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to enter on the threshold of modern history, but are still unable to
make their own authentic history. They have been led into a revolu–
tion but have yet to make their own revolution. They do not stand
outside of history like the feudal serf, they are a principal force in
modern history, but only as the inert passive masses to be manipulated
by dictators in culture as well as by dictators in politics.
A return to an earlier stage when a settled traditional class em–
bodied an aristocracy of culture has been advocated by some prominent
literary men like Eliot and Tate, and it is strongly hinted at by Black–
mur. Such a return might actually occur in the event of a general
smash-up of modern society and technology; but to espouse it as a
deliberate social and political program is thoroughly naive, since one
lesson from history we cannot afford to forget
is
precisely that the
return to a former social structure is never a return to the highest level
produced by that structure, but to a level very much lower, and being
inevitably the accompaniment of a process of major historic dissolu–
tion, it is more than likely to sink to the lowest level, close to barbarism
-like Italy after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. There is no
recourse but that, living through the interregnum, we continue the
Resistance grimly, patiently, with all the strength we have, toward
the only possible liberating condition into which the present might
open: when society has reached such a level as to permit the masses
to become authentically human.
What happens meanwhile to the · avant-garde while these
processes of bureaucratization and cultural exploitation are overrun–
ning the whole terrain of the national consciousness like an army of
tanks?
It
is driven further afield, into a more remote corner of Amer–
ican life: the academic cloister.
The Southern Review
reflected thus
an enormous change beyond the metropolitan and bohemian reviews
of the 'teens and twenties. The connection with the university seems
to promise more security for editors and writers, as well as to minimize
the element of half-baked bohemianism, but it also brings with it new
and considerable dangers. The American university, for one thing,
is very corrupt and in a very uncertain relation to American life. The
writer, remaining outside the university, may have a better chance to
operate some leaven in the life of the university, than, attached to
the university, to have any influence upon American life itself.
The
Southern Review
in its last years offered considerable evidence to sup–
port this; consider the proportion of contributions in that period
which were thoroughly scholastic dissections of Eliot, the late Yeats,
