LONDON LETTER
THE ENGLISH TRADITION
Mr. Goldsmith's Paris Letter in the last issue of PR drew at–
tention to the French love of ideological casuistry. The English have
been supposed the least theoretical of people, at least since Matthew
Arnold, with his love of France, saddled them with the reputation a
hundred years ago. And
in
fact, the English do not delight in the sort
of casuistry Mr. Goldsmith is describing. Nonetheless, what strikes an
American is the extent to which the English mind habitually meets a
specific issue by reference to something which, if it has not the grand
abstractness of ideology, is at least solidly a priori. This is as likely to
be the traditional attitude of a class or an institution as it is to be the
dogma of a social theory, but it has for an American a similar lack of
immediate relevance. No doubt this all goes to show that Mr. Goldsmith
and I, as Americans, have the barbarian's typical short-sightedness.
For example, when I commented to my wife the other day on what
seemed to me the unostentatious dignity of an LCC housing project,
a frowsty Ronald-Searle type in front of us on the bus turned around
and said, "You wouldn't like it if you lived there; they keep the coal
in the bathtub, those people."
It
made you feel like a pollster suddenly
confronted by someone passionately opposed to Nicholas Biddle and the
Bank of the United States. This attitude makes possible the magnificent
achievements of the National Trust and the annual winter freeze-up of
England's Victorian plumbing; it makes possible Mr. John Betjeman's
weekly column in defense of the English landscape and the late-eight–
eenth-century highway system; it makes possible London's incredibly
polite drivers and its country-village traffic patterns.
This love of traditional attitudes is equally evident in the political
and economic realms; there too it produces results both good and bad
which would be almost inconceivable in America. In February, for ex–
ample, after a passionate ethical discussion in the press, Parliament set
aside such trifling immediate issues as the Middle East, Cyprus, and
inflation, to have a full debate on the abolition of capital punishment.
Mr. Geoffrey de Freitas, the teller, was reported in
The Times
to have
paused for an appreciable moment to get control of himself before he
