AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
447
signature have prevented. Yet we are told that if we make up our
minds, do anything, we are as guilty as before: for
all
will,
all
action,
are evil. (From this universal secular condemnation it was easy for
Auden to pass to Original Sin, the universal depravity of Calvinism.)
Deep within the liberal- who feels, and usually correctly, that he
does
less than he ought-nothing calms more profoundly, alleviates more
fundamentally, the anxiety always gnawing at the core of his good–
heartedness, than the feeling of
group guilt.
What precarious indivi–
dual acquittal can rival the
We are all guilty
that wipes out at one
stroke any p0ssible specific guilt of one's own? What proposition can
express more fully and more tactfully one's own sensibility and
honesty? (Look how guilty I feel over what most people wouldn't
even be bothered by: most people think it's quite possible to will some–
thing or to do something without being
necessarily
guilty.) When, in
early
1941,
our liberal magazines were racking their brains over what
to do, to think, or even to write about the war that was perhaps a
crusade, and perhaps a struggle of rival imperialisms; the Russia
that was perhaps Utopia, a trifle regimented, and perhaps the Com–
panion of Hitler; the world that was, and no perhaps about it, a
damnable puzzle; suddenly there was a great increase of articles about
-the Negro in America. It would take a hard man to look unsym–
pathetically at so touching and revealing a manifestation of our
' being.
Much of the guilt of Stage II is moral, the guilt the moralizer
necessarily ascribes to his backward moralizees. But much of it is
sexual. Love has come to be thought of as a guilty evasion, an escape
-to excuse itself it must "implicate" itself in society, politics, the
"real world." Love is a place we stop at when we should go on, a
power or insight we bury selfishly and uselessly, instead of using in
the social situation. It
should
be sublimated in Social Service. Eros
is-at least potentially- a secular, humanitarian Agape which we
have helplessly perverted.. ove is a
problem:
one half of a stru le
between love and duty, our moral and po 1ca uty to t e world. In
tnis
contest between
public
and
pri·uate;-ub}~ctirnranas
1ective,
Paris
always dutifully awards his prize (that golden word,
Real)
to Mi–
nerva, but not without dne burning backward glance. Love is "an
island and therefore unrear'; both Auden and Hitler knew, in those ,
days, that
There are no more islands.
(The
are,
in Auden's case, is
not an existential but a normative judgment.) Auden's disapproval
probably
is
grounded in society's disapproval; certainly his inter–
minable moralizing is.
If
his attitudes and behavior had been ac-
