海带排骨汤怎么做England Your England by George Orwell

2021年1月2日发(作者：步巴)
Your task: read and write

Read the following essay carefully, at least twice, before you begin to write a
summary of no more than 500 words on the national characteristics of the English
people.

England Your England by George Orwell

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out
to be trivialities or seem to have no connection with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals,
Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling.
Obviously such things don't matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the
fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about the realities of English life.
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all
observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the
Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in
France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of
vabstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this
because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look
at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is
out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and
measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care
about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their
world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound
up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and
act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone,
though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’,
would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being
called a sleep-walker.
But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not
often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices
when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it
not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who
have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English
characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to
hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of
flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp- collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters,
coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword- puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native
centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football
match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still
believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty,
the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you
like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you
from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of

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course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the
English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of
their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them
will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no
Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
But in all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order.
The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface,
unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks
directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They
are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes,
and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of
astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc. etc.) which are designed to
interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are
without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a
real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only
influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost
forgetting the name of Christ. The power- worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which
has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people. They have never
caught up with power politics. The ‘realism’ which is preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers
would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the spirit of England from the comic
coloured postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort
of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their
old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their
extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You
notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are
good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it
easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off
by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is
rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class.
Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it was common
for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to
refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when there are two million
unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the
country gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and
slum proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their
attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by promising them
conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. In the last war
the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but
humorous and mock-defeatist(1). The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major.
In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small
minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not
retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature,
like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for

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themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular
poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's army at Corunna, fighting a
desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a
brilliant victory. The most stirring battle- poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which
charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved
themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a
disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown
to the general public.
The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the
existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed
a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round
and say that war is wicked?
It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class this
hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing
armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an
external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist
everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all
classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and
the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the
same significance in England as ‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred
years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when
off duty.
One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its
army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a
certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the
world, far more terrifying than a dive- bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power;
contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.
Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at
me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose- step not used in England?
There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some
such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point,
military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German
control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if
it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French
army. In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth
century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a
society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the
scabbard.
And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms.
Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm
Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully
with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences. In England people
are still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these punishments are

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obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them.
People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part
of ‘the law’, which is assumed to be unalterable.
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and
legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something
which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the
rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for
granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.
Remarks like ‘They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong’, or ‘They can't do that; it's
against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have
this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls
Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of
conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that
this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be,
ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is
no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only
accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half- truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar
arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never
take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no
bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They
may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,
national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber
truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there
corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all
but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class.
But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt.
You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote,
nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful
safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing
short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the
law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the
symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion,
democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the
nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.



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