148
PARTISAN REVIEW
with any class, but equally cut off from organic relation to the whole
of society, and eventually expires. We have to consider whether the
modem world is hostile not merely to any particular and antiquated
form of culture, but to culture
in
any form. And that does. not mean
hostile to the satisfactions of a limited number of persons in any
nation, but hostile to the proper development of the nations them–
selves.
II
If
a conflict between modem civilization and true culture exists,
this is not a merely political malady, and is therefore beyond a merely
political cure. Indeed, both nationalism and internationalism, the one
by applying unnatural methods, for extraneous purposes, to the forc–
ing of local culture, and the other by attempting to ignore local differ–
ences of soil and climate, can do more harm than good. An artificial
centralization is reacted against by an equally artificial regionalism.
With the motives for cultural regionalism, including the preservation
of existing languages, one cannot but have warm sympathy. For the
expression of imaginative reality, for the truths of poetry and of
religion, a man is best equipped when he uses the language of
his
ancestors, shaped by a particular racial sem;ibility and capable of
conveying the messages of the inherited imagination: science and
commerce would find one common abstract medium of communica–
tion more convenient, and the prestige of the languages of a few
dominant peoples has therefore been exaggerated by an age of science
and commerce-though without nourishing the imaginative resources
of these languages. It is true that in the past the combination of racial
strains and of different linguistic elements, and the supersession of
various dialect'> by one standard speech, have made most important
contributions to culture: but it is of the present that I am speaking.
. The effects of an industrial civilization have combined to deprive
the mass of humanity of its native culture: a culture which, with
laborious inefficiency or in spasms of alarm, we endeavor to supply
by education and enlightenment. The assemblage of masses of men
in large centers for mechanical occupations, the mobility of labor
(a mobility which labor instinctively resists), the separation of work
and play, tend to destroy culture at the root. These are commonplaces
of observation from which people proceed to make recommendations:
but in'3tead of proposing cures which may be only palliatives, we have
first to understand what culture is, what are its relations to the funda–
mentals of religion and the departments of human activity, and what
has happened to it. Only thus can we break down the two alternative,
