536
PARTISAN REVIEW
a time has come in which our main efforts need no longer be directed
toward modifying the pleasure principle. [Dr. Bettelheim is speaking
of the practice of psychoanalysis.] Maybe it is time we became con–
cerned with restoring pleasure gratification to its dominant role in the
reality principle; maybe this society needs less a modification of
th~
pleasure principle by reality, and more assertion of the pleasure prin–
ciple against an overpowering pleasure-denying reality." It cannot
be said of Howells' smiling aspects that they represent a very intense
kind of pleasure; yet for most men they will at least serve, in Keats's
phrase, to bind us to the earth, to prevent our being seduced by
the godhead of disintegration.
"Your really beautiful time will come," wrote Henry James
to Howells on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday- what James
characteristically meant was the time when the critical intelligence
would begin to render Howells its tribute. The really beautiful time
has come to James, but it has not yet come to Howells, and prob–
ably it
will
be a very long time coming. Weare not easy with the
quiet men, the civil personalities--the very word
civil,
except as
applied to
disobedience
or
disorders
is
uncomfortable in our ears.
"Art
inhabits temperate regions," said Andre Gide in 1940. Well,
not always; but if the statement is perhaps a little inaccurate in the
range of its generality, we can understand what led Gide to make it,
for he goes on: "And doubtless the greatest harm
this
war is doing
to culture is to create a profusion of extreme passions which, by a
sort of inflation, brings about a devaluation of all moderate senti–
ments." And the devaluation of the moderate sentiments brings a
concomitant devaluation of the extreme passions: "The dying an–
guish of Roland or the distress of a Lear stripped of power moves us
by its exceptional quality but loses its special eloquence when re–
produced simultaneously in several thousand copies." The extreme
has become the commonplace of our day. This
is
not a situation
which can be legislated or criticized out of existence, but while it
endures we are not in a position to make a proper judgment of
Howells, a man of moderate sentiments. It is "a disqualification that
we cannot regard with complacency, for if Gide
is
right, it implies
that we are in a fair way of being disqualified from making any
literary judgments at
all.
