[In the following essay, Medcalf praises Wodehouse for his innocence and originality, maintaining that his use of language “lies very much in one tradition of English writing, perhaps the most enduring and specifically English—humour.”]

C.S. Lewis, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, describes as one of the crucial events in his mental life the discovery of C.F. Alexander's distinction between Enjoyment and Contemplation. They compose an analysis of consciousness. As I read this book, I contemplate it: I enjoy my act of contemplation. If I turn to examining my consciousness of this book, then I cease to contemplate the book, and cease to enjoy that contemplation: I contemplate my consciousness and enjoy a certain second-order consciousness of that contemplation. In fact, I have stopped reading.

Lewis drew from this distinction the doctrine that to examine one's own consciousness is a necessarily falsifying act. ‘The enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible.’¹ He would admit no activity between the two aspects of consciousness, no looking, as he would regard it, out of the corner of one's eye to see what seeing is like. Introspection finds only ‘mental images and physical sensations’, left behind by ‘the thought or the appreciation, when interrupted … like the swell at sea, working after the wind has dropped’.² The only kind of introspection Lewis would allow was self-examination before God in terms of clearly defined concepts of good and evil—the tradition, the way, the Tao. The Tao is like a Copernican system by which you can stand outside yourself and see your own world moving in relation to God.

The fact that Lewis disliked most ‘modern’ authors—Kierkegaard, Freud, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Sartre—is to be ascribed, I think, not to something automatically reactionary in him, but to the perfectly correct perception that such literature is necessarily involved with the attempt to catch consciousness in the act. He sets up, for example, a distinction between lovers of Milton and lovers of James Joyce. Miltonists believe that the essence of consciousness is choice, preference, so that it and its expression have necessarily a certain buildedness about them. Joycians desire to investigate consciousness as it exists prior to any deliberate direction of attention. But the Joycians are deceiving themselves. ‘The poet who finds by introspection that the soul is mere chaos is like a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his notebook “The stillness in this street is highly suspicious.”’³

These doctrines necessarily affect the way Lewis used words. His language cannot appear to be altering itself as he writes: it can only be corrected afterwards. ‘As I write this book’ is subject to the same laws as ‘As I read this book’. We find therefore:

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire, Himself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.⁴

That is tremendous, yet it is a rhetoric based on an absolute assurance that the meaning of certain words can be found with certainty in their past uses in a particular tradition of Christian and English writing. Compare what Lewis says here with a sentence from Charles Williams, whom he admired, equally working within the tradition to reform our ordinary conception of love: ‘The famous saying “God is love”, it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, and not that our meaning of love ought to have something of the “otherness” and terror of God.’⁵

Lewis would not have quarrelled with this thought about love (he copies it in The Weight of Glory). But except in his last books, in Till we have Faces and A Grief Observed, when he changed his style markedly, he would have eschewed its interactive form—Williams's awareness that if you intend to enlarge the meaning of ‘love’ or any other word you must not confine yourself to multiplying existing models for its use, but show how those models are themselves modified in the process.

Lewis aggressively proclaims his faith in ‘stock responses’; he is a master of integrating scraps of language into his writing from writers he loved, neither losing anything of their power, nor changing it, nor increasing it. His style rests in a certain assumed or chosen security about the relation of consciousness to the world and of language to the objects it describes. It has expressed, perhaps, a similar security in English culture. You can find the same style, for example, in Winston Churchill's books of speeches, and in Harold Nicolson: it is very instructive to compare A la recherche du temps perdu with Helen's Tower and The Desire to Please, the first two volumes of Nicolson's projected In Search of the Past, in the light of Nicolson's ambition to be remembered as ‘the Proust of England’. Somehow Nicolson never properly developed the ironic edge of his early Some People: perhaps because he was a part of, therefore secure in, the aristocratic tradition which Proust looked on from outside.

Plenty of lords of English culture have chosen modernism—Yeats deliberately, Eliot through an infinite need of introspection, Golding for his canon of ‘intransigence’, and so on. I want to consider in this essay, however, one of a group of writers who might at first sight seem to have chosen very deliberately to remain with security, tradition in the sense of what has been done, and attention to the given external world, but who nevertheless provide paths through insecurity which show an intuitive knowledge of its nature, extend awareness and create new inner worlds. I think of G.K. Chesterton, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman.

There is in ordinary language, in the coverage of meaning of words, a latent store of experience, therefore of wisdom, derived from the way in which words have been used, and their meaning extended, by diverse people in indefinitely diverse situations. Each of the four writers I mention, using a standard and traditional vocabulary and syntax which he has no wish to disturb, has his own method for tapping this wisdom and displaying it as fresh. Chesterton has especially his paradox, Wodehouse his simile, Waugh one kind of irony (a classic, suave, even creamy surface covering accidie and terror) and Betjeman another (a beautiful double-take which doubles itself again, so that the very choice of metre and word declares, ‘I like directly what I like ironically to parody’). Of these four I want to look at the greatest and most original as a writer, and, except as a writer, the least deliberate—P.G. Wodehouse.

Wodehouse is as secure in the matrix of the traditionally English and ethically Christian as C.S. Lewis himself—the more so in that, unlike Lewis, his ethics have no basis in religion, in which he disclaimed all interest. His subject-matter is English society as it existed before the First World War or survived unharmed by it. The one notable public incident of his life, the broadcasts from Berlin in 1940, shows a notable innocence, but a complete unawareness that anyone could be as ungentlemanly as the Nazis actually were. Of his ethics, W.H. Auden says that Bertie Wooster could be thought of as a suitable object of attention only in a Christian, never in a Classical or a Marxist society:

The Communist would probably say: ‘It is incredible that anybody should like people so silly and useless as Mr Pickwick, Miss Prism, Madame Wetme and Bertie Wooster.’ The Greek would probably have said ‘It is incredible that such people, so plain, middle-aged and untalented, should be happy.’⁶

Bertie belongs in a society which places absolute value on any and every individual. More: he belongs in a society that could produce fairy stories of the idiot and innocent younger son who succeeds where his clever elder brothers fail, where Don Quixote, Parson Adams and Mr Pickwick can be regarded as paradigms of virtue.

Wodehouse is also, it might seem, a very trivial writer. He has neither the irony nor the undercurrent of Angst which make Evelyn Waugh a candidate for high seriousness.

But look at his language. It lies very much in one tradition of English writing, perhaps the most enduring and specifically English—humour.

Chaucer (quite probably the father of it all) enjoys producing opposite effects with the same line by exploiting the determination of meaning by context—effects with infinite reverberations. Arcite cries out in ‘The Knight's Tale’:

What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye.(7)

A few lines later, at the beginning of the next tale, the Miller says of Nicholas, the Oxford clerk:

A chambre hadde he in that hostelrye
Allone, withouten any companye.(8)

The passion of Arcite and the flatness of the Miller both ring true, but when you put them side by side, you begin to wonder about the power of self-recognition and creation which humanity has, that it can stand back from and create both lines. Already in Chaucer we find that contemplation of his own creativity in the act of creation which C.S. Lewis rebuts.

One might guess that Chaucer is exploiting an existing literary cliché; and that his gentle, his traditionally noble knight, his C.S. Lewis figure, is using unself-consciously and with its full original meaning a tag of noble literature which the Miller converts into mock-heroic with flat-footed unawareness—or perhaps with a leering debasement of the overtone ‘love-company’ in ‘companye’. This is probably true—it goes back at least to Dante's

Taciti, soli, sanza compagnia

of himself and Virgil in hell.⁹

Wodehouse's art likewise centres on his ability to bring a cliché just enough to life to kill it. Gussie Fink-Nottle, a teetotaller from youth, is about to distribute the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School ‘before an audience of all that is fairest and most refined in the county’ while liberally primed with whisky and gin. Bertie begins a conversation:

‘It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?’

‘One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.’

‘You mean imagination boggles?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.¹⁰

Both halves of the process are important. Wodehouse enjoys the cliché he kills, and enjoys killing it. His use of words is not unlike that of the philosopher Austin, who says that existing ‘does not describe something that things do all the time, like breathing, only quieter …’¹¹ There is a lively sense in that sentence of what the meaning of ‘exist’ which Austin wants to discredit actually is, and the metaphor of breathing succinctly revives it in a way designed for ridicule.

Wodehouse intuitively hits on just such a philosophic appeal to common sense as Austin or Gilbert Ryle love. If you put self-consciousness through the kind of slow motion which Bertie applies to it here, you realise that it is a category mistake to think you can so isolate and inspect imagination as to see it boggling.

But Wodehouse is not out to discredit ‘boggle’, like Ryle and Austin. He continues to enjoy the fustian use of ‘imagination boggles’; and he uses it to convey his meaning. In a sense what he does is to use the cliché more seriously than most people do. ‘He shook like a jelly’ is nothing. But ‘He shook like a jelly in a high wind’ at once destroys the simile by exaggerating it beyond all credence and makes it vivid with physical exactness.

Again, Wodehouse shares with C.S. Lewis and Chaucer a love for using noble quotations that are a little hackneyed. But he uses them not, like C.S. Lewis, simply to draw on their power without changing it, but in Chaucer's way, seeing them in the new context he puts them into even while he puts them into it, as when he quotes from Byron's Destruction of Sennacherib: ‘His demeanour was that of an Assyrian who, having come down like a wolf on the fold, had found in residence not lambs but wildcats.’ There is in that sentence an awareness of Byron's real power and an awareness that it is a power which even in the original has loosened itself from contact with the objective reality it professes to describe. The strength and weakness of Byron's line is connected with a slight dislocation of metaphor and reality, so that one reads ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf’, feels that the simile is over, and sees, for the fraction of the blink of an eye, the Assyrian attacking a real walled sheepfold. Almost immediately one transfers not only the wrath of the wolf to the Assyrian, but the protective walls and the innocence to Jerusalem. But there was a moment when one could have taken another path, and made a quite complicated fool of the Assyrian for attacking the wrong thing. Wodehouse slips in smartly at that point, puts wildcats into the fold and draws the actual power—Byron's power—off to his own uses. It is not surprising that T.S. Eliot admired Wodehouse. For Wodehouse does for other purposes, but with the same kind of Protean consciousness of language, and indeed more deftly, what Eliot himself does when he describes London in the rush hour with a literal translation of Dante's lines about the vagrant dead in the antechamber of hell:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many.(12)

It cannot be too much stressed that Wodehouse delights in his original quotations and clichés and does not discredit them. This is the case, to return to my first example, even with: ‘I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.’ Drive that too far, and it is nonsense. But in fact use the phrase gently, and you find exactly the process which I am describing as characteristic of Wodehouse, Chaucer and Eliot. They inspect their imaginations in the act and moment of boggling, and write out of that narrow point. Nevertheless, what it seems to Bertie comically impossible to do, not only is he doing, but his creator is doing as he creates him, and the reader as he reads the result.

Wodehouse's wit is often intuitively metaphysical. Any humour is apt to be. There is the example of man's affinity and unlikeness with the animals, which has been a joke certainly since Egyptian days, and perhaps from the cave painters, if the Spanish drawing of a stag sticking out its tongue at a man trying to shoot it means the mockery it might mean. Wodehouse compares man to dog: ‘Bingo uttered a stricken woofle, like a bulldog that has been refused cake’,¹³ or, submerging the reference, ‘Sir Roderick sort of just waggled an eyebrow in my direction, and I saw that it was back to the basket for Bertram’,¹⁴ and dog to man:

Nothing can ever render the experience of being treed on top of a chest of drawers by an Aberdeen terrier pleasant, but it seemed to me that the least you can expect on such an occasion is that the animal will meet you halfway, and not drop salt into the wound by looking at you as if he were asking if you were saved.¹⁵

But he goes further. Chesterton once observed that a great part of theology could be deduced from the fact which is the heart of the animal joke, that we find our existence as mind and body funny. Pascal made a heroic affirmation from it when he said that it does not need the whole universe in arms to kill a man. A drop of water will do it. But if the whole universe combined in arms to kill a man, the man would still be the greater. For he knows what is happening, and the universe knows nothing.¹⁶ Andrew Marvell concentrated this heroic affirmation in a metaphysical pun about Charles I's execution:

But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try

‘Keen’ applied to eyes means something greater than ‘keen’ applied to axes.

Wodehouse uses almost the same thought in what is at first sight a joke conveying a vivid physical perception, but turns out in the whole context of The Code of the Woosters to be carrying on a process of deflation of the evil hero-figure of the twentieth century—the dictator: ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’¹⁷ It is an accurate description of most would-be, real or fictitious, dictators. And with the Wodehousian flight between hyperbole and emperor's clothes literalness it puts them in their place even more neatly than the more extended bathos of an earlier description of Roderick Spode: ‘I don't know if you have ever seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley, but that was what he reminded me of.’¹⁸

Wodehouse's language, his characters' modes of thought, and their natures, are all three pervaded by this duality of acceptance and sharp criticism. It is a dual innocence: an innocent wisdom which goes straight to the point, and a preternaturally innocent gullibility. Either side can be uppermost, and we flash from one to the other with a rapidity which is a great part of the humour. The language depends on exploiting the gap between what words mean and what they might mean—the characters are like Tony Hancock, mugs, but shrewd, hard-thinking mugs, and, as Chesterton said of Mr Pickwick, they are eternally taken in by life, while the sceptic and the cynic are cast out.¹⁹ Consider how the Honourable Galahad Threepwood's mind works:

‘Did I ever tell you about poor Buffy Struggles back in’ninety-three? Some misguided person lured poor old Buffy into one of those temperance lectures illustrated with coloured slides, and he called on me next day ashen, poor old chap—ashen. “Gally”, he said, “what would you say the procedure was when a fellow wants to buy tea? How would a fellow set about it?” “Tea?” I said “what do you want tea for?” “To drink,” said Buffy. “Pull yourself together, dear boy,” I said. “You’re talking wildly. You can't drink tea. Have a brandy and soda.” “No more alcohol for me,” said Buffy. “Look what it does to the common earthworm.” “But you're not a common earthworm,” I said, putting my finger on the flaw in his argument right away. “I dashed soon shall be if I go on drinking alcohol”, said Buffy. Well, I begged him with tears in my eyes not to do anything rash, but I couldn't move him. He ordered in ten pounds of the muck and was dead inside the year.’

‘Good heavens! Really?’

The Hon. Galahad nodded impressively.

‘Dead as a doornail. Got run over by a hansom cab, poor dear old chap, as he was crossing Piccadilly.’²⁰

The two high moments of comedy in this rest on the distinction between what the words might mean and what they do mean. First: ‘No more alcohol for me. Look what it does to the common earthworm …’—that is, it is generally harmful. But there is an undistributed middle here: Buffy is not a common earthworm, and Gally knows it. And then: ‘He ordered ten pounds of the muck and was dead inside the year.’ It is less Gally's conviction of post hoc ergo propter hoc that is funny here than the fact of our being ourselves temporarily duped by a trick of language which suggests his conviction without his having to state it.

Galahad in action works like Galahad in language: full of ingenuity, easily mistaken (an early experience misapplied, perhaps, as in his unremitting belief in Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe's criminality) and good-hearted. He is on the side of those girls in Wodehouse who love without difficulty. ‘The Honourable Galahad Threepwood was himself an Old Etonian and in his time had frequently had occasion to employ the Eton manner to the undoing of his fellow men.’²¹ But when Ronald Fish turns the same manner on to Sue Brown, Gally responds straight away, and is furious.

But the fullest objective correlative of this dual innocence and shrewdness is, of course, Bertie Wooster: ‘mentally negligible’, as Jeeves said, but ‘capable of acting very shrewdly on occasion’, and wholly obedient to the Code of the Woosters. In his creation there is again an immense awareness of what is happening, both on the language level and on the level of morality. It is so from the first question ever asked of him, in 1917, by his Aunt Agatha.

‘What are your immediate plans, Bertie?’

‘Well, I rather thought of tottering out for a bite of lunch later on, and then possibly staggering round to the club, and after that, if I felt strong enough, I might trickle off to Walton Heath for a round of golf.’

‘I am not interested in your totterings and tricklings.’²²

For an infinitesimal moment we see through Aunt Agatha's disdain the possibility of taking Bertie's tricklings and totterings literally. They were created as a kind of metaphor: for a moment we experience the flash of imagination which created them, which saw the point of contact between what Bertie actually does and these other actions, ‘stagger’, ‘totter’, ‘trickle’, which connote weakness and even inanimate action. But Aunt Agatha forces the metaphorical leap to go backwards: instead of seeing how aptly Bertie's acts might be imagined in this way if the meaning of the words were a little extended, we see how stupid Bertie's acts must be if the meaning of the words is extended as little as possible. Bertie totters. The whole style depends on an awareness of the point from which language is created, of that in man which perceives metaphor. It has therefore that awareness of the interactive nature of metaphor which puts Wodehouse as an artist with Charles Williams and James Joyce, rather than with C.S. Lewis and Harold Nicolson, puts him among those who not only enjoy their own creativity but contemplate it and modify it in the light of that contemplation.

But there is more. The play of consciousness in language in this passage reflects a play of consciousness in ethics. Under the game of language, a complicated game of evaluation is going on. The point of Bertie's language, here as very often, is self-deprecation, a self-deprecation which is, alas, fairly just. Bertie senses, even before Aunt Agatha does her hatchet job, the irredeemable futility all his actions must have in her eyes; and gently, humbly—but to all appearances cheerfully—puts his head firmly on the block. In that Bertie can sense such things we have a counterweight to his objective and real limitations. Do we then praise Bertie's sweetness of character—it is humility after all—and think that Aunt Agatha takes unfair advantage of him? Surely in the book we do. But that decision is given edge by the realisation that we might not: that in a way Bertie is a weak tottering creature who disguises his weakness by flourishing it rhetorically. The complicated to and fro here does depend on the point Auden makes, which I have already quoted: that the ethics of finding Bertie a sufficiently interesting hero are Christian ethics, ethics of humility with their complicated to and fro of self-realisation and avoidance of self-realisation (you can never say, ‘I am humble’), ethics of forgiveness with their simultaneous awareness and abolition of awareness as if it had never been. ‘No cause, no cause,’ said Cordelia to Lear.

To analyse Wodehouse's language should involve going far beyond looking at his general habits of thought into minute descriptions of the utter, poet's rightness of every word. But all the time one would have to bear in mind the perfect aptness of his language to his peculiar way of describing character, his particular ethics and his whole individual world of fiction. The best criticism I have found of Wodehouse comes from Basil Boothroyd's essay in Homage to P.G. Wodehouse,²³ he analyses the sentence in which Bertie, arriving on a yacht, says he ‘handed the hat and light overcoat to a passing salt’.²⁴ Bertie's characteristic self-deprecation is apparent in his saying not ‘my’, but ‘the’, and in his attempts to accommodate himself to the world of the tailor and his jargon—‘the light overcoat’—and the nautical world as he understands it—‘a passing salt’. With those proprieties goes the duality of meaning in ‘light’—colour and weight, both proper to the season, as it was summer—and the rightness of sound, the crisp consonants at the close of the sentence, of ‘salt’. And that last is supported by the echo of a perfectly irrelevant common phrase—‘Please pass the salt.’

Much the same applies to Madeline Bassett's telegram: ‘Please come here if you wish but, Oh Bertie, is this wise? Will not it cause you needless pain seeing me? Surely merely twisting knife wound. Madeline.’²⁵ The main humour lies in the idiocy of omitting ‘in the’, after putting in ‘Oh Bertie’. This is an idiocy exactly appropriate for the girl who thought the rabbits were gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen (‘Perfect rot, of course. They're nothing of the kind’) and that every time a fairy hiccoughs a wee baby is born. But it also makes the cliché ‘twisting the knife in the wound’ effective by reducing it to its mere skeleton. And there is a rightness of sound about ending with the clean monosyllables of ‘knife wound’—again supported by the existence of an irrelevant hyphenated compound: knife-wound.

Wodehouse has, very much in conformity with this general picture, a combination of freedom and inwardness when he handles the meanings of words. I doubt if he has contributed many new meanings of specific words to the language: his world is too specific to extract single words from it. But he has contributed a whole idiom with this freedom, as when he makes a back-formation not previously used: ‘He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject.’²⁶

John Bayley observes, rightly I think, that the Shakespearean joy in language, the love of the creator rather than the engineer, is better to be found in the experiments of Wodehouse than in the experiments of Joyce. Wodehouse follows the prescription that C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man,²⁷ quotes from Confucius: ‘It is upon the trunk, it is from within the tradition, that a gentleman works.’ In this sense his style is within the Lewis—Nicolson canons. It is his freedom that puts him within tradition in T.S. Eliot's sense (Tradition and the Individual Talent),²⁸ the tradition which necessarily changes in carrying on rather than fossilising. His freedom goes with inwardness in ways which both Lewis's tendency to fossilise and Joyce's stony Irish intellectuality deny them.

Bayley goes on: ‘In Wodehouse as in Shakespeare we feel that the source of lightness and joy is ultimately, and quite simply, the virtue of the writer.’²⁹ The loving disinterestedness of the creator pervades his world as well as his language. The language works perfectly with the emergence of character in plot. Once you have looked closely at Bertie's language it is no surprise that he evolves schemes fully as ingenious as those of Jeeves, but that, to some readers' recurring regret, his schemes must fail where Jeeves's succeed. It is again the combination of shrewdness and innocence: but alas, Bertie represents the gullible side of Wodehousian man, Jeeves the shrewdness. Again, once you have noticed exactly how Bertie responds to Spode in the quotations I have given, you find natural enough the discovery that Spode's bluster and fascism are flawed by the way he finances his movement—his considerable talent for designing women's underclothing. Everything emerges inevitably, with the utmost consistency. And it is the combination of plot and language that makes a good many readers of Wodehouse remember gratefully moments when they rolled about with a laughter that they wanted to continue though in all literalness it hurt their ribs.

It seems that in the writing of individual books it was the plot that had to be contrived first, and the language then flowed. Wodehouse says in a letter, wondering if Trollope really did write fifteen hundred words a day:

Of course, if he did plan the whole thing out first, there is nothing so very bizarre in the idea of writing so many hundred words of it each day. After all, it is more or less what one does oneself. One sits down to work each morning, no matter whether one feels bright or lethargic, and before one gets up a certain amount of stuff, generally about fifteen hundred words, has emerged.³⁰

But over the whole course of his writing it looks as if the language came first, and the world was created from it. His style seems to come directly out of his first school stories (compare those of Frank Richards), out of the self-consciousness of the sixth-former who is just becoming aware of the richness of English literature and language, and beneath a sophisticated carapace is too insecure to use it straight-forwardly. The Hindu babu would have provided a similar starting-point, but in fact the first authentic Wodehouse man is Psmith, who preserves all his life the way of speaking he learnt at Eton:

‘Oh, it's you?’ [Baxter] said morosely.

‘I in person,’ said Psmith genially. ‘Awake, beloved! Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight; and lo! the hunter of the East has caught the Sultan's turret in a noose of light. The Sultan himself,’ he added, ‘you will find behind yonder window, speculating idly on your motives for bunging flower-pots at him.’³¹

Psmith talks like this from Mike (1909) onwards, but this quotation comes from Leave it to Psmith (1923), when he attained his apotheosis by being grafted into the world of Blandings Castle, which had already been created (but by no means perfected) in Something Fresh (1915). Wodehouse's external life seems to have helped here, through his move to the United States. American English is after all a thing of different spirit and pattern from English English, with different overtones, intensities and relaxations. The handling of the two languages perhaps contributed to Wodehouse's intuitive self-consciousness about meaning. And the difference in cultures undoubtedly helped to create his own special world, as he introduced Psmith to New York in Psmith, Journalist (1915) and wrote about Blandings Castle for the Saturday Evening Post. The development is something like standing Henry James on his head.

When one adds the self-deprecating idiom of Bertie Wooster (the exchange with Aunt Agatha I quoted is also from this developing period, from 1917), the conditions for forming the worlds of P.G. Wodehouse are present. Of course there are worlds which I have not mentioned—those of Ukridge, Mulliner, Hollywood, golf, and others which never developed beyond a single book. But they have all of them the same kinds of co-inhering exaggeration and realisation, formalising and life. And they all have the pervasive innocence into which Wodehouse, strangely enough, develops, out of the confused motives and debased mingling of realism and wish-fulfilment of ordinary school stories and light romances.

‘The gardens of Blandings Castle’, says Evelyn Waugh, ‘are that original garden from which we are all exiled.’³² It will be clear that I take this statement fairly seriously—by virtue perhaps of a displacement of concepts from myth to comedy such as Northrop Frye speaks of. But, having in particular consideration the degree to which the perfection of the Wodehouse world is a creation of art, I should also offer a comparison with the Arcadia of Virgil's Eclogues—a golden world, largely created by a perfection of style and a living observant humour, which has two connections with the world outside. First, that by its innocence it reproaches it. Even the villains in Wodehouse have the whole-heartedness and innocence of Falstaff, the qualities which enable Auden to declare that Falstaff is a parable of divine charity.³³Second, in that the pressure of external events is always present in it, seen dimly in a golden shadow; Wodehouse, of course, had tremendous capacity as an observer. His encounter with Hugh Walpole at Magdalen College, Oxford, could not be bettered if it had been Bertie himself meeting someone like Florence Craye (the author of Spindrift):

It was just after Hilaire Belloc had said that I was the best living English writer. It was just a gag, of course, but it worried Hugh terribly. He said to me, ‘Did you see what Belloc said about you?’ I said I had. ‘I wonder why he said that.’ ‘I wonder,’ I said. Long silence. ‘I can't imagine why he said that,’ said Hugh. I said I couldn't either. Another long silence. ‘It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!’ ‘Most extraordinary.’ Long silence again. ‘Ah well,’ said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, ‘the old man's getting very old.’³⁴

But I should be inclined to say that there was some rigidity after Money in the Bank (1946), which Wodehouse wrote in his internment camp and in which the principal source of freshness, Lord Uffenham, was actually ‘drawn from a man in my dormitory’. The language after the war tends to become a little like epic diction, a mechanism for digesting experience which is a little too successful to be alive. And external conditions like the welfare state sit very unhappily in some of the books, lacking the naturalness with which the Great Dictator takes his place among Wodehouse's earlier efficient villains. Yet I'm not sure. In his very last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974), Wodehouse showed signs of being capable of absorbing protest marches. The book is very lacking in the great sign of Wodehouse life, the simile, but what else would Jeeves say when asked why a protest march was taking place, than this:

‘I could not say, sir. It might be one thing or it might be another. Men are suspicious, prone to discontent. Subjects still loathe the present Government.’

‘The poet Nash?’

‘No, sir. The poet Herrick.’³⁵

(The poet Nash is, of course, Ogden Nash.)

However that may be, in the thirties Wodehouse undoubtedly had the root of the matter in him. An article by Philip Thody professes to be mock-solemn in comparing Jeeves's relation with Bertie with the principles of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.³⁶ The trouble is, it cannot be wholly mock-solemn, because it is true, and most readers have some trouble deciding how serious Thody was in his unseriousness. That the moral problem of authority and acceptance is really at work in Wodehouse is shown by the way in which Jeeves, the Efficient Baxter and Roderick Spode set one another off. The terrible analysis of power and subjection and the urge to be without responsibility even at the cost of the servile state are undeniably reflected in Jeeves and Bertie. It has been said that the only difference between tragedy and comedy is timing; tragedy looks slowly at what comedy plays quickly. But I would add that comedy has something to do with love. Again, it is not quite nonsense to say that the silence of Christ in the fable of the Grand Inquisitor, the answer of grace and the morality of the spirit to the Inquisitor's remorseless conviction are reflected in the helpless innocence of Sue Brown or Bertie Wooster. What Bertie's innocence called out is the benevolence of Jeeves. Admittedly, Jeeves's benevolence is that of the dictator who controls his subjects, as we see in the one story he tells himself, the uncomfortable ‘Bertie changes his mind’.³⁷ Yet there is an acceptable moral paradox in the fact that it is the dictator, Jeeves, who is the servant. There is, after all, real non-puritan morality, morality of the spirit, in Wodehouse's world.

From this intuitive grasp of principle follows an equally fine grasp of particular facts. To the remarks about the Dictator Spode which I have already quoted I would add Gussie Fink-Nottle's description:

‘Roderick Spode is founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organisation better known as the Black Shorts …’

‘By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’

‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’

‘Footer bags, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘How perfectly foul.’³⁸

That is both cheerfully funny, and a comment on British attitudes to fascism which tells one more than whole books might. Nigel Nicolson writes in the introduction to Harold Nicolson's Diaries and Letters 1930-39:

‘There is one passage in his diary which is so typical of him that I laughed aloud with remembered affection when I first read it. He was talking to Sir Oswald Mosley in 1931 about the new ‘trained and disciplined force’ by which Mosley intended to bolster up his crumbling New Party. ‘We discuss their uniforms’, the diary records. ‘I suggest grey flannel trousers and shirts.’³⁹

Wodehouse cannot have known of that conversation: but he knew, not self-consciously but because he shared it, of the traditional and decent Englishman's total incomprehension of what fascism was really like. In this joke you can readily see why there was appeasement, why there was no successful fascist movement in Britain, and why Wodehouse himself broadcast a cheerful talk from Berlin in 1940 about what it had been like in his concentration camp. But Wodehouse substitutes for incomprehension of the cult of fascism today an awareness of its absurdity sub specie aeternitatis. If you put Wodehouse on Spode alongside such cartoons as Pont's man with a walrus moustache and a bucket observing: ‘Suppose we hear a little less about him being only a paperhanger’, you can see too why the British never really thought Hitler could be victorious. It is possible that the straightforward revival of traditional values by a C.S. Lewis or a Churchill was no more important in confronting Hitler than the humorous half-awareness of the new thing in the world of P.G. Wodehouse, Pont and Tommy Handley.

Kierkegaard says somewhere that wit arises at the frontier of the aesthetic and the ethical, humour between the ethical and the religious. As I understand it, then, wit, or satire, is the product of a man accustomed to live by satisfying his immediate and momentary impulses and responses (aesthetic) who is nevertheless aware of the demand of moral norms which he will not quite accept for himself, but will accept to scald the world. There are qualities in Joyce like that, particularly in Stephen Dedalus, and in the early Evelyn Waugh.

But humour arises in a man who has thoroughly assimilated the ethical universals and norms of his society and made his world of them. A very good man, a patient, humble man—the sort of man whose comment after nineteen hours in one of ‘those Quarante Hommes, Huit Chevaux things … in other words, cattle trucks' is that he'd often wondered what it would be like to be one of the quarante hommes. ‘The answer is, as I had rather suspected, is that it is not so good … Forty men are cramped, especially if they are fifty men, as we were.’⁴⁰ Humour in Kierkegaard's sense arises in such a man when he is aware at the back of his mind, and perhaps in practice, that all genuine and moral decisions are unique, that we stand alone before God, and that human nature includes the martyr, the monster and the ambiguous state, impossible for an external observer to judge, of Abraham commanded to sacrifice Isaac. The response of such a man, not fully conscious of this, of which he feels the pressure, seems to me to be the ideal world of Wodehouse's fictions, its language and the triumphant innocence which runs through it. There is still truth in the fact that ‘silly’ originally meant ‘blessed’, innocent and blessed.

Notes

1. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London, 1955), 206.

2. ibid., 207.

3. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), 131.

4. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London, 1940), 35.

5. Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (London, 1950), 15.

6. W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (London, 1963), 412.

7. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight's Tale’, lines 1919-21.

8. Chaucer, ‘The Miller's Tale’, line 17.

9. Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, canto 23, line 1.

10. P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (London, 1934), 207.

11. J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962), 68.

12. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 62-3.

13. Wodehouse, ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’, Very Good, Jeeves (London, 1930).

14. Wodehouse, ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’, Carry on, Jeeves (London, 1925).

15. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (London, 1938), 180.

16. Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma (Paris, 1952), no 200.

17. ibid., 45.

18. ibid., 21.

19. G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London, 1906), chapter 4.

20. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning (London, 1929), 28.

21. Wodehouse, Heavy Weather (London, 1933), 194.

22. Wodehouse, ‘Extricating Young Gussie’, The Man with Two Left Feet (London, 1917), 13.

23. Thelma Cazalet-Keir (ed.), Homage to P.G. Wodehouse (London, 1973), 58-76.

24. Wodehouse, Thank you, Jeeves (London, 1934), 155.

25. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters, 32.

26. ibid., 9.

27. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London, 1946), 58.

28. In Selected Essays (London, 1951), 13-22.

29. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London, 1960), 285.

30. Wodehouse, Performing Flea (London, 1953), 126-7.

31. Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith (London, 1923), 262.

32. Evelyn Waugh, ‘An act of Homage and Reparation to P.G. Wodehouse’, Sunday Times (16 July 1961).

33. Auden, ‘The Prince's Dog’, The Dyer's Hand, 198-208.

34. Wodehouse, Performing Flea, 128.

35. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (London, 1974), 7.

36. ‘Jeeves, Dostoievski and the Double Paradox’, University of Leeds Review, 14: 2, 319-31.

37. In Carry On, Jeeves (London, 1925).

38. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters, 71-2.

39. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930-39, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London, 1969), 25.

40. Encounter (November 1954), 29.

In writing this essay I have made use of R.D.B. French, P.G. Wodehouse (London and Edinburgh, 1966) and R.A. Hall, The Comic Style of P.G. Wodehouse (Hamden, Conn., 1974).