TRIALS OF THE MIND
11
The historic process must be conceived on the plane of tragedy.
To regard it as melodrama is to believe that it yields to accident,
cunning, and heroics. On a provisional scale such yielding may occur;
none the less within the final implacable summation the impurities
are dissolved and the interventions repulsed. In acting, man takes
liberties; hut only in recognizing as he acts the tragic nature of the
forces that involve him does he gain freedom. To endeavor to become
the authors of the tragedy of history is utopian-all we can do is
identify ourselves as its characters.
·
Engels transposed Hegel's definition of tragedy as the struggle
between two rights into the statement that it is the struggle between
old and new values. The class war, insofar as it encompasses the
historic process, is essentially tragic. Both sides are right- yet in dif–
ferent ways. One class defends its acquisitions, its "right" not to be
uprooted and destroyed. The other fights for its future, as only
through strife can it realize its metamorphosis into "the human race."
The intellectual, if his values are not to petrify, must join with the
new, and in that very union he will redeem the old.
\Vhat is this new apotheosis of "democratic hope," this artificial
optimism and fraternity of the people's front if not a vain effort to
escape the tragic? Being unreal, it is but the inversion of despair. The
trials in Moscow, staged by the party of fraternity and hope, dis–
closed the mechanism of the inversion; and the intellectual sterility of
the age belies its optimism. In attempting to crawl out from the cave
of national socialism the Stalinist party will discover that peasant
guile is no substitute for those qualities which only the international
action of the class can create. To the liberal, "progressive," and
machine-Communist alike history is an obstruction to be circumvented
rather than the mode and temper of social existence. The petty–
bourgeois makes the happy ending of melodrama his condition for
participating in a tragedy. Such a gross misreading of the text of
historic experience can end only in defeat, and to the defeated, as a
modern poet has written, history
M~ay
say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
