England's Glory
By GRAHAM HUTTON
gel ALL a dog Hervey,' said Dr. Johnson, 'and will love him.' Why? The Herveys were Earls of Bristol : cute, keen, crazy as coots; original, eccentric, engaging. The barmy Earl of the eighteenth century, in the palmy days of Grand Tours, was the original of 'the mad Englishman,' le fou anglais, der verrackte Eng- lander, etcetera. All h6tels Bristol on the Con- tinent are named for him. He performed fantastic feats—standing on one foot on the roof of Milan Cathedral over the piazza, driving a coach and four (or was it six?) up the steps of the Vatican, offering to lead other nations' armies in other nations' wars, scandalising the Church, delighting the bourgeois, making the rest of the aristocracy bite its nails with envy, 'everything by starts and nothing long,' the devil of a dashing fellow beloved by one and all, and getting the best ant of a packed, if _a short, life.
The glory of England, from Anglo-Saxon times (see William of Mal- mesbury passim) until this century, was its aristocratic and upper bourgeois eccen- trics. In the two darkest cen- turies of our history, those from the departure of the Roman legions to the conver- sion of Ethelbert of Kent, one or two of the only records we have—and then mainly from continen- tal evidence—show hugely independent, eccentric, rebellious, nonconforming leaders under our earliest kings. Standardised, mass-produced, flattened by the Welfare State and the typification of ever bigger administrative and productive units today, we tend to think that all English Noncon- formists began with the Reformation, if not with the Puritans. Far from it. They were our hallmark among the barbaric and embryonic European nations in the early Dark Ages. Our ealdormen, thegns and other leaders earned the awed respect of all Europe for their individualism, which they were often prepared to carry—if provoked enough—to rebellion, heresy, apostasy and other flagrant sins. Nor were our over-kings and their kinglets immune from the common heritage of pioneering individualism, carried to heroism, which they brought with them when their fore- fathers 'o'er the sea faring, Gat hold of the land.' Hengst and Horsa—'stallion and mare' as the names mean—were perhaps the first, and not the least lively, exponents of the pirate-leader's art of payable rebellion; and, by all accounts, they were eccentric and nonconformist. As time went on, especially after the Normans and Plantagenets had 'jelled' a hierarchy on Anglo-Saxon society, this original vein of rebellious nonconformity only broke out on the upper crust. But through all the centuries, including the nineteenth, the vein was still rich and formed the talking-point of many a continental people when discussing the English (and not the Welsh, Irish or Scots).
Is it fanciful, I wonder,. to reduce our English and inordinate love of schoolboy practical jokes and jokers—especially when aimed (as Horace Cole aimed it) at authority—to this same origin? What kills, in England, more than ridicule, par- ticularly when directed at authority? 'A dog's obeyed in office'; yes, but disobeyed, too, if lampooned. Where is there—save in North America (and then not in Presbyterian and Catholic Canada)—as rich a lampooning of public authorities as in England? Real nonconformity, verging on eccentricity, is the hallmark of the English alone. North Americans are still rabid conformists and eccentrics have a thin (and their innocent children a thinner) time of it. Sir Osbert Sitwell has given us a picture of his father that makes us come apart at the seams. Mr. Isherwood gave us his .Mr. Norris, and last year Mr. Gerald Hamilton filled it out a bit with his Mr. Norris and / (Wingate), as near a jimning of a modern Gil Blas as anyone could imagine. The breed is thinner on our ground; but it persists, and always in the upper crust.
It must never be confused with publicity- seekers and notoriety-hunters. Of these we have, alas, more than our bellyful—unhappily so at our ancient universities, where the polytechnic type of undergraduate of both sexes has con- fused eccentricity with notoriety, the dons largely concurring, as so many of them, too, seek notoriety on radio or TV.
Eccentricity, the divine type of madness, is creative and liberating, without making libertines. It uninhibits, without making undisciplined psychopaths. To begin with, it is rational ab initio. It is thought out, without being rationalised ex post. If a man misleads two other men and a young woman into ill-conceived nonsense beyond the Iron Curtain, ill-equipped for it both mentally and physically, that isn't eccentricity— though it may be madness, notoriety-hunger and psychopathology. But if someone declares that the earth is flat and proposes to show why—or takes a live lobster on a bus and pays for its seat (this has been done)—or that material possessions spoil life (as Diogenes, Christ and many another taught) we today would term them eccentric and would be right. But we would only be right about them because they are off-centre from the modern mass. In other ages eccentrics of today might be conformists. So time and chance happen to us all; and our time and its chances are agin' eccentricity. It is a pity; for from it, and from its minority of devotees, have come much progress in human thought, practice and behaviour, as well as in our standards of life.
I think of that Dorset farmer, buried in Worth Matravers churchyard, who 'with com- mendable fortitude' tried the cow-pox on his wife and children, by inoculation, before Jenner. And of Copernicus and Galilei; and the Englishman in Saint Joan who, when told that someone thought the earth went round the sun, said, 'Couldn't the fool use his eyes?'; and George Eliot; and Dr. Taylor ('scientific method' in management) generations ahead of his time; and our few remaining, but true, anarchists who maintain that what is wrong with industrial humanity is the State and Government, which are killing and flattening-out all variants from standardised norms, when it is by variants that any living species survives and develops. I may add that this is one—but a chief—reason why I cannot be a Socialist in this country, in which Socialism seems more and more to mean equali- sation of all conditions of life, work and even leisure pursuits.
If you want to pursue this line of thought, get hold of Irving Wallace's The Fabulous Originals (Longmans, 21s.), wherein are depicted the originals of such 'characters' as Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, the Dame aux Cam6lias, Marie Roget, as well as the mother of Byron's ill-fated but not unloved little daughter Allegra, Uncle Tom, Madame Bovary and so on. Truth is far, far stranger. Look at Leigh Hunt's, Byron's, Rimbaud's lives; at those of our fantastic aristocratic Englishwomen who made the Middle Eastern Arabia their backyard; look at Hester Stanhope and the Lord Stanhope a century before her; look at the Brunel brothers or the 'lives of the engineers'; and honoris causa look at the longest run of sheer genius and eccen- tricity England ever produced, in every walk of life, between 1815 and 1914, when one by one the embattled bastions of custom, mode and conformity went down in ruins—for our bene- fit. And what do we aim at in our succeeding but hardly suc- cessful society and its order- ing? Uniformity, ironing out of 'differentials' (are we crazy?), cap-touching to an Establishment in which press and radio vie with each other for mass-criteria, and a polytechnicised one-class, one-standard education from which all differ- entim and variant versions shall be expunged, to the greater glory of the insect-State. Only an Orwell stands out, reviled by all politicians and criticised by all others.
But stay! I notice that as laws multiply, crimes and criminals do, too. (I didn't say that first; it was said in the Roman Republic.) Maybe juvenile delinquency, robbery with violence and the breakdown of a centuries-old respect for persons and property are but diverted expressions of eccentricity, nonconformity and rebellion. Maybe our society is getting what it deserves and has encouraged. We may no longer get the grand deceivers, the huge hoaxers, the Jimmy Whites and Horatio Bottomleys and Insults (so "engagingly portrayed in Mr. Alexander Klein's Grand Deception, Faber, 21s.) simply because our society makes it impossible to amass much wealth singly. But now everybody fiddles on a small scale. We are all fiddlers now, for an Old King Cole of a State. I only say it may 'be 'so. But 1, for one, regret the times when eccentricity was the badge of a few at the top; setting new modes of thought and behaviour; warmly and cosily loved by tolerant masses; making many amused. Today, try we never so hard (over the air, by vast amusement industries, in the press), we are not amused. We conform. And we chafe exceedingly. I doubt if we shall ever feel our- selves well and truly English again until we can afford those traditional Anglo-Saxon artists and Nature's fools,' eccentrics. They were really social-minded. In an egocentric era, which isn't, they will take some finding.
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