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test of education is the ability to talk brilliantly about nothing. And
they have such a sense of community, of alliance ; they call out to one
another in a crowd, not oblivious to but careless of the hundred other
faces that turn to observe, the hundred outsiders. What are they going
to do in America? Well, of course they will study something or other.
But the civilization they know in advance ; their map included America.
If
they were going to India, now, they would have a sense of the
dif–
ferentness, the possible partial superiority of what they were going to
see. They would have something approximating a readiness for reverence.
But America: they know the vast cultural vacuum they will find there.
And they find it. Listening to the best orchestra, they remark on the
banality or the eccentricity of the program, the banality and eccen–
tricity of the audience. Americans in England sometimes do the same.
But sometimes they put it all down to our credit. Both possibilities are
open to them, and so sometimes, a little more often than us, they
arrive at a just estimate.
The English university, after all, is a hothouse. Its pride and joy
is the exotic. And any difference of temperature, however normal and
healthy, is apt to seem a change for the worse. The university is a social
institution, with a social mission; it transmits a heritage of wisdom,
not of learning; whatever they are studying, the students are keenly
learning what tone of voice to use for Hollywood, which attitudes
are permissible toward sex, how to be brilliant in conversation. (The
idea of brilliance, incidentally, is a curiously central one; it means
knowing things other people don't know, and not knowing what they
do know, never working for exams but doing very well in them, and
usually having some eccentricity of manner, either of shyness or of ebul–
lience. It almost invariably connotes some lack of interest in, incapacity
for, ordinary life; but not for Oxford and Cambridge life-that would
cancel one's candidacy for brilliance.) University life has in the past,
of course, been quite compatible with a fundamental seriousness and
solidity. But many of the sources of that solidity have weakened and
failed since then. The social-cultural structure, in which, at bottom,
the universities put all their faith, is manifestly impermanent and im–
perfect, nothing to rely on or even patch up, but to reconsider and
rebuild from the beginning, from outside. The manner of university
life is an aristocratic manner. And our only future is democratic.
Sometimes Englishmen don't realize that fully: whatever our per–
sonal aptitudes or preferences, whatever society we would build if we
had a choice, we are committed to democracy. Our fathers and grand–
fathers committed us. It is natural to rebel, at the moment we realize
