528
PARTISAN REVIEW
hopeless illness, it is but one item among such others as the family
budget, nagging wives, daughters who want to marry fools, and the
difficulties of deciding whom to invite to dinner. In extenuation of
Howells we remember that this is all the matter of Jane Austen, the
high reverberations of whose touch upon the commonplace we have '
habituated ourselves to hear. But Howells does not permit us to de–
fend him with the comparison; he is profligate in his dealings with
the ordinary, and in
A Hazard of New Fortunes
he does not think
twice about devoting the first six chapters to an account of the
hero's search for an apartment, I have heard that someone has
written to explicate the' place of these chapters in the total scheme of
the novel, and in perfect ignorance of this essay I hazard the guess
that its intention is to rescue Howells from the appearance of an
excess of literalness and ordinariness, and that in the carrying out
of this intention Basil March's fruitless ringing of janitors' bells is
shown to be a modern instance of the age-old theme of The Quest,
or an analogue of the Twelve Tribes in the Wilderness, or of the
flight into Egypt, or a symbol of the homelessness of the intellectual.
But it is really just a house-hunt. Of course any house-hunt will
inevitably produce lost and unhappy feelings, even a sense of cosmic
alienation-so much
in
our dull daily lives really does make a sig–
nificant part of man's tragic career on earth, which is what Howells
meant by his passionate sentence about the charm and power of the
commonplace. But when we yield to our contemporary impulse to
enlarge all experience, to involve it as soon as possible in history,
myth, and the oneness of spirit- an impulse with which, I ought to
say, I have considerable sympathy-we are in danger of making
experience merely typical, formal, and
representative,
and thus of
losing one term of the dialectic that goes on between spirit and the
conditioned, which is, I suppose, what we mean when we speak of
man's tragic fate. We lose, that is to say, the actuality of the condi–
tioned, the literality of matter, the peculiar authenticity and authority
of the merely denotative.
2
To lose this is to lose not a material fact
but a spiritual one, for it is a fact of spirit that it must exist in a
world which requires it to engage in so dispiriting an occupation as
2. Students have a trick of speaking of money in Dostoevsky's novels as
"symbolic," as if no one ever needed, or spent, or gambled, or squandered the
stuff-and as if to think of it as an actuality were sub-literary.
