WORLD OF NECESSITY
355
as possible, with limited materials and quickly, just as it is necessary
to compromise with Russia over Poland, perhaps reluctantly to aban–
don the cause of the Central European Social Democrats, or of the
Yugoslav monarchy. Necessity is no respector of persons or of parties.
The only demand one can make of it is that it should really be nec–
e..<:Sary.
In the postwar world dominated by the god of necessity, it seems
likely that many people will turn away from politics and seek to
construct small worlds out of their private relationships, based on
personal values. In doing this, these people will be imitating art: for
this has been exactly the tendency of various literary movements dur–
ing the past hundred years.
The significance of the attitudes of the various literary move–
ments toward politics lies in their not having been directly political
or allied to any political palty: or if they had political alliances, these
were for some other reason than a purely political one. The poet
considered himself to be sensitively in communication with the most
significant realities of life, which might be summed up under some
such idea as the experience of beauty, and if he happened, like Wil–
liam Morris, to be a socialist, it was for the sake of beauty rather than
for the sake of socialism. The politics of the artist are the politics
of the unpolitical, decided on for the sake of life and not of politics.
Therefore even the non-political and anti-political attitude of artists
is a criticism of politics by life, though it may also imply a criticism
of the artists themselves if they have an incomplete or a false attitude
toward life. Thus, if one realizes that the attitude of artists who are
critical of
all
politics is ultimately a political attitude, since politics are
and must be concerned with the same kind of life as forms the subject
matter of art, then it will be seen that, as so often happens, the art–
istic attitude foreshadows one which later may become widespread.
The attitude of the esthetes of the end of the last century toward
political organization is epitomized in Whistler's famous apothegm
to
his
fellow students whom he saw exercising with dumbbells: "Can't
you get the concierge to do that sort of thing for you?" Politics, like
gymnastics, were the business of the public servants while the esthetes
got on with their art for art's sake, which might also be called life
for life's sake. The attitude that politics exist in order that one may
forget about them
is,
in fact, a political attitude, based on the truth
that art and life are separate from and more important than the
machinery of living. Unfortunately, though, in the highly organized,
rationalized modern age, this idea is only a half truth. The other
