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It seems impossible to sort out where all the many strands in British life are leading just now, or to forecast the political future of the country. Too much depends on outside influences. There is the world-wide question of the future of relations between America and Russia. There is the question of what way continental Europe will turn in the next year or two. There is the appalling complication of the economic crisis. The political situation at home and abroad is still a fluid one.
Some American readers may have read a “London Letter” by Arthur Koesder to the Partisan Review which appeared some months ago. Koestler, with all his ability for penetrating and destructive criticism, called England an island of “virtue and gloom.” This is an impression many people now get when they compare England with continental countries in many ways far worse off, such as France or Italy.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1948
References
1 Certain dailies such as The Times and The Manchester Guardian and several other provincial papers need to be excepted. And, of course, I except the weeklies, The Spectator, The Economist, The New Statesman, etc. Labour newspapers seem to me less “depressing” than Conservative ones. But as regards the standard, I remember that Orwell made an examination in some detail last year and he came to the conclusion, unless I am mistaken, that the intellectual level of newspapers was almost exactly in reverse ratio to their sales.
2 Mr. Shinwell was Minister of Fuel and Power until the reshuffle of the Cabinet in October 1947.
3 The Intellectual Man's Guide to the Post-War World by Cole, G. D. H. (Gollanez, 1947).Google Scholar
4 Quoted in Tribune, October 3rd, 1947.Google Scholar
5 If this alternative is attacked by minority spokesmen such as Prof. Cole, it is surely because they do not take the psychologcial and spiritual factors in revolutionary history enough into account. Their ideals are too abstracted from reality. Reality shows Mensheviks falling before the Bolshevik men of action, or how the idealists of the French Revolution made way for the intolerance of Robespierre.
6 The Third Program of the B.B.C. with its very wide diffusion has, however, done much to combat this feeling.
7 An issue of Horizon devoted to art and literature in the United States suggested that in America there is a somewhat similar reaction of spirit amongst writers of the new generation. The writer referred to the influence of Henry Miller on anarchist and pacifist feeling centered in California. Miller is a good example of how inapplicable the words “Left” and “Right” have become. For insofar as he is a revolutionary enemy of “bourgeois” society, he has been called “left.” But he is equally far from “socialist” ideas and has much more in common with D. H. Lawrence and above all Spengler (to whom he owes much) than with the “Left” or “Right” as they are in the world today.