534
PARTISAN REVIEW
cause it has assumed the spurious grandeur of 'historical nect"SSity'
but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless,
bloodless, meaningless, and unreal"-disintegration itself fascinates us
because it is a power, just as evil has always fascinated men, not only
because it is opposed to good but also because it is, in its own right, a
power.
Lifeless
J
bloodless
J
meaningless
J
and
unreal-without
stopping
to estimate just how much life, blood, meaning, and reality Howells
actually has, we must observe that the modem reader who judges
him to have little is not exactly in a position to be objective, that he
is likely to deal with Howells under the aspect of a universal judg–
ment in which he says that very little in life has life, blood, meaning,
and reality. The sentence in which Howells invites American novelists
to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life as being
the more American is well known and has done much harm to his
reputation. Possibly the sentence is more .ambiguous than is generally
supposed, for when Howells says "we invite," it is not clear whether
"we" is the editorial pronoun or is meant to stand for the American
people; and taking the sentence even in its worst construction, we
ought to recall that it appeared in an essay on Dostoevsky in which
Howells urges the reading of Dostoevsky, that when he speaks
of the more smiling aspects of life as being the more American it is
in the course of a comparison of America with the Russia of Dostoev–
sky, that he is careful to remark that America is not exempt from the
sorrows of the natural course of life, only from those which are
peculiar to the poverty and oppression of Dostoevsky's land, and
that he is not sure that America is in every way the gainer by being
so thoroughly in material lucie But let us leave all extenuation aside
and ·take the sentence only as it has established itself in the legendary
way, as the clear sign of Howells' blindness to evil, his ignorance of
the very essence of reality. Taken so, it perhaps cannot be thought
a very wise statement, but our interpretation of it, the vehemence
with which we are likely to press its meaning, tells us, I think, more
about ourselves than about Howells. It raises the question of why
we believe, as we do believe, that evil is of the very essence of reality.
The management of the sense of evil, I have said, is not easy.
The sense of evil is properly managed only when it is not allowed to
be preponderant over the sense of self. The reason why Shakespeare
