304
PARTISAN REVIEW
its death many times in the
pa~t,
so he has now the power- if he but
musters
his
intelligence and his will-to create it imperfectly again out
of the needs and desires, the energies and abilities, the institutions and
the individuals, the good conflicting with the evil, of existing human
life: the only materials man has ever had, his skill and wisdom, his
fumbling and folly, in handling which, makes the whole sum of what
he has been able to transmit: the human tradition.
We are it seems to me at a beginning time in the history of
cultures and are more disturbed, because we know more about it,
by the distress of what
is
ending, than by the stress of what is begin–
ning, of which we know only that it is tearing us-us, not the dead
past-to pieces with an intensity and a spread of energy of which,
with each fresh outburst from the French Revolution to the present
revolution, we have successively thought ourselves incapable. The
long Christian revolution aimed at the unification of Europe, and
by implication of the world, by the force of a universal church. The
present urban and technical revolution is one stage in a grand revo–
lution which aims at the unification of the world-- and by its impli–
cation the individual and his free communities-under the common
beliefs of a single society. The beliefs have found so far only partial
articulations, and the contradictions between them have not been
composed into an order nor envisaged as a unity capable of rligcsting
compatible disorders, tolerating incompatible disorders, or making
room for fresh disorders as they appear.
Eliot seems to desire to articulate these common beliefs, whatever
they may be, in Christian terms and
is
led to dejection and an ill
spirit, because, by applying his terms, he has missed a large part of
the values by which he himself, and all the rest of us, actually exist.
I do not know that the effort to discover and unite by secular means
the common beliefs of the actual world will succeed; certainy it will
not succeed permanently or completely; perhaps what Plato called a
noble lie will have to be told before it succeeds at all; but I do know
that Eliot's kind of effort is impossible for many and sterile for most
of the people who will have to make whatever effort
is
made; and I
know that for some of us only a secular effort
is
possible to partici–
pate in, for only that effort requires of us that we muster all our will
and all our intelligence towards the mastery of experience: which is
the human tradition.
