Vol. 33 No. 3 1966 - page 352

352
FRANK KERMODE
which will end democracy and all the "Bergsonian" attitudes to time
or human psychology, all the mess which makes up a commonplace
modern view of reality. Instead of these there is to be order as the
modernist artist understands it: rigid, out of flux, the spatial order
of the modern critic or the closed authoritarian society; such a society,
we were told in 1940, as would persist, all inferior races, all
Unter–
menschen
excluded, for a thousand years. All who, in the thirties
and forties, fonned their minds on the great moderns but spent their
good years opposing fascism, must understand this paradox as in
need of resolution. The eschatological fictions of modernism are
innocent as ways of reordering the past and present of art, and
prescribing for its future.
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.
But to clear that paradigm of natural spume
is
one thing in poetry
or in a theory of poetry; another when the encumbrances can be
removed, the spume for ever blown away by a police and a civil
service devoted to this final solution.
It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling
him
deriva–
tive, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted
to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity
it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention.
He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order
to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of
the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city
as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradi–
tion, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him
the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his
thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition
through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his
demonic host, too; the word "Jew" remained in lowercase through
all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy–
fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed,
immobile hierarchical societies.
If
tradition is, as he said in
After
Strange Gods-though
the work was suppressed-"the habitual ac–
tions, habits and customs" which represent the kinship "of the same
people living in the same place" it is clear that Jews do not have it,
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