THE NOVEL AGAIN
191
to wrestle with the sublimity of poetry." Such a paradox makes
comment not only on changes in actuality but on changes in at–
titudes towards that actuality.
Both these theories carry a large share of truth, I think, but no
single explanation of a historical process so complex can achieve a
persuasiveness commensurate to our sense of that complexity. With–
out wishing to oppose or dismiss either theory I should like to put
them aside now and address the problem from another perspective.
Novels are not written out of thin air, and novelists, unlike God,
do not generate their ideas
ex nihilo.
If
we complain that novels fail
to provide an adequate description and interpretation of contempor–
ary experience, or that they have ceased to deal with ideas, we must
also admit that they are not alone in their barren and unfed con–
dition but reflect the general state of intellectual culture in our time.
But so does the fact that we must remind ourselves of such time-worn
truths as Matthew Arnold's notion that the precondition for a vivid
and healthy culture and a morally significant literature is a strong
and continuous exercise of the critical intellect- and it should be
remembered that Arnold did not exclude general criticism of society
from the intention of criticism. Some years ago Randall Jarrell wrote
that we live in an age of criticism, but he wrote wryly and meant
literary criticism, an enterprise which may be said to have prospered
through lack of competition. In addition, the dominant form which
literary criticism chose for itself in recent years was distrustful of
ideas or interests which might be thought of as "extrinsic" to the
work under scrutiny.
As
for a coherent body of serious and signi–
ficant critical thinking about modern culture, the closer one looks
the less one finds. And as in the case of the novel, we cannot regard
this situation from fancy moral postures, as if it were a simple failure
of nerve or will, or a sudden depravity of intelligence, such as
capitulation to the favors of an affluent society: it is a general condi–
tion we are faced with.*
A good example of this state of affairs is the most widely read
work of sociology written during the past fifteen years, David Ries-
• The reader will note that the argument in the last part of this essay is phrased
in terms which refer more immediately to the situation in America than in
England. It is probably not so different, although the vigorous assertion of dif–
ference which is general in England today must be taken into account.
