566
H. STUART HUGHES
speculation on what it means to a civilization to have drained
its
daily tasks of their meaning and joys. Here Mr. Bell the dis–
engaged social observer enters into a subtle change of character;
a new note of personal emotion creeps into his prose, surprising
us-and doubtless himself also-with some old-fashioned ideo–
logical anger.
But the key to Mr. Bell's major theme comes only in Part III
in a series of short essays on "The Mood of Three Generations."
These are frankly autobiographical, and by telling us what
hap–
pened to himself and to what he conceives to
be
his generation,
he enables us to understand how he reached his present position.
The three generations Mr. Bell distinguishes are successively: the
"once-born," "the first political generation of the century"-Dewey,
Beard, Holmes, Veblen, Brandeis-whose "essential optimism ...
was based upon an ultimate faith in the rationality or common
sense of men"; the "twice-born," who went through the political
wars of the 'thirties and 'forties and now find "wisdom in pessimism,
evil, tragedy, and despair"; the "after-born"-too young for the
great experiences of the century-who combine a "sober-matter-of–
fact, 'mature' acceptance of the complexities of politics and exist–
ence" with "an underlying restlessness, a feeling of being cheated
out of adventure, and a search for passion." It is of course
the
middle generation that interests Mr. Bell most. He thinks of it as a
long generation ranging all the way from writers now over sixty like
Edmund Wilson to people around forty like himself. The younger
men, he finds, simply inherited almost unchanged from their
elders "the key terms which dominate discourse today: irony,
paradox, ambiguity, and complexity." For these elders themselves
"led their own 'counter-revolt'" against the ideologies in which
they had earlier believed-thus leaving the younger members of the
same age group with no ideological task to perform.
All this is historically true, and Mr. Bell expresses it with
clarity and sympathetic understanding. But it is not the whole
truth. It is a parochial version of recent history betraying the
myopia of the New York intellectual. Mr. Bell falls into the same
sort of error that the French so often make when they assume that
European intellectual life is restricted to the habitues of
the
Parisian literary cafes. The high value he puts on "sophistication,"
