PARTISAN REVIEW
permits itself to choose only between a cheery or a sour democratism;
it is questionable whether any American novel since
Babbitt
has
told us a new thing about our social life. In psychology the novel
relies either on a mechanical or on a clinical use of psychiatry, or on
the insights that were established by the novelists of fifty years ago.
It is not, then, unreasonable to suppose that we are at the close
of a cultural cycle, that the historical circumstances which called
forth the particular intellectual effort in which we once lived and
moved and had our being is now at an end, and that the novel, as
part of that effort, is as deciduous as the rest.
3
But there is an explanation of the death of the novel which
is both corollary and alternative to this. Consider a main intellectual
preoccupation of the period that ends with Freud and begins with
Swift or with Shakespeare's middle period or with Montaigne-it
does not matter just where we set the beginning so long as we start
with some typical
and
impressive representation, secular and not re–
ligious, of man's depravity and weakness. Freud said of his own
theories that they appealed to
him
as acting, like the theories of
Darwin and Copernicus, to diminish man's pride, and this intention,
carried out by means of the demonstration of man's depravity, has
been one of the chief works of the human mind for some four hundred
years. What the mind was likely to discover
in
this period was, by
and large, much the same thing, yet mind was always active in the
enterprise of discovery; discovery itself was a kind of joy and some–
times a hope, no matter how great was the depravity that was turned
up; the activity of the mind was a kind of fortitude. Then too, there
was reassurance in the resistance that was offered to the assaults of
mind upon the strong texture of the social facade of humanity. That
part of the mind which delights in discovery was permitted its delight
by the margin that e.xisted between speculation and proof; had the
mind been able fully to prove what it believed it would have fainted
and failed before its own demonstration, but so strongly entrenched
were the forces of respectable optimism and belief in human and
social goodness that the demonstration could never be finally estab–
lished but had to be attempted over and over again. Now, however,
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