ART AND FORTUNE
great former will of humanism, which, as they imply, has brought
us to this pass. One must always listen when this opinion is offered
in true passion. But for the vision and ideal of apocalyptic renovation
one must be either a particular kind of moral genius with an attach–
ment to life that goes beyond attachment to any particular form of
life-D. 'H. Lawrence was such a genius--or a person deficient in
attachment to life in any of its forms. Most of us are neither one nor
the other, and our notions of renovation and reconstitution are social
and pragmatic and, in the literal sense of the word, conservative. To
restoration and reconstitution of the will thus understood the nov–
elistic intelligence is most apt.
When I try to say on what grounds I hold this belief, my mind
turns to a passage in Henry James's preface to
The American.
James
has raised the question of "reality" and "romance," and he remarks
that "of the men of largest resounding imagination before the human
scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, pro–
digious Zola, we feel, I think, that the refiexion toward either quarter
has never taken place"-they have never, that is, exclusively com–
mitted themselves either to "reality" or to "romance" but have
maintained an equal commerce with both. And this, James goes on
to say, is the secret of their power with us. Then follows an attempt
to distinguish between "reality" and "romance," which defines "real–
ity" as "the things we cannot possibly not know," and then gives us
this sentence: "The romantic stands .... for the things that, with all
the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all
the wit and all the adventure, we never
can
directly know; the things
that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit of thought and
desire."
The sentence is perhaps not wholly perspicuous, yet if I under–
stand it at all, it points to the essential moral nature of the novel.
Julien Sorel eventually acquired all the facilities in the world; he
used "all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and
all
the
adventure" to gain the things that are to be gained by their means;
what he gained was ashes in his mouth. But what in the end he
gained, came to him in prison not by means of the "facilities" but
through the beautiful circuit of thought and desire, and it impelled
him
to make his great speech to the Besanc;on jury in which he threw
away his life; his happiness and his heroism came, I think, from his
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