MODERN LITERATURE
35
scholars never take notice of, presumably because they suppose
it to be an aberration, "This is the very thing in which consists
poetry; and
if
so it
is
not so fine a thing as philosophy-For the
same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth." For
many students no ideas that they will encounter in any college
discipline will equal in force and sanction the ideas conveyed to
them by modern literature.
The author of
The Magic Mountain
once said that all his
work could be understood as an effort to free himself from the
middle class, and this, of course, will serve to describe the chief
intention of all modern literature. And the means of freedom
which Mann prescribes (the characteristic irony notwithstand–
ing)
is
the means of freedom which in effect all of modern litera–
ture prescribes.
It
is, in the words of Clavdia Chauchat,
use per–
dre et meme
...
se laisser deperir,"
and thus to name the means
is
to make plain that the end is not merely freedom from the
middle class but freedom from society itself. I venture to say that
the idea of losing oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of
surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest
or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal
bonds, is an "element" somewhere in the mind of every modern
person who dares to think of what Arnold in his unaffected
Victorian way called "the fulness of spiritual perfection." But
the teacher who undertakes to present modern literature to his
students may not allow that idea to remain in the
somewhere
of
his
mind; he must take
it
from the place where it exists habitual
and unrealized and put it in the conscious forefront of his
thought. And
if
he is committed to an admiration of modern
literature, he must aJ.so be committed to this chief idea of modern
literature. I press the logic of the situation not in order to ques–
tion the legitimacy of the commitment, or even the propriety of
expressing the commitment in the college classroom (although
it does seem odd!) but to confront those of us who do teach
modern literature with the striking actuality of our enterprise.
