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PARTISAN REVIEW
The pressure of the environment cramps
art
as it cramps be–
haviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay
for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia
without a guilt-complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for
wanting to make others richer. An armament manufacturer may have
a perfectly clean conscience; but I have never met a pacifist without
a guilty look in his eyes.
Those who attack the intelligentsia for its neurotic dispositions
might as well attack the miners for their susceptibility to T.B. It is
a professional disease and should be recognized as. such, without scorn
or shame.
VI
THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND THE FuTURE
The old, liberal and socialist intelligentsia of the Continent is
no more; though we still fail to realize how thoroughly Nazism
im–
plemented its poet laureate's programme 'When I hear the word
culture I fire my pistol.' A new intelligentsia may be growing under–
ground, a new seed beneath the snow; but in spite of newspaper
articles, intelligence-digests, radio, etc., we know at present as little
about the mental climate of the people beyond the Channel, about
how the past, present and future looks, smells, tastes to them, as we
know about the planet Mars. Samples of literature which reach us
from France do not seem to me very encouraging; but then, I am
perhaps prejudiced against what I believe to be the growing French
intellectual predilection for melodious bombast. Yet in Italy and the
Balkans, in Austria and Norway, a process might already have started
which one day will come into the open as a brand-new movement,
a fresh attitude to life which will make all of us appear like old
Victorian dodderers; and any of us who earn a patronizing pat will
have got all the credit which historically they deserve.
This is all speculation; it is easier to prophesy in terms of decades
than in terrns of years. One may have some ideas as to the historical
curve along which we move; but the oscillations and ripples of the
curve are completely unpredictable.
If,
in the long run, Burnham's
diagnosis comes to be true (as I believe it well may), and if, after
some intermediary oscillations, we are in for an era of managerial
super-states, the intelligentsia is bound to become a special sector in
the Civil Service. This is less farfetched and fantastic than it sounds;
in Russia during the past twenty years this state of affairs has been
realized to a very large extent, and Germany during the last ten years
was on the way to imitate it. Russian publishing houses, theatres,
