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one another, for he has no wish to impo5e upon them a similarity
praise which punctuate the book; yet while he admires her, he
which would be himself; and he will be quite willing to see their
knows the partic�lar corruptions which our civilization is working
faults, for his affection leaves him free to love them, not because
�pon her, for he 1s aware not only of her desire to pull down what
they are faultless but because they are they; yet while he sees their
1s above her but also of her desire to imitate and conform to it and
faults he will be able, from long connection and because there is no
to. despise what she herself is. Millicent is proud of doing nothing
reason to avoid the truth, to perceive the many reasons for their
w1.t� her hands, she despises Hyacinth because he is so poor in
actions. The discriminations and modifications of such a man would
spmt as to consent to make things and get dirty in the process, and
be enormous, yet the moral realism they would constitute would
she values herself because she does nothing less genteel than exhibit
not arise from an analytical intelligence as we usually conceive it
what others have made; and in one of the most pregnant scenes of
but from love.
the book James involves her in the peculiarly corrupt and feeble
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The Princess Casamassima
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sexuality which is associated in our culture with exhibiting and
The Princess, as some will remember, is the Christina Light of
looking at luxurious obj,ects.
James's earlier novel, Rodei-ick Hudson, and she considers, as
But it is in the creation of Paul Muniment and the Princess that
Madame Grandoni says of her, "that in the darkest hour of her life,
James's moral realism shows itself in fullest power. If we seek an
she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so
explanation of why The Princess Casamassima was not understood
as such a terrible piece of frivolity that she can never for the rest of
in its own day, we find it in the fact that the significance of this reher days be serious enough to make up for it." Seriousness has bemarkable pair could scarcely have emerged for the reader of 1886.
come her ruling passion, and in the great sad comedy of the story
But we of today can say that they and their relationship constitute
it is her fatal sin, for seriousness is not exempt from the tendency of
one of the most masterly comments on modern life that has ever
ruling passions to lead to error. And yet it has an aspect of heroism,
been made.
this hunt of hers for reality, for a strong and final basis of life.
In Paul Muniment a genuine idealism coexists with a secret de
"Then it's real, it's solid!" she exclaims when Hyacinth tells her
sire for personal power. It is one of the brilliances of the novel that
that he has seen Hoffendahl and has penetrated to the revolutionary
his ambition is never made explicit. Rosy's remark about her brother,
holy of holies. It is her quest for reality that leads her to the poor, to
"What my brother really cares for-well, one of these days, when
the very poorest poor she can find, and that brings a light of joy
you know you'll tell me," is perhaps as close as his secret ever comes
to her eye at any news of suffering or deprivation, which must
to statement. It is conveyed to us by his tone, as a decisive element
surely be, if anything is, an irrefrangible reality. As death and
of his charm, for Paul radiates what the sociologists, borrowing the
danger are-her interest in Hyacinth is made the more intense by
name from theology, call chai-isma, the charm of power, the gift of
his pledged death, and she herself eventually wants to undertake
leadership. His natural passion for power must never become exthe mortal mission. A perfect drunkard of reality, she is ever drawn plicit, for it is one of the beliefs of our culture that power invalidates
to look for stronger and stronger drams.
moral purpose. The ambiguity of Paul Muniment has been called
Inevitably, of course, the great irony of her fate is that the more
into being by the nature of modern politics in so far as it is moral
passionately she seeks reality and the happier she becomes in her
and idealistic. For idealism has not changed the nature of leaderbelief that she is close to it, the further removed she is. Inevitably ship, but it has forced the leader to change his nature, requiring
she must turn away from Hyacinth because she reads his moral
him to present himself as a harmless and self-abnegating man.
seriousness as frivolousness; and inevitably she is led to Paul who,
It is easy enough to speak of this ambiguity as a form of hyas she thinks, affirms her in a morality which is as real and serious pocrisy, yet the opposition between morality and power from which
as anything can be, an absolute morality which gives her permisit springs is perfectly well conceived. But even if well conceived, it sion to devaluate and even destroy all that she has known of human
is endlessly difficult to execute and it produces its own particular
good because it has been connected with her own frivolous, selfconfusions, falsifications, and even lies. The moral realist sees it as betraying past. She cannot but mistake the nature of reality, for she
the source of characteristically modern ironies, such as the liberal
believes it is a thing, a position, a finality, a bedrock. She is, in short,
exhausting the scrupulosity which made him deprecate all power
the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself in
and becoming extravagantly tolerant of what he had once devirtue, making itself appear harmless, the will that hates itself and nounced, or the idealist who takes license from his ideals for the unfinds its manifestations guilty and is able to exist only if it operates restrained exercise of power.
in the name of virtue, that despises the variety and modulations of
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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the human story and longs for an absolute humanity, which is but
another way of saying a nothingness. In her alliance with Paul she
constitutes a striking symbol of that powerful part of modern culture that exists by means of its claim to political innocence and by its false seriousness-the political awareness that is not aware, the
The Function
social consciousness which hates full consciousness, the moral
earnestness which is moral luxury.
of the Little Magazine
The fatal ambiguity of the Princess and Paul is a prime condition
of Hyacinth Robinson's tragedy. If we comprehend the complex
totality that James has thus conceived, we understand that the novel
is an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of
our civilization. I ventu
re to call it incomparable because, although
other writers have provided abundant substantiation of James's insight, no one has, like him, told us the truth in a single luminous THE PARTISAN READER may be thought of as an ambiguous monument. It commemorates a victory-Partisan
act of creation. If we ask by what magic James was able to do what
Review has survived for a decade, and has survived with a
he did, the answer is to be found in what I have identified as the
vitality of which the evidence may be found in the book which
source of James's moral realism. For the novelist can tell the truth
marks the anniversary. Yet to celebrate the victory is to be at once
about Paul and the Princess only if, while he represents them in
aware of the larger circumstance of defeat in which it was gained.
their ambiguity and error, he also allows them to exist in their pride
For what we speak of as if it were a notable achievement is no more
and beauty: the moral realism that shows the ambiguity and error
than this: that a magazine which has devoted itself to the publicacannot refrain from showing the pride and beauty. Its power to tell tion of good writing of various kinds has been able to continue in
the truth arises from its power of love. James had the imagination
existence for ten years and has so far established itself that its audiof disaster and that is why he is immediately relevant to us; but ence now numbers some six thousand readers.1
together with the imagination of disaster he had what the imagina
Here is an epitome of our cultural situation. Briefly put, it is that
tion of disaster often destroys and in our time is daily destroying,
there exists a great gulf between our educated class and the best of
the imagination of love.
our literature.
I use the word educated in its commonest sense to indicate those
people who value their ability to live some part of their lives with
serious ideas. I limit the case to these people and do not refer to the
great mass of people because that would involve us in an ultimate
social question and I have in mind only the present cultural ques-
This essay was first published as the introduction to The Pa'.tisan Re�d�r: Ten Y�m:s
of Partisan Review, 1933-1944: An Anthology, edited by Wilham Ph1lhps and Ph1hp
Rahv (New York: The Dial Press, 1946).
1 Four years later the number has risen to ten thousand.
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Function of the Little Magazine
91
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tion. And I do not mean to assert that Partisan Review in itself conthe consulship at Venice. It was then the common practice to place tains the best of our literature, but only that it is representative of
literary men in foreign diplomatic posts.
some of the tendencies that are producing the best.
I am not trying to paint an idyllic picture of the literary life of our
The great gulf to which I refer did not open suddenly. Some fifty
nineteenth century. It was a life full of social anomaly and economic
years ago, William Dean Howells observed that the readers of the
hardship. I am only trying to suggest that in the culture of the time
"cultivated" American magazines were markedly losing interest in
literature was assumed. What was true of Howells in Ohio was also
literary contributions. Howells is here a useful witness, not only betrue of Mark Twain in Missouri. Nothing could be falser than the cause he had his finger in so many important literary pies and was
view that Mark Twain was a folk writer. Like his own Tom
admirably aware of the economics and sociology of literature, but
Sawyer, he was literate and literary to the core, even snobbishly so.
also because he himself was an interesting example of the literary
The local literary culture that he loved to mock, the graveyard
culture whose decline he was noting. The Ohio of Howells' boyhood
poetry, the foolish Byronism, the adoration of Scott, was the literahad only recently emerged from its frontier phase and in its manner ture of the London drawing rooms naturalized as a folk fact in
of life it was still what we would call primitive. Yet in this Ohio,
Missouri. We were once a nation that took its cultural stand on the
while still a boy, Howells had devoted himself to the literary life.
intense literariness of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. When Oscar
He was unusual but he was not unique or lonely; he had friends
Wilde and Matthew Arnold came here on tour, they may have
who also felt called to literature or scholarship. His elders did not
figured chiefly as curiosities, but at least these literary men were
think the young man strange. Literature had its large accepted place
nothing less than that.
in this culture. The respectable lawyers of the locality subscribed to
In the nineteenth century, in this country as in Europe, literature
the great British quarterlies. The printing office of Howells' father
underlay every activity of mind. The scientist, the philosopher, the
was the resort of the village wits, who, as the son tells us, "dropped
historian, the theologian, the economist, the social theorist, and even
in, and liked to stand with their backs to the stove and challenge
the politician, were required to command literary abilities which
opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope
would now be thought irrelevant to their respective callings. The
and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare." Problems of morality and
man of original ideas spake directly to "the intelligent public," to the
religious faith were freely and boldly discussed. There was no inlawyer, the doctor, the merchant, and even-and much more than tellectual isolationism, and the village felt, at least eventually, the
now, as is suggested by the old practice of bringing out very cheap
reverberations of the European movement of mind. Howells learned
editions of important books-to the working masses. The role of the
an adequate German from the German settlers and became a disciple
"popularizer" was relatively Jittle known; the originator of an idea
of Heine. The past was alive, and the boy, rooting in a barrel of
was expected to make his own full meaning clear.
books in his father's log cabin, found much to read about old Spain
Of two utterances of equal quality, one of the nineteenth and one
at the age of fifteen, having conceived a passion for Don Quixote, he
of the twentieth century, we can say that the one of the nineteenth
vowed to write the life of Cervantes. At the outbreak of the Civil
century had the greater power. If the mechanical means of com
War, when Howells was twenty-three, Abraham Lincoln, wishing
munication were then less efficient than now, the intellectual means
to reward the young author for a campaign biography, offered him,
were far more efficient. There may even be a significant ratio beat the instance of John Hay and the urging of the Ohio politicians, tween the two. Perhaps, as John Dos Passos has suggested, where
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The Function of the Little Magazine
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books and ideas are relatively rare, true literacy may be higher than
work. They involve ultimate considerations, and, apart from the fact
where they are superabundant.2 At any rate, it was the natural
that it is always futile to make predictions about culture, the practiexpectation that a serious idea would be heard and considered.
cal activity of literature requires that a sense of the present moment
Baudelaire is the poet from whom our modern disowned poets have
be kept paramount.
taken their characteristic attitudes, yet Baudelaire himself was still
To the general lowering of the status of literature and of the inable to think of "success," to believe in the possibility of being seriterest in it, the innumerable "little magazines" have been a natural ouly listened to by the very society he flouted, and he even carried
and heroic response. Since the beginning of the century, meeting
his belief to the point of standing for election to the Academy.
difficulties of which only their editors can truly conceive, they have
This power of the word, this power of the idea, we no longer
tried to keep the roads open. From the elegant and brilliant Dial to
count on in the same degree. It is now more than twenty years since
the latest little scrub from the provinces, they have done their work,
a literary movement in this country has had what I have called
they have kept our culture from being cautious and settled, or
power. The literary movement of social criticism of the 192o's is not
merely sociological, or merely pious. They are snickered at and
finally satisfying, but it had more energy to advance our civilization
snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say
than anything we can now see, and its effects were large and good.
in a precise way just what effect they have-except that they keep
No tendency since has had an equal strength. The falling off from