O
times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchantress, to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favored spots alone, but the whole Earth
The beauty wore of promise!
The
inert
Were roused and lively natures rapt away!
Yes, everybody is swept away by the excitement of the promise, the vision of the
good life, the better world; and whoever you are, whatever your skills may be, there is
room for you in the movement of redemption and liberation. You are called upon to exercise
your skill, to help realize the vision — where? In some far off place and time? No, here,
today, now! This was as true in the Nineteen Thirties as of the days of the French
Revolution. Nowhere has this aspect of the twentieth century vision been stated with
greater precision and power than in THE PRELUDE.
Were called upon to exercise their skill
Not in Utopia—subterranean fields—
Or some seculded island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness or not at all.
For between the vision of the Book of Revelations, as interpreted by the Middle Ages,
and the French Revolution — of which the twentieth century revolution is a direct
continuation — a tremendous change had taken place in the minds of men in regard to
history and historic time.
Men are not content to wait milennia for their redemption and liberation through
miracle; they want to work for it here and now and to achieve it step by step not in
eternity alone but first in time.
In our own time, William Butler Yeats wrote a hymn to the vision in his poem about the
Easter uprising of 1916. This was the Irish manifestation of the basic dream with the
changing name, but it was part of the universal dream which roused Mexico in 1910, China
and Turkey in 1912, Russia in 1912, America in the Nineteen Thirties, the dream of a world
so changed that it is better.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
All changed, changed utterly–
A terrible beauty is born.
[Candide bows]
Thank you, gentlemen.
(EXIT CANDIDE. END OF COMEDY)
Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman wrote a poem in which he said that everything
he had ever written had one purport – Freedom; yet freedom eluded his songs.
Freedom is not only the hardest thing in the world to achieve; it is the hardest thing in
the world to write about; for freedom is at once the deepest of human desires and the
greatest of the world’s riddles.
Ours is a world where there is no darkness without light and no light without darkness.
This is the ying and the yang of Chinese thought. Out of the great darkness comes great
light; out of the great light, great darkness, (and out of great darkness again great
light.)
The hopes of the Puritan Revolution are followed by the defeat of that revolution and
the despair which the Restoration brought to lovers of liberty. Milton voiced the hope in
his great pamphlet; the mitigated despair in great Samson Agonistes.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth voices the tremendous hopes roused by the French
Revolution, then the tremendous disappointment, then the refuge in reason, friendship and
love.
The Thirties opened with many American and European writers immensely enthusiastic
about the Russian Revolution, by that time a decade and a half old. Before the Thirties
were over, most of them were disappointed in and many of them were hostile to the Stalin
regime, which they felt had brutally, cynically and with unparalleled cruelty betrayed the
vision, the Good Old Cause, the Great Idea.
In the Thirties Andr? Gide entered Russia an enthusiast and came out an opponent.
Andr? Malraux fought with the Loyalists in Spain and came out an anti-communist. John Dos
Passos was also shocked in Spain and hasn’t gotten over that shock to this day. In the
mid-thirties, many American writers lost their enthusiasm for Russia without losing their
enthusiasm for socialism. These joined Trotsky.
The Moscow Trials and Stalin’s Great Purge in the mid-Thirties and the assassination of
Trotsky in 1940 disillusioned many American writers, yet it is amazing how many remained
among the faithful in spite of the blood.
It was not till the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939 that there was general disillusion and a
general exodus of those intellectuals who in the Thirties had seen Marxism and the USSR as
the twentieth century embodiment of the basic dream with the changing name.
In World War II, Russia became our great and gallant ally and both President Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill paid Stalin the most extravagant compliments; a courtesy which
Stalin, not being bourgeois, failed to return. Under these circumstances new American
writers jumped on the pro-Soviet bandwagon. But the Nineteen Forties were something else
again. Now the vision centered on the war against fascism and many people hoped that after
the foe was defeated, the Allies would usher in a new era of peaceful coexistence and
peaceful construction. Instead we got the Cold War, the battle between East and West, the
threat of global atomic war and, in literature, an outburst of necessary but uninspiring
muckraking in which disillusioned radical writers denounced the Stalinite empire for its
barbarism and for betraying the vision.
In the Fifties came our own Great Persecution and writers lost interest in political
reform. The vision was forgotten or distrusted and freedom was sought in modern art, in
Zen Buddhism, in nothing.
But every night ends and gives way to morning. It’s the ying and the yang. I have a
feeling that we are about to see a new awakening, a new spirit that will flourish in the
Nineteen Sixties.
You are a fortunate generation because you are an uncommitted generation.
Forty years separate us from two key events which have shaped this epoch and its
literature: America’s entry into World War I and the fall of the Winter Palace. It is an
immense distance — the distance between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the novels
of Stendhal and Balzac in 1830, the distance between the election of Lincoln in 1860 and
the re-election of McKinley in 1900.
Forty years is a long, long time and this epoch is now dosed and a new one is about to
begin. The writers of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties are by no means through but the
coming decade will belong to the writers of your generation.
And because you are an uncommitted generation, you are free to begin not only with the
Perennial Vision of man redeemed and liberated, but also with some truths which are
clearer to all of us today than they were to some of us two decades ago.
In the Thirties many of us thought that the source of the problems which plague man is
society. We know better now. The source of the problems which plague man is — man.
Man cannot live without society and society cannot live without man. Man without
society is a solitary savage. Society without man is the collective savage of the
mechanical nightmare we have today.
What YOU, the uncommitted generation, have to find is not an imaginary but an actual,
living, creative inter-relationship, a true dialectic of man and society.
We cannot give you any specific prescriptions for this. Nobody has the one and only key
that opens all doors; nobody has the one and only answer that is valid for all time and
all the world and all the problems of man. We cannot even give you specific answers to the
specific questions you will encounter in the next stage of the human enterprise, which is
yours. We cannot foresee your questions and answers because we cannot foresee your world
any more than you can; and we won’t be there but you will.
That world will evolve out of ours, but it will be uniquely yours. You will have to
advance your heritage and achieve your goals by asking your own questions and finding your
own answers. Better still, you will create your answers and thereby you will create
your world.
And if your questions are right, your answers will be right; and if your answers are
right, your world will be right.
The literary spokesmen of the new spring will be young writers who are now between
twenty and thirty; the writers of your generation. I have a feeling that your generation
will — in new forms appropriate to the second half of the 20th century — bring to
life again the vision, the basic dream with the changing name, the Good Old Cause, the
Great Idea.
You will turn out a new fraternity of what Professor Aaron has felicitously called men
of good hope.
And you will incorporate into your dream what many of us have learned since the
Thirties and will say, after your own fashion, what Saint Clement of Alexandria told the
Greeks in his famous exhortation:
As are men’s wishes, such also are their words,
And as are their words, such also are their deeds,
And as are their deeds, such also is their life.
Good luck and Godspeed!