Lucy McDiarmid- The Treason of the Clerks:
The modern 'clerk' is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and takes no interest in the passions of the State ... Today the 'clerk' has made himself Minister of War. written with contempt for this figure, this clerk.
--Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (Aldington translation) treason is for the intellectual to be a clerk? to engage the passions of the State?

Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives;
because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
--Auden, 'At the Grave of Henry James'

clerk, soul of a citizen, statesman, political animal, man of the polis, worldly cares. activist.
/vs/ the man who shuts himself up with art or science.

The 'soul of a citizen'- how ardently Benda's contempt comes through even in translation. Yeats had such a 'soul' in the Seanad, speaking on the coinage, or the condition of schools, or fire prevention. Eliot had the same soul in the Criterion, opining on Owsald Mosley, Harold Laski, Parliament, education, public buildings, agriculture, and money. Nothing human was alien to them; no current issue was too remote or too dull. nothing human was alien to Eliot?
Wanting, in Eliot's phrase, to have "some direct social utility," wanting to turn a fragmented group into a community of neighbors Auden, wanting to save civilization ~Yeats, all three poets "betrayed" the intellectuals.
Yet even while making "vigorous use" of these citizens' souls, they did not feel the "contempt" Benda ascribed to them for the inhabitants of the ivory tower. Yeats's poetry is filled with admiration for the person "shut up" in art.
The position of many lyrics in The Tower, The Winding Stair, Last Poems, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Auden's poems of the early forties, is not simply nonactivist, but- like Benda's- anti-activist. These great poems form a response to the more engaged speeches and minor poems, and recant their "treason." treason to engage the passions of the State. the human. the worldy. treason against? ~ art ~ ?

As they confront the limitations and fallibility of art to do what, what were we expecting~hoping that art could do? and we find it limited, we find it fails, the poets define it more positively.
The power of art increases proportionately as the burdens placed on it diminish. and then it does what, what is its power?
As less is demanded of art, as it is burdened with less idealism, and therefore less likely to disappoint and disillusion, it has freer rein to do what it can do, which is to create a model of a saved world, in which, as Auden says, crowds are communities and sins forgiven.1
The work of art, so understood, represents the world that the poet can "save" completely; there, at least, he can create a perfect order that no war, no dictator, no historical change can ever ruin. It embodies a community in which every fragment finds a place; it is the aesthetic equivalent of the twigs bound by the fascia, the discrete, isolated citizens who make up a nation. A verbal League of Nations, it has the qualities that the actual saved civilization was to have had, according to the poets' more activist moments.
Untainted by human imperfection, the work of art is more perfect, and more permanent, than any small circle of friends can ever be. that seems a strange thing to say, ~ the perfection of a poem is what we'd have wanted in a circle of friends?