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PARTISAN REVIEW
all-embracing philosophy and to the principle that literature must
serve as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas-that such a movement
would have been able to grasp .the effects of our social experience
on our national mythology in more significant terms than the sim–
ple rites of awakening and conversion. As it was, radical novelists
in this country took the short cut to integration by substituting data
for values and the specious unity of the narrative for the interplay
of historical meanings. Sharing the general aversion and distrust
of ideological fiction, they failed to create a single intellectual
character--either revolutionary or ·conservative--thus depriving
themselves of their very medium of understanding, for it is only
through the consciousness of such a character that it is possible, it
seems to me, to depict the modulations and tensions of belief that
make up the political movement.
If
any one figure can be said to be a symbol of our entire
culture, it is Henry Adams, whose active life covered almost the
entire phase of our modem development and whose work sounded
its principal themes. In its spiritual baffiements, its peculiarly
native mixture of materialism and religious feeling, its desperate
search for some central tradition, his
Education
reads like a diary
of our speculative conscience. A product of the New England mind,
he was soon cast adrift by what he called the "multiplicity" of the
world-his repeated 'use of the word suggests a morbid fondness
for it-and he began his life-long probe into
hist~ry
for some prin–
ciple of unity, some contemporary· equivalent of the ideal unity he
believed to have existed in the thirteenth century. In a measure,
he thought he discovered this principle in a dynamic law of his–
tory, but it served only to confirm his dilemma, for the law merely
proved all over again the increasing complexity and disintegration
of society; and, besides, his experimental bent led him to distrust
theoretical constructions because they tend to "falsify the facts."
He turned to science. But he could not overcome his feeling that
its authority was limited to purely secular matters; and even in
this sphere the prevailing chaos all but defied the efforts to create
order, or, as Adams put it, "the multiplicity baffiing
s~ience."
Finally, there was God, the supreme and infallible synthesizing
force; yet he could derive no conclusive satisfaction from his faith
because his Calvinist leanings toward a personal creed precluded
any belief in a single unifying system. What was left?-nothing
but to return, after completing the cycle of his researches, to a
