THE FUTURE
Of ENGLISH FICTION
under the still continued influence of the Romantic movement, from
the eighteenth century's preoccupation with self-interest, so despised
by the sensibility, and yet ubiquitous. So persistent that who can
doubt in a vulgar society such as ours, a society of the common
people, that it has the interest of a major passion. There exists at
present a kind of mystique of the plain, the ordinary, of
all
that we
mean by the sound, human feeling of 'the people'; it is dangerous
and insensitive to fail to observe the other side of this mystique. The
movement dominated by the word 'people' has a strong Puritan
derivation: the inseparable companion, the unholy whisper at its
elbow, is the picaro or rogue.
The failure to write about money, in our generation, has its
roots, I believe, in the reaction against the Protestant outlook on life,
for Protestantism is not totalitarian. Its vitality has lain in its readiness
to break up into new forms; and, in England, its spirit has, para–
doxically, done much to create 'the people' movement. Condemned
by its intimate association with individualism and capitalism, its hatred
of the medieval outlook, its repugnance to anonymity, the Protestant
attitude has enormously in its favor the belief in the necessity of vir–
tue and good conduct. There is no salvation through sin. There is
salvation only in virtue and restraint. The Protestant lives on earth.
This religious attitude
is
now profoundly part of English character;
and in ignoring the consequences of it, the novelist ignores important
elements in psychology, for religion intones the fundamental human
responses. One example may be taken from a Victorian novel, simply
to show what the modern novelist has totally neglected: I mean the
quite common wish to be good. In psychological terms one would
say that the novelist has ostracized the super-ego. The example comes
from
Felix Holt
and George Eliot was the novelist of the super-ego
above all. Here one sees the mischievous and agreeable Esther Lyon
sitting beside the harsh and doctrinaire young Radical at one of his
meetings-meetings so topical and disturbing to mid-Victorians, so
boring, it must be confessed, to us-and, at the sight of his handsome
face, she is perturbed, not by the so improbably direct sexual desire
our contemporaries immediately imagine; but by the longing 'to be
better.' We need not suppose that longing takes this precise form
nowadays when a nice girl sits next to a handsome one-track com–
munist, or any other young man with an overmastering idea in his
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