THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
23
be relieved, therefore, at knowing a few critics personally: how pleas–
ant the discrepancy between their writings and their lives!
But it is Original Sin that today commands the highest prestige
in the literary world. Like nothing else, it allows literary men to
enjoy a sense of profundity and depth-to relish a disenchantment
which allows no further risk of becoming enchanted-as against the
superficiality of
mere
rationalism. It allows them to appropriate to
the "tradition" the greatest modern writers, precisely those whose
values and allegiances are most ambiguous, complex and enigmatic,
while at the same time generously leaving, as Leslie Fiedler once sug–
gested, Dreiser and Farrell as the proper idols for that remnant be–
nighted enough to maintain a naturalist philosophy. To hold, as
Dickens remarks in
Bleak House,
"a loose belief that if the world go
wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right,"
this becomes the essence of wisdom. (Liberals too have learned to
cast a warm eye on "man's fallen nature," so that one gets the high
comedy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. interrupting his quite worldly po–
litical articles with uneasy bows in the direction of Kierkegaard.) And
with this latest dispensation come, of course, many facile references
to the ideas supposedly held by Rousseau
5
and Marx, that man is
"perfectible" and that progress moves in a steady upward curve.
I say, facile references, because no one who has troubled to read
Rousseau or Marx could write such things. Exactly what the "per–
fectibility of man" is supposed to mean, if anything at all, I cannot
say; but it is not a phrase intrinsic to the
kind
of thought one finds
in the mature Marx or, most of the time, in Rousseau. M.arx did not
base his argument for socialism on any view that one could isolate
a constant called "human nature"; he would certainly have agreed
with Ortega that man has not a nature, but a history. Nor did he
have a very rosy view of the human beings who were his contempor–
aries or recent predecessors: see in
Capital
the chapter on the Work–
ing Day, a grisly catalogue of human bestiality. Nor did he hold to
a naive theory of progress: he wrote that the victories of progress
5 Mr. Randall Jarrell, who usually avoids fashionable cant: "Most of us
know, now, that Rousseau was wrong; that man, when you knock his chains off,
sets up the death camps." Which chains were knocked off in Germany to permit
the setting-up of death camps? And which chains must be put up again to pre–
vent a repetition of the death camps?
