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PARTISAN REVIEW
seemed to agree that "effective measures" took precedence over matters of
principle.
I
am not now arguing about Conscription;
I
merely remark that
the debate never passed beyond terms of instant expediency. Our present
concern is with a posture of "defence," and to hell with the composition
of what is defended.
I
should like to give an amusing illustration of that.
Movie news-reels take some weeks to reach our rural cinemas; on the day
Conscription was announced
I
happened to see a six-weeks-old reel prais–
ing our voluntary system and proclaiming that England had shown that
democracy had no use for anything so essentially totalitarian as Conscrip–
tion! Soft fruit was blown by the audience, hut the quick change was
accepted without serious question. We are an accommodating people. For
us democracy is always dandy, and it may he defined as our own political
system as we find it at this moment (including the Stop Press).
The prevailing mood, then, in sloganese is an intensified resistance to
. fascist aggression, for the sake of democracy. Europe of course is an
armed camp of resisters and peace-defenders looking vainly for an aggres·
sor, hut we can't help that: the rightness of our cause is so obvious that
there is no second opinion, and so long as the Government keeps repeat·
· ing the slogan it will stay in power. To find anything happening one must
go behind the scenes. Chamberlain's real danger is from within his party,
and the next months will show whether the Tory Right Wing-those who
oppose Hitler most militantly in terms of imperialist rivalry-can capture
the Cabinet. The apparently certain thing is that Bloomsbury influence on
political thought will diminish. The daring revolutionary bravado of this
decade may even return to the bourgeois womb and be reborn as a Popu–
lar Front, Left in its slop;ans
a~1d
Right in its motives. Champions of the
status quo
are naturally delighted to take over a highly moral propaganda
which suits their policy. Bloomsbury is putting its left foot forward in
order to march backwards, and the playing-fields of Eton are about to
resume their former strategic importance.
So much for politics.
I
might add that
I
had just finished these notes
when the PARTISAN REVIEW Spring issue reached me and
I
found in D. M.'s
Editorial on American affairs a complete counterpart of what
I
have tried
to describe.
I
quote this, "Just think what social progress we'll make once
we've rid ourselves of those monsters in black and brown shirts three
thousand miles across the Atlantic," and it needs only a geographical cor–
rection to he entirely true of England. We have exported our sins to the
Axis countries. We find we can he more deeply shocked at that distance.. . .
Literature meanwhile has in some respects been "buoyant," as they
say on the Stock Exchange. Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Eliot have
published new books. James Hanley, Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene
have enhanced their reputations, and they can now be reckoned-with one
or two others-as the best of our novelists.
Finnegans Wake
has at last
arrived to l!'ive the reviewers a head-ache, and the general run of books
has ·been of better quality than in recent years. But probably the more
immediately sensitive barometer of a culture is its periodicals, and here
