PARTISAN REVIEW
according to any pattern of its choice, submits itself to trial
Against this experiment is opposed, not conservatism, but
the
slowly growing creative consciousness of the people of the world
-the Modernism of the carriers of human values against
the
Modernism of individual will to power.
No one can predict which city or nation will be the center
of
this new phase. For it is not by its own genius alone that a capital
of culture arises. Currents flowing throughout the world lifted
Paris above the countryside that surrounds it, and kept it suspended
like a magic island. And its decline, too, was the result, not
of
some inner weakness-not of "sensuality" or "softness," as its
former friends and the present enemies of the people declare-but
of a general ebb. For a decade, the whole of civilization has
been
sinking down, lowering Paris steadily towards the soil of France.
Until its restoration as the capital of a nation was completed by
the tanks of the Germans.
