New English Weekly, 25 APRIL 1940
Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘message’—for it is a message, though a negative one—has not altered since he wrote ‘Winter in Moscow.’1 It boils down to a simple disbelief in the power of human beings to construct a perfect or even a tolerable society here on earth. In essence, it is the Book of Ecclesiastes with the pious interpolations left out.
No doubt everyone is familiar with this line of thought. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Kingdom of Earth is forever unattainable. Every attempt to establish liberty leads directly to tyranny. One tyrant takes over from another, the captain of industry from the robber baron, the Nazi gauleiter from the captain of industry, the sword gives way to the chequebook and the chequebook to the machine-gun, the Tower of Babel perpetually rises and falls. It is the Christian pessimism, but with this important difference, that in the Christian scheme of things the Kingdom of Heaven is there to restore the balance:
Jerusalem, my happy home,
Would God I were in thee!
Would God my woes were at an end,
Thy joys that I might see!2
And after all, even your earthly ‘woes’ don’t matter so very greatly, provided that you really ‘believe.’ Life is short and even Purgatory does not last for ever, so you are bound to be in Jerusalem before long. Mr. Muggeridge, needless to say, refuses this consolation. He gives no more evidence of believing in God than of trusting in Man. Nothing is open to him, therefore, except an indiscriminate walloping of all human activities whatever. But as a social historian this does not altogether invalidate him, because the age we live in invites something of the kind. It is an age in which every positive attitude has turned out a failure. Creeds, parties, programmes of every description have simply flopped, one after another. The only ‘ism’ that has justified itself is pessimism. Therefore at this moment good books can be written from the angle of Thersites, though probably not very many.
I don’t think Mr. Muggeridge’s history of the ’thirties is strictly truthful, but I think it is nearer to essential truth than any ‘constructive’ outlook could have made it. He is looking only on the black side, but it is doubtful whether there is any bright side to look on. What a decade! A riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber. It starts off in the hangover of the ‘enlightened’ post-war age, with Ramsay Macdonald soft-soaping into the microphone and the League of Nations flapping vague wings in the background, and it ends up with twenty thousand bombing planes darkening the sky and Himmler’s masked executioner whacking women’s heads off on a block borrowed from the Nuremberg museum. In between are the politics of the umbrella and the hand-grenade. The National Government coming in to ‘save the pound,’ Macdonald fading out like the Cheshire Cat, Baldwin winning an election on the disarmament ticket in order to rearm (and then failing to rearm), the June purge, the Russian purges, the glutinous humbug of the abdication, the ideological mix-up of the Spanish war, Communists waving Union Jacks, Conservative MPs cheering the news that British ships have been bombed, the Pope blessing Franco, Anglican dignitaries beaming at the wrecked churches of Barcelona, Chamberlain stepping out of his Munich aeroplane with a misquotation from Shakespeare, Lord Rothermere acclaiming Hitler as ‘a great gentleman,’ the London air-raid syrens blowing a false alarm as the first bombs drop on Warsaw. Mr. Muggeridge, who is not loved in ‘left’ circles, is often labelled ‘reactionary’ or even ‘Fascist,’ but I don’t know of any leftwing writer who has flayed Macdonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain with equal ferocity. Mixed up with the buzz of conferences and the crash of guns are the day-to-day imbecilities of the gutter press. Astrology, trunk murders, the Oxford Groupers with their ‘sharing’ and their praying-batteries, the Rector of Stiffkey (a great favourite with Mr. Muggeridge: he makes several appearances) photographed with naked female acquaintances, starving in a barrel and finally devoured by lions, James Douglas and his dog Bunch, Godfrey Winn with his yet more emetic dog and his political reflections (‘God and Mr. Chamberlain—for I see no blasphemy in coupling these names’), spiritualism, the Modern Girl, nudism, dog racing, Shirley Temple, B.O., halitosis, night starvation, should a doctor tell?
The book ends on a note of extreme defeatism. The peace that is not a peace slumps into a war that is not a war. The epic events that everyone had expected somehow don’t happen, the all-pervading lethargy continues just as before. ‘Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.’ What Mr. Muggeridge appears to be saying is that the English are powerless against their new adversaries because there is no longer anything that they believe in with sufficient firmness to make them willing for sacrifice. It is the struggle of people who have no faith against people who have faith in false gods. Is he right, I wonder? The truth is that it is impossible to discover what the English people are really feeling and thinking, about the war or about anything else. It has been impossible all through the critical years. I don’t myself believe that he is right. But one cannot be sure until something of a quite unmistakeable nature—some great disaster, probably—has brought home to the mass of the people what kind of world they are living in.
The final chapters are, to me, deeply moving, all the more because the despair and defeatism that they express is not altogether sincere. Beneath Mr. Muggeridge’s seeming acceptance of disaster there lies the unconfessed fact that he does after all believe in something—in England. He does not want to see England conquered by Germany, though if one judges merely by the earlier chapters one might well ask what difference it would make. I am told that some months back he left the Ministry of Information to join the army,3 a thing which none of the ex-warmongers of the Left has done, I believe. And I know very well what underlies these closing chapters. It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in the military tradition, who finds in the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all. It is all very well to be ‘advanced’ and ‘enlightened,’ to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognize it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia.