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be judged by what it does for the moral perfection, rather than for
the physical easement, of man. For the earthly good of man-the
localizing adjective is important for Mr. Eliot-is moral perfec–
tion; what advances this is politically good, what hinders it is
politically bad.
Now I do not think, with Mr. Eliot, that morality is absolute
but I do believe that his way of considering morality has certain
political advantages over Trotsky's way or the Marxist way in
general.
If
one thing more than another marks the culture of radi–
calism in recent years it is that a consideration of means has taken
a priority over the consideration of ends-or perhaps, to avoid the
chances of a means-and-ends misunderstanding, we might rather
say that immediate ends have become more important than ulti–
mate ends. The radical intellectual of today differs from his politi–
cal ancestor of even twenty-five years ago in the interest he finds
in the immediate method as against the ultimate purpose. And
if
we take a longer period we find an even greater difference. The
preparatory days of revolution-! mean the days from Montaigne
to Rousseau and Diderot-were the days in which men projected
a gre'at character for man. The social imagination, when it was
fresher, gave the worlds of the future a quality which our projected
worlds can no longer have. The French Revolution was advanced
on the warmest considerations of personality-one thinks of Mon·
taigne's Mo:ntaigne, of Rousseau's Rousseau and his Emile, of
Diderot's d'Alembert and his Rameau's nephew. And it is inci–
dentally significant that, after this time, in every nation touched
by the Revolution, the novel should have taken on its intense life.
For what so animated the novel of the nineteenth century was the
passionate-the "revolutionary"-. interest in what man should be.
It was, that is, a moral interest, and the world had the sense of a
future moral revolution. Nowadays the novel, and especially
in
the hands of the radical intellectuals, has become enfeebled and
mechanical: its decline coincides with the increasing indifference
to the question, What should man become?
The heightened tempo of events will go far toward explaining
the change-the speed with which calamity approached, our sense
of the ship sinking and our no doubt natural giving to survival the
precedence over the quality of the life that was to be preserved.
Much of the change can be laid to the account of Marx, for it was
