"Baldwin had moral, social and aesthetic beliefs, and also a religion, but few of his beliefs were political. He was pessimistic about purpose and felt an instinctive resistance to it. Though he succeeded, where necessary, in mastering the reluctance that he felt, his interests were spiritual and atmospheric, his instrument of demonstration the wand rather than the baton. What he wanted to express were the feelings of a "decent Englishman". In imagination he lived a version of what these were and created a teaching about what they should be. In doing so, he did something that no twentieth-century politician, except Grey, had quite done before. In doing it he implied a consonance between the politics of the public-school gentleman of middle-rank, literary interests and rural tastes and the reticence of the body of the people as a whole. "Englishmen", he wrote in 1935, "may appear to take [their] mutual loyalties for granted: we don't talk about them. But it is good once and again to break the silence of our instinctive reserve and say to each other what we might regret never having said if death came to one of us unexpectedly.""