482
PARTISAN REVIEW
humans into their affairs by perhaps making a mortal the judge of
a beauty contest among their women, and then bribing him, so that
at length he gets
in
trouble and throws his own nation into war. And
so there is a war, which we can now see is really a little part of
the requisitioning, something going on over our heads: a war which,
even though we have pulled it down on ourselves, we seemed not
able to prevent, and the precipitating factor of which, even though
it be of our own making, we suspect is not the real cause.
To dramatize by fantasy the shaking up of a few little earthly
towns on the remote edge of some cosmic doings is not much of a
way to explain the cosmic doings, but it is infinitely better than no
way at all to account for something that would otherwise go forever
unaccounted for.
A story
in
this spirit will be the most appropriate if people be–
lieve that they occupy the whole of the universe and that the earth
is the only place there is. Then the human characters can be indi–
vidual heroes in an aura of fame, their names well known to the
beings on the mountain, who are bound to respect and even to be
a little wary of them. In conflict, though these beings are more power–
ful and always the ones to determine what ultimately happens, man
can still stand up against them with stature and dignity, even foil
them from time to time in little ways if he is clever. And in his defeat
he can still have his defiancc--he can still cut a splendid, tragic
figure on the landscape.
But maybe our visionary lives in a time when everybody knows
that the earth is not the total of creation, and he can no longer talk
to people as though they thought it was. The investigators have pried
and found out what perhaps they did not want to know, that the
whole thing is a violently outflung swirl of sparks and dirt, of which
the earth is one of the tiniest dirt specks, and that man grew out of
the animals inadequately equipped for life upon it. They have found
it out, and slowly everybody, after long resistance, has been told and
become resigned and stopped thinking about it. So our spectator
cannot find it in his heart to represent his angels as splendid-winged
creatures holding council on the earth to its glorification: rather they
are something like a committee of oil men on their way from New
York to San Francisco, stopping over in some drab little western
town to look glumly around and estimate any possible utility. They;
