Scarlet and Black: The Silent Pistol

Extract

Any political idea in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the midst of a concert.—Stendhal.

I.

It was Silone, I believe, who proposed that we might be communists without the Party and Christians without the Church. Individually, perhaps : collectively, it can scarcely be doubted we lack the necessary courage and self-discipline. Belloc, I suspect, came closer to evaluating our gifts when he advised ‘always keep ahold of nurse. . . .’ The difficulty is, of course, that most of our nurseries are empty of nurses—the last wraith of a political nanny had disappeared some time before Mr Wilson sent for his famous removal van, and now that those long-serving retainers, the Latin Mass and the 1662 Anglican Communion, are skipping among us as vernacular folk masses and Second and Third Series, it is understandable that we should be in some confusion. Indeed, despite Silone, our predicament is such that we cling yet more tightly to the only security available. It is perhaps pleasantly ironic that for many of us the last and most esteemed resource is none other than Progressive nanny. Orwell could see the way of it a quarter of a century ago.

‘Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives is progressive, or at least wishes to be thought so. . . . We are all of us good democrats, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinction, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth’, (England your England. Seeker and Warburg.)

Regrettably, some of the pleasanter aspects of such a position are now more in question than they were when Orwell wrote—colour prejudice wears all the dignity of democratic consensus—but for the most part the position remains unaltered and has probably been strengthened by the dominant position of television as a means of influencing public attitudes.