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PARTISAN REVIEW
to understand this, by force and by suffering. Why shouldn't he
suffer? He ought to suffer. Why can't he be used as manure, as
long as he remains evil and stupid?
If
the intellectual must know
the agony of thought, why should he spare others this pain? Why
should he shield those who until now drank, guffawed, gorged them–
selves, cracked inane jokes and found life beautiful?
The intellectual's eyes twinkle with delight at the persecution
of the bourgeois, and of the bourgeois mentality.
It
is a rich reward
for the degradation he felt when he had to be part of the middle
class, and when there seemed to be no way out of its cycle of birth
and death. Now he has moments of sheer intoxication when he sees
the intelligentsia, unaccustomed to rigorously tough thinking, caught
in the snare of the revolution. The peasants, burying hoarded gold
and listening to foreign broadcasts in the hope that a war will save
them from collectivization, certainly have no ally in him. Yet he
is warm-hearted and good; he is a friend of mankind. Not mankind
as it is, but as it
should
be. He is not unlike the inquisitor of the
Middle Ages; but whereas the latter tortured the flesh in the belief
that he was saving the individual soul, the intellectual of the New
Faith is working for the salvation of the human species in general.
His chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself. It is
not merely that he is afraid to arrive at dangerous conclusions.
His is a fear of sterility, of what Marx called the misery of philoso–
phy. I myself am not entirely free of a like fear as I write these
words. Let us admit that a man is no more than an instrument in
an orchestra directed by the muse of History. It is only in this con–
text that the notes he produces have any significance. Otherwise
even his most brilliant solos become simply a highbrow's diversions.
We are not concerned with the question of how one finds the
~urage
to oppose one's self to the majority. It is a much more
poignant question that one poses to one's self: can one write well
outside that one real stream whose vitality springs from its harmony
with historical laws and the dynamics of reality? Rilke's poems
may
be
very good; but if they are good, that means there must have
been some reason for them in his day. Contemplative poems, such
as
his,
could never appear in a popular democracy; not only because
it would be difficult to publish them, but because the writer's im–
pulse to write them would be destroyed at its very root. The ob-
