184
LIONEL TRILLING
upon pleasure, upon pleasure postponed and purified but analagous
in kind to worldly pleasure. Dostoevsky's clerk has had his way with
us: it would seem to be true that, in the degree that the promises
of the spiritual life are made in terms of pleasure--<>f comfort, rest,
and beauty-they have no power over the modern imagination.
If
Kafka, perhaps more than any other writer of our time, lends the
color of reality to the events of the spiritual life, his power to do so
lies in his characterizing these events by unpleasure, by sordidness
and disorder, even when, as in
The Castle,
the spiritual struggle
seems to yield a measure of success. He understood that a divinity
who, like St. Augustine's, could be spoken of as gratifying
all
the
senses, must nowadays be deficient in reality, that a heaven which
is presented to us as well-ordered, commodious, beautiful-as
luxuri–
ous--cannot be an object of hope. He was set on the road to this
understanding by Dostoevsky, who, more dramatically and cogently
than anyone before him, expresses the modern aversion from pleasure.
Yeats tells us that "Berkeley in his youth described the
summum
bonum
and the reality of Heaven as physical pleasure, and thought
this conception made both more intelligible to simple men." To
simple men perhaps, but who now is a simple man? How far from
our imagination is the idea of "peace" as the crown of spiritual
struggle! The idea of "bliss" is even further removed. The two words
propose to us a state of virtually infantile passivity which is the
negation of the "more life" that we crave, the "more life" of spiritual
militancy. We dread Eden, and of all Christian concepts there is
none which we understand so well as the
"felix culpa"
and the
"fortunate fall"; not, of course, for the reason on which these
Christian paradoxes were based, but because by means of the sin
and the fall we managed to get ourselves expelled from that dreadful
place.
I have tried to make explicit, although surely in a way that is
all
too summary, a change in the assumptions of literature which
everybody is more or less aware of. In undertaking to do this, my
first intention has been historical and objective. But it must be
obvious that my account of the change has not been wholly objec–
tive in the sense of being wholly neutral.
It
asks a question which
is inevitably adversary in some degree,
if
only by reason of the irony
