English literature is irremediably racially oriented. Even if we only consider the greatest works and names, we find a pattern which persists and remains unmistakable to this day.
In Beowulf, which is certainly the greatest work in English before the Norman Conquest, and arguably still the greatest of all English epics, group pride is confined to individual Germanic tribes:
Hark! We have heard how the kings of the Spear-Danes
Gained glory in days of yore, how the noblemen
The Norman Conquest set the seal on a national unity already loosely achieved under the leadership of the kings of Wessex, and in time a truly national feeling grew up, exemplified by the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I the
first such enforced exodus in medieval Europe.
England was to be free of Jews until Cromwell's time, when they were again allowed in, for a large loan.
Anyone reading Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, in which little Hugh of Lincoln is kidnapped and murdered on his way
home from school, need have no doubts as to Chaucer's attitude toward Jews, which he condensed into two lines:
For foule usure and lucre of vileynye,
Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye ...
In Shakespeare's works race consciousness is rampant. There never was such a patriotic poet, before or since. His historic plays are one long paean of praise for England. Diatribes against the French are commonplace. In Henry VI, Part I, he goes so far as to represent the burning of Joan of Arc as good riddance to a wicked witch:
Break thou in pieces and consume to ashes,
Thou foul accursed minister of hell!
Shakespeare's portraits of Celtic peoples are by no means uniformly flattering, but when he comes to Jews he outdoes himself. Even John of Gaunt's dying speech of praise for England,
"This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle," contains a reference to Christ's sepulchre in "stubborn Jewry."
Everything possible has been done in the modern theater to make the character of Shylock more appealing. His uglier aspects have been played down, awkward passages have been cut out, and actors like John Gielgud have done their best to represent Shylock's hypocritical self-pity as Shakespeare's pity for Shylock. No wonder the play has been acted with the Christian characters in Nazi uniforms and with Antonio portrayed as a Gauleiter.
Nor is Shakespeare less ethnically tuned in Othello, whose fatal flaw, self-deception, is described as inherited, not acquired. lago is merely a diabolus ex machina. The inescapable core of the tragedy is the clash of race, the marriage of the dusky Moor to the beautiful white Desdemona. No amount of West Indian style ham acting by Laurence Olivier can shift or defuse this overpowering emphasis.
Marlowe's Jew of Malta is a Machiavellian monster, who cheats and murders without scruple and evokes admiration from his youthful creator and from the audience only because of the scale of his crimes. Nor was Ben Jonson's view of Jewry any more flattering. The satire of his Alchemist makes it one of the funniest plays ever written.
Milton, with his references to "God's Englishmen" is no less of a patriot than Shakespeare, and when he gives precedence to the Old Testament over the glories of Greece, he is letting his intellect prevail over his deepest instincts. Paradise Lost is an epic of the Grecian mold, and Samson Agonistes is in effect a Greek tragedy. Even when he describes the beauty of the Garden of Eden, he has to play the trick of reciting a long list of Grecian glories, adding somewhat lamely that Eden was even more beautiful than that.
Marvell, like Milton, was a secretary of Cromwell, and he gives us noble portraits of both his employer and of Charles I.
Like Milton, he saw the English as a chosen people. Dryden makes full use of the Old Testament in describing the religious factions of his own day:
The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murmuring race
As ever tried the extend and stretch of grace,
Cod's pampered people, whom, debauched with ease,
No king could govern, nor no Cod could please.
Pope in his turn, strongly associates the Jews with moneylending:
While with the silent growth of ten per cent,
In dirt and darkness, hundreds stink content.
Cowper's reference to "the leathern ears of stockjobbers and Jews" is in the same vein.
The English Romantics, who rebelled against the rule of money and praised the virtues of folklore and popular cohesion have, with a few notable exceptions, never been liberal-minority favorites.
Byron's attack on political manipulation by "Jew Rotchschild and his fellow Christian Baring" is too explicit for comfort.
Nor were the English novelists more enthusiastic about the aliens in their midst. Defoe, who knew a lot about the seamy side of life, had a very poor opinion of the Jews, and Fielding, a magistrate, also disliked them. That appears to be why Richardson is strongly preferred by liberal critics, although Defoe takes precedence over him in point of time and Fielding in point of excellence.
When we come to Dickens, the xenophobic tendency is even more manifest. His Fagin is a creature who trains little boys as pickpockets, and his hanging is regarded by Dickens as good riddance. Dickens's later attempt to make amends by portraying a gentle Jew was a complete failure. Who now remembers in which novel Elias is to be found?
Where Negroes are concerned, Dickens's attitudes are even more severe.
He was the great proponent of the argument that charity begins at home, and never ceased to ridicule silly women like Mrs. Jellyby in Barnaby Rudge, whose principal concern was "educating the natives of Βorrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." In his first fulllength novel The Pickwick Papers he, makes fun of a "noble society for providing the infant Negroes in the West Indies with flannel waistcoats and moral pocket handkerchiefs./I So it is no surprise to find him, in the latter part of his life, supporting General Eyre, .who put down a Negro rising in the West Indies by hanging all the insurgents on sight.
Thackeray has one young lady advising another not to marry anyone who works in the City of London, "among the stockbrokers and Jews." Trollope can hardly be considered to have displayed any more fondness towards them.
In the twentieth century the pattern persists: Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, all show strong signs of anti-Semitism. And remember, only a few of the most outstanding writers have been selected. If quotations were taken from writers of the second rank, the list could be lengthened enormously. Nor is it an answer to say that one could also make out a selective Iist of pro-Jewish
quotations from Scott's Ivanhoe, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joyce's Ulysses. In the broad and brilliant range of English literature unfavorable references to Jews and other minorities heavily outnumber the favorable ones.
Racial feelings have by no means disappeared now that minority writers have been made central to the study of English. The only difference is that minority racism becomes the theme. What could be more explicit than Norman Mailer's calumniation of the Wasps, or Philip Roth's fantasies of easily exploited "shikses?" His hero in Portnoy's Complaint even keeps one whom he calls the Monkey for the purposes of fellatio. He also alleges that the Majority blondes are all just dying to hop into bed with men who look like his uncle Hymie.
We wonder about the future of English literature, now that it has passed into the hands of alien races who have only been speaking and writing English for a few generations. If environment is everything, then English literature has nothing to worry about. Any Fiji Islander will have as much chance of being a second Shakespeare as any direct descendant of William the Conqueror or any fifteenth-generation American descendant of a Plymouth or Jamestown colonist.
So far, however, the environmental theory doesn't seem to be working out too well in the Iiterary field. As more more millions of people learn to speak and write English,as more and more minority members seek to "enrich" it, English literature is turning into a malodorous heap of pornographic garbage.(Περιοδικό Instauration Ioύλιος 1977)
