366
STEPHEN SPENDER
imagistically, or converted into a mystique, without appearing to lose
its own kind of precision. Here the Marxist poet is only encountering
the difficulty of other modern poets in a secular world. The precision
of science resists being interpreted into the precision of poetry. But
if
one sees beyond the poem, as through a transparent screen, the struc–
ture of the dialectic, it is clear that this is an attempt to write Com–
munist poetry.
If
one does not see this, then one might agree with
Stansky and Abrahams that "the abstractions and metaphors proliferate,
taking us still further from reality and deeper into the visionary world
of the seer." Having lived through the thirties,
I
can only rub my eyes
reading this. Still-from the Marxist standpoint-all that is wrong is
thinking that "abstractions" (if they are "correct") lead away from reality
instead of penetrating deeper into it. The point is that Cornford was
trying here to be a Marxist visionary and seer. And, but for Stalin and
the Marxists, the attempt would not be a contradiction in terms.
What does seem strange is that the idea .of literary Bloomsbury
that literature should be untainted by politics seems to have derived
from France, or rather, from Roger Fry's and Clive Bell's idea of a
France of complete esthetic purism. Probably this went back to de NervaI,
Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Flaubert-and to the eighteen–
nineties, reviled and disowned, yet such an influence up till 1930. Art for
art's sake looks sophisticated when metamorphosized into "significant
form," and Oscar Wilde walks again, but unrecognized, through G. E.
Moore's doctrine of the value above all other things of "certain states
of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of
human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects."
But to hold up post-1918 France as the country of pure esthetic
aims is rather as though the French were
to
point to the work of
Edgar Allen Poe in Baudelaire's translations as the type of recent
American literature.
A young English writer going with eyes unprejudiced by Blooms–
bury's view of France to Paris in the late twenties or early thirties
soon discovered that the newspapers and reviews had national parks
freely ranged over by French novelists and poets offering their opinions
on social topics. When Julian Bell was sent in 1927 to Paris, to learn
French at the home of a teacher, he found that his host, as well as
knowing much about French literature and art was a theoretical Com–
munist though "there was nothing of the modern party line about him."
Just as English good taste is often modeled on an idea that France
is the country of perfect
ele~ance
(one has only to travel a little in the
provinces to see that the real strength of France lies in its bourgeois bad
