FATE OF PLEASURE
185
which is implicit in the historical approach to a fact of moral culture.
It suggests that the modern spirituality, with its devaluation of the
principle of pleasure, because it came into being at a particular time,
may be regarded as a contingent and not a necessary mode of
thought. This opens the way to regarding it as a mode of thought
which is "received" or "established" and which is therefore, like any
other received or established mode of thought, available to critical
scrutiny.
And that possibility is by no means comfortable. We set great
store by the unillusioned militancy of spirit which deals violently
with the specious good. Upon it we base whatever self-esteem we
can lay claim to--it gives us, as one of D. H. Lawrence's characters
says of it (or something very much like it) our "last distinction";
he feels that to question
it
is a "sort of vulgarity.»7 To what end,
with what intention, is
it
to be questioned? Can an adversary scrutiny
of it point away from it to anything else than an idiot literature, to
"positive heroes" who know how to get the good out of life and who
have "affirmative" emotions about their success in doing so? The
energy, the consciousness, and the wit of modern literature derive
from its enterprise of violence against the specious good of what–
ever poor "pleasure" may be offered to us by the universe or by our
general culture in its quotidian aspects. We feel an instinctive re–
sentment of questions which tend to suggest that there is tault to be
found with the one saving element of our moral situation-that ex–
truded "high" segment of our general culture, with its exigent, vio–
lently subversive spirituality, with its power of arming us against, and
setting us apart from,
all
in the general culture that we hate and
fear.
Then what justification can there be for describing with any
irony at all the diminished status of the principle of pleasure which
characterizes this segment of our culture?
Possibly one small justification can be brought to light by
reference to a famous passage in the
Confessions
of St. Augustine,
the one in which Augustine speaks of an episode of his adolescence
and asks why he entered that orchard and stole those pears. Of all
the acts of his unregenerate days which he calls sinful and examines
7. Gerald Crich, in Chapter XXIX of
Women
in
Love.
