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to conserve only those things that 'keep': which ideas notoriously
don't.)
The question then arises, Are there any other features of Eng–
lish life which provide a suitable setting for these subtle ideas, which
might serve as the hard ground on which these seeds could fall and
thrive? I believe that there are certain things in Britain which can
be seen in this light. In the first place, there is the withdrawal from
politics that has been so much in evidence since 1949 or thereabouts:
a movement attributable in part to disillusion with the ideologies of
an older generation, in part to satisfaction with the reforms of the
recent past. And whereas immediately after the war to be unpolitical
was to be on the Left, i.e. to hope vaguely that someone else would
do something, to be unpolitical four or five years later was to be
on the Right, i.e. to feel vaguely that no one should do anything
more. In some quarters the movement has gone further and become,
in a very peculiar and inverted way, anti-political. There are a cer–
tain number of people, mostly intellectuals or near-intellectuals, who
feel that they ought to be interested in politics and because they
aren't, feel resentment against politics: in particular, knowing that
if they were interested in politics they would be on the Left, they
feel a special resentment against the Left. This kind of political
beylisme
leads by a natural logic to fanatical admiration for, and
envy of, all these strong burly masculine figures to whom in an earlier
and simpler age political passion, activity and consummation came
so easily: in this way the '30s and the period of the Spanish War
have acquired a prestige like that of some pristine Eden from which
political cynicism has expelled us. A much-publicized example of this
sort of sentiment, though stopping short of the final 'anti-Left' stage,
is Kingsley Amis's curious pamphlet after Suez,
Socialism and the
Intellectuals.
Secondly, there has in some of the higher reaches of British life
been a move toward respectability. In Great Britain for a certain
number of years now, for better or worse, the cause of progressive
ideas has been materially at any rate dependent on, and bound up
with, the existence of a fairly large though amorphous class, eco–
nomically secure and in all ways well-connected, stretching roughly
from the intelligentsia on the Left to cafe society on the Right. It is
a class that escapes at once the anxieties of power and the responsi-
