530
PARTISAN REVIE11'
he feels his way toward a spiritual rapport with those "little people,'
whose friendliness and rural wisdom he regards as the real humanist
underground in fascist Italy. And, carrying these symbols of renewal
and renunciation to the end, Spina purges himself of his doctrinal
burdens through the sacrificial act of giving himself up to the police
to save his friend Infante, a truly Rousseauan figure of the earth. Thus
Silone, ever uneasy about the uses to which the revolutionary intelligence
has been put, has finally dissolved it in a primitive Christianity of suffer·
ing and good deeds.
Naturally, Silone has been berated by the more orthodox Left for
subjecting "social problems to a purely moral analysis." And, from a
strictly logical point of view, it is true that Silone's moral optimism,
based on a bit-by-bit restitution of the human essence, can scarcely be
considered a program for revitalizing the socialist movement. Nor are
we convinced by Silone's reply to his critics (in a recent issue of
The
New Republic),
that since the failure of socialism is moral rather than
material, our great task is that of spiritual purification. For this is
merely a religious paraphrase of those democratic, humanist, aims to
which every socialist who has taken stock of recent events is committed.
The fact .is that the socialist movement is little more than an organized
memory of its past hopes; and while the sheer hypnotic repetition of
classic doctrine certainly dooms it to complete inertia, Silone's exercise
of the moral imagination cannot be said to be any more fruitful. It
contains no positive historical meaning. True enough, Silone has held
on to his socialist faith, but the trouble is that it lacks the will to action.
If
we cannot warm up to Silone's spiritual vision, it is not because we
have at hand a more acceptable solution. In this sense, Silone has actually
put the mirror once more to those radical intellectuals who have largely
given up Marxism as a system of thinking, yet still cling to its optimism
of progress. What we balk at is the installation of such tribal deities as
nature, essential goodness, homely wisdom as the new motive forces of
history, with the. inevitable substitution of religious instinct for social
intelligence.
And it is this moral schematism, it seems to me, that is· responsible
for the weaknesses of the novel. I do not mean to discount those superior
qualities of irony that are to be found here as well as in his earlier
work, nor the unusual cha:rtn and folk-pathos that is given to the sullen,
homespun
cha:rac~ers.
His
sketches of the village functionarie·s are mas–
terful: these bewildered! pompous creatures drift from scene t'O scene,
vying with each other in "oratory," that odd mixture of rationalization
and nonsense that has become a national profession, partly to baffle the
common peasantry, partly to stiffen their own self-esteem. But, on the
whole, the novel cannot hold the weight of its allegory. Too little happens
outside of Spina's spiritual excursions.
H~nte
it is talky, lacking in
dramatic clash and suspense. And Silone's moral fervor produces a
