174
PARTISAN REVIEJr
slavery that would be visited upon the masses if Hitler should
triumph.
It
is true that Mr. Spender would be much more "regimented"
under the Hitler System than he is now under the Chamberlain
System-though the two may soon be less distinguishable, espe·
cially if the war continues to go against England. But would Mr.
Spender be so concerned about losing his freedom if he happened
to be functioning in the Chamberlain System not as an upper·class
literary man, but as a cook or a bus driver or a coal miner? He
would probably then realize quite vividly that freedom is a luxury
product under the Chamberlain System, and that he could afford
only the cheaper commodity of regimentation.
We must assume, however, that Mr. Spender himself is not
conscious of all this, that he does not think of personal freedom as
a class commodity. Otherwise, his statement would be not so much
honest as cynical. And far from being cynical, Mr. Spender has
always been one (if the most politically
responsible
of the younger
English writers-responsible in the sense that he seems to have
always felt an obligation to state publicly and unequivocally his
personal political views. Several years ago, when he was a Stalin·
ist fellow-traveler, he wrote a book to expound his faith in the
Popular Front and the Soviet Union. The book was called
Forward
from Liberalism.
Having lost his faith, Mr. Spender now finds
himself retreating once more to his liberal base (which, of course,
he never left very far behind in actuality). As a liberal, he sees
only a choice between two kinds of
status quo
systems, and he
chooses the Chamberlain System as the lesser evil.
It is true that he does pose a third possibility, namely, paci.
fism, which he quite correctly dismisses as "Utopian" and unreal
But the alternative of revolutionary action against the warmakers
-this is not even mentioned. It would appear that Mr. Spender
sees pacifism as at least a real enough alternative to be discussed,
but that social revolution is excluded from his consciousness.
Yet it is this alternative which seems to us to offer the only
way out of the nightmare into which our age is descending. The
most hopeful thing about this war is that the masses on both sides
of the battle-lines seem to have already reached the same state of
apathy and sullen war-weariness as came only after two or three
years of the last war. One recalls how the false news of an armis-
