László Cs. Szabó
from Dover Crossing (1937)
In a few years time this nation will have reached the peak of its economical, territorial and demographic development: its territory will not be capable of further expansion, its population will hover round the current level for some time, then, in the second half of the century, it will decline. The changing character of the country will adapt itself to this civilized saturation point. (It is of course possible that rather than adapt it might crack under the strain). The English will have rid themselves of all their harmful passions, all their terrible furies, all their instincts for murder and rapine, in other words of all those elements that comprise the daemon of a nation: they will no longer want to kill, they will recoil from acts of violence and have no wish to conquer. All the barbarism will have been “analysed” out of them; they will have become peaceful, perceptive and wise. English civilization will stand at the acme of human civilization: its degree of embourgeoisement will, I believe, exceed what we commonly understand by the term, just as physics after Planck, or chemistry after Curie exceeded what came before it. While Europe was regressing into two centuries of peasant-decimating feudalism, the English Puritan revolution, their first great change in character, counter to the European trend, was enabling bourgeois materialism to progress, and now that Europe is collapsing into a state of militarism sanctioned by law, this latest development of the English character, purged of its bestial energies, will offer an image of perfect human civilization. The island is not one with the mainland.
This process of evolution has marooned our own contemporaries on opposite sides of an intellectual chasm. The reader is not yet aware that what Galsworthy or Kipling are really talking about is the prelude to revolution, or that Huxley, Hughes or Virginia Woolf are in fact always writing about that revolution’s aftermath. The chasm widens, the years erode the rock; after a couple of decades the two parties are hardly audible to each other, just as, with a modern ear, it is difficult to hear the voice of George Herbert, only some thirty years younger than Shakespeare, as part of the voluptuous hubbub of Renaissance England in the Age of Shakespeare.
Let’s wait to see the end of this revolution; the shock alone will be worth living a long time for. No more merciful fate awaits strait-laced, bourgeois, Victorian, unemotional, uneroticized England than awaited the debaucheries of Old Merry England: the insular nation will vanish much as the expansive one did and the English will start from scratch: sooner or later their love lives will change, as will their temperament, and, who knows, even their language. They have the courage and, above all, they possess the poetic imagination. They will exemplify a nation at the acme of civilization, untroubled by the greed for money, avoiding the fires of lust, in other words without a trace of Herrenmoral. It is possible that Huxley is not a great writer—there may be too much glittering contemporaneity or brilliant trash in him—nevertheless he is the indicator of that character reversal, it is by following in his footsteps we may most accurately measure the intellectual development of England, a development that will civilize it unrecognizably while probably rendering it more vulnerable. Traveller, gird your loins: you are standing on the threshold of neurotic England!
László Cs. Szabó: Doveri átkelés, Budapest, Cserépfalvi, 1937, pp. 77–79.
