NOVEL AND AMERICA
57 .
weeper over the thinker, colony over
m~ther
country, ·the com–
moner over the king-nature over culture. At first,
all .~
js
a
game: the ladies of the court in pastoral dres<l swing high into
the
air
to show their legs with a
self-consci~usness
quite
un1ik~
the abandon of children to which they are pretending. But in a
little while, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has fainted on the road to
Vincennes and awakended to find
his
waistcoat soaked with
tears; and it
is
suddenly
all
in eamest. Whatever was down
is
now up, as the under-mind heaves up out of the darkness: bar–
ricades are erected and the novel becomes the reigning form;
the Jew walks openly out of the ghetto, and otherwise sensible
men hang on their walls pictures of trees and cattle. The con–
junctions are comic in their unexpectedness and variety.
It
is
hard to say what was cause and what effe.ct in the
complex upheaval; everything seems the symptom·of everything
else.
Yet deep within the nexus of causes (gods must die for new
genres to be born) was that "death of God" that has not yet
ceased to trouble our peace. Somewhere nea.r the beginning of
the eighteenth century, Christianity (more precisely, perhaps,
that desperate compromise of the late Middle Ages and early
Renaissance, Christian Humanism) began to wear out. It was·
not merely, or even primarily, a matter of the destruction of the
political and social power of one Church or ano.ther, much less
of the lapse of economic control by the .priests. The divisions
within Christendom surely contributed to. the final co.llapse, but
they are perhaps better regarded as manifestations than as causes
of the insecurity o.ver do.gma that was at wo.rk deep within. In-.
stitutionalized Christianity at any rate began to. crumble when
its
God
began to. fail, that
is
to.
s~y,
when its mytho.logy no Io.nger
proved capable o.f co.ntro.lling and revivifying the imllginatio.n
of Euro.pe.
The darker mo.tive fo.rces of the psyche refused any Io.nger
to
accept the names and ranks by which they had been demean–
ed
for almost two.
tho.u~d
years;. o.nce.
w~rshiped
::as.
Ygods,".
