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PARTISAN REVIEW
unrest is that we have higher human ambitions for sex than Europe ever
realized; and amid all the desperate experimentation, here and there
one discerns signs of something positive. The trouble, for ourselves and
our novelists, is that the rules have been so radically changed that no–
body seems to know what they are, and most of us have to discover
our own only after considerable anguish and instability.
With all these changes going on, we should not be surprised that
the voice of traditionalism has become so loud in the last decade.
Perhaps there is no clearer sign of the possibilities of a radical break
with the past inherent in our civilization: when change seems too threat–
ening, some people have to protect themselves from becoming giddy by
clinging to the ready-made structures of the past. Hence the coteries
of traditionalist intellectuals now proliferate allover the country, and the
shadow of T. S. Eliot is long upon the land. The traditionalists have
been valuable against some of the shallower aspects of American life,
but they would be more valuable still if their devotion to tradition were
not always a one-sided adherence to tradition already made rather
than one in the process of making itself. Since they cut themselves off
thus from the possibilities of American development, their writings show
progressively less relation to the realities of life in this country. Amer–
ican civilization, in some of its tendencies, may exist in total error;
that is the conviction held here too; but we have to temper this judg–
ment by the memory that every civilization in the past existed in its
own form of falsehood. To sum up: what has happened in America is
that democracy has become, more than a mere political form, a positive
ethos
permeating the whole society, from the bottom up, and therefore
has also come to involve a bold experimentation with life itself and
with the traditional human norms in which the life of the past sought to
contain itself. To avoid historical short-sightedness, we have to remem–
ber that the breakdown in traditional norms we are currently living
through was something brewing for a very long time within European
civilization itself, to become acute in the period 1870 to 1939. All this
suggests that the word "breakdown," though it has such menacing
overtones, may also denote the clearing away of a rigid structure that
was doomed to death anyway. As a civilization, we are in mid-passage;
and what we Americans will
be
like when we have lived through our
tragedy, nobody can predict now.
