THE AMERICA OF DOS PASSOS
31
exercise this modern way of judgment. The novelist goes where the
law cannot go; he tells the truth where the formulations of even the
subtlest ethical theorist cannot. He turns the moral values inside out
to
question the worth of the deed by looking not at its actual out–
come but at its tone and style. He is subversive of dominant morality
and under his influence we learn to praise what dominant morality
condemns; he reminds us that benevolence may be aggression, that the
highest idealism may corrupt. Finally, he gives us the models of the
examples by which, half-unconsciously, we make our own moral
selves.
Dos Passos does not primarily concern himself with the burly
sinners who inherit the earth. His people are those who sin against
themselves and for him the wages of sin is death-of the spirit. The
whole Dos Passos morality and the typical Dos Passos fate are ex–
pressed in Burns' quatrain:
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
The hazard of concealing;
But, och! it hardens a' within
And petrifies the feeling!
In the trilogy physical death sometimes follows upon this petri–
faction of the feeling ·but only as its completion. Only two people
die without petrifying, Joe
Willia~s
and Daughter, who kept in their
inarticulate way a spark of innocence, generosity and protest. Ideal–
ism
does not prevent the consequences of sinning against oneself and
Mary French with her devotion to the working class and the Com–
munist Party, with her courage and "sacrifice" is quite as dead as
Richard Savage who inherits Wardhouse's mantle, and she is almost
a.s much to blame.
It is this element of blame, of responsibility, that exempts Dos
Passos from Malcolm Cowley's charge of being in some part com–
mitted to the morality of what Cowley calls the Art Novel-the story
of the Poet and the World, the Poet always sensitive and right, the
World always crass and wrong. An important element of Dos Passos'
moral conception is that, although the World does sin against his
characters, the characters themselves are very often as wrong as the
world. There is no need to enter the theological purlieus to estimate
how much responsibility Dos Passos puts upon them and whether
this
is the right amount. Clearly, however, he holds people like Savage,
Fainy McCreary and Eveline Hutchins accountable in some important
part for their own fates and their own ignobility.
The morality of Dos Passos, then, is a romantic morality. Per–
haps this is calling it a bad name; people say they have got tired of a
