelief. It is necessary to see both to see either. The “great” liberal thinkers of the enlightenment and after can see neither. Who ever believed as feebly as Mill disbelieves?
But of all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal thinkers, it is in Bentham that the import of liberalism is at its plainest. Like Locke, he has a programme for reforming language to make it fit for real political thought, which consists, very essentially, in making it unfit for anything else, including politics itself, but most obviously unfit for literature and for the ordinary unspecialised talk literature epitomises. It is a programme for expelling literature not only from politics, but from the language altogether, for so remaking the language as to make literature impossible; or, to put it positively, for turning politics into economics and economics into cost-benefit analysis; for rephrasing all questions as ones with measures for their answers. What other kind would mean anything?
Like Locke, Bentham wants one word for one meaning, one meaning for each word—no synonyms, no ambiguity, no irony—and words that are names, naming “things in themselves”, without any clutter of “adventitious” associations. What above all he doesn't want is words that implicitly judge the things they “name”, words like lust, honour, avarice (which, much after the manner of modern politicians and of Marlow's “pilgrims”) he wants to call pecuniary interest. There is, he says largely—in explanation of how it is that he keeps “running, in appearance, into perpetual contradictions [and] paradoxes”—
a certain perversity of structure which prevails more or less throughout all languages. To speak of motives, as of anything else, one must call them by their names. But the misfortune is, that it is rare to meet with a motive of which the name expresses that and nothing more. Commonly along with the very name of the motive, is tacitly involved a proposition imputing to it a certain quality; a quality which, in many cases, will appear to include that very goodness or badness, concerning which we are here inquiring. . . . To this imperfection of language, and nothing more, are to be attributed, in great measure, the violent clamours that have from time to time been raised against those ingenious moralists, who, travelling out of the beaten tract of speculation, have found more or less difficulty in disentangling themselves from the shackles of ordinary language . . . he has but this one unpleasant remedy; to lay aside the old phraseology and invent a new one . . . instead of the word lust . . . the neutral expression, sexual desire: instead of the word avarice . . . the neutral expression pecuniary interest . . . the steady adherence to the one neutral expression, rejecting altogether the terms, of which the import is infected by adventitious and unsuitable ideas.11
It is what, two hundred years later, has become the commonplace—commonplace at least among the educated but not, thankfully, yet universal—that we should all talk, as it’s termed, “objectively”, “non-judgementally”, without “value-judgements” and other “emotive” terms. But it is a criticism of language—if we can call it that (some neutral term is needed)—which no one can make who is even half-awake to what his own—or anyone else’s—words mean. For what is a more patently “emotive” word than the word emotive itself? What more obviously makes a “value-judgement” than the word value-judgement? What is more plainly “personal” and therefore “subjective” than our preferences, and what more obviously states a preference than the word objective? (Is the distinction between objective and subjective itself objective or subjective?) What’s “neutral” about neutral?12 The whole body of usages is self-contradictory. But that hasn’t stopped it making up for many people today, among the nominally educated, a sort of grand ruling idea. It is an assumption, in fact, not just of the nominally educated, but in more or less all our minds, whether we consciously uphold “objectivity” as an ideal or not. For the really striking thing about Bentham’s anticipation of ourselves is that he anticipates not just the discomfort with “value-judgements” avowed by the educated, but the unavowed discomfort of all.
All sorts of words—I think we may say essential words—like lust and avarice and honour are now obsolescent, usable at all only under strain or else in some truly remarkable feat of expression. “Sexual desire” has replaced “lust”, all sorts of terms like “pecuniary interest” (wealth, growth, prosperity, pragmatism and so on, without end) have replaced avarice and, of course, both honour and Bentham’s suggested replacement for it, reputation, are well on the way to being replaced by image.
The belief that the ordinary language of common judgement is a shackle from which, if we are to think freely—if we are to think, for instance, that there are cases of “lust” which may be “approbated”—we must disentangle ourselves, is sheer superstition. The imperfection that Bentham, and now millions of seekers of the value-free, think that words like lust suffer from (and which we now all of us avoid as if they really and truly did suffer from it) is not an imperfection at all. According to Bentham:
To the pleasures of the sexual sense corresponds the motive which, in a neutral sense, may be termed sexual desire. In a bad sense, it is spoken of under the name of lasciviousness, and a variety of other names of reprobation. Name used in a good sense it has none . . . accordingly, if . . . a man should have occasion to apply the epithet good or indifferent to any actions which he mentions as apt to result from it, he must . . . appear to be guilty of a . . . contradiction.13
But it is just not true that without a “neutral” term like “sexual desire “the pleasures of the sexual sense can’t be approbated without self-contradiction. A word that in common use may indeed carry with it a “proposition imputing a certain quality” can always be used—not necessarily even with irony—to impute something quite different. For the pleasures of the sexual sense even lust itself is available (even if for a use not quite ordinary). Or rather, it was. When it was alive as a serious condemnation it was also, and therefore, equally alive as serious praise. When it was available to say
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action
you could also say with it,
And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust.
The word lust—which, following Bentham, we have replaced with “sexual desire” and its variants—was a word from which poetry could be made: it could be used, that is, to say what matters to us in sexual desire, that is, to make it matter, as something serious in our lives. Words don’t have, as Bentham supposes, fixed meanings. Marvell has no difficulty using the word lust to mean something we daren’t reprobate, not this side of the grave. And we have no difficulty understanding him. He has, like Falstaff, just as little difficulty using the word honour to mean something he does reprobate. What Bentham takes for “a certain perversity of structure” in the language is, in reality, just his own ham-fistedness. He can only conceive of words used inertly. It is a kind of illiteracy. When words aren’t being used inertly, when they are being used in speech which has the life of speech in it (“All speech is art speech”—D. H. Lawrence), there’s no saying what meanings someone might find for them. So—who knows?—even “sexual desire” might some day prove rescuable. The only certain thing to be said about the difference between it and lust is that whereas the latter disposes us to take the pleasures of the sexual sense seriously, the former disposes us to sexology, the science of taking it not-seriously. How could anyone make poetry out of “sexual desire”, “sexuality”, “sex drive” or even “sex” itself? How could anyone use these words to say what mattered to him in this thing? It would indeed take a poet, but could a poet be bothered with anything so far from the language of men? How—and this is really what’s at stake in the question—could anyone ever use the words to make sex matter? (Dirty jokes make more of it than sexology does.) These words would have to be turned satirically against themselves, made fit for serious use by being treated as unfit. And in that way, in that reclamation of the words, we might recover our sense of the seriousness of sex itself which, while it remains just “sex” to us, can never be anything serious at all.
The other, complementary illusion is that we can steadily adhere to neutral expressions (“steadiness” being of course neutral), rejecting altogether the terms of which the import is infected by adventitious and unsuitable ideas (“unsuitable” also neutral). When we won’t accept it on its own terms, language has a way of getting its own back on us. If we won’t play with it, it plays with us. It plays with Bentham:
1 A man ravishes a virgin. In this case the motive is, without scruple, termed by the name of lust, lasciviousness, and so forth; and it is universally looked upon as a bad one. 2 The same man, at another time, exercises the rights of marriage with his wife. In this case the motive is accounted, perhaps, a good one, or at least indifferent: and here people would scruple to call it by any of these names. In both cases, however, the motive may be precisely the same. In both cases it may be neither more nor less than sexual desire.14
But what a drenching in adventitious and unsuitable ideas the language gives Jeremy here! turning the science of accurate classification which Mill so admired into the man who ravished a virgin and, at another time, exercised the rights of marriage with his wife. What would a Mrs Bentham have thought about Jeremy exercising his (? her/their/the?) rights of marriage with/on her? Would she have accounted his motive a good one? Or would she (and he and it) have been indifferent?15
If it were possible to turn words into unambiguous Benthamite terms, we could have a language in which politics was reduced to a science (except that it wouldn’t any longer be politics). It might even be reduced to arithmetical calculation, to cost-benefit analysis, like so:
V To take an exact account then of the general tendency of any act, by which the interests of a community are affected, proceed as follows. Begin with any one person of those whose interests seem most immediately to be affected by it: and take an account,
1. Of the value of each distinguishable pleasure which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
2. Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
3. Of the value of each pleasure which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pleasure and the impurity of the first pain.
4. Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pain and the impurity of the first pleasure.
5. Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole.
6. Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each. Sum up the numbers expressive of the degrees of good tendency, which the act has, with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is good upon the whole: do this again with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is bad upon the whole. Take the balance; which, if on the side of pleasure, will give the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number or community of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain, the general evil tendency, with respect to the same community.16
There you have it. Wave the arithmetical wand and—hey presto!—politics as we know it disappears, replaced by the greatest happiness of the greatest number, duly audited. How has it happened that a programme so impossible of fulfilment has been taken seriously? (What would Ben Jonson have made of it?) Bentham’s ambition of speaking undeniable truths without, in speaking, upholding some this or that as valuable is, this side Heaven or Hell, in a merely human world, an impossibility—thank goodness. All he has done, and all that he could do, is substitute one judgement for another, but a judgement he can’t recognise or offer as one.
Liberalism not only accomplishes the transvaluation of all values but does so from the perfectly impregnable position of denying that it is at work on values at all. Anyone who disagrees is not thought of as disputing about value but as challenging the demonstrable certainties of a science.
In substituting “sexual desire” for “lust”, we say that sex is to be thought about clinically not morally, but what is that but a judgement? In cost-benefit analysis it is affirmed, without reservation, that it’s only the measurable and the countable that matters, that what isn’t measurable and countable is to be treated as illusory—and if this were not done, cost-benefit analysis could not be practised. (Does it concern quantity or number? Matter of fact and existence? No? Then ignore it.) That is the judgement, the initial value-judgement that soon becomes the unchallengeable presupposition, the bigotry, of the lingua franca of the modern educated, the bigotry of pseudo-science, as deep in politics as anywhere.17
You can’t make a language that’s objective and neutral but you can make some things it is essential to be able to say unsayable and not even thinkable.
Take, for instance, the words crime and punishment and the part they play in our notions of the lawful and the just.18
They are essential political words. But, under the influence of that same suspicion and dislike of avowed judgement that we find in Bentham, they are both words (honour and nation are others) our governing classes find embarrassing. British Government white papers on penal questions no longer speak of “crimes”, “criminals”and “punishments” but of “offences”, “offenders” and “penalties”—not merely in those cases, like parking offences, where what has been committed is only a technical offence and not criminally blameworthy, but generally.
It is easy enough to see in the modern climate why a word like criminal gives offence. There’s a stigma attached to being one. And—goes the train of semi-automatic, wholly unconscious thought—what right have we to talk of anyone like that? As if lawbreakers were blameworthy? Who are we to say?—when all they have done is make an entry in the debit column against the aggregate of happiness?
In this way our governors avow their doubt (about the only thing most of them are capable of avowing) of the moral foundation of the laws they establish and uphold. But then, to tangle the moral thread further, their avowal of doubt is merely for form’s sake (we live in a doubting age) and not at all sincere. If they actually doubted the morality of the laws they make and enforce the right thing for them to do would be to stop upholding them, and to work for the establishment of laws they could conscientiously uphold.
Similarly with the substitution of penalty for punishment. When you claim that the penalties you give lawbreakers have the character of punishments, you claim that they serve, that you serve, justice. When you substitute the word penalty you give up that claim. You give your action the character of an administrative arrangement, adopted for the sake of some convenience or other. It is not surprising that if our governors do horrible things to offenders for the sake of administrative convenience those suffering the penalties will resent them and when possible take their revenge.
How wrong it would be to do some of the things they do to people for mere “offences”—in that word’s usual modern context of talk about motoring infringements. There may be nothing worth calling wrong involved in fines and parking tickets but if you are going to imprison someone you do need the justification: that he has done something wrong. You can’t imprison a man for convenience’ sake; you are unjust if you ever do such a thing for any lesser reason than to be just. Why—don’t you know—it’s a horrible thing to do? Either he is a criminal and his imprisonment is a punishment—or free him.
Bentham is at the back of the modern fear of justice-and-punishment, too, with his invention of the word reformatory (reform as against say repentance can be thought of as an external thing, complete when the behaviour of the offender has changed enough to satisfy us) and his programme for the physical production of reform, put into horrible effect in many Victorian prisons in a previous heyday of cost-benefits (Wakefield gaol used to make profits!) though not in his own Panopticon, a project King George III was enough in his wits to veto after the Lords had spent a lot of money on it.
It is a way of speaking that is both caused by and causes the weakening of our grip of the idea of justice. We see our idea of the truly—that is to say, the absolutely—unlawful turning into an idea of the merely technically unlawful. And we also see governors who are therefore ceasing to believe not merely in their own individual fitness to govern but in anybody’s, in the idea of government as such. (Cf. on Mr Trudeau et al., above.) Altogether what we see is a language being created in which politics can’t exist (and not much else, either).
Liberalism mocks unenlightened commonsense and the commonsense order of things represented by ideas like “crime and its just punishment”, and has mocked it to such good effect that the triumph of liberalism over commonsense, amongst the educated at least, is more or less complete. How complete, is to be gathered from the example of men who are not themselves “liberals” and from modern, educated usage generally. William Morris, for example, isn’t a “liberal”, but two hundred years of liberal influence have gone into the making of him. What Locke, Hume and Bentham had to assert, against the prevailing commonsense of their own day, Morris takes for granted as commonsense. News from Nowhere may have no interest as thought but it’s full of meaning: and what it means is that, by the end of the nineteenth century, liberalism—despite Blake, despite Coleridge, despite Newman, despite Dickens and Carlyle—had so made its way in English life as to have become the new commonsense of the language, triumphant not as doctrine or avowed belief but as unquestioned, and hardly questionable, assumption. Morris, who takes himself for—what?—a socialist, a communist?—is nothing so much as an effect of liberalism, a datum. In him we see what it does and what it means. And what it does, more or less, is abolish meaning:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries all.
News from Nowhere is an impossible object, a self-contradiction: a work of political literature that exhibits, unwittingly, the conditions in which politics and literature are impossible. Of course, Morris can’t see much need for either in Utopia (“we are very well off as to politics,—because we have none . . . our differences concern matters of business” (just like ours), “victuals and clothes and houses . . . these are our books . . . As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had little else in which they could take pleasure”) but that’s just because there’s nothing of either in him. His is a form of the language—as remade by liberalism—in which nothing matters, in which nothing can be made to matter—not even the happiness which Morris thinks is the one thing that does matter. How could happiness matter in a world in which nothing else did? How could there be politics or literature in such a world?
The great thing in News from Nowhere, as in The Principles of Morals and Legislation (it is the foundation of the modern state), is to be happy, “thoroughly happy”, and to “live easily”: “unanxious happiness and good temper”, “a quiet happy life”, “in the prime of life . . . but as happy as a child”, “free, happy and energetic . . . beautiful of body . . . and surrounded by beautiful things”, for “one ages very quickly if one lives among unhappy people.” (As in fashion and deodorant advertisements.)
Being a liberal happiness and a genteel happiness (theoretic but very English), it is without modification or qualification, without variation of any kind, a happiness purely pleasurable: “at last and by low degrees we got pleasure . . . then we became conscious of that pleasure, and cultivated it, and took care that we had our fill of it; and then all was gained, and we were happy.” Happiness perpetual but not very intense, pleasure but the pleasure only of what’s pleasant: fields “pleasant”, houses “pleasant”, a breeze “pleasant”, the day “pleasant”, sunlight “pleasant”, shade “pleasant”, “work “pleasant”, her dress “pleasant” and that look she is giving me “very pleasant”. And if things aren’t pleasant, they are “charming”, “delightful”, “amusing”, “elegant”, “graceful”, “trim”, “neat”, “sweet”, “dainty”, “pretty” and . . . “nice”. Happy love, more happy, happy love, and never cloy’d. (Happy, happy talk, even.) The pleasure of mere existence—of “peace and continuous plenty” (but somehow not entirely convincing): “we have plenty to do, and on the whole enjoy doing it. What more can we ask of life?” Pleasure but of the Retirement Home not Pleasure-Dome.
And the way to such pleasure is through “freedom and equality”, “by the absence of artificial coercion, and the freedom for every man to do what he can”: “we live as we like”, unconstrained by the authority of either institutions or opinion: no army, no navy, no police, no parliament (“the whole people is our parliament”), no government at all “to force a man to give way to the will of the majority of his equals”—
no law courts to enforce contracts of sentiment or passion . . . no code of public opinion which takes the place of such courts, and which might be tyrannical and unreasonable as they were . . . no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by . . . unexpressed threat . . . no civil law, and no criminal law . . .
—no “tyranny of society”, no “class tyranny” and no “family tyranny . . . since families are held together by no bond of coercion, legal or social, but by mutual liking and affection, and everybody is free to come or go as he or she pleases.” Each man “lives as he pleases”, “each man is free to exercise his special faculty to the utmost, and everyone encourages him in so doing: “we live as we like.”
And nothing has any meaning or more or less importance than anything else. Morris’s efforts, for instance, to show how much better off we’d be without the ideas of crime and punishment, and the institutions and practices they legitimise, only go to show how necessary they are. What he proves is that in abandoning crime and punishment we abandon the means of taking our own deeds seriously. He looks forward to the day (some time after 2003) when “government by law-courts and police” will have come to an end: “In law, whether it be criminal or civil, execution always follows judgement, and some one must suffer.” (How could we ever countenance that?) So away with judgement, “gallows and prison”, any sort of “custody”, “punishment”, “proof” and even “examination of witnesses” and in place of the word crimes the truly prophetic expression “what I had been used to hear called crimes”. Away with the whole thing, and the vocabulary for talking about it too. Off with its head!
But by extirpating the legal, what a problem Morris creates for himself when he comes to illustrate, as he must, the happy consequences of its extirpation. Having given up the words crime and punishment how is he to talk about what remains of the things? How do you talk about “what I had been used to hear called crimes”? What do you call them? What do you call anything connected with what we do still call crime? How do you convey the psychology of crime and the judgement of it? What could these things mean to us when they don’t mean what they presently mean?
A much greater writer than Morris would be taxed by such questions. And Morris isn’t even a good enough writer—hasn’t the commonsense—to recognise that he’s taxing himself, that the task he has given himself is an impossible one because it is a real self-contradiction, not one of Bentham’s illusory ones. What he offers us in exchange for what makes Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and the Bible possible is childish.
His illustrative case is, first of all, a cheat for, though a man is killed, no crime is committed because he is killed accidentally by someone he is attacking with an axe!—which would not have counted as murder by the law of Moses. As Morris describes the case (chapter 24) no one in his right mind would think of it as a crime.
But it doesn’t suit Morris to acknowledge too distinctly that a crime hasn’t been committed because the whole point of the episode is supposed to be how much better they deal with “these matters” in the 21st century—these matters being, of course crime. So despite the illogicality of it we are supposed to compare the way these people treat crime (murder?) with the way their forebears in the 19th century treated it—and to see the comparison as “civilisation versus barbarism”. Here the thing that strikes one is how little, without the resources of the legal, Morris or his characters can make of any of it. The killer is “upset”—“so upset he is like to kill himself”—and “in a state”—“in such a state that I do not think he can go [away] unless someone takes him.” His neighbours “cannot help being much taken up with it”; it even makes them “feel rather shy of one another.” It so affects the one telling the story that he has “a shade of melancholy on his face, and he seemed a little abstracted and inattentive to our chat, in spite of obvious efforts to listen.” (Morris: the English Dostoyevsky.) Their judgement is: “We have advised him to go away—in fact to cross the seas”—but if he can’t manage that, at least—to “go and live somewhere in the neighbourhood pretty much by himself.” (But why should he? If he has done nothing wrong why should he stir a foot? And if he has done something wrong . . . ?)
Elsewhere, when it definitely is murder that’s in question, they call it “an occasional man-slaying”, “a homicide to put it at the worst”, “a mishap” that “as it were, put out the sunlight for us for a while”—“But what then? Shall we the neighbours make it worse still? . . . Will the death of the slayer bring the slain man to life again and cure the unhappiness his loss has caused?” What—“looking upon the affair from a reasonable point of view”—would be the point?
Because “this strange people” is so enlightened as to abandon the fact and the idea of legal guilt they have no clear idea of innocence either. Not only do the guilty go unpunished but, when a man is perfectly innocent, they‘re all a bit bothered by sort-of guilty and discomforting feelings, feelings which if they had still the conception of guilt and innocence they would recognise as utterly baseless and could never have.
Morris proves, without recognising it, just the opposite of what he sets out to prove: not the barbarity but the civilising influence of the law courts and the police. Without them he himself can’t take crime seriously. It becomes something merely “upsetting”—a passing disturbance in “the happy and quiet life which I saw everywhere around me”, and, as the cause of even so small an entry in the pain column, to be counted as having been taken with “such an excess of tragedy” (tragedy being another outmoded category in this pleasant new world). When Morris tries to take crime really seriously, it’s “a spasmodic disease”. The word criminal remains, as a synonym for foolish.
Work and marriage in Utopia have gone the way of crime: become pointless. Goods and services are so plentiful—and good will too—“assured of peace and continuous plenty”—that not only money but “exchange” itself is redundant (economics there having gone the way politics is going here); and “the respectable commercial marriage bed” has been replaced by “the natural and healthy love between a man and a woman”: marriage, that is, has ceased to be an honourable estate and become a merely biological one (in which satisfaction of natural desire—whether to join or to put asunder—takes precedence over the bringing up of children). Marriage remains, but as a mere form. Nobody works or marries except for pleasure, in order—as it seems from Morris’s attempt to show all the happiness that results (“Pleasure begets pleasure,” not children)—to smile and be smiled at. Nobody is bound—to do or to anything. His Utopians are a people who “had at last learned to accept life itself as a pleasure”—but a pleasure (how far from Wordsworth’s “the pleasure that there is in life itself”!) without any point. Morris’s Utopia is life made unintelligible: “Do your thing, look good, feel great.” It’s like a nice, an English California, San-Francisco-on-Wye (for the aged); and the end of politics and the end of literature altogether.
For all this it can still be said that our literature judges our politics. A tradition is defined by its peaks, and one has only to make the basic discriminations within the literature to identify as an oddity the strand of literature that would deny ordinary language, even though this strand is second nature to our present educated. Hume is in the beautiful clarity and succinctness of his prose a man of letters indeed, but not of the order of Johnson. Locke belongs to the literature, but he is not of the order of his contemporaries Milton, Marvell, Bunyan. A fortiori Bentham on language is not of the order of Wordsworth on language—when he is the great poet speaking the language of men.19 Bentham’s critics, from Coleridge to Leavis, outrank him; there has not been and could not be a great Utilitarian novelist of the order of the great anti-Utilitarians Dickens, Conrad, Lawrence. And it is the greatest people, the writers visibly of the tradition of Shakespeare, who also keep touch with a wholeness of language that still survives (let's hope and believe) in common speech.
The decay of the words which comprise our political vocabulary (and it’s a foolish man who thinks the words work, marriage, parent are not part of it) is the decay of politics itself, and is nowhere better seen than in the virtual disappearance from public speech of that other essential word nation. In place of the historic and common word nation—by which we speak of something of which it makes sense to say we love (or hate) it and would (or wouldn’t) die for it, something with a personal character that endures through all changes of membership, Burke’s permanent body of transitory parts, a partnership not only between those who are living but between the living, the dead and the as yet unborn—in place of that, the oh-so-typically-twentieth-century word, one of the stigmata of the educated, society—a word which speaks of material arrangements and organisation: so much of housing, so much of employment, so much of tax-paying and social-benefit-receiving, a something of which it would be as ludicrous to say that you wouldn’t, as to say that you would die for it; something without a character (except of course the character of being characterless) and no part of the lives of the people who compose it, something merely transitory and contingent, phenomenal merely.
And in England as in Canada the word all politicians from all parties use, the word the whole educated class uses (hallowed by one of the most influential and boring academic writers of the age, Professor Raymond Williams), is this society. Nobody speaks of the nation any more, any more than anybody would think of speaking of adultery, lust, honour or avarice. It is this that made the Falklands War (not, of course, that it was allowed the name of war either) so very peculiar a thing. There is nothing peculiar about a nation defending some of its territory and people against the aggression of some other nation—foreigners. (If there is anything peculiar here it is in having to say so.) There’s not even anything peculiar about defending territory and people when a nation has no distinct material national interest at stake, when the territory it defends is thousands of miles away, and unprofitable, the people few—place and people, as these things go, unimportant, perhaps more, materially, of a liability than an asset and known to be so. Such a war isn’t peculiar even if the nation, before the aggression, has been unwise enough to give signs of willingness to let go the territory it subsequently defends. There’s no particular circumstance that could make the nation’s efforts to recapture its lost territory look peculiar (though there are, of course, many that might make it look foolish or wrong). And that’s because we all understand—if we speak English we do—that a nation, having a personal character and holding what it possesses in trust for the future and from the past, has not only material interests to defend but an honour too—honour being another necessary word, however archaic.20 The—as it used to be—common English word nation speaks of something with not only a right but a duty to defend itself: the duty of looking to its honour as well as its interests (its honour being, of course, not the least of its interests).
The British government of the day, supported pretty well by an opposition temperamentally and ideologically opposed to just about any imaginable war, let alone a “colonialist” war such as this might not unreasonably have been called, acted as if what it governed and was responsible to wasn’t a society at all, not a mere organisation like a limited liability company or one of the newly invented districts of local government, but a nation, with its honour at stake. At a risk, of life and materials, quite disproportionate to any material interest, this government went to war over the Falklands convinced that it was doing just what it ought. Yet, because the word nation and all its cognate and associated terms had disappeared from its political vocabulary (except perhaps nationalism, a vaguely remembered threat from the outlying regions) if not absolutely then as terms it could use with any conviction, it was quite unable to give to itself or to anyone else any convincing reason why it had gone to war or why it could be thought justified in doing so. It had already made obsolete the only terms in which its own actions could be made sense of. It had abandoned the vocabulary Churchill had used with such conviction because it had—as it thought—abandoned his convictions. And yet here it was acting, and plainly to its own immense satisfaction, as if it still possessed them intact. But without any longer possessing a language in which to speak of them! So—with the exception of Enoch Powell21—the defenders of the war talked a lot of claptrap about dictatorship and democracy! As if, as Powell said, we’d all have been perfectly happy about the Argentinians landing if only they’d been sent by a quinquennial parliament!
Powell aside, the British politician who made far and away the most consistent sense during the war made sense not of supporting but of opposing it. That was Mr Wedgwood Benn. His case was not quite, though it had much in common with, the perfectly arguable Whig position that the damage to national prestige was incommensurate with the treasure needed to retrieve it, and we had best let well alone. (That position was perhaps best occupied by Mr Tam Dalyell, who however later marred the impression he made of trying to say “least said soonest mended” by developing a monomania about the sinking of the Belgrano.) Mr Benn would have had the country act as—after the first excitement—it all but unanimously spoke, as if the only conceivable interests it had were material ones; as if it were a society not a nation. He would—like a reasonable, like an enlightened man—have been ready enough to support a war, and the risks of war, if the Falklands really had been important to us, materially important, that is; but they weren’t, so he wasn’t. Feeling himself to speak with the voice of the age, Mr Benn was also able to add to his sense an afflatus not quite to be achieved by an old-style proponent of rational self-interest like Mr Dalyell. So Mr Benn was able to make perfectly consistent sense, and to do so with a sincerity that is as near to wholeness as we are likely to come in the post-political state of the language. The supporters of the war, on the other hand—speaking the same language as Mr Benn, with, apparently, the same assumptions—tried forlornly to justify actions which could only be justified in some other language altogether, one that had lapsed, that they had let lapse. Powell, in part a survivor of this lapsed language, and Benn, who follows the logic of the lapse, seemed just about the only politicians in the country capable of making any sense of the issue. Which is no doubt why the rest of the country thinks them both “extremists”.
How was Britain able to act as if it were a nation with its national honour at stake without being able to say so? I think it must be that words like nation and honour (and, let’s hope, lust, avarice, crime, too) live on as a sort of folk-words—potent but unacknowledged—long after they have ceased to form part of respectable speech, and live on, apparently, not only among the governed but among the governors too, whose enlightenment is, in the issue, a thing more easily darkened than they have any glimmering of. While the national literature remains readable at all (a thing sometimes to be despaired of) the life of the language sleeps, it seems, rather than is dead, even in them. (Drake, he is in his hammock then?)
That odd discrepancy between what people were trying to say and the words they had available for saying it was frequently illustrated after the war, too. As well as relief that it was over, victoriously (though that wasn’t a word that found much use either), and with no greater losses than there were, people wanted to say how proud they were of the men who had fought it. What—it seemed to me—they were proud of was their conduct, that they had conducted themselves like—as would have been said by a previous generation of Englishmen—brave and gallant English soldiers: that they had lived up to, and acted out, a certain ideal of soldierly manhood. But you can’t say such things in public any longer, not even if it’s your husband, brother, friend or comrade you want to say it of, or when saying it of the dead is the one thing to comfort you and when the comfort of it is the one thing you want: He was a brave and gallant soldier. But it can’t be said over the air or in print, even if he gets a posthumous medal inscribed with something like For Valour. And more or less you are thwarted. And what, instead, you say you were proud of in your husband or brother or friend or comrade is, “The professionalism he displayed”. Well, soldiering can be a profession, and that should be remembered whenever we hear that other fashionable modern term mercenary; but it is surely not the case here that anyone could dwell upon and find comfort in what these men share with dentists, stockbrokers or lawyers getting on with their jobs? As if what we need is to respect the memory of someone’s skill and not of his moral nature at all! Professionalism is involved but it does after all take something else even to march all night with heavy equipment, much more to charge enemy machine-guns. The talk of professionalism rang false and there was something of pathos in it, the pathos of people without words, or unable to use the words, adequate to their feelings and the occasion, having to try to make do with words antipathetic to their feelings and inadequate to the occasion—and so not at all sure what their feelings really were or the occasion really was.
Something similar must be seen on Canadian television every Remembrance Sunday: men being interviewed and asked—in effect—why they were so proud of having fought in the Second World War, and answering that it was to keep the Nazis out of Timmins, Saskatoon or Queen Charlotte Sound. But were the Nazis (or the Kaiser before them) so interested in Timmins? Any more than Eskimo Point? Did Canada fight two world wars for Canada’s sake or for Britain’s? Did Canadians die that Canada might be free? Or that Britain might? Mightn’t Timmins have got on very well without fighting at all? Mightn’t Timmins’s interest have best been served by Timmins’s staying out? Very likely. But that, then, couldn’t be said. What a large, an immense category—in such a free-speaking world—is this of the unsayable! As recently as forty years ago Canada, not all of it but as a whole, took it for granted that its national life could not be separated from Britain’s and that as Britain in North America it had to make Britain’s suffering its own or, in its own eyes, be dishonoured. Canadians fought in the First and in the Second World Wars not as Canadians only—as partaking in a national life that was independent and self-sufficient—but as, in Churchill’s phrase, the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe and, as such, partaking in something better and more rooted, a national life—the only one open to it—derivative from Britain’s own. Canada is either as a whole a British North America—which it can be without being wholly British, while including a French province and many citizens from all round the world—or it is politically a mere chaos.22
Grant’s ideal of a British North America free from the British disease is not merely a desirable dream; like all good ideals it recognises reality. No other reality is possible to Canada; the alternative is the economic unrealities by which we are all trying to live. It would be better for both Britain and Canada if they recognised the fact. But what hope of that can there be when Britain can’t even recognise itself and when the 1982 Canada Act ending the constitutional ties between the United Kingdom and Canada hardly got mentioned in the British “media”—or when Mr Mulroney, on his first visit to England as Premier, makes it so plain that he thinks of the connection of Canada with Britain in about the same terms as the connection of a successful businessman with his old mum in the workhouse?23
Having become something from which literature has been expelled, our language of politics has started to decompose: it can’t be used to let us recognise ourselves. It can’t make sense of crime and punishment; it can’t make sense of war; it can’t make sense of marriage; it can’t make sense of work or education.24 It can’t any more—certainly not in Britain or in Canada—make sense of the nation. And if politics can’t make sense of the nation, it certainly can’t make sense of itself. For that, it needs literature.
And now, 38 years later, with a son who is a chip off the old block that would gladden his heart.
This was written, of course, 38 years ago; and now it’s important, in Britain at least, to look dishevelled, to eat pasties and ride a bicycle.
I am not so sure anyone could predict Mr Miller’s mistakes. His very first action as premier after donning the blue serge suit was to sack one of his ministers—for the sake of public morality—because he had learned that, eleven years earlier, the man had been fined $75 for being in a vehicle—not his—which had in it—unknown to him, lying out of sight under a seat, a firearm—not his—out of its case. Mr Miller said he sacked the man because he thought men in high office ought to set high standards. It wasn’t clear whether it was himself he was referring to, or the sacked man, or both. It can be safely concluded about Mr Miller, though, that he reads and pays attention to the newspapers, for the whole of the week before they had been full of the scandal of the Minister of Defence who had been forced to resign—for the sake of national security this time—by an article alleging that he had spent two hours (he admitted to fifteen minutes) in a German night club talking, fully clothed, to a stripper, similarly fully clothed. Something else that wasn’t clear was whether the scandal was his conversation or his resignation. Mr Miller thought one thing, most other people something else.
Cf. Ian Robinson &: David Sims, “Crow”, The Human World, no. 9, November, 1972.
Cf. Brian Lee, “Billy Budd, the American Hard Times”, English, vol. 32, no. 142, Spring, 1983.
Nothing changed in 38 years there then!
Just one (older) example, from one of the founding fathers of the university specialism, I. A. Richards: “Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency . . . . Thus morals become purely prudential, and ethical codes merely the expression of the most general scheme of expediency to which an individual or race has attained.” This is in a work called Principles of Literary Criticism. How could it happen that a distinguished literary critic thought himself competent to polish off morality like that as a bye-product of literary criticism?
Cf. my “Does it Matter how Historians Write?”, The Gadfly, vol. vi no. 4, November, 1983.
Now, in 2023—with the replacement of ‘sex’ by ‘gender’ and the licensing of homosexual ‘marriages’—isn’t this just what has happened to our language of sex and the family? Sir Elton John, for instance, is routinely referred to as having a husband, Mr David Furnish, without himself (herself?) ever being called a wife or asking to be made Dame Elton John.
Cf. my “Locke on Language” in the first Haltwhistle Quarterly, 1973.
Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter x, section 13, including footnotes
As for the neutrality of Bentham’s chosen example, “pecuniary interest”—think what Mr Dorrit does with pecuniary!
Principles, x. 16 and 13
Principles, x. 16
Had he married, how could he have escaped the fate of Dickens’s Mr Bumble?
Principles, IV. 5
Cf. “Grubbing On—by System”, Gadfly Literary Supplement, November, 1983. In practice—and there ‘s hope for us in this—the bigotries are continually colliding with, and being overcome by, political reality. So successive governments, Labour and Conservative, were thwarted in their attempts to make the question whether, and if so where, to build a third London airport an arithmetical question because the population of south east England—not for the most part great readers of Bentham—naively insisted on its being treated as political. Large advertising revenues are still being generated from airlines whose interest it is to make the question arithmetical, but it remains political.
For a longer discussion see the Gadfly editorial, v. 4, November, 1982—and its reception at Westminster as reported in the Gadfly editorial, vi. 2-3, May-August, 1983.
Cf. my essay on the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in the The Gadfly, v. 1 and v. 2, l982.
On the possibly spiritual value of material interests as well as the dangers consequent upon such value see—of course—Conrad, Nostromo.
And, naturally, The Gadfly: see the Postscript to v. 2, May, 1982, and subsequent correspondence.
And in 2023, under Trudeau fils, what else is it?
Mr Mulroney has already forgotten that one of the potent causes of his surprising election success was Canadian annoyance that a royal visit had been postponed to make way for a mere election.
Cf. Gadfly editorials v. 1, February, 1982; vii. 1, February, 1984, and my reply to Robert Protherough, viii. 1–2, February–May, 1985.