The Illustrated London News/1915/9/25/The English Spirit and the Flea
I met a man who was awaiting a letter from his family in the Eastern Counties. Before the letter came he learnt that the place where his family lived had been singled out specially as one of the places where the Germans have lately made hell in heaven with their colossal and destructive flying ships. He did not show much perturbation; but when the letter from his nearest relatives at last arrived, he naturally opened it with some interest.
It was all about a flea. I will not develop the topic, though Swift allegorised infinity under that image, and William Blake thought it worthwhile to paint a most careful portrait of the Ghost of a Flea. In the East Anglian household, anyhow, there had never before been the ghost of a flea. The solitary specimen was by the householder connected in some way with the imprudence of his relative in some slumming adventure: and it was held up before him, as it were, in derision and pursued with a wealth of detail. Its arrival, adventures, and personal eccentricities were scientifically set forth. Any entomologist writing on the habits and habitat of the East Anglian flea would find it a most careful compilation. It contained no reference to the war. There is another animal, not the East Anglian flea, on which the entomologist might gradually have gained a little light. I do not refer to the Zeppelin. Zeppelins did not occur in the letter. I refer to a little-known animal called the Englishman, whose habits, habitat, and other curious constituent elements the German entomologists might find it worthwhile to study, and of which this letter is a fragmentary but not quite valueless record.
I do not idolatrize this animal. I do not expect the German to fall dawn and worship the East Anglian inhabitant any more than the East Anglian flea--like an ancient Egyptian worshipping a beetle. The qualities he displays in such cases are characteristics rather than abstract virtues. No good ever came of merely flattering one's nation: a man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves. The Englishman does not neglect war merely because he is calm and wise and strong; there are many respects in which he can be wayward and foolish and weak. Like the other animal, he can be at his best an irritant and at his worst a parasite. The Englishman is not simply calm and wise and strong; but he is English. I do not set my country above human temptations, like an allegory on a ceiling; I do not say that enemies could not conceivably perturb the British Lion or fluster the British Bulldog. I do say that I am not, as a fact, perturbed, and specially not perturbed by people who say `The British Lion is drawing in his horns'--I perceive that they have no vivid mental picture of a lion. I am not flustered by people who say `The British Bulldog will soon have his wings clipped', because I know such curtailment to be both unnecessary and impossible. And the distinction is important. Our very weaknesses are strengths so long as they are undiscovered weaknesses. It is possible to remind my own countrymen very generally of whereabouts the strengths and weaknesses lie. I would not do even that if there were the smallest chance of a German understanding it.
Some of the best things the English have done were the things they didn't do. For instance, in spite of a seething fuss of small leagues and committees, they cannot really be induced to 'do anything for Shakespeare'. Lord Melbourne (who was almost as English as Shakespeare) used to solve the most intense diplomatic crises by saying, `Can't we let it alone?' We can. We let Shakespeare alone. Just as we have an enormous negative monument to Shakespeare, so we have an enormous negative victory over Count Zeppelin. As a nation we receive his flaming visitations with something more insulting than defiance--absentmindedness. Such absence of mind can co-exist with considerable presence of mind at particular moments. It did in Hamlet, who always struck me as a particularly English character--which was, no doubt, the reason why he could not get on with the Danes, and had to be sent to England. His sudden lunge at the curtain was very like the sudden rush our mob sometimes makes at the alien. But, on the whole, it is the other attitude that is our ultimate strength. Not anything we have done against the Zeppelins, but all that we have not done against them, is our monument aere perennius. Let us continue not to notice Zeppelins. I do not mean this with a dull literalism; and I disclaim responsibility for anyone who should take it so. Notice them, of course-- but not so much as fleas.
There is one kindred characteristic of the English which is very subtle and easily expressed wrongly, but which plays a very great part in practical things of this kind. I know not what to call it, except perhaps, somewhere-elseness. It is a sort of distant optimism. It is a refusal to accept as final the facts immediately in front of us-- a strong belief in the other side of the world, or even the other side of the moon. It was rather pompously expressed by the phrase about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The same thought was much more sincerely expressed in the popular ejaculation, 'Somewhere the sun is shining!' This came, I think, from one of our noble comic songs, and used to be uttered by people when they broke valuable teapots, or put their feet into cucumber-frames. Its excess was well satirised by Mr John Burns when he summed up Imperialism under the text, `The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth'. And it is true, as of every true national characteristic, that it has the defect of its quality, and often goes with an undue laxity about the rights of our own field or the laws of our own parish. But it goes also with more imaginative generosity about remote lands like Bulgaria or Japan than is common in more closely logical countries. And there really exists many a City clerk who is more concerned for bombs in Belgium than bombs in the City.
I repeat that I will have nothing to do with bragging about these good qualities as if they were the only good qualities. It is not a good quality, but a defect in us that we do not understand the French revanche; it only means that we have not long enough memories to make tyrants and enemies keep their promises. Our people are courageous, not because of pride and praise, but rather in spite of it. In spite of our education we are still intelligent; and it was often in spite of our athletics that we were strong. The Battle of Waterloo was not won on Eton playing fields. The Battle of Waterloo (as the same authority said, and he certainly knew something about it) was won by the scum of the earth. And today also we are largely saved by the people whom we have failed to educate, failed to rule, failed to provide with land or religion, and very nearly failed to save from starvation. It is these people who in the travail and agony of the hour, provide the note which is most needed and most unexpected; the note of frivolity. And it is they, even more than their social superiors, who have seen the heavens filled with fire; and thought it less than a flea-bite.