APOCALYPSE
351
which, it is assumed, lies under the threat of destruction by corrupt
politics, economics and language.
Here we find in early modernism a hint of the real treason of
the clerks. Its existence is further suggested by Wyndham Lewis. He
painted on a theory that the closed society of "abstraction"-an anti–
kinematic, antihumanist society of rigid hierarchy, ruled by fear–
much like the fiction of Worringer, was the best for art. Hence his
cult of deadness, his hatred of all that he called "Bergsonian" or
vitalist; of anything that suggested, as relativity theory for example
did, an inalienable degree of independence even in the minds of the
"peons" or
Untermenschen.
The peons, according to the heavenly
messenger of the apocalyptic C
hildermass
J
are merely "the multitude
of personalities which God, having created, is unable to destroy." Sex,
time, liberal thought, are all enemies of paradigmatic rigidity; and
even Pound and Joyce were in their power. Lewis' own ideas are
darkened by smoky polemic and varied by fits of good nature, but he
was certainly antifeminist, anti-Semitic, antidemocratic and had am–
bivalent views on color. T. S. Eliot, in the preface he wrote for a re–
issue of
One-Way Song
in 1955, says that "the less respectable [intel–
lectuals] vociferate the cry of 'fascist!'-a term falsely applied to
Lewis, but flung by the
Massenmenschen
at some, who like Lewis,
walk alone." But this, it must be said, is characteristic of the evasive–
ness that until recently attended discussion of this aspect of modern–
ism; Mr. Conor Cruise O 'Brien has recently castigated it in a study
of Yeats. In 1929 Eliot himself said that Lewis was inclined "in the
direction of some kind of fascism," and Lewis himself in 1926 said
much the same thing. He wrote a book in praise of Hitler, and found
in nazism a system favorable to "aristocracy of intellect." He changed
these opinions, and in any case it isn't my business to condemn them.
It
is sufficient to say that the radical thinking of the early modernists
about the arts implied, in other spheres, opinions of a sort not normally
associated with the word radical.
It appears, in fact, that modernist radicalism in art-the break–
ing down of pseudo-traditions, the making new of a true understand–
ing of the nature of the elements of art-this radicalism involves the
creation of fictions which may be dangerous in the dispositions they
breed towards the world. There is, for instance, the fantasy of an
elect which will end the hegemony of bourgeois or of
M assenmensch
J
