LONDON
LETTER
255
selected and beautifully arranged tribute to the traditional age of taste,
with its exquisite furniture, its enchanting rococo painting, its marvelous
portrait busts (one especially haunting Roubiliac of Pope), and its
dedicated domestic frivolity of Chinoiserie and Gothic. In contrast to
this exhibition was the Tate's display of Modern Art in the United States.
Of it, Basil Taylor of the Royal College of Art said, "These pictures,
particularly the examples of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko and
Still, have great technical accomplishment and vitality and considerable
formal interest.... They represent the logical end of romantic 'sincerity'
but ... as the expression of personality they bear the same relation to
man as the lines inscribed by a seismograph to an earthquake; for all
their size, energy, assurance, they seem to me extraordinarily slight." Here
surely speaks-perhaps with complete justice-the domestic humanism
which is the best of England's traditionalism.
This humanism stands out with equal firmness against the nostalgic
aristocratic attitude into which Mr. Evelyn Waugh has retired (he makes
occasional sorties to fight for his conviction that Alfred Duggan and
P. G. Wodehouse are great writers), against the tired "intelligence"
which led
Encounter
to devote itself this winter to the snobberies of
English diction which fascinate people like Nancy Mitford (U and
non-U-the shorthand for upper-class and non-upper-class diction–
have themselves become a part of the defining diction of the "intelli–
gent"), and against the romantic "sincerity" of which Dylan Thomas
was the symbol if not the example. Not long ago, in
The Observer,
Philip Oakes described what he called "The New Style of Heroes"
as follows:
Born: Coketown, 1925. Parents: lower middle-class. Educated: Local
council school, grammar school and university (after three years military
service) . Married. One or two children. Occupation: Civil Servant/
journalist/lecturer/minor executive. Politics: neutralist... . Enthusiasms:
George Orwell, jazz, Dr. Leavis, old cars. Antipathies: Dylan Thomas,
provincial culture, European novelists.
This is of course the h ero of people like John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and
William Cooper, who have written a considerable number of the inter–
esting novels of the last few years and produce a good deal of the best
journalism.
Of the two poets who have recently created a stir, the first, Philip
Larkin
(The L ess Deceived),
is closely associated with this group and
the second-yet another Welshman named Thomas-R. S. Thomas
(Song at the Y ear's Turning),
shares much of their attitude, though
his background is different. Thomas is very impressive, both in his own
