THE PROMISE
mass media of communication, and all that these mean for serious
literary production. It is also owing to the very quality of the
history of our times and the kinds of need men of sensibility
feel to grasp that quality.
What fiction, what journalism, what artistic endeavor can
compete with the historical reality and political facts of our time?
What dramatic vision of hell can compete with the events of
twentieth-century war? What moral denunciations can measure
up to the moral insensibility of men in the agonies of primary
accumulation? It is social and historical reality that men want to
know, and often they do not find contemporary literature an adequate
means for knowing it. They yearn for facts, they search for
their meanings, they want 'a big picture' in which they can believe
and within which they can come to understand themselves.
They want orienting values too, and suitable ways of feeling and
styles of emotion and vocabularies of motive. And they do not
readily find these in the literature of today. It does not matter
whether or not these qualities are to be found there; what matters
is that men do not often find them there.
In the past, literary men as critics and historians made notes
on England and on journeys to America. They tried to characterize
societies as wholes, and to discern their moral meanings.
Were Tocqueville or Taine alive today, would they not be
sociologists? Asking this question about Taine, a reviewer in The
Times (London) suggests:
Taine always saw man primarily as a social animal and society as
a collection of groups: he could observe minutely, was a tireless field
worker and possessed a quality.. . particularly valuable for perceiving
relationships between social phenomena—the quality of springliness.
He was too interested in the present to be a good historian, too
much of a theorist to try his hand as a novelist, and he thought of
literature too much as documents in the culture of an age or country to
achieve first-class status as a critic. . . His work on English literature
is less about English literature than a commentary on the morality of
English society and a vehicle for his positivism. He is a social theorist
before all else.1
That he remained a literary man* rather than a 'social scientist'
testifies perhaps to the domination of much nineteenth-cen-
1 Times Literary Supplement, 15 November 1957.