THESE "LOS T LEADERS"
Stit,—W. R. M.'s epigram in your issue of June 21st impels me to ask whether there could not now be a close time for snarling at absent intellectuals. About half a dozen of them—not more—are away in America, and week after week their fellow-authors go for them in the newspapers. The attacks are highly moral and patriotic in tone but their continuance raises the uneasy feeling that there must be something else behind them, namely, unconscious envy ; they are like the snarl of an unfortunate schoolboy who has been "kept in," and is aggrieved because the who:e of his class has not been kept in too and therefore complains and complains about those stinkers out in the playground instead of concentrating on his own inescapable task.
And there is a further objection to this undignified nagging: it diverts public attention from certain Englishmen who really are a danger to the country. They, too, are few in number—perhaps again not more than half a dozen—but they have influence, wealth and position, which intellectuals have not, and they shelter not in the United States, but in the City and the aristocracy. Our literary lampoonists can here find a foe worthier of their powers. Let them leave their absent colleagues alone for the next fortnight, and denounce our resident Quislings instead. The consequences may be unpleasant to them, or Quislings sometimes hit back. But they will have had the satisfaction of exposing a genuine menace instead of a faked one, and this should be sufficient reward.—Yours faithfully, Reform Club, S.W. E. M. FORSTER.
[We are glad to publish Mr. Forster's letter, but so far as The Spectator is concerned the controversy would not have been continued in any case.—En., The Spectator.]
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