Flirting

P.N. Furbank

• The English World: History, Character and People edited by Robert Blake
  Thames and Hudson, 268 pp, £14.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 500 25083 9
• The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal by Philip Mason
  Deutsch, 240 pp, £9.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 233 97489 X

Can it be doubted that to write about ‘the English Spirit’ (or L’Ame Française or ‘the Spanish Soul’) is intellectually disreputable? Plainly, there are no such entities, nor does anyone at heart believe there are. The motives for invoking them are various: vote-getting is one; also the need to find something to say at a school speech-day. Then again, flirtatiousness. Intense are the flirtations that have sprung up between English writers (like Gerald Brenan) and Spain, between old-fashioned American scholars and the French poets, and between flattering Frenchmen (like André Maurois) and the bluff English. I revere Nikolaus Pevsner, but he will have to forgive me if I detect a touch of flirtatiousness in The Englishness of Art. One could labour the point, and offer reasons why no such concept could be valid, but I hardly think it is necessary. It is recognised when such talk begins that one is meant to relax, as at a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day.