London Letter
To say what is happening in England at the present time is no easy
task. In every sphere we seem to have come to an interval between Acts.
The opaque and unruffied surface of public affairs suggests indeed that
nothing is happening at all. We are all anti-fascist. We are all devoted to
peace and convinced of our superior solicitude for its preservation. We
have noticed regretfully that other nations are less idealistic than our–
selves. We are determined that Right shall triumph over Might, and we
are leaving no stone unturned in our effort to ensure that Right shall have
as much Might as heavy taxation can provide. In short, we are still English.
But in spite of our one-way enthusiasm-or perhaps because of it–
the air is peculiarly enervating. Politically we are in a kind of doldrums.
Chamberlain has moved far enough leftwards to rob the Socialists of their
slogans, while the Tory Right has completed the circle by appearing on the
far left of the Socialists. In this happy joining of hands there is rarely a
dissident voice. We are agreed that Herr Hitler menaces impartially the
British Empire, the Labour Movement and the "ideals of the League of
Nations, and we can all find one reason out of the three for opposing him.
A single illustration will show what I mean. A few years ago it was Duff
Cooper and Winston Churchill who were most often attacked as the arch–
enemies of radical Bloomsbury; yet recently
Time
&
Tide
was campaign–
ing for their inclusion in the Cabinet, because they are considered to be
strongly anti-Hitler.
The position, then, is that our politics are dominated by foreign
affairs, and that on that subject we are unanimous in our protestations. It
is a sign of the times that Mr. 'Bunny' Austin is too busy with his moral
rearmament campaign to be able to play in the Davis Cup matches. Moral
rearmament, in one form or another, is our chief preoccupation. England
did not want to fight last September. We agreed that the German treatment
of Czecho-Slovakia was unspeakable, but we did not want to fight about
it. We probably didn't want to fight about anything at all. I think it would
be true to say that men of thirty and under-the post-war youth of Eng–
land-had grown up in the belief that ultimately war was something that
could be left out of account. I don't mean that there had been any wide–
spread consumption of the simpler utopias. It went deeper than that, an
unconscious assumption that war was one of the human bogeys that would
never quite invade actuality. That is how I would account for the peculiar
shock of September. Some of us perhaps were not caught unawares, but
more were than cared to admit it. The passing of Czecho-Slovakia carried
with it the whole ethos of intellectual optimism-the progressive Wellsian
conspiracy, the dawning May Day, the revolution painlessly directed from
Bloomsbury armchairs. All that experimental theorising presupposed that
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