England Fair and Foul
THE author describes his book as " a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933." The journey was made partly by car, partly by motor coach, and sometimes by train, and for a man like Mr. Priestley, with an observant mind and an open sympathy for all conditions of men, it was well worth making. So rapid a traverse of our country will naturally be called superficial in result, but the present reviewer, who at various times has followed a similar method, has always found it give a fresh and valuable knowledge of a people with traditions deeply rooted in the past and remaining one in nature in spite of all differences of scene, occupation, and even of dialect. Mr. Priestley, fully alive to the beauties of the country and the abominations of the great cities, easily recognizes the inherent unity of the inhabitants, for he is himself a born Englishman, and, as he says, it is the little England that he loves.
It is quite true that he finds in little England, not only Disraeli's " two nations " of rich and poor, but the two nations of north and south. We feel the difference as he proceeds on his oval journey from London to Southampton, round by Salisbury and Bristol to Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham, on through Lancashire and Yorkshire to Newcastle and Durham, and so past points along the Eastern counties to London again. On the whole he finds the southern counties still the more beautiful, and the people the more cheerful, because, up to now, the factories and pits have not overwhelmed them, though continually threatening as in Kent. Even the motors and the by-pass roads have not yet utterly destroyed the ancient woods, streams, and villages of the south. One might call it the country of William Morris's ideal, for it is the natural home of the few craftsmen and artistic workers still surviving. Mr. Priestley naturally finds the finest remnants of England's beauty among the Cotswold villages, built of that yellowish stone that seems to have absorbed the sunshine of generations, and there the people are still capable of individual character and self- expression. " Who cares about the masses ? " he asks. " I wouldn't raise a finger for ' the masses.' Men, women and children, but not masses."
None the less, as he passed into Birmingham and the Black Country, it was hard to avoid the masses. His pictures of life in the manufacturing cities of the north, where no tourist goes for pleasure, are as terrible as vivid. Of his many scenes of dingy, dreary life one hardly knows which to select. For a beginning let us take this in West Bromwich :
" They (such scones) make the whole pomp of government hero a miserable, farce. The Crown, Lords and Commons are the Crown, Lords and Commons of Rusty Lane, West Bromwich. In the heart of the great Empire' on which the sun never sets, in the land of hope and glory, Mother of the Free, is Rusty Lane, West Bromwich. What do they know of England who only England know Y The answer must be Rusty Lane, West Bromwich."
Such an answer is final. It is like Matthew Arnold's " Wragg is in custody."
Such scenes abound in the accounts of all the cities and regions in the industrial north. In Lancashire perhaps the wretchedness is now worst, chiefly owing to the collapse of the cotton trade. But really it is as pitiful in Newcastle, or down the Tyne at Jarrow and Gateshead, or among the pits of Durham, owing to the collapse of shipbuilding and the slackness in the coal trade. In coal mining the casualties amount as in a war to an average of over 5,000 in five years and 800,000 injured. Yet a pitman's life is not the worst. The worst is the life of the unemployed. Mr. Priestley tells us that just after the Armistice he was sent to look after some German prisoners of war :
" They had a certain look, those prisoners of war, most of whom had been captured two or three years before. It was a strained, greyish faintly decomposed look. I did not expect to see that kind of face again for a long time ; but I was wrong. I have seen a lot of those faces on this journey. They belonged to unemployed men."
In the great Yorkshire towns, such as Bradford, where he was horn, we may see a redeeming gleam of light owing to the moors, never very far away. People did not care very much, he tells us, if our city had no charm, for it was simply a place to go and work in, until it was time to set out for Wharfedale or Wensleydale again : " We were all, at heart, Wordsworthians to a man. We have to make an effort to appreciate a poet like Shelley, with his rather gassy enthusiasm and his bright Italian colouring ; but we have Wordsworth in our very legs."
That is a great saying, and all of us who hail from the north are thrilled by the poetic patriotism of the words.
One would like to give many other instances of Mr. Priestley's breadth of sympathy and perception of the people's nature. We find him in public-houses, cafés, popular ballrooms, cinemas, fairs, the lowest slums even of Liverpool, and always he writes with the same shrewd and often humorous observa- tion, and with that intimate penetration into character which comes only of sympathy and a kind of human affection that is very different from philanthropy. One could also give instances of many points that he has missed, in Leicester and in Boston, for instance. But the book is one of extra- ordinary value for all who can appreciate the hidden depths of the English nature and are not blinded by party or common " slogans." We do not know or care whether Mr. Priestley calls himself a Socialist or a Tory, but we would dwell on passages like the following :
" As I thought of some of the places I had soon, Wolverhampton and St. Helens and Bolton and Gateshead and Jarrow and Shotton, I remembered a book I had just read, in which we are told to return as soon as possible to the study of Victorian individualism. But for my part I felt like calling back a few of those sturdy individualists simply to rub their noses in the nasty mess they had made. Who gave them leave to turn this island into their ashpit ? "
One can only hope that thoughtful people of all parties may meditate upon so wise and observant and kindly a book as this.
HENRY W. NEVINSON.
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