by Colin Wilson
The Last Stand of the Romantic Hero
In England, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were a few last flickers of the heroic ideal. There was Kipling’s “empire loyalism”; but this soured into a curious defeatism in his later work.2 And there was an active interest in the intelligent hero in Wells, Chesterton, and Shaw. This appears most strongly in Chesterton, but he is also, unfortunately, the least serious. His temperament contained a mixture of mysticism, juvenile humor, and naïveté, in about equal parts. His idea of reviving the heroic was to plunge back into the past; The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fantasy about a man who takes the ancient rivalries of the boroughs of London with deadly earnestness and starts a civil war to settle the question of precedence. Even Chesterton’s politics was medieval; he advocated a feudal system of ownership (Distributism). Books such as The Man Who Was Thursday, Manalive, The Ball and the Cross exploit his flamboyant vein of heroic romanticism.
Wells’ contributions, although far more incidental to his major ideas, are a great deal more solid than Chesterton’s. In a very early book, Love and Mr. Lewisham, he showed the young schoolmaster, Lewisham, thinking out a formidable campaign against the world, which begins at five every morning with three hours of French. He reckons that by the age of twenty-four he will have several modern languages and a broad all-round education, and be prepared for greater achievements. Unfortunately, Mr. Lewisham is no Julien Sorel; he falls in love and forgets the whole scheme. And yet Wells never seemed to be interested in the problem of the ambitious man, of the man doing battle with his circumstances. The History of Mr. Polly builds up a picture of a middle-aged man who has allowed himself to become completely oppressed by circumstances, and then shows him breaking the chain with one act of desperation (Mr. Polly’s decision to commit suicide and burn down the house). The book is not a major work, and it is doubtful if Wells himself took it very seriously; yet it is an interesting contradiction of the nineteenth-century spirit of defeat, the Chekhovian pessimism. Wells had an immense store of vitality, and the optimism that went with it; unfortunately, like Chesterton, he failed to take himself seriously enough. In this they form an interesting contrast with the generation of Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway that came after.
Shaw is an altogether more serious writer than Chesterton or Wells, although, like them, he wrote too much and often wrote hastily and carelessly. Even so, his Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra is the only serious attempt in twentieth-century literature to create an undefeated hero. And Shaw faced squarely the metaphysical issues that defeated Faust and the Underground Man. In the Don Juan in Hell scene of Man and Superman, Juan can say, “As long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence,” and speaks of “the work of helping life in its struggle upwards.”
This is far more significant than might appear on a first reading. The ancient Greek hero was a mortal who hoped to gain the favor of the gods, and the medieval knight was a mortal who trusted to his patron saint and Jesus. Faust is the man who objects to being mortal. His whole quest is aimed at becoming godlike; his despair lies in his inability to escape his own miserable limitations. Now Shaw continues in the Faustian tradition, making Don Juan state: “Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself.” “The mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium… are all more or less successful attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely unilludedly self-conscious; in short, a god.” The issue is now plain. The old hero was the favorite of the gods; the new hero aims at becoming a god. Riesman would say that the old hero was tradition-directed, while the new hero aims at being completely inner-directed.
Shaw was the only thinker of his generation to face the ultimate religious issues. He saw clearly that the problem of the hero lies in the fact that nothing a man can do outlasts his own life, that death makes all achievement seem futile. An age of belief could set its hopes on heaven, while liberal humanism contented itself with phrases that concealed the defeat: “A man lives in his descendants,” ‘‘An artist’s life begins after his death,” and so forth. But with the reality of death and corruption hanging over life, the question ‘‘What shall we do with our lives?” has no more importance than ‘‘Do you prefer light ale or brown?” and all philosophy becomes a waste of time. Plato and the Buddha answered the question by saying that man returns to earth repeatedly, so that death is an illusion (and their answer appears to have satisfied many modern intellectuals, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood among them). Shaw decided that men have more control over their lives than they realize (the answer is typical of him) and that they could live indefinitely if they made the effort. Whether his answer is regarded as satisfactory or not, he had recognized the problem and made his attempt to solve it; in doing so, he had taken up the problem of the hero where Goethe had left it.
The chief objection to Shaw’s method of dramatic dialogue is that it cannot command the conviction of Zola-like realism. The only purpose of realism, after all, is to be convincing. In some ways, the technique of realism might be compared to that of music; this can be seen clearly by considering a book such as Joyce’s Ulysses, which apparently adheres strenuously to the conventions of realism, never aiming for dramatic effects, never trying to move the reader by arguments, but whose final effect is like that of music or great poetry—overpowering emotional conviction of the value of life. But at the same time, Joyce can never “say” as much as the third act of Man and Superman. Each method has its advantages, and the greatest writer is the man who can combine the best of both.
But this is precisely what did not happen when a new literary generation followed the generation of Wells and Chesterton. Idealism was out; realism was in, and Joyce, Huxley, Anderson, Sinclair, Hemingway, Dos Passos deliberately excluded any general ideas from their work and plunged deep into the “fallacy of insignificance” and the cult of the ordinary chap. Aldous Huxley, in particular, specialized in the cringing hero, the “chinless intelligent man,” as if to compensate for his audacity in interweaving a few ideas. Down to his most recent novel (The Genius and the Goddess) he seems incapable of writing about a hero without an inferiority complex.
It is true that, unlike most novelists of the twentieth century, Huxley possesses a real sense of values and uses the novel to propagate it. But the values are intellectual, and they affect his writing only on the intellectual level. Physically and emotionally, the insignificance premise dominates. Even the reader who sympathizes with Huxley’s ideas will feel a sense of incompleteness about his world. It ignores so many aspects of living experience that any navvy or Woolworth’s shopgirl would know intimately. Only an other-directed intellectual could find Huxley’s picture of the world adequate, for the Huxley hero is always intellectual and always painfully aware of other people. Without unfairness, Huxley might be called the prophet of the other-directed intellectual.
Literary Faking
The question of literary values provides an interesting side light on the problems of other-direction. The mass manipulation by advertisers has its respectable cultural counterpart in writers such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, D. H. Lawrence. These writers have a set of values, and their purpose is to impose these values on their readers. To do this, they use a method that deserves to be considered as an additional chapter to The Hidden Persuaders. It consists in making the fullest use of literary realism. Greene and Waugh are both orthodox Roman Catholics, and the change in technique becomes immediately apparent if one contrasts them with an earlier Catholic apologist, Paul Claudel. In what many consider to be his finest play, Le Soulier de Satin, Claudel makes the most sweeping demands on his audience; there is very little conventional dramatic action, and the play moves forward in a series of long speeches that require close attention. Greene and Waugh, on the contrary, take care to give the public what it wants and at
tempt to slip in their propaganda at a level where it will hardly be noticed. The result produces in many unprejudiced readers the effect of a literary confidence trick.
Greene’s method, for instance, follows a well-established pattern. He begins by portraying his characters and the world they live in with an apparently ruthless frankness. There is a heavy emphasis on sex, sordidness, and humiliation. The reader has a feeling that Greene is turning to him periodically and asking: “Am I trying to fake anything? Have I told any lies?” And the reader, crushed and impressed, answers: “No, go on.” The picture builds up with appalling inevitability, selecting details of human sin, weakness, and misery—and entirely omitting any reference to the strength or poetry of human existence. If the reader has been carried along and convinced, the final effect is to make him feel that the world is a far worse place than he had ever imagined. And once this idea is firmly established, he is in the right frame of mind to appreciate Greene’s patent remedy: Catholicism.
“Don’t worry, the world may be an awful dump, but the mercy of God is infinite,” and so forth. For the reader who feels inclined to ask, “But what about Beethoven, what about Michelangelo and Van Gogh and Rabelais…?” there is no reply, and he is left with a guilty suspicion that perhaps he is rather immature to ask such questions.
The work of D. H. Lawrence, although at its best it touches greatness, often degenerates into the same kind of thing—in St. Mawr and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance. People are portrayed as stupid, or mean and envious, or hopelessly trivial, and once the reader has been convinced that the world Lawrence presents is a faithful picture of the world in which we all live, he is prepared to agree with Lawrence that things are in a pretty bad way. All that remains is the sale of the patent remedy—in this case, sex.
The type of literary confidence trick that some Soviet Russian authors specialize in adopts roughly the same method—the emphasis upon the delights of communal living, the need for every man to be a good member of the community, the horrors and injustices of capitalism, and so forth. As in the work of Greene and Lawrence, it depends on the reader’s not possessing enough imagination to envisage a higher destiny for the hero (and, by implication, for himself) than the one the author has selected for him—collective farming, the Catholic church, or being Lady Chatterley’s lover.
All these writers present a selected range of human experience as if it were completely representative. Like any other confidence trick, their work depends for the success of its message upon the gullibility of the audience, and in this case, the gullibility is the immediate result of other-direction.
A European Hero in the Twentieth Century
When asked his opinion of modern American writing, André Gide is reported to have said: “American literature is soulless.” His meaning is clear, although the wording is ambiguous (after all, continental literature could hardly be called “soulful”). What Gide meant, undoubtedly, is that American literature is not subjective enough. But even if the European novel has not yet become “society-conscious” to the same extent as the American novel, the unheroic premise still hovers in the background, the unsolved metaphysical heritage of Goethe and Dostoevsky.
One of the most interesting heroes in twentieth-century literature is Ulrich, the hero of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eugenschaften (The Man without Qualities). Musil was an engineer-turned-writer, whose training had been largely military. The extremely interesting result is already visible in his early autobiographical novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Törless (The Perplexities of Young Törless). The novel deals with Musil’s period at Weisskirchen, the military school at which Rilke had been so miserable. But although Törless has something in common with other novels about young artists, it is a far tougher book than the average. If compared with Rilke’s fragments about the same school (The Gymnastic Lesson and Pierre Dumont) Musil’s toughness appears almost as ruthlessness.
Musil’s only other novel is the immense The Man without Qualities. In some ways, this is one of the most disconcerting books ever written, an extraordinary mixture of great writing and long-winded word-spinning. Musil has a preference for indirect narrative and a ponderous prose style that reads like a mixture of Dickens and Kant. The plot is concerned mainly with a great patriotic campaign run by a number of silly, cultured people, and Ulrich’s involvement in it. The satire is heavy going. Anatole France is quoted as saying “Art is long but Proust is longer,” but the bon mot is even more applicable to Musil. His indirect style makes a two-thousand-page book seem like four thousand.
But having said all this, it must be admitted that it is the only twentieth-century novel that at times speaks with the power and authority of Dostoevsky. The greatest sections are all concerned with Ulrich, the “man without qualities,” and his complex personal life. Ulrich is an older version of Törless. He is a man who has never for a moment doubted that it is his destiny to do something great. But he has no idea of what he will do. “He saw wonderfully clearly that… he had in himself all the abilities and qualities favored by the time in which he lives; but he had somehow lost the capacity to apply them.” Like Faust, Ulrich is young and personally attractive, as well as being fairly rich. He has been in the army and has lived a fast life of seduction, drinking, and fighting duels. When the army disappointed his incorrigible romanticism (he had challenged a financier to a duel, and the financier had Ulrich reprimanded by his colonel, thus revealing that money counted for more than courage, even in the Austrian army), he resigned his commission and became an engineer. Even this was pure romanticism; he imagined the engineer as the superman of the modern world (an illusion that still persists in Soviet Russia, to judge by its novels). When he discovered that engineers are no more intelligent or stupid than most people, he became a mathematician, his romanticism having now led him to believe that mathematical truth is pure truth and that the mathematician is the modern equivalent of the wizard. He soon became disillusioned again. This terminates his three attempts to become a “man of importance.” When the novel opens, this stage of his career is already behind him. A mature man stands on the threshold of life, a man armed with the intellect of a mathematician, the subtlety of a philosopher, the sensitivity of a poet, and the physical attractions of a Don Juan. With these qualities, one might expect an extraordinary career for Ulrich; his creator had in his hands the possibility of a rich and exciting narrative. The actuality is disappointing. Ulrich merely gets involved in a propos-terous nationalistic campaign and has several love affairs. In spite of his heroic qualities, there is nothing to be done.
What, then, is Musil’s achievement as a novelist?
In some ways, it can be compared to Proust’s. Proust brought a new slow-motion sensitivity to the novel, one that is able to analyze emotions with infinite subtlety. Musil brings a slow-motion intellect to it, one that reveals the strange ambiguities of consciousness, the extraordinary complexity of modern life. He satirizes the generals and financiers and “cultured” hostesses involved in the great patriotic campaign; they have “explained” life on a number of absurdly simple assumptions that fail to give even the least idea of its complexity. These people all act and speak with certainty because they are stupid. Ulrich, who never loses a sense of the ambiguity of reality, is a man without qualities because his tolerance is too broad to pass judgment. He prefers to remain a young man of promise because he sees too deeply to commit himself irrevocably to any course of action; he would rather be a man with a thousand potential achievements than a man with one actual achievement that has canceled out all the others.
Musil’s theme is the twentieth century, its speed and complexity; some of his early chapters read like an anticipation of The Organization Man. His novel is also an exposure of the outworn fallacies, the absurd oversimplifications, on which our streamlined society runs. A great deal of the book is devoted to Moosbrugger, the sexual maniac who has been sentenced to death although he is plainly unbalanced. Ulrich feels a strange kinship with Moos
brugger. This is not because Ulrich feels himself to be a potential sex maniac (although he recognizes a savagely irrational element in himself that could express itself in murder), but because both he and Moosbrugger are men with a deep and complex vision of the human soul and both feel helpless rage at the stupid oversimplifications upon which society bases its judgments. For Ulrich, the fact that society is stupid makes no great difference; but Moosbrugger its stupidity condemns to death. Moosbrugger’s situation bears some resemblance to Meursault’s in Camus’s L’Etranger; Ulrich cannot help feeling, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Musil never finished the novel (which is perhaps just as well, since it is doubtful whether any reader would have succeeded in doing so). This is unimportant. He had re-created the Faust figure in a typically modern context (1913-1914), and this was a very considerable achievement for the period between the wars, when the unheroic premise dominated the literature of Europe and America.
In this book, I am deliberately paying very little attention to Proust, for obvious reasons. If his hypochondriac Marcel is to be seriously considered as a hero, then the word “hero” is almost meaningless. Marcel suffers from an acute form of the insignificance fallacy. In Swann’s Way, he relates how his mother stayed the night in his room and “permanently weakened his will.” All through the book, he is never wholly free of a feeling of self-contempt. Defenders of Proust might argue that this reveals self-knowledge. I am more inclined to believe that it shows self-deception, the weakness of a man who is too lazy to make any effort to discipline himself. He suffers from the notion that sensitivity must involve various kinds of weakness. Since Goethe and Musil have both created striking disproofs of this, Proust’s argument will convince only other hypochondriacs. This is not to dismiss Proust, but only to say that his work is irrelevant in this context.