The middle class: "this patient ass"

In February 1942, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Rev. William Inge -- nicknamed "the gloomy Dean"  -- stressed both the depth of the contemporary European crisis (which was not so unusual at that time) and advocated a resurgence in new forms of monasticsm as one part of a response to it (which was rather more original).

“The suicide of European civilisation—we cannot use any milder phrase—makes it necessary to consider whether any plan can be devised to do for us, under modern conditions, what the monasteries did in the Dark Ages, that is to say, to provide a refuge for the gentler spirits, from the welter of anarchy and barbarism, and to save what could be saved of the cultural tradition of the shattered Empire.”

Interestingly, he here brought together his vision of a modern monastic revivial with some fulsome words for the middle classes.

“But on public grounds the most serious danger [to society as a result of the war] will be the virtual extinction of the highly educated and financially comfortable middle class, to which the greater part of our progress in all the arts of civilised life has been due. Now that the inverted snobbery of Bloomsbury and the brutal militarism of the Nazis unite in pouring scorn on ‘bourgeois liberalism,’ a member of the abused class may be forgiven for quoting the words of Euripides: ‘Of the three classes it is the middle which saves the country’. This patient ass, bowed between two burdens, must find some way of escape from a state of society which might make it impossible for him to devote himself to his higher interests.” 

I'm far from d'accord with a lot of Dean Inge's views (he was an ardent advocate of eugenics and, before the war, rather too sympathetic to the right-wing variants of totalitarianism); still, I find myself with advancing years -- much to my own surprise -- having a soft spot for kind words about "bourgeois liberalism" (or at least its "higher interests").

And a "refuge" from "anarchy and barbarism": oh yes, I'll have one of those please. Preferably with an ocean view, if possible.  

Rev. W.R. Inge, "Community Life After the War", The Church of England Newspaper, 6 February 1942, 1.  

Of pansies, potatoes, and middle-aged sublimity

Amidst a much longer rumination on ageing by Frank W. Boreham, a popular early twentieth-century English Baptist preacher, one finds...a garden. 

A man’s life is like a garden. There is a limit to the things that it will grow. You cannot pack plants in a garden as you pack sardines in a tin. That is why the farmer thins out the turnips, the orchardist prunes his trees, and the husbandman pinches the grapebuds off the trailing vines.

Life has to be treated similarly. By the time a man enters middle life he realizes that his garden is getting overcrowded. It contains all the flowers that he planted in his sentimental youth and all the vegetables that he set there in his prosaic manhood. It is too much.

There must be a thinning out. And, unless he is extremely careful, he will find that the thinning-out process, will automatically consist of the sacrifice of all the pansies and the retentions of all the potatoes.

It carries on in this vein for some time and then draws some conclusions from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and some thoughts about Habakkuk.

Then: 

The man of forty rests, therefore, under at least three imperative obligations. He must make up his mind that the arrival of middle-age has not closed against him the door of enterprise; he must resolve that, in the mature years of his life, he will cherish some of the more amiable sentiments that inspired his impressionable youth; and he must regard himself as the natural protector of those who are battling fiercely and bravely with the forces through which, not without scars, he has himself passed.

In spite of everything, middle-age may then be made sublime.

Articles "On Being Fifty" and "On Being Sixty" followed, so Dr. Boreham seems to have been speaking with some experience.

Dr. F. W. Boreham, "On Being Forty", The Christian World, 13 June 1940, 8. (Line-breaks added)