THE NEW NIHILISM
577
lem led inevitably (or so it appears today) to a religious solution.
If
God is dead-as Nietzsche had proclaimed-and his death (with all that
the metaphor implies) has rendered life intolerable--as Kafka and
Lawrence and Eliot went on to say-why, then, He must be speedily
resurrected. Eliot, in his best disingenuous manner, once complained
that when
For Launcelot Andrewes
appeared, a reviewer "made it the
occasion for what I can only describe as a flattering obituary notice . . .
he pointed out that I had suddenly arrested my progress-whither he
had supposed me to be moving I do not know-and that to his distress
I was unmistakably making off in the wrong direction." (On which one
is
tempted to comment, "Well said, old mole! canst work i'th' earth
so fast?") We all know whither Eliot's early admirers had
not
supposed
him to be moving, but at any rate the direction he himself took was
representative of the direction taken by the attitudes toward modernity
that animated the great literary flowering in which he played so promi–
nent a role. When the theologians stepped in-and they stepped in glee–
fully, announcing that the poets had borne eloquent confessional wit–
ness to the disasters of the flight from religion-the voice of the spiritual
engineer was bound to drown out the voices crying from the wilderness.
And so it did. The prophet had said: "Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / . . . . / The
best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate in–
tensity." And the priest (in the words of Professor Stanley Romaine
Hopper) answered: " ... there are many otherwise creditable (and even
distinguished) literary people whose knowledge of what
is
taking place
in theology today is almost sublimely unenlightened. Their creative works
are therefore legitimate but uninformed fumbling after solutions to prob–
lems of the spirit, works which could have been more efficiently ordered
and more accurately construed had the author or the artist been work–
ing within the framework of a well articulated world-view."
Once this emphasis was established, the theme of the loss of values
suffered debasement into a strictly polemical device for attacking the
secularizing forces at work in Western civilization-science, industrialism,
and liberal democracy. And having shrunk from being the vital expres–
sion of the consciousness of an age to the status of a plank in the plat–
form of the Church party, the theme could no longer serve the uses
of
a living literature. Moreover, this hitching of
the
responsibility for
having brought death into the world and all our woes on science, in–
dustrialism, and liberal democracy was badly timed, coming as it did
to a head precisely at a moment when everyone (soldiers to a man
in
Mle Cold War) was busily engaged in rediscoveriruz: the values latent
