THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
gave the workers a chance to emerge as a social class inheriting the
problems left by the capitalist wars. Instead of this, there were Mus–
solini and Hitler who might indeed be just another symptom of
the "decline of the West" but whose oppressive methods crystallized
an opposition which was practically the whole intellectual life of
Europe and the whole tradition of European freedom.
Thus it appears that deep and inevitable divisions between
generations are an inevitable result of the history in which we live.
We can only try to overcome these divisions by understanding them.
To some extent we may try to avoid becoming victims of circum–
stances by relating our own attitudes within our own situation to that
of others.
If
we are not able to do this, we run the risk of our civil–
ization becoming divided into so many irreconcilable cliques repre–
senting different attitudes that the objective picture of our cultural
life will be scarcely distinguishable from that of the mad.
When I was in England after 1930, I used often to stay with
Rosamond Lehmann whom I had met when I was an undergraduate
at Oxford. She had a beautiful house called Ipsden on the Berkshire
Downs, which had once belonged to Charles Reade, the novelist.
It had a large garden, partly surrounded by trees, but where this
screen was broken, one could see the whale-like gray green forms
of the Downs. The house and garden although opening onto the
Downs were just sheltered enough to enclose their own atmosphere
of the lawn covered at morning with dew
in
front of the wall of
the side of the house, shafted with the Georgian windows.
Rosamond was one of the most beautiful women of this gen–
eration. Tall, and holding herself with a sense of her presence, she
had a warmth and vitality which avoided the coldness of the statu–
esque. She had almond shaped eyes, a firm mouth which contradicted
the spontaneousness of her girlish complexion. Her manner was warm,
impulsive, and yet like her mouth under her cheeks which blushed
there was a cool self-control which contradicted this. She had a sym–
pathetic rather queenly attitude to the many young men who admired
her and kept them at a slight distance beautified by a vague sense
of tragedy that they could not come nearer. She gave me a delightful
sense of my own sadness always.
To stay at Ipsden was one of my greatest pleasures. With Rosa–
mond and Wogan Phillips-to whom she was then married-we
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