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FRANK KERMODE
upon an infection of liberalism. The British Government, to take a
current example, drips cant when it pretends that its bill against colonial
immigration applies equally to white and black citizens. On the other
hand, Dr. Verwoerd talks not cant but evil nonsense; we can be sure
that Negroes will fare better on cant. Verwoerd betrays and smashes
people; Mr. Butler only ideals. This exactly measures the desirability
of political cant.
I should not expect Miss McCarthy to allow this line of argument.
Particular instances of injustice she refers to the appropriate theory.
"The difference between a democracy and a tyranny is that in theory
the citizen of a democracy possesses inherent rights." To behave as
if
these rights were not inherent, but merely favors and subject to good
behavior, like the right to own a gun,
i~
therefore tyrannical. Licenses
they mean when they cry liberty. The context is the persecution by
Committee of, for instance, Arthur Miller; but Miss McCarthy is capable
of treating the calumniating of Dickens by a modern reviewer as a
symptom of a similar disease. She notes the paradox that ideas now
enjoy an immunity from state interference denied the people who hold
them; this is at least in part because the persecutors can assume that
most people are entirely impervious to all ideas, whether dangerous or
not. And this again sets Miss McCarthy apart, an ideal citizen of a
Mill-inspired anarchy in which all ideas circulate freely, the good tending
to survive and the bad to die, the community as a whole being equal
to the demands upon its ethical maturity. "Is it really so difficult to
tell a good action from a bad one?" asks Miss McCarthy. It would
seem so, since most people appear to be wrong most of the time.
Here we observe a puritanical streak in the contrariness; Miss
McCarthy's intolerance, especially of intolerance, is based upon an
uncompromising attitude to untruth, as much in herself as in others.
This simplicity underlies the subtlety of the very important critical
essays which come at the end of the present collection. Miss McCarthy
is mistress of a direct and vivid style; it seems to reflect the color of
her mind, to be the natural rhetorical mode of her truth-telling, as,
once more, were Shaw's and Orwell's. Her argument goes straight
forward; she is absolutely free of the modern critical habit of stopping
every few words to admire the terminology. And nowhere
is
it more
impressive than in these critical essays.
There is at present a growing and I think healthy movement of
thought in England which advocates a return from the novel of formal
experiment, the twentieth-century ideal, to an older kind, the novel
of "character." Iris Murdoch and John Bayley have argued with much
