Few books are as odiously self-satisfied as this one. Roger Scruton, English ideologue of the far Right, sets out to portray a now-vanished England whose virtues are symbolised by the game of cricket: "it displayed the reticent and understated character of the English ideal: white flannels too clean and pure to suggest physical exertion; long moments of silence and stillness, stifled murmurs of emotion should anything out of the ordinary occur and the occasional burst of subdued applause".
This is not, would you believe it, intended as parodic. Scruton is well aware that it will be derided by grubbily unpatriotic cynics like myself, but ploughs on regardless, with a certain gloomy bravado one can't help furtively admiring. The English always "instinctively knew who they were", without need of such suspect continental notions as Volk and nationhood. Their country was "an enchanted territory, which called to its children in every far-flung corner of the globe, furnishing them with the idea and the love of home". Ordinary customs there possessed "a quasi-divine" aura; they were there because they were there, requiring no sordidly rational explanation. Monarchy was less a political fact than a "work of the imagination". The nobility may have been resented, but "it was hard to escape the soft supple radiance of its charm".
At least it was for Roger Scruton, son of a militantly Old Labour working-class Mancunian, who now plays the squire in Wiltshire, rides to hounds and yearns to believe in the Anglican God. At one point in this gravely ridiculous book, the prole from High Wycombe even fantasises that he might be a nob himself; the name "Scruton" may derive from the stately home where his greatgrandmother was seduced, and he himself bears a "striking resemblance" to one of its present-day patrician offspring. Better an aristo from the wrong side of the sheets than a legitimate pleb.
Supposedly English characteristics which most people would see as thoroughly unpleasant are for Scruton worthy of lavish praise. Cold, aloof, regressively infantile and "seriously repressed", the English know no more valuable freedom than "the freedom to close a door". They help strangers more out of duty than geniality, and tend to prefer clubs, teams and regiments to personal relationships. They are, however, a "gentle " race, as Scruton's own attitude to immigration makes clear. The English disquiet over this, he believes, is not at all a question of racism, just a regret over the loss of one's sense of home.
It is a typically high-minded reason for being worried about wogs. There is no sense that the arrival of the immigrants may have something to do with the disruption of their homes, by (among others) the enchanted English. Many immigrants have "seized on the idea of British nationality as a means of having no real nationality at all". As these comments reveal, English disapproval of foreigners is often expressed in the shyest, most wistful, softly nostalgic way.
Much the same is true of the English class-system, which is more of a "spiritual" than an economic fact. "It was not snobbery but a kind of decorum that motivated the English people to seek out their separate spheres of belonging" - as though 19th century mill-workers chose their lowly status out of a sort of politeness. Workingclass life was "not a prison but a maze", where at any moment "you might find yourself standing before an open door, with a vista beyond it of green fields and open skies". That a man as bright as Roger Scruton can spout such absurdities is indeed a sign of the dumbing down he deplores.
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. Among the lovable customs which were there because they are there, one can number the destruction of the English peasantry. Even the remorselessly idealising Scruton can't wholly ignore England's more squalid crimes; but he either suggests (falsely) that they were always quickly corrected, or that they were common to other nations too. English virtues are unique, whereas English vices are really European imports. Oddly, however, he allows that England's treatment of Ireland was especially brutal, which is more than most Irish historians do.
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. But the priggish, mawkish tone of this elegy suggests that he has now degenerated from Kant to cant. His obtuse ideology has finally up-ended his fine intelligence, as the belligerent young fogey gives way to just another boring old fellow. The tone of the book is at times nearer to Sir Roy Strong than to the bracing astringency of Scruton the Young Turk. The rational and the Romantic have always slogged it out in his breast, and the former has now finally been sent packing. The chill of reason is to be disowned, in the name of defending the chilliness of the English. This self-deluded nationalist, eager to bury all sorts of moral nastiness in a rhapsodic fervour, makes Arthur Griffith look positively cosmopolitan.
Terry Eagleton is Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. His most recent book is The Idea of Culture, published by Blackwell.