Eccentricity and Peace

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. "Plum" to his friends. Evelyn Waugh said he'd never met a duller man, but then when you're a man named Evelyn (slightly married to a woman named Evelyn, at times) you get to say these things about the best stylist in English since Shakespeare.Roger Ebert noted in 2009 that the top-selling Indian author in England was R.K. Narayan, while the top-selling English author in India was P.G. Wodehouse.  He hypothesizes that the two countries have a mutual fascination with eccentrics.

I hope he's right.  We suffer from a surfeit of seriousness about all the wrong things, principally God (who, whatever His faults, cannot be charged with taking Himself too seriously).

The way Wodehouse approached prose was very godlike: he mimicked the high and the low with equal felicity, and in presenting them, chose the words and phrases that would give to each their own valuation of themselves.

The heroes and heroines principally redeem themselves by being creatures who love simple things, like peace and harmony and sometimes love itself.

Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth is the sort of old parasite on the working classes that nobody should have to like, but one does, because in spite of his representing aristocratic indolence, we rather prefer his values to those of The Efficient Baxter who bothers him and suspects his fellow men of all manner of thing.

The love of peace is not a bad thing, even in a peer whose ancestors were obliged to make war on behalf of their sovereign's silly causes.

The human race, those aristocrats of nature, would do well to re-read Wodehouse, and take with less seriousness the things that drive them to the violence of the heart: jealousy, rage, fear, need, and vengeance.  At the least, they might leave God out of it, the old comedian.