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PARTISAN REVIEW
ties, could experiment with everything that man today has within
him of health or monstrousness: with pure intellect, revelling in
the tension of a perfectly adjusted line; with the ferocious trance
of the uncaused act; with the quiverings of mood and memory left
by unmixed paints; with arbitrary disciplines and the catharsis they
produce; with the nonsense of the street and the classics; with the
moody pulps and absolute lyrics of paranoiac dreams.
Because the Modern was often inhuman, modern humanity
could interpret itself in its terms. Because Paris was the opposite
of the national in art, the art of every nation increased through
Paris. No folk lost its integrity there; on the contrary, its artists,
renewed by this magnanimous milieu, discovered in the depths of
themselves what was most alive in the communities from which
they had come. In Paris, American speech found its measure of
poetry and eloquence. Criticism born there achieved an apprecia·
tion of American folk art and music; of the motion-picture tech–
nique of Griffiths; of the designs of New England interiors and of
early Yankee machines; of the sand paintings of the Navajo; the
backyard landscapes of Chicago and the East Side. Ideas spreading
from this center of Europe and the world could teach a native of
St. Louis, T. S. Eliot, how to deplore in European tones the dis–
appearance of a centralized European culture-and a modem
language in which to assault Modernism.
True, the Paris Modern did not represent all the claims of
present-day life. Any more than its "Internationalism" meant the
actual getting together of the peoples of different countries. It was
inverted mental image, this Modern, with all the transitoriness and
freedom from necessity of imagined things. A dream living-in-the·
present and a dream world-citizenship--resting not upon a real
triumph, but upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary into
nothingness in order to shake off what was dead in the real.
A
negation of the negative.
Perhaps the wrenching of Western culture that had produced
this style had been too severe, resulting in a kind of "leftism"
in
the field of thought, an over-defiance of the powers of the past.
Science and theology had crossed boundaries in earlier centuries;
the abstract had shown that it could drop from the skies; but life
itself, manners, ways of speaking, acting, composing images, and
planning the future, had always been imprisoned by the gravitation
