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STEPHEN SPENDER
that,
qua
intellectual, he represented detached intelligence. Stooping
from his exalted height, the "clerk" made objective, disinterested
judgments.
It is true of course that sometimes a Romain Rolland or a Henri
Barbusse, infected with the virus of the International disguised as Inter–
nationalism, looked across the channel and appealed to a Shaw or a
Wells to attend some international conference or sign some declara–
tion of Human Rights. But if and when they responded, the English
"great writers" did not descend as radiant messengers from the realms
of pure imagination and impartial intellect. Wells, although priding
himself on being a social prophet, cultivated the manner of a traveling
salesman for the scientific culture, when he made his public "inter–
ventions." Like Shaw, Bennett and Galsworthy he thought of his
public personality as antiesthetic, lowbrow. He was forever explaining
that he was a journalist who breathed a different air fr,om that in
the novels of Henry James.
Eliot, Virginia Woolf, even D. H. Lawrence saw to
it
that Wells
and Bennett should never forget their public streak. When during the
thirties E. M. Forster appeared on
"front populaire"
platforms he did
so because the time demanded that he should assume a role in which
he had no confidence and for which he felt little enthusiasm. His
presence at Congresses of the Intellectuals during the anti-Fascist
period, and that of young English poets, was extraordinary-like lions
walking the streets of Rome on the night preceding the Ides of March,
a sign that the artist had become denatured from his function by
apocalyptic events.
Until the thirties the younger generation of Oxford and Cam–
bridge were infected by the antipolitics of their parents' generation.
Stansky and Abrahams mention that the famous society of Cambridge
intellectual undergraduates-the Apostles-which had such a close
connection with literary Bloomsbury, agreed
in
the twenties that
"practical politics were beneath discussion." Even more striking, in the
early thirties, the Apostles ceased for some years to exist, as the result
of the pressure of "too many conflicting political beliefs" among their
members. Yet so different was the atmosphere by then that to Julian
Bell, no longer then an undergraduate, and to John Cornford, who was
one, this must have seemed like saying that having at last something to
discuss, the Apostles had decided to discuss nothing.
To the Cambridge and Bloomsbury generation of their parents
Bell and Cornford were ducklings hatched out from suppositious hen's
eggs, swimming out on to those dirty choppy political waters. Not that
