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Council, and continues: "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." In fact, the gentlemen now consti–
tute "a social class bound together by a community of tastes and habits
in everything from religion to humor.... There is a certain territory
of mind which everybody has in common, where they all follow certain
paths and honor certain mountains."
This last remark-about the cultural map which the educated
Englishman carries with him and which tells him just where everything
belongs and how important it is- is very perceptive: that is exactly it.
But the rest of the analysis seems oversimplified. All Englishmen may
have pretty much the same map, but they don't all choose to explore
the same areas of it. There are very distinct specializations these days
within the general field of "gentleman." Historically, even, there is
not one tradition of the "English gentleman," but two: the urban tra–
dition of the eighteenth century, which, if not genuinely "intellectual,"
at least stood for "taste" and for the things of the mind, and the rural
tradition of the nineteenth century, which was emphatically conserva–
tive and anti-inteliectual. And it seems to me to be the heirs of the
second tradition who now speak in what Mr. Green identifies as the
Times
voice: the
Times
is their newspaper (the only possible news–
paper for them), cricket and horses are their hobbies.
If
they read at
all for pleasure it is always travel, biography, history-very rarely fiction,
never poetry. Most of them are administrators, civil servants, profes–
sional men, Conservative Members of Parliament (altogether they rep–
resent a pretty solid Conservative vote ) . There are a few of them at
the universities, too, especially at Oxford and Cambridge, but in general
the university, B.B.C., British Council "gentlemen" (I hesitate to gen–
eralize at all about the Arts Council and the stage) are of quite a
different type, with at least some pretensions to a serious interest in
literature and the arts. They are more in the eighteenth-century tradi–
tion than in the nineteenth, and they are more likely to read the
Manchester Guardian
(a paper Mr. Green never mentions) than the
Times.
Their present weakness and lack of creative effectiveness, either
socially or artistically, as a group seems to stem from excessive ennui–
whether genuine or assumed one can never be quite sure. But at least
there is a group here-fairly cohesive, its members more readily iden–
tifiable (and more ready to be identified) than those of any comparable
group in America-which, re-invigorated, could prove capable of a
positive contribution.
