30
PARTISAN REVIEW
the power to choose." These, it would seem, are scarcely the chara
with which the moralist can best work. But here we must judge
only by the moral equipment of
th~
characters (and it is not at •
certain that Mr. Whipple's description is correct: choice of actioni
seldom made as the result of Socratic dialectic) but by the novelist'a
idea of morality-the nature of his judgments and his estimate
II
the power of circumstance.
Dos Passos' morality is concerned not so much with the utility
of an action as with the quality of the person who performs it.
WhM
his people do
is
not so important as
how
they do it, or what
thty
become by doing it. We despise
J.
Ward Morehouse not so much fer
his creation of the labor-relations board, his support of the war,
hi
advertising of patent-medicines, though these are despicable enough;
we despise him rather for the words he uses as he does these thingJ,
for his self-deception, the tone and style he generates. We despise
G.
H. Barrow, the labor-faker, not because he betrays labor; we despie
him because he is mealy-mouthed and talks about "the art of
Jiv.
ing" when he means concupiscence. But we do not despise the
pal–
pable fraud, Doc Bingham, because, though he lies to everyone
eke,
he does not lie to himself.
The moral assumption on which Dos Passos seems to work
Wll
expressed by John Dewey some thirty years ago; 'there are cerWII
moral situations, Dewey says, where we cannot decide between
tht
ends; we are forced to make our moral choice in terms of our prefer·
ence for one kind of character or another: "What sort of an agent,
of a person shall he be? This is the question finally at stake in
any
genuinely moral situation: What shall the agent
be?
What sort
li
character shall he assume? On its face, the question is what he shal
do,
shall he act for this or that end. But the incompatibility of
the
ends forces the issue back into the question-; of the kind of selfhood,
of agency, involved in the respective ends." One can imagine
that
this method of moral decision does not have meaning for all
times
and cultures. Although dilemmas exist in every age, we do not
find
Antigone settling her struggle between family and state by a reference
to the kind of character she wants to be, nor Orestes settling
his
in
that way; and so with the medieval dilemma of wife vs. friend, cr
the family oath of vengeance vs. the feudal oath of allegiance.
But
for our age with its intense self-consciousness and its uncertain moral
codes, the reference to the quality of persouality does have meaning.
and the greater the social flux the more frequent will be the interest
in qualities of character rather than in the rightness of the end.
The modern novel, with its devices for investigating the
quality
of character, is the aesthetic form almost specifically called forth
to
