‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observ-ed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’
I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop.
Given the tremendous row, we really should read Dr Rowan Williams’s recent speech on Islam and the Law properly, from start to finish. The more I read, the more I am struck by the parallels with Eliot’s Mr Casaubon, his argument ‘lost among small closets and winding stairs’.
Journalists are not good at handling intellectuals. When we come face to face with one of these we treat it like something encountered in a zoo. If it has a beard, so much the better. Equipped (we suppose) with inferior intellects ourselves, we approach the creature as if it were possessed of a mysterious attribute whose qualities we are unqualified to fathom. We delve for a clutch of associated words — ‘learned’, ‘scholarly’, ‘academic’ — as though they meant the same thing; we describe the creature as having ‘one of the finest minds of his generation’; and then we go on, with ill-concealed sniggers, to hint that this person is unworldly, indecisive or out-of-touch.
Thus the intellectual gains a kind of immunity from critical examination, at the cost of not being taken seriously as a man of action. Commentors, meanwhile, are excused the tiresome chore of actually asking whether the intellectual’s intellect is any good. Keith Joseph got similar treatment. So does Gordon Brown, of whom we repeat (because we have heard it somewhere) that he is ‘astonishingly well-read’, and that he has a deep knowledge of political philosophy and can quote the names of all the leading authors, and passages from their books.
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