16
PARTISAN REVIEW
Spender the emergency manreuvers· of the Soviet foreign office became the
norms of socialist action; the People's Fronts of Spain and France he ac–
cepted as full-fledged socialist governments; and the injustices, the tyrannies,
the crimes of the Soviet regime were put down as misdemeanors which
the new "democratic constitution" would correct. Spender'S authorities
on the Soviet Union, needless to say, were the indispensable Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, in whose ancient persons the Fabianism of two epochs was
united_
In
Forward from Liberalism
Spender declared that it was a "betrayal
of his function" for the intellectual to become the apologist for a political
party. The intellectual, he said, must "judge and criticize" the party line
from the viewpoint of absolute justice, the final end of politics. However,
in the two-odd years of his membership in the Communist Party (he joined
it shortly after the appearance of
Forward from Liberalism)
Spender has
found no occasion to exercise publicly the right to "judge and criticize."
He has recently published a verse play written for the Group Theatre
in London.
Trial of a Judge
is not strong either as poetry or as drama.
The characters are poorly-contrived effigies of types popularized by the anti–
fascist movement; the situations are as banal as the editorials of the
Daily
Worker,.
and the infusion of T. S. Eliot has given the verse no more than
a factitious "atmosphere." But the play is curious as a comment on Spen–
der's ideological development since 1934. With its Central European
setting, it shows him still clinging to his early experiences. It is as though
the present line of the Comintern had conspired with the meagerness of
his own English experience, to convince him that the tragic political subject
is confined to Central Europe. But from his memories of the Vienna journey
he now draws rather different conclusions.
Trial of a Judge
is an attempt
to construct a tragedy out of the predicament of a liberal faced with the
choice between communism and fascism. The play is probably an accurate
reflection of history as it looks to supporters of the People's Front, for the
fate of society is made to hinge on the liberal's decision, and the commu–
nists in the play are reduced to the role of suppliants. Thus for Spender the
locus of tragedy has moved up a step in the social scale since he composed
Vienna.
In that poem the heroes were workers tragically betrayed by their
leaders and- by liber:!ls.
The Healer
Where Spender, as a poet, remains the captive of his reasoning mind,
with its abstract data and its memories of other literature, Auden, drawing
on latent memories of the ruined Midlands of his childhood, is able to build
around his emotions an entire landscape of images, fearful in their grotesque
materiality. Among his fellow writers Auden is really the
poet :
he alone is
really sensitive to the
zeitgeist;
the others are merely sensitive to him.
