514
PARTISAN REVIEW
The compleX' of ideas I speak of has ben promoted with tactical
skill, group movements, concerted attacks and extremes of mutual lauda–
tion. Snobbery and prestige have counted heavily. But it is not a con–
spiracy. There are truths in it, and much immediate support from the
particular history of our time. It asserts that living language, literary
sensibility and poetic values are supported by the traditional, the Catho–
lic, the regional, the mythic, the aristocratic, and by a sense of the
tragic, of transcendental absolutes, of sin and grace. Language and
sensibility and values are destroyed by rationalism, liberalism, positivism,
progressivism, equalitarianism, Shelleyanism, sociology, and the ideology
of the Enlightenment. This has been made explicit by Eliot in
After
Strange Gods
and
The Idea of a Christian Society,'
by the Southern
regionalists,,including Tate and Warren in much that they have written
since their first manifesto,
I'll Take My Stand;
and by Auden in the
Herod-as-liberal speech in
A Christmas Oratorio
and in the various
reviews urging liberals and reformers to go jump in the lake.
In this complex of ideas the antisemitism with which William
Barrett is principally concerned has a vital part. For these ideas did not
originate with Eliot or Pound or Hulme, but with the French reactionary
critics at the end of the nineteenth century, and were made into a
program of action by Charles Maurras of whom Eliot used to speak
with favor in
Criterion
days. Under the influence of Maurras, the
virulently antisemitic students of the
Action Franfiaise
stormed the Sor–
bonne, beat up liberal professors, and howled down plays by J ewish
writers, as untroubled as their Fascist and Nazi successors by problems
of form and content. This mob antisemitism was the antisemitism of
Pound's broadcasts when he, like Maurras, became a traitor both to
his country and humane culture. (John Berryman's extenuating all this
in PARTISAN REVIEW by comparing Pound to Roger Casement is one
of the more fantastic examples of the way we are all involved.)
Eliot's antisemitism is different in kind but just as essential in his
poetry and social ideas. Awed by his great achievements, fearful of
showing insensibility, of introducing irrelevant "liberalism," most critics
have accepted this in Eliot's terms. As homeless cosmopolitans and us–
urers, the Bleisteins and Sir Ferdinand Kleins represent the debase–
ments of modern commercialism. As intellectuals, the Jews are the fore–
most carriers of disintegrative rationalism, earthly messianism. For the
Southern Regionalists, Negroes are less interesting ideologically, but
equally outside the tradition, and not to be made part of it by any lib–
eral rhetoric.
Here we have not a question of form and content, of purity in
