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STEPHEN SPENDER
into a contemporary debate. All pasts are converted into chemical
nutritious matter for the devouring appetite for the present. Existing
always within the present moment and without resort to a past out–
side it from which the present can be viewed, the civilization forms a
whole of diverse infighting forces of energy and inertia which never–
theless are one in being brought together within the unity of the
present. This struggle which is of the very nature of American civiliza–
tion becomes conscious in the work of writers and artists who give
expression to everything that happens in America
now.
Until quite recently (when this has perhaps become impossible )
European civilization meant the extension into the present of the
continuity of the past tradition. The identification of civilization with
the past of the tradition surviving into the present, had two main
results in Europe. The first was that contemporary life was seen by
many poets and critics as consisting of two worlds on different levels
of time, and though mutually antagonistic, not really related: one
of the past, the other of the present. The past, whose survival was
affirmed in traditions, unspoiled nature, cultural monuments, and the
social hierarchy, was a world less abstract, impersonal, and distracted
than the modem one and therefore felt by its devotees to be realer,
more concrete, in the whole history of human experience, more alive.
It represented values which were those of religion, of man, of nature,
of art, values which were not those of perpetual self-transformation of
machinery into other machinery, those of Progress.
But, secondly, this insistence on the past as the goal of civiliza–
tion meant that, given the circumstances, it was a receding goal, mov–
ing backwards, against the contemporary world which was advanc–
ing (progressing) with ever-increasing rapidity. Thus to those who
sought the receding goal of the diminishing past civilization, the
modem was the world which moved in the opposite direction to the
civilized. It was, in fact, anticivilization.
If
civilization implied, as
Matthew Arnold thought it did , the Platonic idea of "very and
true life" then the modem world implied the opposite. What it called
progress meant regress, what is called values, the lack of them, what
it called life, death:
We are the hollow men,
Weare the stuffed men.
