10
PARTISAN REVIEW
official public opinion. But, unlike the old, the new gentility is
not based on a growing economy and a rising civilization; it is
based on a downward-curving economy and an exhausted civiliza–
tion-hence its real content is fear and hypocrisy, not puritanism,
provincial manners, and hard work. There is also coming into
being, side by side with the new gentility, a new literature of his–
torical conjuring with ghosts, a literature in which, as in Elmer
Rice's play,
American Landscape,
and in other recent plays,
poetry, and stories, the renowned dead of the Republic are im–
plored to teach the quick how to live, what to do.
And what is this new nationalism, this bombast about the
"American way of life/' this so-called "rediscovery of our demo–
cratic past" if not the second childhood of bourgeois progress,
if not a futile effort to solve the problems of today with the
solutions of yesterday? When the revolutionaries of 1789 draped
themselves in the ,togas of the heroes of the Roman Republic,
they were manifesting symptoms of childhood, which loves
imitation; when our social-patriots of 1939, however, dress up
in the costumes of the heroes of 1776, they are manifesting
symptoms, not of childhood, but of senility. The fact is that
nationalism, whether invoked by Roosevelt, Hitler, or Stalin, has
long ago become the shield and property of the dominant
classes; and our democratic order, whose liberties are sharply
limited to politics alone, cannot simply be conserved as it stands.
Either it will be changed by revolutionary methods into a socialist
democracy or the fascists will take care to "reform" it from the
right.
We are now entering an epoch in which thought images his–
tory in the reverse. Its most voluble oracles, in art and in politics
alike, have forgotten or are unable to learn that the grand and vital
truths of the past are often transformed into the
superstitio~
into
the lemures and vampires of the present.
3.
To speak of modem literature is to speak of that peculiar
social grouping, the intelligentsia, to whom it belongs. The intelli·
gentsia, too, is a modem product, created by the drastic division of
labor that prevails under capitalism. Restricted to the realm of
