ART AND FORTUNE
other classes. All great characters exist in part by reason of the ideas
they represent. The great characters of American fiction.-such, say,
as Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo-tend to be mythic because
of the rare fineness and abstractness of the ideas they represent; and
their very freedom from class gives them a large and glowing gen–
erality. They are few in number and special in kind; and American
fic~ion
has nothing to show like the huge substantial population of
the European novel, the substantiality of which is precisely a product
of a class existence. In fiction, as perhaps in life, the conscious realiza–
tion of social class produces intention, passion, thought, and what I
have called substantiality. The diminution of its reality, however
socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect
of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and spe–
cialness.
Then we must be aware of how great has been the falling-off
in the energy of mind that once animated fiction. In the nineteenth
century the novel followed the great lines of political thought, both
the conservative and the radical, and it documented politics with
an original and brilliant sociology. In addition, it developed its own
line of psychological discovery, which had its issue in the monumental
work of Freud. But now there
is
no conservative tradition and no
radical tradition of political thought and not even an eclecticism
which is in the slightest degree touched by the imagination- we are
in the hands of the commentator. On the continent of Europe politi–
cal choice may be possible, but political thought is not; and in a
far more benign context the same may be said of England. And in
this country, although for different reasons, there is a similar lack of
political intelligence: all over the world the political mind lies passive
before action and the event. In psychological thought we find a strange
concerted effort of regression from psychoanalysis, the reformulations
of the analytical psychology which Dr. Homey and Dr. Sullivan make
in the name of reason and society and progress, marked by the most
astonishing weakness of mind, appealing to the liberal intellectual
~y
an exploitation of the liberal intellectual's fond belief that he suspects
"orthodoxy." Nor, really, can it be said that the Freudian psychology
itself has of late made any significant advances.
This weakness of our general intellectual life
is
reflected in our
novels. So far as the novel touches social and political questions it
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