The Affirmative Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 67

you can survive. You will never be a saint or a conqueror, but your failures will be minor
ones. In classical tragedy, those who aspire and fall make more of a splash because they
tend to be privileged, heroic types. Comedy, by contrast, is the anti-heroic mode of those
who accept the inevitability of things going awry, and have learnt to be stoical about it. It
avoids the afflictions of tragedy by sacrificing its splendour. Comedy settles for half, tol-
erant and disenchanted, sceptical of all wide-eyed idealism and passionate intensity, adept
at the art of compromise. It is not a cynical form, since it believes in the reality of human
value; but it believes that such value is best preserved by not making too much of a fuss
about it. It is a very British way of seeing.
Like comedy, the British are traditionally suspicious of the success ethic. Unlike Americ-
ans, they are not an affirmative nation. Among their national icons are a ship that sank (the
Titanic ) and a calamitous military defeat (Dunkirk). Defeat is what the British are particu-
larly good at. They are maestros of utter disaster. No doubt there are bunkers deep below
Whitehall where intensive seminars in how to screw up are secretly conducted. Glorious
defeats, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, are almost to be elevated over stupendous
victories. The British are not proactively heroic, but brave out of necessity. Unlike Amer-
icans, the only kind of heroism for which they have a sneaking admiration is one forced on
you when the odds are hopeless and your back is to the wall. After such sporadic bursts of
self-sacrificial glory, they resume their normal, grumpy, unheroic existence until the next
catastrophe happens along. They need the occasional hardship in order to show what stuff
they are made of, and suspect that American civilisation is too easy and flaccid in this re-
spect. The States may be full of virile, chisel-jawed, bestubbled types, but all those stretch
limos and Jacuzzis are fatally weakening. This is ironic, since quite a few Americans see
the British themselves as effete. This is largely because their accents can sound vaguely
gay, rather like their prose styles.
The British are no enthusiasts of extremes. They are not convinced that truth is what
shines forth when you are driven to the outer edge. This can happen from time to time,
as when German submarines are sinking your supply ships, but it is out of the ordinary. It
should not be taken as a measure by which to characterise everyday life. The real self is the
everyday, middle-of-the-road one. It is one that lends itself to the novel, a form at which
the British have been adept, rather than to epic or tragedy. The British value freedom, for
example, but tend to suspect that Americans make too much of a song and dance about it.
Charles Dickens records in his American Notes an encounter he had with a doctor who in-
sists he has no intention of leaving America. “Not yet awhile, Sir, not yet. You won't catch
me at that just yet, Sir. I am a little too fond of freedom for that , Sir. Ha, ha! It's not so easy
for a man to tear himself away from a free country such as this is, Sir! Ha, ha! No, no! Ha,
ha! None of that, till one's obliged to do it, Sir. No, no.” The doctor turns out to be a Scot
who has only been in the country for three or four months. The national rhetoric is clearly
contagious.