WORLD OF NECESSITY
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Pound, for example) gave political support to fascism. What is im–
portant for art is that almost every view of life today has social impli–
cations. The various schools and movements of the last few years have
attempted to develop an artistic aim, a psychological truth or a view
of personal relationships split off from the modern social problem. Yet,
as with the esthetes of the '90's, social implications are involved even
in the most personal or private world,and thus we find a writer like
D. H. Lawrence, who concentrated on developing a very one-sided
view of relations between men and women and the inner depths of
sexuality, sympathizing with the atavism of the Nazis. The fact is that
D. H. Lawrence, like Yeats and Pound, was too big a man to exclude
from his mind the social problem, and the attempt to avoid it in his
work put him in sympathy with the repressive lords of blood and soil.
The development of the complete view of life which was potentially
within him would have made him sympathetic more with his own
people--the miners of Nottingham- but this would have meant a
broadening of
his
vision and a denial of his intuitive personality
altogether too painful and difficult for him.
As
with Lawrence, so
with the Imagists, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, the Apocalyptics,
the Personalists: there is an attempt to embrace any reality, however
narrow, remote, violent, neurotic, visionary, private or mad, so long
as it can be appealed to as part of an inner world of individuality
more important and durable than the external world which seems
outside the control of the individual. Yet there are elements of false
prophecy and desperate remedy about all these efforts to get away
from an overwhelming present history:
Newman, Giddy, Plato, Fronny, Pascal, Bowdler, Baudelaire,
Doctor Frommer, Mrs. Allom, Freud, the Baron and Flaubert,
Lured with their compelling logic, charmed with beauty of their verse,
With their loaded sideboards whispered, aBetter join us, life is worse."
Yet the outside life has a way of overtaking and overthrowing the
most elaborate positions of the "art for art's sake" whieh is "life for
life's sake." The elaborate self-disguises of the esthetes become too
expensive to be kept up, the madness of the surrealists is excelled by
the behavior of a world at war, personal relationships are torn aside,
the journeyings of a D.H. or a T.E. Lawrence become impracticable.
The innner world of personality is certainly the most important
reality we know, but unless it can be related to the outer world, all
attempts to develop it only reveal its isolation and weakness. This
inner world is the world of civilization, but civilization is a reality in
