FATE OF PLEASURE
187
thou." Our high culture invites us to transfer our energies from
the bourgeois competition to the spiritual competition. We find our
"distinction"-last or penultimate-in our triumph over the miser–
able "gentlemen," whether they are others or ourselves, whether our
cry be, "I have more life in me than you have" or "I have more life
in me than I have." Now and then it must occur to us that the
life of competition for spiritual status is not without its sordidness
and absurdity. But how else are we to live?
But this is a matter for the novelist- for that novelist we do
not yet have but must surely have one day, who will take into
serious and comic account the actualities of the spiritual career of
our time.
More immediately available to our awareness and more sub–
stantive and simple in itself is the effect which the devaluation of
pleasure has upon the relation between our high literature and our
life in politics, taking that word in its largest possible sense. There
was a time when literature assumed that the best ideals of politics
were naturally in accord with its own essence, when poetry cele–
brated the qualities of social life which had their paradigmatic ex–
istence in poetry itself. Keats's
Poems
of 1817 takes for its epigraph
two lines from Spenser which are intended to point up the political
overtone of the volume:
«What more felicity can fall to creature /
Than to enjoy delight with liberty."
Even when Wordsworth is deep
in Toryism and Stoic Christianity, it is natural for him to assert the
Utopian possibility.
Paradise and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields-like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main-why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
He goes on to say categorically that these imaginations may become,
at the behest of rationality and good will,
«a simple produce of the
common day."
But the old connection between literature and politics
has been dissolved. For the typical modern literary personality, po–
litical life is likely to exist only as it makes an occasion for the disgust
and rage which are essential to the state of modern spirituality, as
