GOOD BYE ENGLAND, WE LOVE YOU...

All Shook Up: “We have no ideals left to which we can be asked to aspire to
on an inherently, almost subconscious, level. Our idea of Britishness is rooted
in the notion of history and a sense of belonging by birthright to a superior
tribe - it's not one which can easily be extended to incomers. Much as we might
be uncomfortable with this fact, and wish to reinvent it...we've thrown out our
Land of Hope and Glory and can't find its successor.”

The bearing of these remarks, I should surmise perhaps, is a mere
summing up, and not as might wrongly be supposed, in any spirit of support for
an imperial philosophy of state. Nor, in the name of an idea, would it be
presumptuous to assert that England is a very different nation today, or that
in her case one might consider the really decisive loss to have been
virtues, which are, in a quote, “something that is inborn, and subtle , and
everlasting...something like a solid principle, and masterful like an instinct -
a disclosure of something secret - of that hidden something, that gift of good
or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations”

Joseph Conrad, who thus endeavoured to formulate the conditions, was
peculiarly perceptive on this point. Unfashionable though they may sound to us
today, his words nevertheless make it clear, if only for rhetorical purposes,
how completely the genius of those who once took pride in the thought that they
were God‘s Englishmen has become diluted by egalitarian ideologies implying
that we have ceased to be British, ceased to be the defenders of invincible
Armadas, the “pugnacious and unconquerable bulldog race.”

There is an old biblical saying that God rejects the proud and gives
grace to the humble. Humility, therefore, is doubtless a praiseworthy thing. But
- to the best of my belief - if the evolution of the civilized world depended to
a considerable degree on English national or racial ingredients, it is
nevertheless the case that their chief and foremost contribution to it has been
the long and fortuitous history of a Charmed Life, rather than the humility of
those who can surrender themselves, for the sake of pity, to pacific or passive
influences. There are further considerations, of course, which point in the
direction of development which, in a country the size of Britain, is not perhaps
at liberty to desist, but essentially it is England and the English spirit for
which we mourn.

“A nation behaves like itself,” it has been succinctly said. And
accordingly, in a contribution to the 1939 edition of The English Genius, its
central doctrine could still be expressed as follows: “What pleases us we take
from Europe, what displeases us we leave to Europeans; for only accidentally to
we consider ourselves as such.” Few, even a short while ago, would have liked to
read this differently. But we live in the age of “Confederalism” and its
mastering doctrine abdicated, the new policy of this country and its
discontinuity with her old traditions has become quite unmistakable. And to the
extent this is an issue, not of national polity but of the logic of events, it
must clearly lead to results that are in profound contradiction with the age-old
assumption that its own inherent genius is the soul and body of a nation.

But whether we admire it or not, and regardless of whether or not it is
to be subsumed under a confederate ethos, this , at all events, is the very
genius which conquered the world, ’Hellenised’ it and formulated the conditions
under which the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number was
actually going to be achieved. Imperial or not, one might as well admit that
it has brought into existence laws and rules of behaviour that we now recognize
as universal; liberties not so much of Englishmen as of all men; rights that are
constituent elements of our very own time. And that, in fact, is why we are
compelled to say, when brought face to face with the enduring quality of certain
unalterable codes of British conduct, with “that perfection”, finally, “of
moral, intellectual, and professional qualities” which Trevelyan called “The
Nelson Touch”, that This was their finest hour...!

Dreamy