WRITERS AND POLITICS
367
taste) so Bloomsbury estheticism was modeled on the idea of French
writers and artists devoted to nothing but their art. But France is pre–
eminently the country of the
deuxieme metier,
of the writer who is also a
teacher or journalist, the writer who, though he may be "pure" in his
poetry or fiction, yet lives by selling his opinions. Even Paul Valery
wrote about politics in the modern world.
It is, indeed, the English who are the real esthetes, failing per–
haps to be as pure as they would like to be, but nevertheless upholding
a standard of art for art's sake. One has only to mention the names
of Kipling, Wells and Shaw to see that these writers, because they
published undisguised opinions about politics, damaged their reputa–
tions as artists here more than they would have in any other country.
And today the writers of the thirties suffer from the odium of their
early work being tainted with politics.
All the English or American writer may do with his politics, if
he is not to be labeled journalist, is cultivate convictions which show
through his work, attitudes basically political, but implicit, not vulgarly
declared. The anglicized Americans, Henry James and T. S. Eliot,
adapting chameleon-like to England, acquired a traditionalist coloration
that, on the rare occasions when it is developed to the point of crude
statement, is conservative. But in fact they hardly ever do come into
the open.
A point which Mr. John Harrison rather misses in his book
The
Reactionaries,2
in adding up the sum of Eliot's anti-Semitic and political–
ly reactionary observations, is that they are not in character with the
Eliot who after all became an English poet. They come rather from
another Eliot character, a somberly jaunty young American in Paris,
a figure in a cape, almost eighteen-ninetyish. The famous pronounce–
ment about being a royalist would do better as a bouquet thrown to
the Comte de Paris, than to George V.
The characteristic of the special kind of crisis which persuades
the young English or American poet (yesterday Spain, today Vietnam)
to take the plunge into politics is one of conscience among sensitive
and intelligent young members of the ruling class caused by what they
regard as a betrayal of principle on the part of their fathers' genera–
tion. The failure is the failure to act according to principles when
interests are threatened. Since the principles of democratic and "free"
societies are basically liberal and since liberal values are always open
to the challenge that those who profess them have refused to pay the
2 THE REACTIONARIES.
By
John Harrison. Golancz. 35s.
