LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

Daily Express wasn’t all out to uphold. That is the crux of the Felicity
Taverner novel. In England an heritage going back at least to the days of
Holbein but NOT limited to that period, and inimical to that tradition, to
the fine elegance of the older houses, to clarity of English air on the
western seacoast. There is (in the novel and in reality), as I think you
may wake [up] too late to perceive, there is another force working.
Something not very open, something that you decline to take very
seriously.
For 25 years to my knowledge there has been a difference of view, I
mean among the serious minority, of the intelligentsia, as to how far the
attack is conscious, how far it is part of a plan, premeditated. How far
the evil is brought in by carriers. Unconscious agents, that bring an
Anschauung, an attitude toward life, poisonous as the germs of bubonic
plague, carried by animals who don’t know they have got it.
Maiski of course KNOWS he has it. Litvinov has made no bones about
having it. But it is not merely political, it is molecular or atomic. It
destroys all scale and all sense of proportionate values. It calls to the
basic laziness of the mind, the basic softness of human organism. It
profanes. It soils, it is greasy and acid. It revolts all men who have any
desire toward cleanliness. But it entangles the clean, it entangles them
because of their inconsequentiality, their inability to see the connection
between one thing and another. Facilis descensus.
The young are unheeding. Nothing is more tiresome than the moralist.
Nothing more difficult for a profane author than to draw the line
somewhere, or to persuade his reader that certain sloppiness of outlook
can possibly have any consequence.
I make a tardy acknowledgement to Mary Butts, author of the Death of
Felicity Taverner. I did not advertise the book during her lifetime. It may
have arrived while I was busy, and I was not a reviewer; not specifically.
I was concerned with very rare books that conformed to a certain canon.