ABSTRACT
It is neither the lightness of the joker, the detachment of the pure artist, nor the self-righteousness of the Juvenalian satirist, for he is him self too much a part of the confusion which he describes to attain any of these; but it is something which does enable him to maintain a sort of balance in the midst of events where all balance has been lost. The motley world which he describes-a world in which all sorts of people, from the frank wastrel to the scholar, are united by a common inability to think their way through the confusion of their age-is a painful one and its creator is, at bottom, as lost as any of his creatures, but his very ability to describe and to analyze supplies him a refuge. He looks down from no mountain top and achieves no real serenity; he solves no problems and he sees, in a word, very little further than his characters do. Yet he manages to exist-and to live and to write-in a world where all of the others die some kind of death.
