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PARTISAN REVIEW
economics, on the domestic scene, appear impenetrable, mysterious,
and roughly successful. A revolutionary politics or economics makes
no sense as applied to contemporary America. What does make sense,
in improving our economic and political life, is the liberal virtues:
moderation, compromise, countervailing forces, the vital center, the
mixed economy-plus the usual cynicism.
-Is that what they call the moral intelligence?
-Yes, I should think it is.
-It occurs to me, sir, that "moral intelligence" is redundant.
Don't you agree that no thought is intelligent unless it is moral?
-No, Silverman; remember Bourne's remark about the Nietzs–
chean "war and laughter" of the intelligence. But let me continue.
My point is that the virtues just referred to are those we do
not
want
to invoke in our criticism of the general culture- that large complex
of arts and letters, aesthetic attitudes, manners and morals, public
poses and gestures, opinions, tastes, shared fantasies, humor, slang,
folk tradition-in short, the vital medium in which we live when we
.are doing something more than merely existing. The general culture
has recently been showing anew its nearly fatal tendency, whenever
we let its energy and vitality flag, to collapse into middlebrowism,
compromise, centrality, the middle way. At the present time, these are
not virtues in American culture; they are its bane. They have been
so ever since the smiling father of modern middlebrowism, Howells
-that moderate, vaguely raffish, plausibly genteel man with the
clearing-house brain and the tireless evasiveness and cunning intel–
ligence, who despite his noted receptivity to writers different from
himself, could see nothing in Whitman.
- Isn't that portrait of Howells a bit overdone, Professor?
-I have to admit that it is rather fancy. Howells inspires in
me a perverse poetry. I am thinking of founding a literary society;
the fraternal salutation among the members will be "In the bowels
of Howells." But I see you are looking at your watch, Silverman, and
I know you are a busy man. I will try to be concise in the rest of what
I have to say. The fact we radicals start with is that the kind of criti–
cism that applies to American politics and economics does not .apply
to American culture. This is one of the invigorating contradictions
we live with, in a civilization that defines itself, on the rare occasions
when it has the courage to do so, by its contradictions. Randolph
