THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
533
by our desire that literature should be in accord with reality as we
now know it.
Our responsiveness to the idea of evil is legitimate enough, yet
we ought to be aware that the management of the sense of evil
is
not an easy thing. Be careful, Nietzsche said, when you fight
dragons, lest you become a dragon yourself. There
is
always the
danger that when we have insisted with a certain intensity upon the
fact of evil, we will go on to cherish the virtue of our insistence, and
then the fact we insist upon. I would make a distinction between the
relation to evil of the creator of the literary work and that of the
reader, believing that the active confrontation of the fact of evil
is
likelier to be healthy than is the passive-there is something sus–
pect in making evil the object of, as it were, aesthetic contemplation.
But not even the creator is nowadays immune from ' all danger.
Consider that the awareness of evil is held by us to confer a certain
kind of spiritual status and prestige upon the person who exercises it,
a status and prestige which are often quite out of proportion to his
general spiritual gifts. On another occasion
4
I remarked upon the
feeling of our time for what the sociologists call
charisma,
which, in
the socio-political context, is the quality of power and leadership
that seems to derive from a direct connection with great supernal
forces, with godhead. This power we respond to when we find it in
our literature in the form of alliances with the dark gods of sexuality,
or the huge inscrutability of nature, or the church, or history;
presumably we want it for ourselves. This
is
what accounts in our
theory of literature for our preference for the hidden and ambiguous,
for our demand for tension and tragedy-what Richard Chase called
the hyperaesthesia of the modem mind, "its feeling that no thought
is permissible except an extreme thought; that every idea must be
directly emblematic of concentration camps, alienation, madness,
hell, history, and God; that every word must bp.stle and explode with
the magic potency of our plight." And Hannah Arendt, in her recent
book,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
speaking of the modem dis–
integration, remarks that with us today "to yield to the mere process
of disintegration has become .an irresistible temptation, not only be-
4. In an essay, "Wordsworth and The Iron Time," in
Wordsworth,
edited by
Gilbert
Dunklin, Princeton University Press, and, previously, in
The Kenyon
Review,
Summer 1950.
