PARTISAN REVIEW
head, but the idea of self-elevation
is
a permanently recurring episode
in love, and
is
fertile in social consequences: In our own time, so far
have we removed from the close observation of environment, we
are inclined to take too primitive a view of human conduct and
society. The truth
is
that the primitive and the civilized have settled
down to living side by side.
I
.am not suggesting a crop of pious novels. I am suggesting
that what in its broadest sense can be called the Protestant environ–
ment, has been neglected by the satirical and the serious. For the
novelist, the mad religions are as fruitful as the serious ones. I am
suggesting a world with which the novelist can do as he likes. A second
suggestion grows out of this: it has already stimulated some of the
work of Rex Warner, though he has not infused his subjects with the
juice of human life. There might well be a return to the unromantic,
unpicturesque rendering of the great characters who are really great
moral types: to the hypocrite, the miser, the envious man, the tyrant,
the sycophant, the sadist, the virtuous man, the lazy man. :Sen John–
son, Bunyan, Moliere and (half-way towards ourselves ) Balzac show
the way. Above all, the moralized figures of the Russian novel, char–
acters like Prince Myshkin, the superb Indushka of
The Golovlyov
Family,
or the sublime Oblomov. The novelist who is imbued with
the idea of the virtue and imagination of 'the people,' ought to seek
to create myths which the cinema has- so crudely-already suc–
ceeded in creating, without benefit of moral reflection;
in
these moral
types, whom all recognize, upon whom
all
brood, he might find
matter which
is
not repugnant to the intellect and which is delightful
to the general imagination. They are the necessary demi-gods, the
humanized ideas, which a new humanism will have to create if it is
to survive aesthetically. Our world is not likely to be satisfied for
much longer with the picaresque novel, which has become popular in
the present period of chaos.
If
our world survives at all, the craving
for these moral figures, these moralities, will impose itself, I believe,
upon the novelist. The experience of war, whatever else it is on the
surface, has deposited in millions of men deprived of any other in–
tellectual resource a simple rudimentary moral interest in the types
among whom they have lived. For man is sustained by the sight of
his fellows and, in these years, has often been sustained by nothing
else.
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