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PARTISAN REVIEW
satisfying minimal needs. Flamboyant and rhetorical tastes, which
produced the most beautiful architecture of the past, appear anti–
social in a time when governments are conscious of the limited uses
to which they can put their limited stocks of building labor and ma–
terials. The dynamic need for self-expression which made the nine–
teenth century flourish despite all the flaws of its judgment, is dwarfed
by the enormously exposed public wounds of whole nations in our
time which must be healed before anything else is attended to. Thus
personalities and causes are made insignificant by the perception of
necessity. Overnight the struggle between the propertied and the poor
classes in several countries of Europe disappeared when it became
evident that everyone in those countries was almost equally dependent
on aid coming from America. Ironically, the triumph of Russian com–
munism has occurred just at the moment when communist revolu–
tions are less than ever in a position to solve the problems of countries,
and thus communists themselves have abandoned the idea of the
proletarian revolution.for that of a struggle of power between power–
ful, realistic interests, some of them formerly conservative, some of
them formerly revolutionary.
In this world of necessity, there is danger of the individual who
clings to personal values becoming as cynical and apathetic as many
individuals under fascism. The definition of scruples, free choice,
opinion, differentiation, is tending to disappear from the picture of
the postwar world. Whether for or against the interests of the future
of humanity, arrangements are being made and will continue to be
made which will inflict injustice and misery on whole populations
and involve a painful sacrifice of principles in the minds of every
fair-minded spectator. Recent events in Poland, and also in Greece,
are examples of a situation which is likely to repeat itself many times
after the war, in which fair-minded people will have to say, with the
emphasis of a new kind of patience:
Be still, be still,
my
soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.
All these terrible injustices will have to be measured against the
necessary changes in Europe. Moreover, physically, the new world
we build cannot be a beautiful one. Prefabricated or temporary or
steel houses on emergency sites, standardization, the most rigid econ–
omies in materials-there is no functionalist who would dare suggest
that cities rebuilt under these conditions will look beautiful. All that
can be said is that it is necessary to provide houses for as many people
