AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
439
The Moralist from the Machine>; The Questing Beast; Reason
aJ
Agape, or The Saviour with the Vote.
Here everything important
happens
in
the Realm of Logical Necessity. Here we are free to choose
-are impiored
br
forced to choose, are told again and again that our
choices are meaningful, that the right choice is predestined to success.
A change of heart is a change of vote-what is meaningless about
that? Existence has become a
problem
that Auden reasons about,
advises
11s
about, exhorts us to make the right choice about· it is_
cate orized
rath~-
t!!_an
pr~,
in secular, liberal, humanitarian,
sentimental, me_La horically-.scientific terms. The typical poems are
problem poem:;, The political moralist raids a generalized, popularized
Science for the raw materials and imagery of a morality which he
construct~
to satisfy the demands of the self and of the age, but which
he implies is Scientific: a favorable mutation becomes for
him
"a
morally good act," and even Destiny presents itself (as it does to his
father-in-law) in political terms, to be voted for or spoken against.
Animals, misguided former voters bogged down in the partial but
final solutions brought them by their wasted votes, are patronizingly
condemned by the political adviser because they are not free, like us,
to go on voting (and being advised) . Auden's ethics appear in an
abstract, virtuous and interminable Volume II, all the particulars
of which are derived from a Volume I that consists of a single sen–
tence:
We must do something about Hitler.
We are all guilty, the
will itself is evil (the judgment is a bitter pill with a sugar-and–
morphine center) ; but we can, practically speaking, escape our guilt
by recognizing it, by
willing
a sort of Popular Front of the Universe.
The quoted
Freedom is the recognition of necessity -(
originally, in the
purely deterministic Spinoza, the recognition that there is no freedom
except the "freedom" of acting according to the conditions of our
being, of knowing and consequently loving the universe we are help–
less to change) changes, through the growingly optimistic determinism
of Hegel and Engels, into Auden's consolatory fable:
To recognize
necessity is to have escaped it.
Thus the fundamental structural pic–
ture underneath the poems is that of the
fairy tale quest
(and the
assimilated Quest of the Grail, temptations of the Buddha or the Mes–
siah, etc.) : so much so that genetic development, the underlying
structural picture of the first stage, is itself expressed in terms of the
quest. Success is no longer struggled for interminably and found at
last a failure, but is won, in an instant, by choosing correctly-i.e.,
voting. Good will
is
Grace: in
this
ideally democratic fable the third
son-a humble and unexceptional hero distinguished from his able
