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gentlemanly. Nowadays we don't trust gentlemen in matters of values;
gentlemanliness is a deceit. Nevertheless, if we could put a body of
men who were fully democratic, not aristocratic, and fully convinced
of the values of the few, in key positions, they might form a sort of
heart, a central ganglion of the democratic mind. These men, if any,
will make democracy possible. Where shall we find them?
In England, the only possibility attests the impossibility. Kingsley
Amis's heroes are in revolt against this dead culture, and at last-the
first heroes in how many years ?-they see no way out in terms of
spiritual or revolutionary elites. They are possible citizens of a demo–
cratic nation. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule. What
is their way out? Jim Dixon is caught up into his
machina
by an art–
loving millionaire
deus,
and whisked away out of mortal view. John
Lewis goes back to the people. There is no real solution for them. They
are doomed to defeat, socially at least.
In America? In America one meets people who combine a sim–
plicity and solidity of temperament with a genuinely adventurous mind,
and sufficient shrewdness and self-confidence to keep them from disas–
ter. And one finds them in the sort of place where they can do the
most good-teaching English I at the universities, for instance. At their
best they have a sort of determined ambition, a half-amused realization
of being out on a limb, perilously separated from the mass. They include,
in their personal and group past, all the huge unredeemed populace.
Their ambition has been-until they met it-Britishness, culture. Now,
as a satisfactory present and future, they have only each other, only
more isolated fragments.
It
is up to them to make a new world; to
explain and excuse to their parents and cousins and friends and pupils
their differentness; to make the practical decisions that follow from
their new insights-the votes, the agitations, the sympathies and
apathies-palatable and influential in their communities. They are
characterized, often, by domesticity and financial struggles. And finan–
cial struggles, especially in America, make it particularly necessary
and difficult to explain oneself. They cannot say, as their equivalent in
England can (tacitly, of course), I have risen in the world, I enjoy
the company, putatively, of power and wealth. They can hardly say,
I have done thus-and-so because I love my fellow man; so much of
the change in them is toward criticizing their fellow, common, man.
They must explain, somehow, that there are other values, and that they
are living for them. Their life is privately, inherently, as well as pub–
licly, professionally, a reconciliation of the contented self-respecting life
