ART AND FORTUNE
Then, great as their mental force has been, they have been touched
with something like stupidity, resembling the holy stupidity which
Pascal recommends: its effects appear in their ability to maintain
ambivalence, which is not an acquired attitude of mind, or a weak–
ness of mind, but rather the translation of a biological datum, an
extension of the pleasure-pain with which, in a healthy state, we
respond to tension and effort; the novelist expresses
this
in his co–
existent hatred and love of the life he observes. His inconsistency of
intellectual judgment is biological wisdom.
It is at this point that I must deal with a lapse in my argument
of which I am aware. My statement of belief that the novel is not
dead, together with what I have said about what the novel should or
should not do, very likely does not weigh against those circumstances
in our civilization which I have adduced as accounting for the hypo–
thetical death of the novel. To me certainly these circumstances are
very real. And as I describe the character of the novelist they inev–
itably occur to me again. For it is exactly that character and what in
a culture it suggests that the terrible circumstances of our time destroy.
The novelist's assertion of personal demand and his frank mingling
of the mundane and personal with the high and general,
his
holy
stupidity, or as Keats called it, "negative capability," which is
his
animal faith-can these persist against the assaults which the world
now makes on them?
If
the novel cannot indeed exist without ambi–
valence, does what the world presents us with any longer permit
ambivalence? The novelist could once speak of the beautiful circuit
of thought and desire which exists beside the daily reality-but the
question is now whether thought and desire have any longer a field
of possibility.
No answer can soon be forthcoming. Yet, "as Agathon says,
'Art
fosters Fortune; Fortune fosters
Art'."
There is both an affirmation
and an abdication in that sentence; the abdication is as courageous
as the affirmation, and the two together make up a good deal of
wisdom.
If
anything of the old novelistic character survives into our
day, the novelist will be sufficiently aware of Fortune, of Conditions,
of History, being himself, as Fielding said, the historian's heir; but
he will also be indifferent to
~istory,
sharing the vital stupidity of the
World-Historical Figure, who of course is not in the least interested
in History but only in his own demands upon life and thus does not
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