Part 23

Shades of the heroes of the mind! Here is a critic who can entertain the possibility that much of our contemporary “knowledge” is untrue, and then merely wring his hands elegantly in the melancholy produced by assuming that it is true. In The Modern Temper (1929) romantic criticism in America culminates in weak despair.

As we should expect, there have been departures lately. There is Mr. Walter Lippmann, as able a cartographer of the Kingdom of Whirl as Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent of civilisation is in collapse because society has no common human aim, no hold, that is, on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure. “The effect of modernity, then,” he says in A Preface to Morals (1929), “is to specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all things were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family, the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art, and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In the modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of separate interests each sovereign within its own realm.” And the remedy he proposes, who can quarrel with it? The “good life,” he says, is an acquired disposition,--surely an advance over the implication of the other critics we have mentioned that somehow the “good life” would naturally come to pass, if one could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions and flow with one’s desires. No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop “detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” We must enter into a new asceticism--who would have anticipated five years ago such a phrase from our new critics?--defined as “an effort to overcome immaturity.”

This is excellent in that it perceives the problem and the goal of the clear-insighted modern man, but does not Mr. Lippmann underestimate the enormous psychological difficulties that block the passage from unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling that his is a paper solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for psycho-analysis as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire. The aim of psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann adopts the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment” in practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the following of the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments by beings to an environment progressively unfavourable mean the progressive deterioration of a species: ultimately adjustment means extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs can give us a lesson in the fallacy of adjustment. It is farcical for this critic to patronise Pythagoras, for instance, who “could not have known any tested method either of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything besides a crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as long as we can contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of surmounting the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of adjusting (merely reacting) to it.

Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others has articulated what will probably be the fundamental position of American criticism in the next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking and acting chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can “learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant but eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution of the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave of Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within the grave of a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned to the all-important question of a method of realising Wholeness in fact as well as in concept. You will find his method outlined at the close of The Re-discovery of America (1929). It is, I fear, hastily constructed, and more than smacks of amateurishness and of the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in where sages fear to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a method for the development of human potentialities into open discussion.

The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer us “a way out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper to repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of the formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus far, the new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up against them. In passing, I may say that I have before this dipped my freelance pen to the humanists in salutations of great respect mingled with a few misgivings, and I have not the least hesitation in volunteering to defend them against the oblique attack of Mr. T. S. Eliot.

This painstaking critic owes much to Professor Babbitt, far more than does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much overlapping between his views and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue between the new humanists and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the question of Authority. Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas and we shall see the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish may compare it with the new humanists’ position. In The Sacred Wood (1921) he began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of criticism upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist. Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for certain decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, in which the idea of “creative imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious? Matters became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr. J. Middleton Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were the instabilities and insufficiencies of private judgment and private experience that a man should discipline himself in allegiance to some outside Authority, and for the literary critic this meant loyalty to the classical literary tradition. Something was here given away: the strict corroboration by personal experiment of classical wisdom was left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist (with some romantic elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary authority.

The next step for him, as a man too intelligent and too serious to evade the problems of social and moral chaos, was to acknowledge that criticism in our age could not be so limited as it was conceived to be in The Sacred Wood. On the contrary, the critic he saw must become philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here again he was neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in politics and in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter Anglo-Catholic.

Turn to his essays on style and order entitled For Lancelot Andrewes. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but not, not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere analysed the structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a full-bodied prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen, but the prose of a judge conscious of the weight of authority behind, not in, him. Now observe that in For Lancelot Andrewes Mr. Eliot, like a learned judge and with an air of profundity, is continually pointing to the tradition of a Church, set up as an authority external to himself. He is at his best when he presents comparatively narrow ideas, ideas about literary style for the most part, as in his exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’ prose. At his most disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place generality, as when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with great and permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr. Eliot never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the stuff itself of moral conflicts.

Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write about religion: he points to a Church and the intellectual riches of its history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a Church.” And again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”--but we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter gives us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what Mr. Eliot calls “Ersatz-religion”: the two, spirit and letter, must correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this examination turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and therefore necessarily inactive: he points out where Authority may be found, but one may doubt from the evidence of his writing whether Authority resides in him.

Following the course of Sherman, we entered the professional literary world and explored its criticism, coming finally to Mr. T. S. Eliot, whose latest departure turns our eyes outwards again to the academic world, to Professor Babbitt and humanism, or to the worlds of religion or philosophy. It appears to me that our purely literary critics have at one point or another all failed fundamentally: they are all leaders by default only and not by essence. Either they are bound to move towards the position of Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, who realises that “all the bases upon which modern despair rests were laid joyously by people who were quite sure that they were serving humanity, and all the chains by which we are now bound so much more firmly to earth than we want to be were forged amidst shouts of triumph,” or they are spying some loophole which on inspection seems not to exist. But in either case, and this is a hopeful sign, they are all converging toward a common realisation that King Whirl must, if possible, be deposed. The goal is seen: the reconstructed human spirit. But without adequate leadership how may we start to approach it?

Well, it is easy to exaggerate the power of literary criticism. If certain things in our culture have gone dead, criticism cannot revive them. The essential “about-ness” of the critical activity limits it to the guidance, stimulation, and judging of things in which there is still some life. But assuming that a funeral ceremony such as Mr. Krutch has conducted is still premature,--and it is premature so long as any doubt exists of final decay,--we may then try to conceive of what a genuine leader in critical thought would be like, and by this ideal measure ourselves.

Objectivity in judgment would be one of the principal marks of the leader. That requires a sufficient scale of values to stand outside not only the frame of one’s century but outside the frames of all centuries. It means the ascertainment of primary laws in our field, which may be possible as it has been possible in physics to say that a few laws are true regardless of what frame of time and space one may be in. Objectively considered, literature may be found to have been in decline, not just for a century and a half or just for six hundred years but almost from its classical sources and from the Scriptures of ancient lands. Is this depressing? It is not depressing to contemplate a magnificent mountain from its base.

On the contrary, a real view of the heights of Parnassus and Olympus may inspire an uncommon elevation of aim--a second mark of the critical leader; it seems to me unnecessary to argue that the critics we have looked at do not realise how high man has ascended in the past or can conceivably ascend now. Their ideas of human greatness are small. Really, are we practitioners of literary criticism distinguished by any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No one can believe it.

Nor can I believe that we approximate the ideal critic in passion, in a burning unquenchable indomitable love of perfect things. This is the spirit that giveth life to standards that otherwise would seem too skeletal, too non-human to be glamorous and magical in their remoteness: this is the spirit that killeth despair and compromise. Infused with it, our imagined critic becomes single-minded and proof against deviations and resting-places.

Finally, he would, I conceive, be distinguished by an immense capacity for relating deeds to words. His interest would not cease with a beautiful formulation, but would continue until the formulation was embodied in experience. Not words alone, not deeds alone, but words and actions would be his great desideratum.

Of whom am I thinking? It is dangerous in calling attention to concepts or principles to cite examples until the concept or principle or, in our case, ideal has been thoroughly understood, and I dare not hope for that within the space of this paper. But with a caution not to debate the achievements of him but only to study his framework, I take the risk of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the build of a great critic. We need in our national letters a critic of the stamp and dimensions of Arnold.

I append The Prayer of a Young Critic.

But we have heard rumour of the Mistral. It is a cold wind that blows from the heights, Day after day it sweeps steadily down, Cold and from above, changing the air In the lowlands. We are dwellers in lowlands And our air has been breathed before. It is A sultry air: men talk to each other In haze and their words are close and fevered. A warm breeze crosses our little hillocks, And then the dust settles down again. Not near the Alps do we live. Great Genius, Grant us an electric climate! Touch us With snowy fire, send the Mistral to sweep Bare our plain and proclaim the gaiety Of altitudes, the glory of clear stars, The exaltation of the sun burning The rare air. Great Genius, send the Mistral!

FOOTNOTES

From Points of View, 1924, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.

From Americans, 1922, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.

The rest of the sentence is “and he sees the common weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligible and transitory.”

Also he could have mastered the philosophy of Mr. John Dewey and made his “religion of democracy” more respectable.

A perusal of the Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman, published after this essay was written, increases my confidence in the diagnosis above of Sherman’s weaknesses. Mr. P. E. More wondered many years ago whether his young reviewer did not have “an inclination to avoid the central problem.” Later, he warned Sherman: “I do not like to see a man of your ability and insight deliberately taking up the job of whitewasher” for democracy. And finally Mr. More said: “Yours is but a sickly sort of democracy at bottom, and needs a doctor.”

From Prejudices: Fourth Series, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher.

From The Modern Temper, Harcourt, Brace & Co., publisher.

Mr. Lippmann is not a literary critic but his views are pertinent to this discussion.

The Macmillan Company, publisher.