Vol.15 No.12 1948 - page 1275

ART AND FORTUNE
a
Kulturroman;
actually every great novel deserves that name, for
it
is
hard to think of one that is not precisely a romance of culture.
By culture we must mean not merely the general social condition
to
which the novel responds but a particular congeries of formulated
ideas. The great novels, far more often than we remember, deal
explicitly with developed ideas, and although they vary greatly in the
degree of their explicitness, they tend to
be
more explicit rather than
less. Nowadays the criticism which descends from Eliot puts ideas
in literature at a discount-which is one reason why it is exactly this
criticism that is most certain of the death of the novel-and it has
led many of us to forget how, in the novel, ideas may be as important
as character and as essential to the given dramatic situation. In addi–
tion to the works I have mentioned there stand as examples
Lost
Illusions, A Sentimental Education, War and Peace, The Brothers
Karamazov,
and
Jude the Obscure.
This, then, as I understand it, is the nature of the novel as
defined by the work it does. Of its defining conditions how many are
in force today?
We cannot say that money and class have the same place in our
social and mental life that they once had. They have indeed not
ceased to exist, but certainly they do not exist as they did in the
nineteenth century or even in our own youth. Money of itself no
longer can engage the imagination as it once did; it has lost some
of its impulse and certainty, it is on the defensive, it must compete
on the one hand with the ideal of security, and on the other hand
with the ideal of a power which may be more directly applied.
As
for class, in Europe the bourgeoisie together with its foil, the aristoc–
racy, has been weakening for decades. It ceased some time ago to
be the chief source of political leaders; its nineteenth century position
as ideologue of the world has vanished before the ideological strength
of totalitarian communism; the wars brought it to the point of eco–
nomic ruin. In England the middle class is in process of liquidating
itself. In this country the real basis of the novel has never existed–
that is, the tension between a middle class .and an aristocracy which
brings manners into observable relief as the living representation
of ideals and the living comment on ideas. Our class structure has
been extraordinarily fluid; our various upper classes have seldom
been able or stable enough to establish their culture as authoritative.
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