CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
545
Kirk's
The Conservative Mind
the connection between the quality
of life that he praises in the text of the book and the houses that
he mentions in the preface as the places where he wrote it, is embar–
rassingly apparent. For an English writer of comparable sophistica–
tion the connection would have worked rather differently: if he had
stayed in those or similar houses, then he wouldn't have written the
book at all. Professor Kirk refers in this same preface to the "un–
bought graces of life": nowadays these are sold in England at the
price of silence.
Finally of the middle-class ideal, of the conception of society as
preserved from tyranny and philistinism and disorder by a minority
of intelligent, cultivated, liberty-loving, property-owning families, we
hear a little more but not much. One book,
The English Middle
Classes
by Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, attracted in its day-1949
onwards- a considerable amount of interest, but more on account
of its clever perverse partisanship than of any imaginative appeal it
tried to exercise. The ordinary Englishman is not much given to ro–
mantic ideas in politics, but when he does give himself to one, he
demands that it be genuinely and full-bloodedly romantic. And the
cause of the middle classes, whatever it may be, is certainly not that.
The very name conjures up
The Diary of a Nobody,
and any at–
tempt to go beyond this and delineate the actual virtues of this way
of life can never do much better than skirt the ridiculous. Take for
example the most distinguished contemporary draughtsman of the
subject, Mr. E. M. Forster: one is aware even in his most touching
sketches of quiet civilizated professional life that one has only to alter
a phrase or two and one would have something in praise of 'gracious
living.' Scratch the Schlegels, and you have Mrs. Miniver. Again, just
the very modesty of the middle-class ideal makes any explicit descrip–
tion of it peculiarly vulnerable to social criticism. For whereas it is
perfectly possible to think of aristocratic life as existing in some kind
of economic vacuum, with no visible means of support, it is impos–
sible even to start describing middle-class life without at once in–
serting into one's description references to an economic and social
context: a small unearned income, domestic servants, fee-paying edu–
cation--so that straightway one finds oneself involved in controversial
issues. There is, as it were, no moment at which one can stand back
from a portrait of middle-class life and say "That is the good side,
