PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of experiences of Stalinism in power, that so few of the official
leaders in Europe and America have been able to understand its
inner meaning. Their minds, their structure of values, have been
formed by the tradition of Western civilizaiton, that is to say, the
civilization which has its origin in western Europe and in Christianity.
They confront a cultural force which is almost, in Kant's sense,
"transcendental": which is beyond the limits of the categories of
their understanding. In the language of Arnold Toynbee, whose ideas
have had such a remarkable influence in America during the past
year, Europe and the West are now facing an ultimate challenge.
Is it still possible for the West, for Europe, to make a creative response
to the challenge? Or is Europe, as a historical reality, already dead?
Before answering this question, however, we must first know what
"Europe" itself is. What are we to mean by "Europe"?
Malraux:
Perhaps it is less easy than one would think to talk
of Europe.
Let us examine, first, the cultural problem. For the great French
intellectuals, such as Andre Gide and Roger Martin du Gard, of
the generation which considerably preceded my own, Europe con–
sisted essentially of a collection of democratic countries.
If
they had
tried to be accurate about it, Europe would have been reduced to a
curious federation of the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, France,
and England.
As
for Spain and Italy, they were part of Europe, to
be sure, but of a secondary zone while they were under fascist gov–
ernments.
As
for Germany, you are quite aware to what degree
western Europe has always seen in that nation a contrast between
something fundamentally European and the eternal influence of
the East:
Until the Nazi conquests, there was never any question whether
England was actually a part of Europe.
If
we leave the cultural
for the psychological plane, we notice that up to the twentieth cen–
tury there have been only two countries of moralists: France and
England. Take as an example the attitude expressed in European
literature toward women. In all countries of Europe there are splendid,
romantic feminine figures. A few of the women in German litera–
ture, and incontestably all the women in Tolstoy, are at least equal,
in the sensitivity with which they are drawn, to the most convincing
418
