BOO KS
143
lines) as a platform from which to launch more and more violent and
intemperate attacks against a modern world that was very far indeed
from embodying any heroic beauty. More, he prophesied its total de–
struction in a purifying holocaust that would clear the way for a society
in accord with his esthetic visions. Once transferred from poetry into
political terms, however, George's estheticism took on a very sinister
aspect; a good many members of the German intelligentsia (not George
himself, it is only fair to add) took the advent of the Nazis as a ful–
fillmen t of George's jeremiads.
A very friendly critic, C. M. Bowra, has pointed out that "the
swastika had long appeared in his [George's] books. He had introduced
such phrases as
'der Fuhrer'
and
'Heil.'
He had proclaimed the super–
iority of instinct to brains, of deep inherited qualities to anything im–
posed from without. He had preached the beauties of
'Gemeinschaft'
and
corporate life, the heroic ideal and the right of the German to lands
not h is own, the inferior position of women as wives and mothers, the
government of mankind by a select class." Of course George had meant
all this quite differently, quite spiritually; and we should not forget
that he went into exile in 1933 and died in Switzerland the same year.
Yet there is no doubt that George, in setting up his esthetic ideal as a
C Y R I L
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