tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of
moral judgment. It is, I would venture to say, the normal or ideal
voice of the novelist. It is characteristically modest, yet it has in it,
without apology or self-consciousness, a largeness, even a stateliness,
which derives from Fitzgerald's connection with tradition and with
mind, from his sense of what has been done before and the demands
which this past accomplishment makes. " ... I became aware of the
old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh
green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had
made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the
last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory and enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of
Art and For tune
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genre has been exhausted, worked out in the way that a lode of ore
is worked out-it can no longer yield a valuable supply of its natural
matter. The second explanation is that the novel was developed in
Art and Fortune
response to certain cultural circumstances which now no longer exist
but have given way to other circumstances which must be met by
other forms of the imagination. The third explanation is that although the circumstances to which the novel was a response do still exist we either lack the power to use the form,1 or no longer find
value in the answers that the novel provides, because the continuing
I
I
circumstances have entered a phase of increased intensity.
T IS impossible to talk about the novel nowadays without hav
The first theory was put forward by Ortega in his essay "Notes on
ing in our minds the question of whether or not the novel is
the Novel." It is an explanation which has its clear limitations, but
still a living form. Twenty-five years ago T. S. Eliot said that
it is certainly not without its cogency. We have all had the experithe novel came to an end with Flaubert and James, and at about the ence of feeling that some individual work of art, or some canon of
same time Sefior Ortega said much the same thing. This opinion is
art, or a whole idiom of art, has lost, temporarily or permanently,
now heard on all sides. It is heard in conversation rather than read
its charm and power. Sometimes we weary of the habitual or halfin formal discourse, for to insist on the death or moribundity of a mechanical devices by which the artist warms up for his ideas or by
great genre is an unhappy task which the critic will naturally avoid
which he bridges the gap between his ideas; this can happen even
if he can, yet the opinion is now an established one and has a very
with Mozart. Sometimes it is the very essence of the man's thought
considerable authority. Do we not see its influence in, for example,
that fatigues; we feel that his characteristic insights can too easily
V. S. Pritchett's recent book, The Living Novel? Although Mr.
be foreseen and we become too much aware of how they exist at the
Pritchett is himself a novelist and writes about the novel with the
expense of blindness to other truths; this can happen even with
perception that comes of love, and even by the name he gives his
Dostoevski. And so with an entire genre of art-there may come a
book disputes the fact of the novel's death, yet still, despite these
moment when it cannot satisfy one of our legitimate demands,
tokens of his faith, he deals with the subject under a kind of conwhich is that it shall surprise us. This demand, and the liability of straint, as if he had won the right to claim life for the novel only
our artistic interests to wear out, do not show us to be light-minded.
upon condition of not claiming for it much power.
Without them our use of art would be only ritualistic, or com
I do not believe that the novel is dead. And yet particular forms
memorative of our past experiences; and although there is nothing
of the creative imagination may indeed die-English poetic drama
wrong in using art for ritual and commemoration, still these are not
stands as the great witness of the possibility-and there might at this
the largest uses to which it can be put. Curiosity is as much an intime be an advantage in accepting the proposition as an hypothesis stinct as hunger and love, and curiosity about any particular thing
which will lead us to understand under what conditions the novel
may be satisfied.
may live.
Then we must consider that technique has its autonomy and that
If we consent to speak of the novel as dead, three possible explana
1 This might seem to beg the cultural question; yet certain technical abilities do
tions of the fact spring at once to mind. The first is simply that the
deteriorate or disappear for reasons which although theoretically ascertainable arc
almost beyond practical determination.
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
Art and For tune
243
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it dictates the laws of its own growth. Aristotle speaks of Athenian
We invented money and we use it, yet we cannot either understand
tragedy as seeking and finding its fulfillment, its entelechy, and it
its laws or control its actions. It has a life of its own which it properly
may be that we are interested in any art only just so long as it is in
should noi: have; Karl Marx speaks with a kind of horror of its inprocess of search; that what moves us is the mysterious energy of decent power to reproduce, as if, he says, love were working in its
quest. At a certain point in the development of a genre, the pracbody. It is impious, being critical of existent social realities, and it titioner looks back and sees all that has been done by others before
has the effect of lessening their degree of reality. The social re�lity
him and knows that no ordinary effort can surpass or even match it;
upon which it has its most devastating effect is of course that of
ordinary effort can only repeat. It is at this point that, as Ortega says,
cla�s. And class itself is a social fact which, whenever it is brought
we get the isolated extraordinary effort which transcends the tradiinto question, has like money a remarkable intimacy with metation and brings it to an end. This, no doubt, is what people mean physics and the theory of knowledge-I have suggested how .for
when they speak of Joyce and Proust bringing the novel to its grave.
Shakespeare any derangement of social classes seems always to imply
Here is the case, as strongly as I can put it, for the idea that a
a derangement of the senses in madness or dream, some elaborate
genre can exhaust itself simply by following the laws of its own dejoke about the nature of reality. This great joke is the matter of the velopment. As an explanation of the death of the novel it does not
book which we acknowledge as the ancestor of the modern novel,
sufficiently exfoliate or sufficiently connect with the world. It can by
Don Quixote; and indeed no great novel exists which does not have
no means be ignored, but of itself it cannot give an adequate answer
the joke a
t its very heart.
to our question.
In the essay to which I refer I also said that, in dealing with the
questions of illusion and· reality which were raised by the ideas of
II
money and class, the novel characteristically relied upon an exhaustive exploitation of manners. Although I tried to give a sufficiently So we must now regard the novel as an art form contrived to do a
strong and complicated meaning to the word manners, I gather that
certain kind of work, its existence conditioned by the nature of that
my merely having used the word, or perhaps my having used it in
work. In another essay2 I undertook to say what the work of the
a context that questioned certain political assumptions of a pious
novel was-I said that it was the investigation of reality and illusion.
sort, has led to the belief that I am interested in establishing a new
Of course the novel does not differ in this from all other highly
genteel tradition in criticism and fiction. Where misunderstanding
developed literary forms; it differs, however, in at least one signifiserves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make onself undercant respect, that it deals with reality and illusion in relation to stood; yet to guard as well as I can against this imputation, I will
questions of social class, which in relatively recent times are bound
say not only that the greatest exploitation of manners ever made is
up with money.
the Iliad, but also that The Possessed and Studs Lonigan are works
In Western civilization the idea of money exercises a great fascinawhose concern with manners is of their very essence.
tion-it is the fascination of an actual thing which has attained a
To these characteristsics of the novel-the interest in illusion and
metaphysical ideality or of a metaphysical entity which has attained
reality as generated by class and money, this interest expressed by
actual existence. Spirits and ghosts are beings in such a middling
the observation of manners-we must add the unabashed interest in
state of existence; and money is both real and not real, like a spook.
ideas. From its very beginning the novel made books the objects of
2
its regard. Nowadays we are inclined to see the appearance of a
"Manners, Morals, and the Novel."
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Art and Fortune
245
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literary fact in a novel as the sign of its "intellectuality" and specialapplied. And for many to whom the ideal of mere security is too low ness of appeal, and even as a sign of decadence. But Joyce's solemn
and to whom the ideal of direct political power is beyond the reach
literary discussions in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or
of their imagination, money, in order to be justified, must be inhis elaborate literary play in the later works, or Proust's critical exvolved with virtue and with the virtuous cultivation of good taste cursions, are in the direct line of Don Quixote and Tom fones,
in politics, culture, and the appointments of the home-money is
which are works of literary criticism before they are anything else.
terribly ashamed of itself. As for class, in Europe the bourgeoisie to
The Germans had a useful name for a certain kind of novel which
gether with its foil the aristocracy has been weakening for decades.
they called a Kulturroman; actually every great novel deserves
It ceased some time ago to be the chief source of political leaders;
that name, for it is hard to think of one that is not precisely a roits nineteenth-century position as ideologue of the world has vanmance of culture. By culture we must mean not merely the general ished before the ideological strength of totalitarian communism;
social condition to which the novel responds but also a particular
the wars have brought it to the point of economic ruin. In England
congeries of formulated ideas. The great novels, far more often than
the middle class is in process of liquidating itself. In this country the
we remember, deal explicitly with developed ideas, and although
real basis of the novel has never existed-that is, the tension between
they vary greatly in the degree of their explicitness they tend to be
a middle class and an aristocracy which brings manners into obmore explicit rather than less-in addition to the works already servable relief as the living representation of ideals and the living
mentioned one can adduce such diverse examples as Lost Illusions,
comment on ideas. Our class structure has been extraordinarily fluid;
The Sentimental Education, War and Peace, fude the Obscure, and
our various upper classes have seldom been able or stable enough to
The Brothers Karamazov. Nowadays the criticism which descends
establish their culture as authoritative. With the single exception of
from Eliot puts explicit ideas in literature at a discount, which is one
the Civil War, our political struggles have not had the kind of
reason why it is exactly this criticism that is most certain of the
cultural implications which catch the imagination, and the extent to
death of the novel, and it has led many of us to forget how in the
which this one conflict has engaged the American mind suggests
novel ideas may be as important as character and as essential to the
how profoundly interesting conflicts of culture may be. (It is possigiven dramatic situation.
ble to say that the Cromwellian revolution appears in every English
This then as I understand it is the nature of the novel as defined
novel.) For the rest, the opposition between rural and urban ideals
by the work it does. 0£ these defining conditions how many are in
has always been rather factitious; and despite a brief attempt to
force today?
insist on the opposite view, the conflict of capital and labor is at
I think it is true to say that money and class do not have the same
present a contest for the possession of the goods of a single way of
place in our social and mental life that they once had. They have
life, and not a cultural struggle. Our most fervent interest in mancertainly not ceased to exist, but certainly they do not exist as they ners has been linguistic, and our pleasure in drawing distinctions bedid in the nineteenth century or even in our own youth. Money of tween a presumably normal way of speech and an "accent" or a
itself no longer can engage the imagination as it once did; it has lost
"dialect" may suggest how simple is our national notion of social
some of its impulse, and certainly it is on the defensive; it must comdifference.3 And of recent years, although we grow more passionately pete on the one hand with the ideal of security and on the other
3 Lately our official egalitarianism has barred the exploitation of this interest by
hand with the ideal of a kind of power which may be more directly
our official arts, the movies and the radio; there may be some social wisdom in
this, yet it ignores the fact that at least certain forms and tones of the mockery of
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Art and Fortune
247
desirous of status and are bitterly haunted by the ghost of every
cially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect
status-conferring ideal, including that of social class, we more and
of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and
more incline to show our status-lust not by affirming but by denying
specialness.
the reality of social difference.
Then we must be aware of how great has been the falling-off in
I think that if American novels of the past, whatever their merits
the energy of ideas that once animated fiction. In the nineteenth
of intensity and beauty, have given us very few substantial or memcentury the novel followed the great lines of political thought, both orable people, this is because one of the things which makes for subthe conservative and the radical, and it documented politics with an stantiality of character in the novel is precisely the notation of manoriginal and brilliant sociology. In addition, it developed its own ners, that is to say, of class traits modified by personality. It is
line of psychological discovery, which had its issue in the monuimpossible to imagine a Silas Wegg or a Smerdyakov or a Felicite mental work of Freud. But now there is no conservative tradition
( of A Simple Heart) or a Mrs. Proudie without the full documentaand no radical tradition of political thought, and not even an eclectition of their behavior in relation to their own class and to other cism which is in the slightest degree touched by the imagination; we
classes. All great characters exist in part by reason of the ideas they
are in the hands of the commentator. On the continent of Europe
represent. The great characters of American fiction, such, say, as
political choice may be possible but political thought is not, and in
Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo, tend to be mythic because of the
a far more benign context the same may be said of England. And in
rare fineness and abstractness of the ideas they represent; and their
the United States, although for different reasons, there is a similar
very freedom from class gives them a large and glowing generality;
lack of political intelligence: all over the world the political mind
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