BOOKS
71
so that in the circles which account Mr. Forsythe the Marxian Swift,
Mr. Hriffault's lack of literary feeling was taken to show that he had
transcended the bourgeois shams. However, most critical opinion resisted
this refreshing notion and continued to maintain that Mr. Briffault's lack
of talent was a pity, not a virtue, but nevertheless felt that it was more
than made up for by great gifts of intelligence and anger. And now the
same judgement is being passed on
Europa's
sequel,
Europa in Limbo.
It proceeds, I believe, from the familiar Angelic Fallacy which concludes
that when a writer is, generally speaking, on the side of the angels-
Mr. Briffault is a well known hater of chaos and injustice-he must for
some reason be admirable and the expressed grounds for his partisanship
sound. In this case the fallacy, though naively generous, can only indicate
that the angelic forces are in a state of desperation or irresponsibility:
nothing else could make them accept Mr. Briffault's authoritarian nihil-
ism as intelligence or his spleen as anger.
What are the objects of Mr. Briffault's mind and emotion? Capital-
ism, of course: but chiefly capitalism as it manifests itself in se~ and
culture. For many reasons sex is a most useful index and symbol of a
society's moral tone; all that matters in its novelistic use is the insight
and proportion with which it is employed. Well, as for insight, Mr.
Briffault writes about sex rather more frankly than the expose articles of
the old Sunday American though with little more perspicuity and with
about the same feeling tone. And as for proportion, sex comprises almost
the whole of the purview of moral action in both novels.
Indeed, it is difficult not to conclude from Mr. Briffault's books that
if we are rightly enlightened about the sadisms of the Russian aristocracy,
the perverse indulgences of well-born ladies and the
cold
promiscuity of
female intellectuals, we have a good half of the knowledge necessary
for understanding the motives of the Revolution and the chaos of
Europe. Of course, the license-and-rape theory of social upheaval-the
belief, for example, that the French Revolution was the action of a
populace tired of its rulers' adulteries and sick of having its women
violated-is well-established and cinematically very sound. But it isn't
exactly serious. The sexual habits of powerful reactionaries are un-
doubtedly very baa (though perhaps not wholly of capitalistic growth:
seethe classics of satire
passim)
but somehow it isn't very serious of Mr.
Briffault to give us European Chaos, the Revolution and the Civil War in
terms of perversity or excess. We remember that he is trying to educate
both his hero and ourselves to revolution. We cannot help wondering
if we ought to go to that great trouble to put off the chains of other
people's unchastity.
This, then, is Mr. Briffault in the realm of moral and political action;
and in the realm of thought he is quite as seminal. His great enemies
are defunct ideas. Under his lash every extinct notion of the 19th century
lies perfectly still. Ruthlessly he banishes our last stubbornly-held il-
lusions about the survival of the fittest, the immutability of human
nature, liberal democracy, the idealistic philosophies of reaction, Fabian
socialism,the aesthetics of Ruskin.
Supererogation, though dull, is not dangerous. However, as we fol-
lowMr. Briffault leading his Julian Bern through the education of pre-
war Europe and now, in the new novel, through Europe in conflict, the
feeling forces itself upon us that it is not so much capitalism, as Mr.
