Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Note One is that the character of the English is essentially middle-class; after a little historical explanation as to why that might be safely stated, Forster continues:

Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in every country, but in England they are national characteristics also, because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years. Napoleon, in his rude way, called us ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ We prefer to call ourselves ‘a great commercial nation’ – it sounds more dignified – but the two phrases amount to the same.

The Second Note contains that famous phrase ‘the undeveloped heart’.

Second Note. Just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle classes is the public-school system… How perfectly it expresses their character – far better, for instance, than does the university, into which social and spiritual complexities have already entered. With its boarding-houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers…

And they go forth [the public-school boys] into a world that is not entirely composed of public-school men or even of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts… An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important…

Once upon a time (this is an anecdote) I went for a holiday on the Continent with an Indian friend. We both enjoyed ourselves and were sorry when the week was over, but on parting our behaviour was absolutely different. He was plunged in despair… I could not see what there was to make a fuss about… ‘Buck up,’ I said, ‘do buck up.’ He refused to buck up, and I left him plunged in gloom.

The conclusion of the anecdote is even more instructive. For when we met the next month our conversation threw a good deal of light on the English character. I began by scolding my friend. I told him that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion; that it was inappropriate. The word ‘inappropriate’ roused him to fury. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes?’ I did not like the simile of the potatoes, but after a moment’s reflection I said, ‘Yes, I do; and what’s more I think I ought to. A small occasion demands a little emotion, just as a large emotion demands a great one. I would like my emotions to be appropriate. This may be measuring them like potatoes, but it is better than slopping them about like water from a pail, which is what you did.’ He did not like the simile of the pail. ‘If those are your opinions, they part us forever,’ he cried, and left the room. Returning immediately, he added: ‘No – but your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong. Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn’t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not.’

This remark impressed me very much. Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word ‘bankrupt.’ I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities. But my friend spoke as an Oriental… he feels his resources are endless, just as John Bull feels his are finite.

This is how Forster finishes.

… the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface – self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

I hope and believe myself that in the next twenty years [this was written in 1920] we shall see a great change, and the national character will alter into something which is less unique but more loveable. The supremacy of the middle-classes is probably ending. What new element the working classes will introduce one cannot say, but at all events they will not have been educated at public schools…

The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing us into one another’s arms. To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution -notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

Well, have we seen ‘a great change’? Has the supremacy of the middle-classes ended? In a pig’s arse has it ended. Even today, mutatis mutandis, the character of the English is defined by the character of its (still rising) middle-classes and even today, the character of those middle classes is defined by the character of the (still disproportionately) powerful public-school product. The schools of course have changed, to the extent that public schoolboys wear baseball caps and expensive Nike footwear, listen to rap music, raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences in that bizarre Australian Question Intonation picked up from the TV soaps, and say ‘Cool’ and ‘Slamming’ a lot. That is nauseating certainly, embarrassing obviously, but fundamentally it alters nothing. No one can seriously suggest that the average English public schoolboy emerges from his school with a South Central Los Angeles sensibility, or the outlook, soul and character of an unemployed working-class spot-welder. The body is probably even better developed, the brain as fairly developed but the heart just as undeveloped. The British have always absorbed cultural influences without losing their character. After all Humphrey Lyttelton and his generation listened to black jazz at Eton in the 19308 and probably called their friends ‘cats’ and ‘daddy-o’. In our day we said that things were ‘far out’ and ‘like, wow… ‘ but it altered our Englishness not a whit. Plus ça change…

It is worth remarking, I suppose, that the Indian ‘friend’ Forster referred to in his Notes was, of course, a lover; also worth remarking that Forster never points out that his impression of the English character was not only middle-class and public-school, but also male.

On that subject it so happens that the first edition of Abinger Harvest that I possess once belonged to the historian R. W. Ketton-Cremer who retained in its pages a pristine clipping from the Sunday Times of March 22nd, 1936 containing a review of the book by the eminent critic Desmond MacCarthy – in those days there really were such things as eminent reviewers.

MacCarthy makes the following delicate point with great perspicacity and elegance.

His [Forster’s] peculiar balance of qualities is more often found in woman than in man; and if I could be confident of not being misunderstood by those who consider intellect a masculine speciality, I would add that his view-point… both as a critic and a creator, is feminine rather than masculine… Absurdities and tragedies, he seems to be saying are due to the failure to link experiences together – to connect. That is Mr Forster’s “message.” Now, the essentially masculine way of taking life is to handle it departmentally. A man says to himself: there is my home and my private life of personal relations; there is my business, my work; there is my life as a citizen. In each department he has principles according to which situations can be handled as they arise. But in each department these are different. His art of life is to disconnect; it simplifies problems… The feminine impulse, on the other hand, whether on account of women’s education or her fundamental nature, is to see life as more of a continuum. That is part of what I meant by saying that Mr Forster, as a creative writer and as a critic, takes the feminine viewpoint.