[In the following review of In a Valley of This Restless Mind, originally published in 1938, Beard criticizes Muggeridge's combination of philosophical and moral skepticism as leading to a degrading acceptance of contemporary society's more base and decayed habits and practices.]

Mr. Muggeridge has added another to those perplexed enquiries into the state of the modern world, and like one or two of his predecessors he has followed the Pilgrim's Progress as a model. In a series of loosely-linked fantasies, In a Valley of this Restless Mind endeavours, according to its dust-cover, to destroy some contemporary spiritual absolutes accused of disguising materialism; a task which may bear the emphasis either of defending the spiritual, or of attacking it. A short comparison between his world and Bunyan's may best show Mr. Muggeridge's viewpoint, and incidentally suggest that his choice of model is not altogether appropriate.

First, the vision of a Heavenly City has disappeared, its absence as unquestioned as was, to Bunyan, its existence; Mr. Muggeridge's world is completely bounded within the orbit of the here and now, untroubled even by any thought of Utopian futures. The pack of sins no longer carries a burden of expiation into the pilgrim's future; the meaning of sin, as well as its effect, is now exhausted in terms of present discomfort. And the worldly temptations in Christian's way have become turned into idealisms, and Mr. Muggeridge wishes to destroy them.

The positive philosophy which the book offers is ‘acceptance’ of the twentieth-century world by love.

‘How wonderful life seemed, all its horror like blemishes in a loved face; wonderful even in an idiot slobbering and mouthing, in rich lunchers reeling into the sunlight with business to do, in clumsy embraces paid for with money; even in hatred and envy and the disjointed footsteps of elderly barren women waiting for tea.’ And again: ‘“Purify me, purify me,” I groaned … and was suddenly glad. … I began to run, my face and body glowing, and my heart, too. There was nothing to fear. If the life in me was good, so was the life outside me. They were the same. I saw all life like small flames dancing out of one fire. … “Oh accept life!” I thought. “Oh yield to it!”’

Frequent use of cliché transfers to the reader much of the task of interpreting the author's intentions. If ‘acceptance’ is more than a meaningless, unvarying response, it must imply some hidden unity behind phenomena by which they may be reconciled. But Mr. Muggeridge makes no attempt to explore for such a meaning. That sadness never far from what is true acceptance is here altogether lacking; such emotions as the process does arouse in Mr. Muggeridge are extremely confused; he does not accept life, he swallows it. The swallowing is a drab affair:

‘I thought of my children living on after me, following the same vain hopes … experiencing the same bewilderment. Perhaps they would die on a field of battle, or shed their blood pursuing some ideal to its terrible extreme; perhaps spend themselves in the pursuit of money or knowledge or sensuality or virtue. It seemed then to matter as little as whether they were clever or stupid, short or tall. They existed, they were alive, and that sufficed.’

It is in his brief book's main task, the destruction of ideal absolutes, that his intentions, confused as they are, show up most clearly. As I have said, he sets out to proclaim these ideals false because they are material; but it very soon appears that what he really objects to is not that they are material, but that they are ideal. Moreover he passes his verdict without showing that this ideal element has ever been grappled with; for he never defines any cause in its own terms, or troubles to distinguish it from its representatives; which is the more unfortunate since all the representatives he chooses turn out to be knaves; by exposing these, he thus enables himself not to reveal the ideals, but to hide them. In every case his procedure is the simple one of arguing ad hominem; whether it is the clergy, philanthropists, educationists, politicians or marxists, all are immediately denounced to be either careerists, cranks, or sex-maniacs. (Here, by the way, is our ‘acceptance by love’.) These simple verdicts are delivered with indecent haste; a couple of pages, for instance, account for marxism in the person of a street-corner orator.

‘“I'm a Worker, I!” … “What about us?” I asked humbly. He looked away from our white upturned faces into the dark sky, seeing his Vision there—tall chimneys spouting fire, wheels silently turning, power concentrated in a single switch, and his the finger to control it; mankind's finger operating through his; his the finger.’

Replacing analysis by personal abuse, Mr. Muggeridge's tactics are, in fact, exactly those of the street-corner audience. There is a kind of saeva indignatio, felt by the unconverted for the converted, which finds expression in this way, and almost represents a form of religious persecution. Had he examined his own part of the cause of the world he sees, the author might have made his book of value; but he is as chary of self-analysis as of analysis.

The modern predicament lies, of course, in the belief that the existing patterns of experience are all exhausted. But that is not at all the same thing as the restlessness which merely discards patterns too prematurely, mistaking for experience what is only an illusory forestalling of it by intellectual analysis (in this case, would-be analysis). By thus anticipating experience's conclusions, the mind stales the sources of its own nourishment; predigestion acts as surfeit. And since experience cannot altogether be avoided, when it comes it is rejected because it cannot be utilized; objective belief is thought then to justify false anticipations, when really these have only ensured their own confirmation.

Both in a culture and in the individual, the processes of moral and emotional decay may precede that in the intellect, which may itself hasten them on; Jung has pointed out, for instance, how in some Gnostic sects a bold intellectualism accompanied extreme moral libertinism. Reasons for the subverting of established morality of a very cogent type may then appear, but it is certain that they will be in terms of something other than morals—in terms of philosophy, or economics, or perhaps even of taste; a situation which is a familiar one today. But a morality can be replaced without disaster only by the exercise of the moral faculty itself. And this faculty does not become staled by the intellect, since it does not demand from experience any satisfaction in terms of personal ends. Morality has not been forestalled, it has merely been abandoned, and not least in many so-called moral experiments, which far from judging themselves by this faculty, stifle it.

Mr. Muggeridge genuinely feels a need for a world of moral coherence at the very time that he is not only discarding moral standards, but discarding them on what are really other than moral grounds. When the reasons he gives are moral ones, he betrays himself as he gives them; he does not see, for instance, that though he exclaims that lust is horrible, actually all his descriptions of it make it delectable. Crying that our culture is doomed, many yet find it much more easy to discard the morality in it than the elements of decay.

Those who have written a modern Pilgrim's Progress have usually felt at least the deep unease which preceded Christian's conversion. That is an important and interesting condition, wherever it leads. But Mr. Muggeridge's pilgrim is still all but identified with the very world which he sets out to overcome.