WRITERS AND POLITICS
379
Here the imagination which can give the "perfect picture of dis–
integration" is dramatized as posing the question to which the intellect
gives the answer-the wrong answer, according to Cornford, but even
he, the convinced Communist undergraduate about to go to Spain, cares
more that the question should have been posed than that the answer
should be "correct," for the question suggests what was to
him
the
"correct" answer.
What was common to modern poets between 1910 and 1930
was their condemnation of a society which they saw as the disintegra–
tion of civilization. Given this agreed on line, it was possible to be on
the reactionary or the s,ocialist side of it. The reactionaries, on their
side asked: "What of the past can be saved?" The socialists, on their
side, asked: "How can there be new life?" The awesome achievement
of the earlier generation was to have created for their contemporaries a
vision of the whole past tradition which had a poignant immediacy:
giving shattered contemporary civilization consciousness of its own past
greatness, like the legendary glimpse of every act of his life in the eyes
of a man drowning. Without the awareness of drowning, of the end
of the long game, the apprehended moment could not have been so
vivid. Thus the gloomy prophecies of the future, and the consequent
weakness for reactionary politics, were the dark side of an intensely
burning vision.
The liberals, the progressives, the anti-Fascists could not invest
their future with a vision of the values of present civilization as great as
the reactionaries' vision of past values. Perhaps though they agreed with
the reactionaries that the genius of our civilization which had flickered
on since the Renaissance was soon to be extinguished. E. M. Forster,
whose work stands midway between the idea of past and present, sees
the greatness of England and Europe as over. The past commands his
love, though the causes which should ultimately make people better
off-freedom of the peoples of the world from the old imperialisms,
greater social justice, etc.-command his loyalty. But his loyalty in–
spires him with little love, and he has no enthusiasm for the liberated
materially better world which he felt bound to support.
The anti-Fascists in the end accepted or were influenced by
the idea that the struggle for the future meant abandoning nostalgia
for a past civilization. They had now to emphasize "new life," a new
culture not obsessed with the past. Julian Bell and John Cornford came
to feel that in putting the cause before everything they must be pre–
pared even to jettison their own poetry. And they found themselves
quite glad to do so. In 1932, when he started becoming interested in
