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PARTISAN REVIEW
must think of, not the withered roses; and for that it is essential that
we introduce into our thought, to quote Hegel again, "the seriousness,
the suffering, the patience and the labor of the negative." Then we
shall realize soon enough that in reality there is no Chinese Wall
separating the two types of reaction. They share a common secret,
in that the appeal of both is to "miracle, mystery, and authority"–
the three forces that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor found indispens–
able for holding captive the conscience and loyalty of mankind.
The reactionary implications of traditionalism in the social and
political sphere are of course inevitably lost on the majority of its
partisans, who tend to think in highfalutin romantic-literary cate–
gories that fall short of any possibility of application in the real
world. In those circles a high tone is invariably taken toward the dis–
ciplines of the political mind, as if politics, denoting those facts of
power from which there is no longer any escape and by which our
fate is increasingly determined, comprised some inferior form of
reality with which no person of really fine sensibilities would seriously
concern himself.
It is curious, too, that those people, who
in
literature urge upon
us the adoption of a neo-classicist aesthetic to replace the muddle of
Romanticism, should remain so strangely unaware of the extent to
which they are indebted for their leading ideas to Romanticism,
particularly the German brand of Romanticism, with its strivings to
re-enchant the world, its idealisation of Christendom, its nostalgic
remembrance of the feudal-agrarian past, its archaising social at–
titudes generally and the conversion of its chief spokesmen to Catho–
licism. In Novalis' essay
Die Christenheit oder Europa
you will find
most of the generative ideas of traditionalism, expressed with a
beautiful poetic abandon inconceivable in our time, which has
produced texts belonging to the same order of thought, such as
Eliot's
Idea of a Christian Society
and
Notes toward the Definition
of Culture,
that are marked by a painful though futile effort to
achieve precision and relevance.
I may be overstating the case but it seems to me that there is a
connection between the present slump in creative writing and the
ascendancy of traditionalist ideas in this decade. It is a fact
that in the forties writing fell far below the level attained in the
twenties or even in the thirties. And literary discourse has again
