A GOOD WORD FOR ENGLAND
431
I'm not very hopeful of this, however, except in so far as the
group may become progressively infiltrated by the new, postwar genera–
tion of English writers, teachers, artists, even journalists and politicians,
whom-apart from Kingsley Amis-Mr. Green almost completely ig–
nores. Maybe, as Mr. Green suggests, this new generation has as yet
nothing to put in place of the old traditions (which, in view of the
longevity of those traditions, seems scarcely surprising), but at least it
is feeling its way toward such a replacement. In novels by Kingsley
Amis, Iris Murdoch and John Wain, in poems by Philip Larkin, Eliza–
beth Jennings and Thorn Gunn, in plays like John Osborne's
Look Back
in Anger,
one can discern at least the beginnings of a new and more
hopeful movement-a movement toward honesty and away from
hypocrisy, a reaction against political lies and social shams, a rejection
of all cults of the gentleman. Theirs is thus, in a very real sense, a thor–
oughly subversive movement, and, at the moment, still violently so:
but when things have settled down a little I have a feeling that the
movement (it is scarcely organized or even conscious enough to deserve
that title as yet) will find itself essentially in tune with the gentlest of
writers, Mr.
E.
M. Forster. For Forster there is no such thing as public
belief, no large society based on public values: the only worthwhile–
indeed, the only possible-relationships are those between individuals
or, at most, within a small group. I believe that it is toward ideas such
as these that the new generation is moving, and that these ideas repre–
sent genuine positives, a place to start from.
The generally accepted view is that the old liberalism, with which
Forster is usually identified, died through its own inadequacies at
the time of the First World War. But Forster's central insistence on
honesty and "naturalness" in human relationships ("Only connect"–
the epigraph of
Howards End)
is surely not obsolete but has simply
been lost sight of during the great intervening battles of political and
social ideologies. In England now those battles have substantially ended.
Perhaps the country will merely stagnate: and this is what it seems
to have begun to do. But perhaps-and here is
my
hope for the future–
England's postwar generation can produce out of their growing revolt
against those aspects of English life which they, Mr. Green and I join
in abhorring, a way of life that is genuinely liberal, honest, humane,
sensitive-and democratic. It isn't, frankly, a big hope, but I believe
it to be a bigger, and better-founded, hope than Mr. Green's.
Michael Miligate
