PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet I think it won't do to dismiss
this
group and its attitudes with
epithets, however just they be. I even find that I can't
be
wholly or
merely hostile to the culture I describe, although I fear it--one can't
be only hostile
if
one knows the people who make it up and gets
the sense of their seriousness and the legitimacy of many of their
aspirations. In addition, I am forced to admit that it isn't my ideal
of a really good culture that the mass of intelligent people should
devote a large part of their lives to dealing with difficult ideas and
artifacts, and to come to believe that such an activity is-as Matthew
Arnold said of someone's notion of the place of Biblical exegesis in
the life of man-as much a natural function as to eat and copulate.
I believe that the group I · describe is paying less and less lip–
service to contemporary highbrow culture, that it has little regard for
any anterior culture, that it is contriving a culture which
will
not be
middlebrow at all in the sense of having reference, at one remove,
to highbrow culture: it will be an inadequate culture and a
stupid
one, but it will be, at least for a time, satisfying in its inadequacy
and dullness to the people who want it; it will contrive its own
prestige and make the high and exigent culture more irrelevant than
it is now.
If
we can think of highbrow culture as a unitary thing, it
is very doubtful that its response to the cultural group I have described
is a useful one. Its error lies not in its lack of "responsibility," which
is a word that masks the demand for its emasculation, but in its lack
of an aggressive impulse of survival. Some of my other answers may
· suggest what I mean.
3. The revivals you mention don't need a great deal of explana–
tion. They aren't quantitatively very great. Yet they truly e.xpress a
need, even though the need of a small number. The need is for mind
to be applied to human life in its social and personal factuality and
with the particular joy and goodwill of creativeness. People of almost
all cultural groups are agreed that we are living in an extreme, even
in an ultimate, situation; and very likely they are right. They are
agreed too that the best way for literature to. deal with this situation
is to confront the reader with it, and as directly and literally as pos–
sible; and they may be right in their strategy. .But I am inclined to
think that they are promoting the paralysis of fear and hopelessness.
Opposed to this is a residual feeling that one of the ways of preserving
oneself is to take a serious delight in the qualities that presumably
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