5#
PARTISAN REVIEW
would be to let the left hand of the country know what its right
hand is doing. In the life of the present Parliament there has, more
than once, come before the House of Commons a Private Member's
bill designed to prevent newspapers from publishing the details of
wills and bequests. What the supporters of this measure were trying
to do on a humble scale-to choke up the sources of 'social envy,'
as it is euphemistically called in England today-would be undone
on a large scale and
quite gratuitously
by the scribes and publicists
of an 'aristocratic' political theory.
This practical conspiracy of silence is reinforced and cemented
at its weaker points by a well-known though certainly not overesti–
mated feature of English life: snobbery. (No one who does not know
Britain can appreciate the real power of snobbery within it. Of
course .a great deal has been written about snobbery. But in English
literature snobbery nearly always appears as a comic subject: in
English life it doesn't.) Those not acquainted with country-house
life do not wish to make themselves ridiculous by getting it wrong,
whereas those who are acquainted with it do not wish to make them–
selves even more ridiculous by taking it too seriously. Indeed it is
likely that snobbery not merely runs parallel to, but also has more
direct links with, the whole strategy of expediency: it is as if the
upper classes finding it necessary to wear a certain kind of protective
clothing, tried to supplement the arguments of necessity by declaring
this also to be the height of fashion. A trivial but indicative example
of this tendency was the reception afforded to an article that ap–
peared in
Encounter
last year by Miss Nancy Mitford on the dif–
ferences between upper-class and non-upper-class speech
("V"
and
"non-V"). The article aroused large-scale interest
(Encounter
even
issued separate off-prints of it, presumably in the cause of 'cultural
freedom') and a certain amount of resentment. This resentment,
however, came not from those who did badly in the test (on the
contrary it assured them of a way of doing better next time), but
from those who did, or would have done, well in it. For them it did
the unmentionable thing: it blew the gaff. (Favorite reactions: "I
think that that article of Nancy's was, if I may use the expression
for a moment, the most non-
V
thing I have ever read": "It all
seems to me so unnecessary.")
The general point might be put like this: In Professor Russell
