There is a line in a song by The Avett Brothers that often comes to my mind. The band’s singer intones, “I wanna have pride like my mother has,/And not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad.” This sticks with me, I think, because it draws a crucial distinction between a healthy rejoicing in the good of one’s own virtues, homeland, and associations, on the one hand, and a self-destructive sense of superiority about everything that is ‘mine,’ on the other.
Everyone, I think, intuitively recognizes that this distinction is a real one. And yet, it is a distinction that is too rarely invoked in either our personal moral discussions or our broader political ones.
One of the best ways I know of countering the temptation to pride (whether in ourselves or our polities) is to enjoy comedic works of literature. Comedy of the right sort is deeply informed by a sense of humility and helps to encourage that virtue in us. Humility, some have said, is the recognition ‘that God is God and I am not.’ Thus, an honest sense of one’s own failings and shortcomings is part of what makes levity possible. One of the best books I know for inculcating humility through humor is Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).
An amusing journey of musings
Three Men in a Boat begins, unsurprisingly, with three men (albeit without a boat). The first is the unnamed narrator, referred to as “J” (obviously meant to imply Jerome, the author). The other two men are named George and Harris, and are, it seems, longtime friends of the narrator. Finally, there is the eponymous dog, Montmorency, who is quite as much a fleshed-out character in the novel as are the humans, in large part because of the clever ways in which the narrator describes his actions.
All three of the men are hopeless hypochondriacs. In the first chapter, the narrator tells readers of how (while perusing a book in the British Museum that detailed maladies) he was
frozen with horror …. I … discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too …. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee.
George and Harris, being of similar disposition, enjoy complaining of their various imagined maladies as much as the narrator, and thus they all come together to gripe. While doing so, they come to the conclusion that the lion’s share of their illnesses and discomforts have a common root cause: overwork. Thus, it is only natural that they take a holiday together, a holiday that will allow them to take in fresh air in order to help heal their constitutions. They eventually decide to take a boat ride on the River Thames.
The trip does not begin smoothly. The men (and the dog) deal with a number of obstacles of varying levels of seriousness. Perhaps my favorite of these is when they try to find their train from Waterloo to Kingston. Waterloo Station is full of confusion, and they question everyone from passerby to the traffic superintendent, but “nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it.” Finally, completely exasperated, they find an engine-driver, slip him some money, and beg him “to be the 11.5 for Kingston.” “‘Well, I don’t know, gents’ replied the noble fellow, ‘but I suppose some train’s got to go to Kingston; and I’ll do it.’”
This kind of misadventure continues once they reach the river, and each episode is as amusing as the last. The characters have the goal of completing their trip, but there is no real central conflict in the novel. That being said, the reader never wishes there were. At various times, the crew have to solve problems, while at others they simply cause them. Readers are simply along for the ride to the river and down it.
While there is great comedy in the situations themselves, a large part of the novel’s charm is the narrator’s reflections. From complaints about English country life and praise for various beverages to considerations of virtue and rambling digressions on Henry VIII, the characters’ misadventures are ornamented by Jerome’s characteristic wit.
Humility and the West
I mentioned that the narrator reflects on Henry VIII, but that king is far from the only historical figure discussed in the novel. Given the great history of many of the places the three men pass through, it is natural that the thoughtful narrator would speak a bit about English history. These historical digressions are striking, because they express both pride in the great nation of England and the characteristic humility found in the kind of humor at which Jerome excels.
No fair-minded person could deny that England has an illustrious history, and that that history has impacted the entire world. She boasts kings and queens who have improved the lives of countless subjects. She has gifted us with some of the greatest poets ever known. Her politics have helped inform many of the most stable nations in the world. Her distinctive traditions of rural life stand as an essential counterpoint to the ravages of modernity. I could easily provide a far longer and more detailed list, and any Englishman worth his salt could give one two or three times as long.
Three Men in a Boat’s narrator is certainly an Englishman worth his salt. His reflections on history exhibit a genuine pride in—and love for—his nation. The narrator does not just remind readers of the characteristic goodness of England, but by association he encourages those of us not living in that blessed nation to reflect on the distinctive gifts of our own lands. This kind of patriotism is not just beautiful, but it is actually necessary to maintain a healthy nation and a healthy world. Indeed, we should have pride in our own nation, and even in the West more broadly.
Let me return to the quotation with which I began this reflection: “I wanna have pride like my mother has,/And not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad.” I propose that one example of the positive kind of pride is a healthy pride in one’s own nation, and in the West. A man ought to love his nation and take pride in it. At the same time, he should be cautious to avoid the kind of pride “that turns you bad.”
The West, few of our readers will dispute, is a great civilization. Indeed, it is arguably the greatest to have ever existed. Westerners are the inheritors of the Divine Comedy and Shakespeare, of Chartres Cathedral and the paintings of Caravaggio, of the claim to equal justice before the law and the ideals of chivalry. In addition, the nations of the West have shared these gifts with the entire world. This is a legacy of which every Westerner should be proud—proud in the sense that the Avett Brothers extoll.
Many today see the heritage of the West as something of which we ought to be ashamed. This is frustrating, as the West has bequeathed great gifts to all of mankind. However, like any civilization, it is marked by human sin. Certainly, nations in the West have practiced slavery. Nations in the West have at times failed to protect the vulnerable. Nations in the West have at times allowed a sense of racial or ethnic superiority to lead to acts of horrible cruelty. In these moral failures, though, the West is no different to any other civilization.
It is because the nations of the West share these evils with all other civilizations that we can be sure that such evils do not define our civilization in some distinctive way. The fact of universality, however, does not excuse such wrongdoing, and a worrisome trend of not properly acknowledging these evils has arisen among conservatives in the past decade or so. The reason for this is quite understandable: we have become tired of hearing how the West is some kind of uniquely evil civilization that exists purely to perpetuate the unjust, heteronormative, ‘white supremacist’ status quo. This kind of Foucauldian flim flam is obviously foolish, but we cannot allow it to push us from a healthy love for—and pride in—the West to a sinful pride.
This is where Three Men in a Boat’s historical digressions come in. These digressions display a clear love for the nation of England. At the same time, they are unequivocally part of a comic novel. Here is a rather short passage that shows what I mean:
You pass Oatlands Park on the right bank here. It is a famous old place. Henry VIII. stole it from some one or the other, I forget whom now, and lived in it. There is a grotto in the park which you can see for a fee, and which is supposed to be very wonderful; but I cannot see much in it myself. The late Duchess of York, who lived at Oatlands, was very fond of dogs, and kept an immense number. She had a special graveyard made, in which to bury them when they died, and there they lie, about fifty of them, with a tombstone over each, and an epitaph inscribed thereon.
Well, I dare say they deserve it quite as much as the average Christian does.
There are many different approaches a writer could take to these two historical points. One could use them as a way of claiming that the English monarchy is a foolish institution that does harm to the English. One could, conversely, wish to defend them as legitimate actions of the monarchy. Then there is the possibility that, while these two actions are not entirely noble, they do not represent the monarchy’s true positive character.
The narrator, unlike any of these, does not attempt a more serious consideration of the issue. Instead, he makes a deceptively simple joke comparing the ‘dignified’ burial of dogs with the burial of Christians. I say “deceptively simple,” because in reality the joke challenges readers to consider the value of their own bodies weighed on the scales of eternity. In addition, in a book that includes a dog, Montmorency, as a titular character, it can encourage a reader to recognize his own failings. Burial of the dead is an act of mercy. Perhaps it’s foolish to perform a solemn burial for an animal, but this simple joke allows readers to encounter an aspect of human life (namely death) anew.
The quotation above is also useful for understanding Three Men in a Boat’s attitude towards the Christian faith. The narrator, who could hardly be accused of being overly pious, makes many jokes that reference Christianity. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the time when the book was written. What is striking is how the book balances levity about the weighty things of God with a sort of presumption of Christianity’s truth and goodness. This is hardly a religious tract, but whenever any trapping of Christianity is brought up, there is a sense that the narrator has a certain trust in God’s providence.
The narrator is cheeky, there’s no doubt about it. But his cheekiness is not disrespect. Instead, he is able to be comical because love underlies his jokes; the narrator has an ordered love of self, a healthy love of nation, and maybe even the seeds of love for God. In a healthy relationship, there is freedom for jocularity because each person loves the other and recognizes his goodness.
In the case of one’s relationship with a father, a nation, or (still more) God, the case is obviously distinct, but the same dynamic is, I believe, present. Take the relationship of the father with the son. The son owes his very life to his father, and so long as he recognizes that he will have a proper humility before him. At the same time, he recognizes that his father is a fallen human person. He is proud of his father’s strength, but he also feels free to poke fun at him. This is also true of a man’s nation.
The real outlier, though, is one’s relationship with God. Jerome’s narrator brings his lighthearted tone to English Christianity, and any Christian knows that jokes about holy things can easily cross the line into blasphemy. However, I think that there is a proper way of joking about faith and even God Himself. A full treatment of this issue would require several more articles, but I will at least indicate that positive religious humor should generally be more about man’s failings before God, or about the human elements of religion, than about God Himself or the practices He has commanded. This is the kind of religious humor, it seems to me, is the sort that permeates Jerome’s writings.
Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog) is a silly book. But it is also a helpful one. In a time when social media promotes distorted pride in users, when many nations are in constant political turmoil over their histories, and many religious institutions are in disarray, it may be helpful to step back and enjoy this novel, which is both light and instructive. Reading it has reminded me to try and have a level head about the realities of human life, friendship, and history, and to attempt to cultivate the right kind of pride.
