THE NOVEL AGAIN
177
subject, one might say, of the French Revolution itself. And the
attitude of the great nineteenth century novelists toward this ques–
tion, and toward the society at which it was pointedly directed, seems
in most important respects an attitude favorable to the creation of
a high art. It was an attitude of passionate ambivalence and con–
tradiction. In Jane Austen and Dostoevsky, in Stendhal and Dickens,
in Flaubert and Henry James, the depth to which society is criticized,
hated, regarded with derision and disgust, and judged as unworthy
to
survive is consistently responded to by a desperate affection, a
nostalgia for old, passing values, and an often touching weak willing–
ness to compound with the existing world and all its rotten glories.
The continuity of the first part of the twentieth century with the
nineteenth is evident when we reflect that the attitude of modern
writers toward the two great events of the first part of the present
era, the first World War and the Russian Revolution, is of a similar
ambivalence. Such an attitude seems no longer possible, although we
cannot with any certainty attribute this either to the "betrayal" of
the Russian Revolution-after all, half the significance of the French
Revolution had to do with its "betrayal"---or to the nature of the
second World War. Nevertheless, that an interruption in the con–
tinuity of attitude has occurred seems unmistakable.
It would be mistaken, however, to consider this inevitable change
in the historical character of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century novel as pure loss. The wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines
and of the Houses of Lancaster and York are lost to us forever,
insofar as any immediacy of interest is concerned. And although one
dare not anticipate the day when the arguments in
The Possessed
or
the episode of "The Grand Inquisitor" will seem no different in kind
from the arguments in
The Republic
or in
Gargantua and Panta–
gruel,
this too is certain to happen. For some writers, the change
will pretty surely lead to redemption. Kipling is a case in point. For
some thirty years Kipling has been, from the point of view of a
balanced critical appraisal, next to inaccessible. Even the best essays
on his writing-those by Edmund Wilson and George Orwell–
reveal embarrassment in the very act of praise. Some day, however,
Kipling's imperialism will have little more bearing on the reader's
feeling for him than Virgil's imperialism has on our attitude toward
The Aeneid,
and readers will take Kipling's intermittent racist beliefs
