Part 22

Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, Towards an American Type: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is, etc.” Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.

I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman, a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection.

In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C. Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society. He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.

Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to issues that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he should seem not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher discoursing with men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of progress, but that he should seem to be a contemporary with a touch of conservatism, crying with other average men for Prohibition and vituperating with them our one-time Teutonic enemies. My reader, are you now chiding me for drawing an unsympathetic portrait? Recall then one of the pieces in Americans (1922) and then say, if you can, that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am wrong. The piece in evidence is An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More, wherein, after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman complained: “But he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen.” In fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating statement, “Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his substance arrives.” It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him to be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s rôle than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values, then as is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values. Consider the following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More had loved the aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went on, “Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be a leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman, that Socrates at his trial spoke of his brief experience in politics and explained scathingly why he had thereafter abstained from politics, I say that what has occurred here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication of two men so uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply critical of us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be, to put it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of cant. “If ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the religion of democracy, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; etc.”

In the lexicon of contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase, “unselective sympathy.” I think it applies to what Sherman meant when he said “religion of democracy,” else why does he base so much of his message on the statistical average man? He could, like Mr. More, have appealed to the latent common sense of man, which is not a visible property of the average man to-day any more than it characterises his leaders, or he could, like M. Charles Maurras, have tried to conceive clearly of a perfect and normal man and argued for a closer approach to normality in human affairs; but no--there was working in Sherman an element of “unselective sympathy” and it made his grasp relax on enterprises of perfection. It was no divine average man he espoused.

When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our milieu sorely lacks, a vigorous conservative literary review. But what he organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal review with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were, for instance, already identified as reviewers for the Nation. We have followed Sherman from the academic world to the professional literary world, and it would seem to a superficial glance that Sherman changed remarkably in his transit from one to the other. He had been an assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism: he was to praise An American Tragedy. He had sneered, and not very well, at the “moderns”: he was to become their friendly counsellor. He had learned, he said, that it was a certain “vitality,” no matter under what guise, that he wanted in letters, and this platform enabled him to do a great deal of explaining away of his altered views. He became less provincial.

But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of leadership. For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him which he called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a fear of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors who are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they will compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel defensive about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on the defensive in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no marked force in himself, on him the registry of environment would be speedily and plainly made. In an academic environment he had fought the New York critics. He came as an editor to New York and the environment quickly persuaded him to blend with it.

When Sherman died, the professional literary world eulogised fulsomely the émigré from the academy. That already tells us a great deal about this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with which Sherman assimilated.

It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits and closing now in disillusion and pathos. Three representative players have been Mr. Joel Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L. Mencken: a study of their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of contemporary American criticism. The influence of the first of these is a most curious phenomenon in our recent history.

In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the leisured gentleman and scholar who adorns all too rarely our national society. His interests are wide: for a number of years he was in politics and he has distinguished himself by his generous efforts in behalf of the Negro: he has been an army officer and has, one fancies, a spark of the old-time gallantry of the military man. For us, however, he is the wealthy amateur of the arts and philosophy; but what, one may still ask, are his claims to critical leadership?

Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a number of years teaching in an academic environment. He specialised in the history of literary criticism, producing the three-volume compilation, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (1909) and the volume, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899), which pleased certain Italian thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than the usual competent product of academic industry and research: Mr. Spingarn himself revolted against the type of sterile scholarship they represent. In 1910 he delivered his famous lecture, The New Criticism. He declaimed it at the climax of a spree, for he had intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory of Benedetto Croce: he was in full cry against academic dry rot. Consequently his statements at the time were more extreme than those he would probably make on the same theme to-day.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of a record, we must write down such pronunciamentos in this lecture, in the addenda to it in Creative Criticism (1917), in his article, The Seven Arts and the Seven Confusions, and in his contribution to Civilization in the United States (1921) as bear on the following topics: the essence of art, the function of the artist, the duty of the critic.

Literature, he said, pointing to the trend of nineteenth-century criticism, “is an expression of something, of experience or emotion, of the external or internal, of the man himself or something outside the man; yet it is always conceived of as an art of expression.” As for the artist, he bade him know that “madness and courage are the very life of art.... For the madness of poets is nothing more or less than unhampered freedom of self-expression.... To let one’s self go--that is what art is always aiming at, and American art needs most of all.” The duty of the critic? To ask and answer these questions: “What has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his intention? What is he striving to express and how has he expressed it? What impression does his work make on me, and how can I best express this impression?” With the flourishes of a platform speaker who knows instinctively that it is not straight hard thinking which sways an audience so much as the verve with which possibly dubious generalities are pronounced, Mr. Spingarn exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have done with the whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies, and moral judgments.

This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement of romantic æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s essential response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always withheld what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or judgment. (It is hard to make concrete statements about the so-called æsthetic emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the “æsthetic response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn had written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers. This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just at the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality in the documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing to the Crocean doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing in it. He did not even apply it, abstaining, then and since, from concrete criticism of individual works. He merely proclaimed it. And a widespread revolt against standards followed in American criticism. So hearty, and eventually so wilful and silly, was the revolt that in 1922 its opponents were entertained by the issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a restraining manifesto entitled The Younger Generation. This time, recoiling from the destructiveness of the young men, Mr. Spingarn would herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to “discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often before, romantic expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a soberer Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.”

It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained scholar, man of feeling, who can detain us, for there is literally nothing in his writing for the mind to work on: as a thinker, he is thoroughly derivative and weak on definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn stands for, the theory of self-expression, still needs a scotching.

“Self-expression” is simply a magical catchword of the black variety. It is a good catchword in that it emphasises the self, but it is pernicious to the best interests of the self. For to express one’s self means no more than just to manifest oneself, and if we say self-manifestation instead of self-expression, we see at once how paralysing the latter term has been. It has placed the emphasis, one sees, on the artist as he is and not on his possibilities of growth: thus it has a static effect. Think now: impulses, people say, arise in them or occur to them; no one claims to create his own impulses, to self-induce his inclinations; in a manner of speaking, our impulses come to us from the outside. Therefore, advice to be spontaneous, to let oneself go without check, to follow one’s impulses is necessarily advice--to do what?--to live as unconsciously and mechanically as possible. The romantic may just as well hand himself over to the Behaviourist psychologist, saying, “Here am I, a creature of whim and impulse, the living proof of your thesis of automatism.” But the romantic is not sternly logical. He has been proof against the question as to the value of the self that is being expressed, and not only proof against it: self-expression as a theory has encouraged his conceit and sometimes fostered megalomania, thus pitching him deeper into bondage to external conditions, for conceit makes one exaggeratedly sensitive to the environment.

To identify one’s self with the mechanical temperamental flux of one’s existence and call that freedom is surely strange, and it is no wonder that it is a strange “science” which has risen to support this identification. I am of course referring to psycho-analysis, spoken of respectfully by Mr. Spingarn, utilised as a probing instrument in biography by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and championed by Mr. Mencken. It does not seem necessary here to make a serious attempt to discredit psycho-analysis, for that is being done rapidly enough by such critics of it as Dr. Trigant Burrow, by the Behaviourists, by the academic psychologists themselves. The facts have never been other than these: that psycho-analysis is admittedly experimental (and therefore speculative in its procedures, unsure of itself), that its central conception, the unconscious, not to speak of its many little metaphors like the “censor,” has never been objectively established, and that it has no ideal of psychological health toward which to guide its adherents (in lieu of such an ideal, the analyst has either gone in for an excessive relativity or he has taken the “reality” of the statistical average to be the norm). These are the undeniable facts and one who would like to take pride in the sturdy commonsense of the literary profession must regret that they were not kept in mind. Literary men to-day, one must conclude, are no less gullible than any other group. Naively, they welcomed the psycho-analytical dramatising of inhibitions as the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought was a sublimation of sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate function of man, they wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul, the unconscious. Ah, my highly suggestible writers, it is easy come, easy go with your ideas: within a decade you will be sneering at psycho-analysis as now you sneer at Christian Science.

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and biographical interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is not the sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but shy of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to use the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions, temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness.

Who would dispute Mr. Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an acquisitive society provides unfavourable conditions for the development of the artistic life? Of course it does. It badly nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost obsessed with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure, as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions in the history of America which had hampered and throttled their predecessors: he showed how frontier life had made the machinery of existence, the actual getting of a living, paramount and from this necessity had originated the contempt for the arts of enjoying existence, and how this split had perpetuated itself in the divorce between the world of practice (“lowbrow”) and the world of theory (“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his pleading. For struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe that the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is precisely the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though he casually said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through the development of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation.” But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent on this theme. He seems rather to have the sweet wistfulness and yearning of one pledged to a lost cause. This mood of wistfulness and yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast, lonely and eager, has not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the American writer.

Was it fortuitous, as in the example of Mr. Spingarn, that Mr. Van Wyck Brooks should have held a certain leadership, should have put far more than most of his generation his impress upon American taste and thought in literary matters? It would seem that he has been a leader faute de mieux, for although a charming minor critic, he has never managed to awake an indomitable desire among his followers to master the odds. He voiced the sentiments of a wistfully rebellious generation but shed no light on the object of their rebellion, the achievement in a democracy of real individuality.

That is the problem Mr. H. L. Mencken has at least perceived, and his bold tone better fits a leader in our present straits than Mr. Brooks’s gentle accents, but alas! He “solved” the problem of being an individual in a “democratic” nation simply by striking an attitude of swagger, and like Midas he is cursed with a touch that changes all objects into some one thing else. It is easy--and this is the secret of his influence--to adopt Mr. Mencken’s attitude toward the current affairs of men. Let me quote his Catechism and you will have it in one simple lesson. “Q. If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A. Why do men go to zoos?” But let us observe the man in the zoo, traipsing open-mouthed and superciliously from cage to cage, grinning in silly patronage at the imprisoned beasts who at least are true to the laws of their being, and shall we not mock at man’s cheap sense of superiority based not on what he (poor lunatic!) has done for himself but only on what Nature has made of him? No, no, it is not by contempt for the inferior that man will grow but by dissatisfaction with himself. The net effect of Mr. Mencken’s writings, however, is to produce self-satisfaction and a feeling of false superiority, and this naturally enough makes for personal passivity.

As for the Mencken touch! It turns everything to horse sense (not to be confused with the hard-won virtue of commonsense) and it is admirable when it is applied to current cant, as this: “Law Enforcement becomes the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.”

But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say, a clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology, one that has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century since the Poetics was introduced into European thought, is the Aristotelian conception of katharsis. Hear Mr. Mencken after the sages and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment affords katharsis to modern societies. “Katharsis, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is katharsis. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also katharsis. A subscriber to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not buy Liberty bonds. This again is katharsis.” And this again is cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is clodhopperism. Something like this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers the diamond ideas of the world; the process of degrading intellectual grandeur to horse sense began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years ago.

By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do not forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also given to fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists. Mr. Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, he says, is “the most eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published in America since Leaves of Grass.” Conceivably, it may be the third, but is it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments are not uncommon when Mr. Mencken feels a praising mood come on.

III

Into the critical pond presided over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic values were in deliquescence, and he was greeted with cheers when he began to revise his former estimates and with eulogies when he died untimely. Much may be said for the three critics I have taken as big frogs in this puddle: do not forget the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the historical consciousness and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable scavenger-work of Mr. Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no fertility in the viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the failure of Mr. Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic ideas, the failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image of themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look at their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s masters.

Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably showing that it is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising great central ideas than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr. Lewis Mumford, who is a pleasing writer on architecture, a literary critic who seizes on the romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and repeats with spirit what his predecessor has said, a thinker whose general terms are vague, and who is impractical because of his credulity as to what modern letters can actually effect in modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr. Brooks’s, is a certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here! Without a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding stress on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff. And the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an æsthetic school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra Pound and the T. S. Eliot who wrote The Sacred Wood. For after all Mr. Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.

We have, it would seem, come to the end of a decade and a half of exuberance. Enter mournfully Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch to confess the disillusioned after-thoughts of the modern romanticist. It is a supine admission he makes, without blushes be it added, when he says in beginning his account of the modern temper or mood: “I have been compelled to make references to many facts or supposed facts in biology, psychology, and anthropology. Obviously no person is qualified to assert them all with authority and obviously I am much less qualified than many others, but when I state them I do so not as facts, but simply as commonplaces which we have been taught to believe. My subject is not any series of objective facts, but a state of mind, and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which I and my contemporaries have been led to hold ... if the tenets of Freudianism or the hypotheses of the Darwinian theory are false, they have at least been so accepted as to influence the modern temper quite as unmistakably as if they were true ... these supposed facts have an emotional significance. That is as far as it is necessary to go if they are to be used as I use them, only in the effort to account for a mood.”