From: Hermit (virus@hermit.net)
Date: Fri Sep 26 2003 - 13:01:44 MDT
Scrutinising Scruton
Stephen Moss on Roger Scruton's hymn to a time past, England: An Elegy
Source: The Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/critics/reviews/0,5917,398494,00.html)
Authors: Stephen Moss
Dated: 2000-11-16
There was one important qualification to review Roger Scruton's England: An Elegy (Chatto and Windus, £16.99) - you had to be a man, preferably a middle-aged white man. It appears that only men of a certain age are permitted to pronounce on English history, character and culture.
As Nicholas Wroe noted in his profile of Scruton in the Guardian, the Tory philosopher has at times been a hate figure for the left. "His books have been unmercifully slaughtered by reviewers and his pronouncements on society mocked," said Wroe. "He is accused of being a grammar-school boy in thrall to the upper classes."
I looked forward to plenty of unmerciful slaughterings (incidentally, is it possible to be mercifully slaughtered?), but only Terry Eagleton in the Irish Times came up to scratch. Eagleton's first sentence showed the glint of his blade: "Few books are as odiously self-satisfied as this one." This was going to be bloody.
Eagleton allowed one note of mercy before the slaughtering: "This is a silly book rather than a stupid one. Some of its reflections, not least on English common law, are probing and suggestive, and Scruton himself is one of Britain's most brilliant philosophers." Then the punchline: "But the priggish, mawkish tone of this elegy suggests that he has now degenerated from Kant to cant."
The knockabout had a serious point: "The book either edits out uglier English realities or disingenously excuses them. Its vulgarly sentimental hymn to the English countryside, a land which may have been green but was rarely pleasant, is mostly silent on the dispossession and exploitation which made it the first capitalist rural set-up in world history."
James Wood in the London Evening Standard was almost as dismissive, and also began with an arresting, almost novelistic opening sentence: "There is always a danger of confusing one's childhood with the universe."
Where Eagleton wielded a machete, Wood skewered Scruton with an elegant dagger. "Scruton's vision of England mixes Burke's conservatism (in which a proper society honours both the dead and the unborn) with Orwell's quiet patriotism. But he lacks the eloquence of the former and the precision of the latter. Instead, his intellectual tone is closer to the windy popular travel books of the 1930s, by writers like HV Morton, which went 'in search of the English'.
"What dismays is the utter conventionality of what Scruton loves: he laments the passing of the country house, the death of the hedgerow, the debunking of empire by left-wing academics, the killing of the grammar schools, the fading relevance of the Church of England, the demise of the idea of the English gentleman and the hereditary principle. It is not that what Scruton writes is necessarily untrue, though his generalities unman verification; it is that what he writes is too true, is bloated on truism ... So in a curious paradox, the book which so praises English individuality entirely lacks it." A clever putdown.
Blake Morrison, in the Independent on Sunday, used neither machete nor dagger, but sought to kill the book by irony. It was a wickedly effective weapon. "If there was a kinder, wiser, more equable place than Old England, he [Scruton] can't think of it. And if a people ever matched the English for 'their stoicism, their decorum, their honesty, their gentleness and their sexual puritanism', he hasn't met them."
Surely the Sunday Telegraph would gallop to Scruton's aid. Sadly not. Alasdair Palmer was neither entertained by the prose nor convinced by the polemic. "Scruton's philosophical analysis of England is in fact very un-English. In its determined ponderousness, its true homeland is not England, but Germany. We get an Hegelian analysis of cricket and of public schools - something which no Englishman who had participated in either would ever be tempted to formulate."
Parts of Scruton's book - the better parts, many thought - are autobiographical, and Palmer got personal at the end of his review. "Just about everything that Dr Scruton values about his own life derives from the changes he excoriates as having killed off England. It would be too much to expect a Germanic philosopher to be grateful for that. But you might expect an Englishman to notice it." Ouch.
There was some respite for the harried Hegelian in previously hostile territory - the Guardian. "Scruton, who is a huntsman and Tory philosopher, and runs an austere 'experimental farm' in the hard, dry soil of northern Wiltshire, has written a defence, of some elegance and sophistication, of the crustiest version of Englishness imaginable," wrote Andy Beckett.
Beckett admired the style and passion, and enjoyed the biographical bits, but he too found the argument unfocused: "This story has some of the moral momentum and intensity of a Victorian novel," he wrote. "Around his grainy memories, Scruton arranges essays about the educational, legal and geographical structures that bred his favourite sort of Englishness in others. These sections are less successful. Over-familiar assertions of national uniqueness ... replace the usual Scruton logic and economy of expression."
Scruton did have one supporter, again an unlikely one - the Labour peer, Lord (aka Melvyn) Bragg, in the Independent. "This is an elegant and moving book. It will be read by those whose affection for Roger Scruton's England has survived the disparaging assaults of the last few decades. It deserves to be read by those who have often led the half-baked attack on this particular view of England. Scruton's England, apart from its final over-compressed, over-simplified chapter, is a classic elegy: biased, selective and resonant, done with that passionate regret which can seed re-emergence."
A romantic Tory vision rejected by the Telegraph and embraced by the artistic arm of New Labour: we live in confusing times. Now let's hear from a few non-male, non-white, non-Oxbridgeans. There are, apparently, one or two such people in England.
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