in a powerful way.
our social and political ideals. For it is in general true that the
Religious emotions are singularly absent from Shakespeare and
modern European literature to which we can have an active, reit does not seem possible to say of him that he was a religious man.
ciprocal relationship, which is the right relationship to have, has
Nor does it seem possible to say of the men of the great period of
been written by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the
American literature in the nineteenth century that they were retradition of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, ligious men. Hawthorne and Melville, for example, lived at a time
Proust and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide-these men do not seem to
when religion was in decline and they were not drawn to support· it.
confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.
But from religion they inherited a body of pieties, a body of issues,
If we now turn and consider the contemporary literature of
if you will, which engaged their hearts and their minds to the very
America, we see that wherever we can describe it as patently liberal
bottom. Henry James was not a religious man and there is not the
and democratic, we must say that it is not of lasting interest. I do
least point in the world in trying to make him out one. But you
not say that the work which is written to conform to the liberal
need not accept all the implications of Quentin Anderson's thesis
democratic tradition is of no value but only that we do not incline
that James allegorized his father's religious system to see that Mr.
to return to it, we do not establish it in our minds and affections.
Anderson is right when he says that James was dealing, in his own
Very likely we learn from it as citizens; and as citizen-scholars and
way, with the questions that his father's system propounded. This
citizen-critics we understand and explain it. But we do not live in
will indicate something of why James so catches our imagination
an active reciprocal relation with it. The sense of largeness, of
today, and why we turn so eagerly again to Hawthorne and Melcogency, of the transcendence which largeness and cogency can ville.
give, the sense of being reached in our secret and primitive minds
The piety which descends from religion is not the only possible
this we virtually never get from the writers of the liberal democratic
piety, as the case of Faulkner reminds us, and perhaps also the case
tradition at the present time.
of Hemingway. But we naturally mention first that piety which does
And since liberal democracy inevitably generates a body of ideas,
descend from religion because it is most likely to have in it the
it must necessarily occur to us to ask why it is that these particular
quality of transcendence which, whether we admit it or no, we
ideas have not infused with force and cogency the literature that
expect literature at its best to have.
embodies them. This question is the most important, the most fully
The subject is extremely delicate and complex and I do no more
challenging question in culture that at this moment we can ask.
than state it barely and crudely. But no matter how I state it, I am
The answer to it cannot of course even be begun here, and I shall
sure that you will see that what I am talking about leads us to the
be more than content if now it is merely accepted as a legitimate
crucial issue of our literary culture.
question. But there are one or two things that may be said about the
I know that I will not be wrong if I assume that most of us here
answer, about the direction we must take to reach it in its proper
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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form. We will not find it if we come to facile conclusions about the
absence from our culture of the impressive ideas of traditional re
ligion. I have myself referred to the historical fact that religion has
been an effective means of transmitting or of generating ideas of
a sort which I feel are necessary for the literary qualities we want,
and to some this will no doubt mean that I believe religion to be
a necessary condition of great literature. I do not believe that; and
what is more, I consider it from many points of view an impropriety
to try to guarantee literature by religious belief.
Nor will we find our answer if we look for it in the weakness of
the liberal democratic ideas in themselves. It is by no means true
that the inadequacy of the literature that connects itself with a
body of ideas is the sign of the inadequacy of those ideas, although
it is no doubt true that some ideas have less affinity with literature
than others.
Our answer, I believe, will rather be found in a cultural factin the kind of relationship which we, or the writers who represent us, maintain toward the ideas we claim as ours, and in our habit
of conceiving the nature of ideas in general. If we find that it is
true of ourselves that we conceive ideas to be pellets of intellection
or crystallizations of thought, precise and completed, and defined
by their coherence and their procedural recommendations, then we
shall have accounted for the kind of prose literature we have. And
if we find that we do indeed have this habit, and if we continue in
it, we can predict that our literature will continue much as it is.
But if we are drawn to revise our habit of conceiving ideas in this
way and learn instead to think of ideas as living things, inescapably
connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth and
development by their very nature, as showing their life by their
tendency to change, as being liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and to work harm, then we shall stand in a relation to ideas which makes an active literature possible.
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