446
PARTISAN REVIEW
Of course, the "practical" is never of use in large matters,
nor ever practical in a time of crisis.
To the "practical man" thought is a matter of taste. Some
people enjoy Hegel, Shakespeare, Bach, Cezanne, scientific analy–
sis, historical accuracy-others prefer mystery stories. It is all a
question of how one spends his spare time; for "doing," these
differences are irrelevant. Molotoff, with his "Fascism is a matter
of taste," has simply given a limited formulation of the attitude
taken by his type towards
all
ideas.
To defend Paris, men and slogans long discredited were
restored to power. The Communists claimed the "Marseillaise" as
their own, and former surrealist poets acclaimed Romain Rolland.
In this milieu, inquiry soon became not merely a matter of
taste but of bad taste. Another blow by Fascist "radicalism," and
it became treachery, the Fifth Column.
Meanwhile, modern formulae perfected by both Paris and
Moscow in the hour of their inspiration, and now discarded, had
been eagerly seized upon by Germany, and adapted to its peculiar
aims. In that country, politics became a "pure (i.e. inhuman)
art," independent of everything but the laws of its medium. The
subject matter of this
"avant-garde"
politics was, like ·that of earlier
art movements of Paris, the weakness, meanness, incoherence, and
intoxication of modern man. Against this advanced technique,
which in itself
has
nothing to do with revolutionary change,
the
academic Paris of the 1930's was helpless.
Germany became the only country. in Europe where thinking
continued on the plane of Modernist analysis. Thomas Mann
declared that he saw
th~re
a movement representing the same
"forces of darkness" that had animated the "expressionists" and
other Modernist experimentors. (Mann, the symbolist, overlooked
the tremendous material difference between an image in verse or
on canvas and a similar image in actual life, between a Picasso
cubist portrait of a woman and a female torso chopped to bits by
a "cubist" murderer. Thus once more it was shown that he who
confuses art and action stands on the verge of crime-or of false
criticism.)
In Germany, Bohemian spiritual negation had been armed
with a scientific method based upon the techniques of subjugation
employed in all modern class States. With increasing skill, the
