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221
(feudal or modern) and masters of chicane. And if, for a technological
age, he preferred a functional economy to the regime of waste, he also
saw that "the limit of tolerance native to the race, physically and spir–
itually, is short of that unmitigated and unremitting mechanical routine
to which the machine technology incontinently drives." Insisting that
our economic habits determine spiritual differences and deal with im–
material goods, he made clear how "fact-conditioned"-to use Lionel
Trilling's phrase- American life has become; and showing how every
functional type is permeable by "leisure-class" ideology, he announced
that our cultural dilemma would not be quickly solved. In his recourse
to two-bit Bolshevism and his desperate attempt to adjust his own values
to a bleak technological utopia, he engaged in a continual suicide of
spirit that did not solve anything. But while the theoretician evolved
through the stage of commitment toward an ultimate despair, the fabu–
list developed his fundamental subject with increasing clarity. He by–
passed economic abracadabra on the "contradictions of capitalism" to
get to the contradictions which have developed in the eighteenth-century
liberal synthesis, that happy triad of humane values, unlimited free com–
petition, and technical efficiency which has fallen apart in a three-way
incompatibility. In his power to represent the crisis of our time, Veblen
transcends the shoddy answers and the spiritual petrifaction that are
also in his work. In his world of fable, there was a perhaps unconscioUli
orthodoxy that made him see evil almost exclusively in terms of negation :
waste was for him the great evil, so that he saw power as an incidental
function of the waste principle, rather than the other way around as
events have taught our later generation to think. There was also the
conscious irony that led the peaceable moralist to observe that "Live
and let live" is merely "the modem version of the Golden Rule." Be–
cause the vital sources of
his
irony could not be killed off, even by him–
self, Veblen is still going strong.
J.
C.
Levenson
ART AS METAMORPHOSIS
THE VOICES OF SILENC E.
By
Acdro Malraux. Translated
by
Stuart
G iibert.
4~5
Illustratioros. DoubleddY. $25.00 (boxed).
If
The Psychology of A rt
was a vivid improvisation upon
some passages from art history,
The Voic es of Silence
gives us
Malraux~s
passionate criticism at its full symphonic depth and measure. As in the
