LESLIE FIEDLER
but
·his
reductio
follows logically enough from assumptions
shared by Jefferson and Rousseau, Richardson and Saint-Just.
Whatever has been ·suspect, outcast, and denied is postulated as
the source of good. Before the Break-through, no one, Christian
or Humanist, had doubted the inferiority of passion to reason,
of impulse to law; and though it is possible sophistically to justify
all
eighteenth-century reversals by quoting the verse which says
the last shall be first, Christianity is dead from the moment such
a justification is made. The Break-through, the triumphant in–
trusion of the libido into the place of virtue and reason, is pro–
foundly anti-Christian though it is not always willing to appear
so. There is a brief age of transition when the Enlightenment
and Sentimentalism exist side by side, when it is still possible to
pretend that true reason and true feeling, the urgings of passion
and the dictates of virtue are identical-and that all are alike
manifestations of the orthodox God. But Sentimentalism yields
quickly to the full Romantic revolt; in a matter of months, Don
Juan, enemy of Heaven and the family, has been transformed
from
villain
to hero; and before the process is finished, audiences
have learned to weep for Shylock rather than laugh
him
from
the stage. The legendary rebels and outcasts, Prometheus and
Cain, Judas and the Wandering Jew, Faust and Lucifer himself
are one by one redeemed. The parricide becomes an object of
veneration, and tourists (among them that good American
abroad, Herman Melville) carry home as an icon Guido's pic–
ture of Beatrice Cenci, slayer of her father!
. The process is continuous and nearly universal. Even the
values of language change: "gothic" passes from a term of con–
tempt to one of description and then of praise, while "baroque"
makes more slowly the same transition; meanwhile terms once
used honorifically to · describe desired -
traits~"condescension,"
for example-become indicators of disapproval. The child is
glorified .over the man, the peasant over the courtier, the dark
man over the white, the rude ballad over the polishe4 sonIlet, the
