PARTISAN REVIEW
365
writing, but in order to get there it has to prove that it has some
stinging relevance to the modern scene, that it is not just there in
order to indulge poet and reader in nostalgic dreaming. But at the
same time while the past retains its pastness, it does not go through
that abstractifying process of so much modern critical writing, which
consists of translating a past concreteness into a contemporary concept.
Nevertheless, the view of James and Pound and Eliot was that
the values of civilization were those of the past. Their writing and
criticism was a very up-to-date defense system of those values by
modernizing them while retaining their historic integrity and without
dissolving them into the ternlS of the present. But their social at–
titudes showed that despite the modernism of their style, to them
civilization represented the past values which had to be defended: the
literary modernism was merely a sophisticated system of defense.
Just as much as the nostalgic English writers, they saw Europe as
divided into the forces of the past that made for civilization and
those of the present that were against it. Their literature depended
upon their maintaining those past values. All they hoped of the fun–
damentally alien modern world was that somehow it might be per–
suaded into employing its modern techniques for defending the past.
The economic and political power of contemporary Europe was
justified in their eyes only by its innate conservatism, its resistance to
the modern, its hierarchic social institutions which, in their own in–
terest, defended anachronisms. Henry James and Edith Wharton
saw the First World War simply as a conflict between civilization
(primarily the French tradition) and German barbarism. Eliot, after
the war, identified the collapse of the traditional civilization with
that of the whole society. Pound fell into the tragic error of support–
ing Fascism because he thought that Mussolini wished, in his eco–
nomic planning, to return to a phase of the European economy which
preceded the introduction of the system of usury. The poetry which
could go back several centuries, take up a theme of some Provenc;al
troubadour, and turn it into a modern poem became in his mind an
analogue for what Mussolini was doing with the social system.
The failure of members of the American "lost generation" in
the 1920s to get away from what they regarded as the barbarism of
their country into the past of the European civilization, indicates
that the past, considered as traditions of the lives of the dead which
