AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
441
The change of heart and its accompanying changes of behavior are
now important only as a stgn that we have
been
changed, elected-
just as they were in Calvin; but the iron confidence of the theocrat
(recreated for our age, in an unprecedented feat of the histrionic
imagination, by Karl Barth) has scaled away, exposing its shaky
armature of guilt and hope. The detecrninism of Stage I has returned,
but transfi ured b that Christian optimism which, in its avid ac-
h worst ev o our wor as necessarily inse arable
from o ...fleshly existence, is more ng erung t an t e most pessimistic
· of secular views. This already determined text of eXISte:ilcCIS.neither
- presented, as in Stage I; nor categorized, as in Stage II; but
com–
mented on.
Auden's work now consists of commentaries or glosses of
every kind- dramatic, philosophical, critical. He becomes fond of
writing criticisms or reviews which, under a vague show of criticizing
a work some magazine has hopefully handed him, are secondary
commentaries or glosses on those primary commentaries or glosses
which are his creative works (so that readers of his reviews are con–
tinually exclaiming,
((Now
I see!") ; these primary and secondary
commentaries are indistinguishable in dialectic and imagery- purple
patches, heartfelt confessions, and magical feats of dialectical in–
genuity reach their highest concentration in reviews of minor theo–
logians.
In this stage Auden has not forsaken ethics in the least-how
could so confirmed a moralist? But his morals are now, like the law in
Luther or Niebuhr, merely a crutch to beat people into submission
with, to force home to us the realization that there is none good but
God, that no works can either save us or make us worth saving. The
Old Auden he has been forced to forget entirely-just as, in Freud's
myth, we
have
to wipe from our conscious memory all the experiences
of our earliest childhood. (In his
Collected Poems
he makes extensive
changes in the poems of Stage II, but either omits the poems of
Stage I or leaves them unchanged-they are so genuinely and com-
j
pletely alien to him that he can do nothing with them. To prove
that he has not kept the faintest understanding of or sympathy for
his earliest work, he does worse than leave out
Paid on Both Sides-
he destroys it for good, by following Untermeyer's precedent of print–
ing a few last surviving fragments as lyrics.) But the Secular
Au
den
of
__Stage II is the New Auden's favorite target of attack. .Herod–
hitherto re resented b everybody as an abori ·nal o re, Freu s
_F
f the Primal Horde-Is resente in
For the Time Being
as
t~e
Humane, ecular, Liberal _Audei). of _Stage II. This explains the
