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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion with the social reforms that have taken place since the war and
which allow men
de bonne volonte
to feel that it is no longer true
that all getting on is getting on at someone else's expense. Yet, when
all these reservations and qualifications have been made, the fact is
that the new hero of today's literature is, potentially at any rate,
an
homme de droite:
by which I mean someone who subscribes to
right-wing views not because they are his by tradition and upbringing,
not because they coincide with his interests, not because they seem
to him to be true and all others false, but because, better than any
others, they fit in with and they form part of his vision of life. And
I would not be surprised if a generation brought up to accept him
tended also to accept his views. For as the Romantic movement
showed, in the cult of literature there is great efficacy in the maxim,
Love me, love my dog.
Is there then a revival of conservatism in England today? There
are certain things that point toward it; they do not prove it, though;
and there are many other things that point away from it. Moreover
in England things can change very quickly. Culturally the country
has the geography of a broad, sandy estuary through which a river
works its tortuous way to the sea down a number of different chan–
nels. To map it is the difficulty. For it requires only a shift in the
wind that blows across it, only a change in what the river brings down
from the mountains, for the course of the channels and the configura–
tion of sandbank and strand to change, overnight, beyond recognition.
Just where one thought firm land was emerging, there is, next day,
rushing water; and far off, in an unexpected place, new sand boils up.
