from the vulgar materialists whom he despised as much as he
hated the idealists against whom he aimed them. There are
contradictions in Marx-great
prophet, great historical phi-
losopher, great economist, but too harried a man to be a
complete logician. Often on the same page with an unsur-
passed word about man's primal unity, in thought and d·eed,
with the dynamic principle of all life, one will find uncritical
implications of dualism, echoed phrases from the eighteenth
century materialists whom he rejected, implicit denials of
the validity and primacy of man's intuitive organic sense-
all of which betray the premise of the Marxist dialectic.
These flaws in his work have been stressed as virtues in our
Western world by sterile men to whom a dogmatic reduction
of life to the report of the five-senses offers comfort; and it
has been a blight upon our revolutionary growth.
I have no time, nor need, to expatiate upon the symptoms
of this blight. The course of socialism in nineteenth and
twentieth century Germany,
France, England, America, is
full of them. Witness the degradation, one might almost say
the disappearance, of the
true person
from revolutionary let-
ters as the individual is shrunk from an organic integer of
C05mos to a mere quantitative factor of the collective mass,
possessing no inwardness--in consequence of which the human
mass likewise becomes denatured. Witness the simplification
of the human being to a passive product of environment-a
fallacy which any man who has ever planted a carrot seed
next to a pea in a garden knows enough to laugh at. And
the failure, in judging the course, both hideous and heroic,
of contemporary events, to allow, in some adequate modern
term, for what our fathers fancifully called the demonic and
the angelic aspects of human nature. Witness the degradation
of literature from heing. an integral part of life's creative
process to a mere reflection of events falsely conceived as
"objective" or to a mere instrument for some surface action.
Witness, in such poor thought as this,· the decay of logic and
the decay of metaphysics. Witness, above all, the dangerous
failure to distinguish between the true essence of religion-
its .creative role in human culture-its
major role, indeed,
in the genesis of SOCialism, and religion's outworn theological
and class superstructures.
All such systems indicate the contempt for human life and
destiny which comes when man is cut off from his primitive
participation in the cosmos without finding a conscious syn-
thesis (the task of the writers!) to replace it: all, regnant in
the vulgar revolutionary thought of Western Europe and
America, strike at the very heart of' revolutionary meaning.
In agricultural lands, such as Russia, China, great sections
of America Hispana, the folk have not lost that immediate
integration with life, through soil and self, which is the or-
ganic sense in its first phase. The revolutionary doctrines of
the West, even with their present limitations,
tend to free
these peoples from the imposed dualism of their pricstcraft,
to discipline them for technical advance against the cloudy
helplessness in which their misery has mired them, and to re-
lease their instinctive monism so that it should flow with
ease into the organic view and form of a communist order.
This procedure is particularly plain in the Soviet Union
where, despite an orthodox terminology which frequently
sounds mechanistic or even traditionally dogmatic the true
16
foundations of organic Marxism are understood and are
being passionately enacted by the people.
In our industrialised countries,
the case is different.
Science, prostituted and misapplied, has for a hundred years
ploughed down the primitive monistic intuitions of the mas-
ses: the same vulgar empiricism which attaints our literature
flouts its obscene excesses in every penny paper, every school,
every church. The stress on the "environmental," the "be-
havioristic," the "economic" man, the failure to appeal, in
revolutionary terms, to
the whole man,
stimulates the me-
chanolatry to which we are already enslaved; dims further
our enfeebled sense of wholeness from which alone fertility
and power issue; and threatens our whole birth-period with
disaster.
I do not deny the economic-political causes of fascism. But
only psychological and cultural factors in all the people can
explain its spread. Among these factors, preeminently in Ger-
many, was the failure of both great revolutionary parties to
lead forward into fresh forms of loyalty and action those
primordial intuitive energies of man which, balked of their
future, flow back into the rotted channels of Church, State,
race, devotion to a Fuehrer mouthing decayed loyalties--
there, of course, to be exploited by the sinister highpriests of
Money.
I do not mean that the revolutionary cause in its present
form fails to enlist the heroic loyalties of numbers of men
and women. The concentration camps of Hitler give the lie
to such a statement, as does every industrial struggle of the
world from the Saar to California, where you will find them:
the young crusaders for Man, the geniuses of social vision,
clear-eyed, quiet of soul. These are the gifted vanguard who,
of their own lyric health, absorb and express what is deeply
organic in the revolutionary movement. But the world cause
cannot rely exclusively on heroes or on the natural poets of
action. Its Word must be such as to fire also the more
cautious, the more conservatively rooted. And the more sub-
jectively sensitive must also be entrained, those hosts of men
and women'
(teachers,
poets, mothers, subtle and humble
craftsmen) whose religious and esthetic instincts are balked
by the anti-religious and anti-esthetic conventions of most
Marxists.
For each youth who is driven into the Fascist
ranks becayse he finds it easy to adore his own petty ego
magnified in a Fuehrer or a Duce, there are a score of men
and women too decent and intelligent to be tempted by these
obtcene gestures, who yet remain unmoved while the world
cries for them, because the orthodox appeal for revolution
seems
to deny those very depths of man, secret and creative,
whence their revolutionary will and energy must issue.
The N ew World of which the old world is in travail is
like an embryon. Until it be whole, it cannot be born. What
intimate
knowing
moves the embryon, long after its organs
and muscles are complete? This knowing of completeness is
the final phase of completion. When it is there, and not be-.
fore, the being issues forth; a new life breathes .••.
I some-
times feel that all the organs, the limbs, the brain and nerv-
ous system, of the New World exist. They are the laws of
science, the methods of production and communication,
the
treasures of literature,
art, religious wisdom; and, embody-
ing these, the mass of workers possessed of the will and the
FEBRUARY,
1936
