"democratic dynamism."

A final qualification: as applied to the end of an era, the
word *revolt*, which customarily suggests deliberate attack on the
status quo (the sort that always evokes from vested interests the
camouflage-cry of "radical"), signifies less the conscious, directed
assault that the whole <u>evolutionary process</u> the fundamental <u>decay</u>
and/ reconstruction plus their visible signs--disorder, violence,
convulsions. Long-dominant tendencies have run to an extreme, and
they are checked; the checking forces in their battles and bloodshed
may not know or sense the realities of which they are the instruments.

11

Perhaps the characteristic which most basically defines the
waning period is its individualism.

From Montaigne on we have had a literature devoted to an utterly
independent exploration of mankind--and men; Rousseau reaffirmed,
with new vigor, the quality of the individual against compulsive
forces; as critic, Ste. Beuve undertook to define the uniqueness of
everyone he studied. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century English drama
declined as it lost sight of the individual among the categories
created by a new middle-class consciousness; the English novel
achieved stature as it grasped the potentialities of the individual.
The process becomes most apparent in the Romantic prayer...
"Let me not be as other men,"--and Randall Jarrell has recently de-
scribed modernist poetry as the ultimate outcome of romantic indi-
vidualism. Its "private symbols" are familiar enough. Eventually
such a work as *Ulysses* may come to be evaluated in terms of deca-
dent individualism. The voluminousness of autobiographic fiction
today attests an extreme form of the concern with unique men;
floods of straight autobiography

orient art outside the individual artist (as if overstressed freedom
had led to chaos) appears in a constantly recurrent Aristotelianism;
in the neo-Coleridgean view of literature as a synthesis of the con-
flicting elements of experience; possibly in surrealism, which by the
very eccentricity of its operations may aspire to a similar resolu-
tion, to the presentation of an underlying meaningful unity. Otherwise
it remains frantic individualism, which, in whatever field, invites a
dictator. That these phenomena are good is no doubt endlessly arguable;
what we cannot escape is the common effort to direct or control the
individual artist, to impose a discipline that, rightly or not, has
seemed lacking. And now, says Randall Jarrell, individualists "reach
desperately for any collectivist emphasis."

Our political, economic, and social history has been a record of
cumulative guarantees of the "rights" of individuals, a development
from monarchical and oligarchic forms to constitutionalism, to laissez
faire--which once had meaning--and to expanding democratization and
humanitarianism.

Again, we now find revolutionary alterations--of ends, in some
parts of the world; of means, and all that that implies, elsewhere.
To refer to totalitarian countries is trite: familiar to all are the
contempt for individual life; the complete repression of the individual
in economics, politics, education; thought and art made tonequated
by authority. England's trouble has been due considerably to the
XIXth CENTURY IDEOLOGY, which in its short history