Conrad and Politics

It is interesting to note, in an age so strenuously political as our own, how few of the really great writers of our time have found much good to say about modern political movements or have been in any way able to identify themselves with any particular political undertaking. Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima, did not disguise his contempt for what he called the ulcer of envy-the greed of a party hanging together only that it might despoil another to its advantage. Lawrence over and over again expressed his distaste for the political movements of his day; he detested both democratic 'individualism' and 'theoretic socialism.' T. S. Eliot, intensely more conscious of the importance of social traditions than Lawrence, deplores a social set-up which he finds worm-eaten with Liberalism, and Yeat's Aristocraticism and his contempt for a world where all things at one common level lie are too well known to need comment. One reason for this almost universal scepticism concerning the politics of our day among writers of this calibre lies in their appreciation of the vast gulf between what might be termed political motivation and the overt manifestations of political faith. As soon as one comes to examine in particularised detail the motive forces which urge men into public life, to spend themselves on the political stage (and it is always the job of the writer to seek the skull beneath the skin), one is inevitably struck by the immense variety of motives clustering behind those vapid formulae which at first sight may yet seem adequate for binding men together into political association. For each individual inevitably injects into the support of particular political doctrines something of his own private ego; and those egos, with their purposes, aims, devotions, selfinterests, masked behind high-sounding talk about peace, prosperity, progress or what have you, are so varied, so complex, so incalculable by mere rational analysis that the bald exposi

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