752
PARTISAN REVIEW
ture has been fonned together with a religion of partial truth, may live
that religion (at some period in its history, at least) with greater fidelity
than another people which has a truer light." And there seem to be
circumstances, though he does not define them, under which Eliot would
be willing to support political or ecclesiastical acts which would lead
to a deterioration of culture.
Nevertheless, despite all that can be said in criticism of the obscurities,
obscurantism and tautology of these essays, it is good that they were
published. They ought to awaken in the colleges and quarterly reviews
most under Eliot's influence a sense of the total American culture, a
qualitative sense of the popular arts in their relation to politics and
the American way of life. They ought to give the academic mind an un–
comfortable sense that a verbal analysis of a poem by Marvell cannot
be ultimately separated from whatever may be on the radio at the mo–
ment. Because of Eliot's prestige these essays ought to stimulate a general
discussion of what cultural responsibility in a democracy really means.
A number of reviewers, seeing how thoroughly reactionary these essays
appeared, how they recalled the tradition of de Maistre, de Bonald,
Burke and Comte, devoted their reviews to congratulating themselves on
having so much more confidence than Mr. Eliot in human progress, in–
dividual creativity and the prospects of a democratic culture. But they
spoke as abstractly as Eliot, and with rather less ground. For democratic
liberalism has no theory of culture as Marxism has, of cultural changes
and developments and their causes. And no doctrine of the independent
reality of the beautiful as Thomism has. It certainly cannot, with any
exact knowledge of American public schools and the mass cultural m.::–
dia, base its optimism on the observation that in a free capitalist society
the artistically good will triumph automatically over the artistically bad.
And if it looks forward to a socialist society in which cultural vulgarity
cannot be exploited for profit, it makes no effort to imagine how in that
society such practical matters as the official allotment of printing privi–
leges could conceivably permit the spontaneity of an avant-garde or
heretical art. Nor do the trade unions or left democratic political groups
show, as Eliot does, any interest in preserving the kind of pluralistic so–
ciety of comparatively autonomous associations and foundations and
educational corporations which made it possible for men like Abelard
and Rabelais and Erasmus
to
function under an earlier authoritarianism.
In the Soviet Union, where a privileged elite able to extend advantages
to its families seems already in existence, the political dictatorship over
culture is ruthlessly destructive, but the abstract jargon, the lack of any
real feeling for the past, in our own New School theorists of education
