32
PARTISAN REVIEW
morality concerned with individuals "saving" themselves and "real–
izing" themselves. Conceivably only Dos Passos' aggressive contem–
poraneity has kept them from seeing how very similar
is
his morality
to, say, Browning's-the moment to be snatched, the crucial choice to
be made, and if it
is
made on the wrong (the safe) side, the loss
of human quality, so that instead of a man we have a Success and
instead of two lovers a Statue and a Bust in the public square. But
too insistent a cry against the importance of the individual quality
is a sick cry- as sick as the cry of "Something to live for" as a
motivation of political choice. Among members of a party the con–
siderations of solidarity, discipline and expedience are claimed to
replace all others and moral judgment is left to history; among liberals,
the idea of social determination, on no good ground, appears tacitly
to exclude the moral concern: witness the nearly complete con–
spiracy of silence or misinterpretation that greeted Silone's
Bread and
Wine,
which said not a great deal .more than that personal and moral
- and eventually political- problems were not settled by membership
in a revolutionary party. It is not at all certain that it is political
wisdom to ignore what so much concerns the novelist. In the long
run
is
not the political choice fundamentally a choice of personal
quality?
