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STEPHEN SPENDER
nouncements without asking how far these really correspond to ideas in
their best creative work. His problem is to relate their expressed opinions
to convictions of which they themselves may not have been wholly aware,
but which do have political implications,
in
their best writing.
The extent to which we should take a writer's expressed opinions
seriously is difficult to ascertain. What I have been suggesting here
is
that in France it is not so difficult to do this, because there is a tradi–
tion of intellectually respect-worthy ,opinion about politics
to
which the
writer can relate his own views. But in England and America there is
no such tradition of the writer in politics. Therefore his interventions
tend to be sporadic and occasional and perhaps not consistent with his
truest, that is his most imaginative, insights.
This is even more true of the Right than of the Left. For the Left,
after all, even in England and America, can merge into the traditions
of the French and American Revolutions, the internationalism of nine–
teenth-century liberals, Marxism, mingling, for the time being, with a
world river of continuous thought and energy. During the decade of
the Popular Front the English anti-Fascist writers became, as it were,
honorary French intellectuals. And this was not altogether absurd
be–
cause of the international character of the Left. But Fascism, and indeed
the European right, so diverse in its manifestations in different coun–
tries, although potentially an international threat, was nationalist and
local in ideas and performance. Therefore there was something much
more esoteric and perverse about the intermittent support which Mr.
Harrison's reactionaries gave to right-wing and Fascist movements
than about the corresponding political involvements of the anti-Fascists.
The traditionalism which appealed so much to Yeats, Pound,
Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and others doubtless had political implications,
and given the crucial nature of the period, it was not dishonorable of
traditionalists to want to realize these by supporting rightist parties.
But a big leap into the near dark had to be made in order to convert
the poetic traditionalism of Yeats, Pound or Eliot into support of
General O'Duffy, Mussolini or the
Action Franyaise.
The political attitudes of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Lawrence,
consist largely of gestures toward some movement, idea, leadership
which
seems
to correspond to the writer's deeply held traditionalism.
Such gestures and attitudes are largely rhetorical. For the politics of
these writers are secondary effects of their thoughts about the tragedy
of culture in modern industrial societies. They are sometimes con-
