Pigs, Be British
By GRAHAM GREENE
THE pig in our literature has always been credited with qualities peculiarly British. Honest, a little stupid, com- mercially-minded perhaps, but with a trace of idealism in his love affairs, the pigs best nature is shown in domestic surroundings at a period of peace and material comfort.
They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon," Miss Potter has written of Miss Dorcas and Miss Poreas, but the sentence might stand as the epitaph of the whole race. In the latest variant on the tale of the Three Little Pigs, prepared by the Walt Disney Studios*, one notices that same serenity in the portraits of the older generation hanging in the house of the provident pig : " Mother," an old-fashioned parent drawn tenderly in the act of suckling eight children ; " Uncle Otto," changed to a Rugby football, but a football at rest, =profaned as yet by the clamorous, vulgar game ; "-Father," unearVed, sporting his paper frill with the heavy dignity of a Victorian parent in a Gladstone collar. It is impossible to doubt this strong domestic affection when we find it noted by an earlier and less sympathetic observer than Miss Potter. The Rev. W. Bingley, using the very terms in which foreign historians have so often described Englishmen, wrote, " Selfish, indocile and rapacious, as many think him, no animal has greater sympathy for those of his own kind than the hog."
But perhaps the British quality of the pig has never been more thoroughly expressed than in the early poem : " This little pig went to market (one remembers the pride with which Englishmen have always repeated Napoleon's jeer) ; This little pig stayed at home (` 0 sweet content ! 0 sweet, 0 sweet content ! ' ; Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well- Content ' ; I love thee for a heart that's kind—Not for the knowledge in thy mind '—it is sometimes hard to remember that Dekker and Mr. Davies are writing of men and not of pigs) ; This little pig had roast beef (no need to emphasize the parallel) ; This little pig had none ; This little pig cried wee wee wee all the way home." Perhaps no pig was more British than this last ; a literary pig, for the mother-fixation, the longing for the womb has been the peculiar peril of our minor poets. " 0 mother quiet, breasts of peace " : Rupert Brooke is the obvious modern example, but all through the Georgian period one is aware of the patter of little hoofs along the dark rond that leads back to the country stye, the roses round the door, the Mothering Sunday that goes on and on.
Sexual references, it will be noticed, are quite absent from this early poem, as they are from -the rather cruel, politically= conscious story of the Three Little Pigs. It really seems that at this period of pig literature the bigger the litter the greater the inhibition, a situation closely paralleled in Victorian England. Miss Potter, I think, was the first to throw any real light on the Love Life of the Pig, and this she did with a delicacy and a psychological insight that-recall Miss Austen.- She drew for the first time in literature the feminine pig. Hitherto a pig had been just a pig ; one usually assumed the sex to be masculine. But in Pig-Wig, whom Pigling Bland, it will be remembered, rescued from the cottage of the fatal Mr. Peter Thomas Piperson, the female pig was revealed to be as completely British as the male : inquisitive, unromantic, demanding to be amused, fond of confectionery and admirably- unself-conscious : " She asked so many questions that it became embarrassing to Pigling Bland.
*The Three Little Pigs. Prepared by the Walt Disney Studios. (John Lane. 2s. 6d.) - •
He was obliged to shut his eyes and pretend to sleep. Sh became quiet, and there was a smell of peppermint.
' I thought you had eaten them ? ' said Pigling, waking suddenly, Only the corners,' replied Pig-Wig, studying the sentiments (they were conversation peppermints) by the firelight. I wish-you wouldn't. ; he might smell them through the ceiling,' said the alarmed Pigling.
Pig-Wig put back the sticky peppermints into her pocket ; Sing something,' she demanded.
I am sorry . . . I have toothache,' said Pigling much dismayed.
Then I will sing,' replied Pig-Wig. You will not mind if I say iddy tidditty ? I have forgotten some of the words.' "
It is impossible to deny that this is a peculiarly English love scene ; no other nation, except perhaps the Russian, would have behaved or written quite like this, and the sentiment of the ending, the luxurious indulgence in :wistfulness and idealism : " They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes. They came to the river, they came to the bridge—they crossed it hand in hand " would be inconceivable to a race of pigs whose prosperity had been more precarious, to whom the struggle .for existence had been--more-.crudely presented. American pigs, for example, who meet their end, like so many other Americans, abruptly in Chicago, would have been at the same time more brutal and more soft-hearted.
Both these rather contradictory qualities appear in the Walt Disney Studios' brilliant adaptation of Three Little Pigs (and I should like, before I forget in the fascination of the story, warmly to congratulate all those concerned in the production of this book : the chief electrician, the cameraman, the- fashion designer, the art editor, the scenario writer, the director and assistant director, the producer, the author and the composer of the theme song). These pigs are no longer. quite so British, which is to say that they are no longer quite so piggish. The curled tails, the improvident flutings, the house of straw and the house of twigs and the house of brick have never been more tenderly . portrayed, but the wolf never more brutally. This is the wolf of experience, not of dream ; Wall Street smashes, financiers' suicides, the machine guns of the gangster are behind this wolf. Watch him outside. the house of twigs, sitting in a basket, a sheepskin falling on either side of his ferocious muzzle like the wig of a Jeffreys : this is Justice conniving at unjust executions and letting the gangster free. And watch him again outside the house of bricks in a rusty hat, in an overcoat, in a false yellow beard : " I'm the Kleen-e-ze Brush man, I'm giving away free samples " : he is every share pusher personified, the man who knows of a new gold mine, a swell oil field.
But just becauie the whole story is more realistic than the English version, the American mind shrinks from the ruthless. logical denouement. The two improvident pigs are not swallowed by the wolf, they escape and take refuge with their: brother in the brick house, and even the wolf escapes with a scalding. The wolf's escape, indeed, is the most American aspect of this transplanted tale. How often one has watched the methods of justice satirized upon the screen with a realism that would be impossible in England ; yet nothing is done 'about it,' the won' tscapes. The English story is the better one, to sacrifice two pigs that the third may live in safety, to sacrifice the improvident pigs that the provident pig may be remembered for ever in his famous aphorism : " The price of liberty is -eternal vigilanie."
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