PARTISAN REVIEW
in its purity: the Present. The Present which preceding centuries had
sometimes conceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and
sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He had only a
confused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour
which he was living was unique and that it was his, that
it
was in
no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since
they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his
chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered
the combat he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the,
society of the future as a short-term enterprise, one of immediate effi–
cacy.
It
was
this
institution that had to be denounced and right now,
that
superstition that had to be destroyed immediately,
that
particular
injustice that had to be rectified. This impassioned sense of the present
saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating
the eternal ideas of Freedom or Equality. For the first time since
the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against
an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short,
decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market
place, at the tribunal, and that there was no turning away from
the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to
it incessantly and ·to go on beyond it in each particular circum–
stance....
Thus, the overthrow of
his
public and the crisis of the European
consciousness had invested the writer with a new function. He con–
ceived literature to be the permanent practice of magnanimity. He
still submitted to the strict and severe control of his peers, but below
him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting,
a more feminine, undifferentiated kind of desire which would free
him from their censorship. He had disincarnated the spiritual and
had separated his cause from that of a dying ideology; his books
were free appeals to the freedom of
his
readers.
544
