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STEPHEN SPENDER
price which they demand, the crisis is one of the liberal conscience. At
the time of the French Revolution and in the early nineteenth century
the fury of the Romantic poets was against an English governing class
which refused to support freedom when revolution threatened English
interests. Byron and Shelley were never more the young English aristo–
crats than in supporting the overthrowers ,of kings and priests, and in
reviling Castlereagh as though he were their delinquent lackey. Their
attitude has something in common with that of Robert Lowell to
President Johnson.
Likewise in the thirties anti-Fascism was predominantly a reaction
of middle-class young men brought up in a liberal atmosphere against
the old men in power, of the same class, who while talking about free–
dom and democracy, were not prepared to denounce Hitler or defend
the Spanish Republic. They feared that as the price of doing so they
would find themselves on the same side as the Communists. That the
old who professed liberal principles should not see the threat of
Fascism or, if they did see it, that they did not take action, seemed
to the young a betrayal of basic liberal principles by liberals. Cornford
and Bell were not just young Oedipuses subconsciously wishing to destroy
their father's image. They had conscious reasons for attacking it: Laius
was a liberal.
It is only in the circumstances of a moral power vacuum that
the English or American writer can justify, to his conscience as an
artist, his taking a political stand. But he does so not without qualms.
The anti-Fascist writers of the thirties conducted debates, not only
in reviews or at meetings, but in their own hearts, between public and
isolated artistic conscience. Indeed, ever since the nineteenth century
(Shelley, Arnold, Clough, Ruskin, Morris) it has been the case that
the English poet mixed up in politics may spend a lifetime divided
between two voices: that of social, and that of esthetic, conscience:
Shelley calling on the world to dethrone kings, and Keats claiming that
his poetry is unshadowed by any trace of public thought.
There is a good deal to be said in support of the English poets'
mistrust of overtly taking sides. Only in exceptional historical circum–
stances do writers here attend the "boring meeting" or read or write
the "flat ephemeral pamphlet." Very rarely do they find themselves
involved in "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder."
The "disgrace" attaching to the "low dishonest decade" of the
thirties in England was not the same as that in France of some
surrealist turned Communist and currying favor with Stalin by accusing
Andre Gide of being a Fascist because he was critical of the Russia
