PARTISAN REVIEW
will having exhausted
all
that part of itself which naturally turns
to the inferior objects offered by the social world and from its learn–
ing to exist in the strength of its own knowledge of its thought and
desire. I have said that awareness of the will in its beautiful circuit
of thought and desire was the peculiar property of the novel, yet in
point of fact we find it long before the novel came into existence and
in a place where it always surprises us, in the
Inferno,
at the meetings
of Dante with Paolo and Francesca, with Brunetto Latini and with
Ulysses, the souls who keep the energy of thought and desire alive
and who are therefore forever loved however damned. For James
the objects of this peculiarly human energy go by the name of
"romance." The word is a risky one and therefore it is necessary to
say that it does not stand for the unknowable, for what is vulgarly
called "the ideal," let alone for that which is pleasant and charming
because far off. It stands for the world of unfolding possibility, for
that which, when brought to actuality, is powerfully operative. It is
thus a synonym for the will in its creative aspect, especially in its
aspect of
moral
creativeness, as it subjects itself to criticism and con–
ceives for itself new states of being. The novel has had a long dream
of virtue in which the will, while never abating its strength and
activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects
with which the social world tempts it, and either conceives its own
right objects or becomes content with its own sense of its potential
force-which is why so many novels give us, before their end, some
representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in stasis.
It is the element of what James calls "romance," this operative
reality of thought and desire, which, in the novel, exists side by side
with the things "we cannot possibly not know," that suggests to me
the novel's reconstitutive and renovating power.
5
If
there is any ground for my belief that the novel can, by
reason of one of its traditional elements, do something in the work
of reconstituting. and renovating the will, there may be some point
in trying to say under what particular circumstances of its own
nature and action it may best succeed.
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