A COMMUNICATION
263
ernment is headmaster. It expects from Jordan "gratitude," and from
Cyprus "real repentance."
Of course, authority nearly always does wrap itself in an im–
penetrable mystery of rectitude; but this is a newspaper talking-the
fourth estate, believe it or not. This is comment and discussion. The
truth is that in England the tone of serious discussion and the voice of
authority defending itself are much alike. Of course there is such a
thing as political disagreement, but there is one complex of culture
underlying both opinions. The
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
are
identical in their tone, and what other responsible paper is there?
Sometimes i.ndeed one side may reject that culture-Left Wing extrem–
ists sometimes do; George Orwell, Kingsley Amis do-but they have
nothing to put in its place.
And to whom does this tone belong, most truly, most typically? To
the English gentleman. The real broadening of the mind that travel
brings is to hear foreigners' outdated ideas of England, to laugh, and
then to stop laughing:
they are all true.
All the human cliches, that
have been laughed out of existence in England, still operate.
It
is their
comic value that was laughed out of existence; they live on, disguised.
In the embassies abroad, they aren't even disguised-there you meet
gentlemen Evelyn Waugh or Bernard Shaw might have created. In the
British Council, the absurdities are muted, but the serious part of the
personality is the same. At home-in the Arts Council, the B.B.C., the
stage, the universities, the professions- there is no radical difference,
once the members stop being professional and become merely educated
citizens. They are all gentlemen.
Of course, being a gentleman is no longer a matter of the old
outward manifestations of social difference, of servants, Latin tags, or
genealogical guarantees. Times have changed and these gentlemen are
people of intelligence and character. But they remain a class for all
that. A university education is now becoming more indispensable than
a public school; but for much the same reasons. This is no technocracy
or intellectual elite. It is a social class bound together by a community
of tastes and habits in everything from religion to humor; very vague
about religion, of course, very definite about humor. There is a certain
territory of mind which everybody has in common, where they all
follow certain paths and honor certain mountains.
For a map we may take the
Sunday Times
again, though there
are many just as good. The whole thing, from Dilys Powell to Ernestine
Carter, has a unity of tone. When new writers come along, like Roger
