WRITERS AND POLITICS
375
What is distressing about the reactionaries is not that they were
occasionally betrayed by intoxication with their own ideas and fan–
tasies into supporting dictators who would, given the opportunity,
certainly have disposed very quickly of them, but that in the excess
of their hatred of the present and their love of the past, they developed
a certain cult of inhumanity. One has to ask though-was not their
renaissance vision enormously valuable to us, and could it have
been stated without dramatizing the statuesque figures of a visionary
past against the twittering ghosts of the disintegrated present?
Eliot's political views, like those ,of Yeats, are a defense system
hastily thrown out with the intention of defending a spiritual world
deriving strength from the past, against modern materialism. One
suspects that Eliot was convinced intellectually, as a critic, and not
with his imagination, as a poet, of the necessity of rationalizing
poetic values as politics. Without the example of T. E. Hulme and
without some cheer-leading from Ezra Pound and some satiric push–
ing from Wyndham Lewis, Eliot would scarcely have made those re–
marks about liberalism and progress, which seem casual asides, and
which yet set him up as an authority, defender of the monarchy and the
faith. In his role of political commentator in
The Criterion
he must
have baffled readers who did not realize that his mind was moving
along lines laid down by Charles Maurras. There is also something
cloak-and-dagger about the anti-Semitic passages in the Sweeney poems
which Mr. Harrison inevitably relies on to demonstrate his thesis:
T he smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The
jew
is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.
Of course this was distasteful caricature even when it was written.
In the light of later developments it seems almost criminal. Neverthe–
less what seems wrong about the Sweeney poems is not that they are
reactionary-political but that they use a tawdry view of a conspira–
torial capitalism to construct a rather cardboard background to the
poetry.
That Eliot, Yeats, Pound and Lawrence were all exiles (and
Wyndham Lewis a self-declared outsider-Hthe Enemy") has a bear–
ing on their politics. The exile is particularly apt to dramatize him–
self as a metaphor moving through a world of metaphors. Pound and
Eliot left what they regarded as barbarous America to come to civilized
Europe, where they found, in the First World War:
