CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
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bilities of status. Satirized by Huxley, loathed by Lawrence, it has
continued, in a pleasure-loving frivolous patronizing fashion, to toss
food to the mouth that bites it. Often enough its contribution to the
cause of progressive ideas has gone deeper than this. Though in no
marked way connected with radical political ideas, it is supremely
the class that indulges in what Mill called "experiments in living":
without ever standing in the way of those who would appeal to tra–
dition, it has done its best to erode tradition itself. Now there are
certain signs indicating the disappearance of this class: or rather its
re-assimilation into the respectable classes to which it owes its social
origins. The main cause of this is presumably economic: the impact
of taxation and other redistributive measures. The most obvious sign
of it is the formal clothes that after a period of fashionable untidiness
in dress have of recent years become the uniform of the rich and
young. (But what, it might be asked, has the revival of bowler hats
and stiff collars to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideas in poli–
tics? The answer to this question is to be found in that distinctive
feature of English life: the vast, loosely-knit, confederate empire of
Fashion of which politics, literature, art, clothes, speech, ideas, are,
in their different ways, on their different terms, the various tribute–
paying members.) Whether ultimately the disaffection of this class
will mean much, whether its place will not be taken by a New
Bohemia, are at this present point unanswerable questions.
Thirdly, there is the new prestige attached to ambition: the
very word being for thirty years or so out of fashion. To see the
change of sentiment on this score, the best method, as so often in such
matters, is to look at the serious imaginative literature of the period.
Compare the heroes of Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley or Forster
with those of Angus Wilson or Wain or Amis. Differences abound,
of course, but one of the most interesting is a new kind of innocence
that the writer seems to have found in ambition. It is as if he were
telling us that compared with the endless probing into fruitless senti–
ments or the egotistical pursuit of dry and lifeless slogans-the favor–
ite pastimes of earlier heroes-getting on in the world, looking after
oneself, are pretty harmless occupations. I do not want to suggest that
this is as such a right-wing phenomenon. On the contrary, the writers
I have referred to are all on the Left. And again it would not, I
think, be fanciful to correlate this change of sentiment about ambi-
