PARTISAN REVIEW
I would honor fully the incomplete artists who must attack.
The obligation seems to them prior to any suggestion of beauty,
and at any rate their immediate and unquestionable obligation. A
rather wretched poem was once the source of a little compendium
of wisdom when it represented the poetic temperament as given to
"the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love." The occasion
which calls for the hate or the scorn is not the occasion which calls
for the love though it would appear that the artist is improving the
occasion. The poet must bear arms; the poet in politics. In a recent
review of the poetry of Bertolt Brecht, Miss Hannah Arendt indi–
cated this poet's conviction that the arts of peace were not for him,
a European who wherever he might be must share the sufferings of
his own people. The warmest public approval must go out to that
position. Then we are told by other writers- probably they are
editorial aestheticians, whose offices are in New York City where
they look out of the windows eastward upon the Atlantic-that the
same position holds good for the American artists too, who must
deny themselves the advantages of their own actual situation as long
as the noise of lamentation is loud on the earth. For my part I should
honor the American artists who govern themselves accordingly. Theirs
is an intense moral sensitivity which, again, the constitution of the
psyche being what it is, must claim priority over the free or aesthetic
sensitivity.
But I think we must honor also those American writers who
as a matter of course fulfill themselves and proceed to some positive
and formally complete art. We have them, and though they are gen–
erally little ones they sometimes are distinguished. Probably they live
in the "regions," the parts of the vast continental area of these United
States (like the politically "backward" South ) , where a normal and
successful life goes on after the local fashion, and there is no com–
pulsive consciousness that these times are only an interim, in which
one enlists in some revolution in order that happiness may be possible
again. They would scarcely be the natives and residents of New York
City where life
is
lived grimly, at least by the literary colony, in the
sight of ruined Europe. These artists may be considered, as they
would consider themselves, to be in their duty too. Otherwise I am
puzzled about the populations of the vast continental area where a
normal life goes on, etc.
A
great many people are there, and evi-
882
