364
STEPHEN SPENDER
Nostalgia
is
the spiritual sickness of those who identify civiliza–
tion with the past unrelated to the present.
It
is easy then to see why
in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries those English writers
who identified civilization with the European past were the most
nostalgic: forever dreaming of life in the medieval monastry where
religion, literature, scholarship, and a beautiful simplicity were inter–
woven into a pattern of lived ritual; of the knights of the Round
Table; of the Athens of Socrates; of the Florence of Michelangelo;
of the English seventeenth ,century before the period of John Donne
and the supposed "dissociation of sensibility"; of the English village,
the wheelwright's shop, and the "organic community."
To penetrate the European civilization was to embark on a
sacred voyage like that of Odysseus going down into the underworld
to converse with the dead - the journey which Ezra Pound celebrates
in the first of
his
Cantos.
James, Pound, and Eliot, looking at the European civilization
from their side of the Atlantic saw it as having centers in Paris, Lon–
don, and Rome. Comparing it with provincial America, and not
(until the First World War) with its own past, they were far less
inclined than English writers to be nostalgic about it. Looking back
today at this American-European literature it seems to have a heroic
quality, on account of the brave attempt of these writers to state the
past of the tradition as contemporary values confronting the modern
world on its own terms. The characters in Henry James's novels are
central to the life surrounding them. Although they do not speak its
language they speak an invented language of poetry and sophistica–
tion which is as intelligent as that of the world of science. More–
over, these characters, as aristocrats, plutocrats, members of the rul–
ing class, move in the contemporary world of wcaith and politics.
Without
his
inventing a "modernist" style James fortifies the world
of
his
fiction by introducing into his European material his American
characters, who are by no means nostalgic.
From the point of view which I am here considering of writing
about the past civilization without catching the sickness of nostalgia,
the modernism of Pound and Eliot might be seen as an attempt to
smuggle the values of the past onto the modern scene by putting them
into machines of form and idiom which are equipped to deal with the
modern world. The whole past of the tradition
is
present in their
