/
STANLEY El^^AB HYMAN
THE ARMED VISION
a study in the methods ^enodern literary criticism
A \«NTAGE B(
revised edinn, abridged b
V-20I SI.
OK
the author
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES
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The Armed Vision
A STUDY IN THE METHODS OF MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
The Armed Vision
A STUDY IN THE METHODS OF MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
REVISED EDITION, ABRIDGED BY THE AUTHOR
'The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision. SAMUEL TAYLOR coLERroGEi Biographia Literaria
VINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE
New York
VINTAGE BOOKS
are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Random House, Inc.
Copyright, 1947, 1948, 1955, by Alfred a. knopf, inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
To Shirley Jackson
A CRITIC OF CRITICS OF CRITICS
BUT IN REALITY there is another light in which these modern critics may, with great justice and propriety, be seen; and this is that of a common slanderer. If a person who pries into the characters of others, with no other design but to discover their faults and to publish them to the world, de- serves the title of a slanderer of the reputation of men, why should not a critic, who reads with the same malevo- lent view, be as properly styled the slanderer of the repu- tation of books?
Vice hath not, I believe, a more abject slave; society pro- duces not a more odious vermin; nor can the devil receive a guest more worthy -of him, nor possibly more welcome to him. — Henry Fielding
I TAKE UPON ME absolutely to condemn the fashionable and prevailing custom of inveighing against critics as the com- mon enemies, the pests and incendiaries of the common- wealth of Wit and Letters. I assert, on the contrary, that they are the props and pillars of this building; and that without the encouragement and propagation of such a race, we should remain as Gothic architects as ever.
— Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury
AS TO THE HERD OF CRITICS, it is impossible for me to pay much attention to them, for, as they do not understand what I call poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each other. Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them, and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one. — Sir Walter Scott
FIRST-RATE CRITICISM has a permanent value greater than that of any but first-rate works of poetry and art.
— Matthew Arnold
FOR IT IS CRITICISM which Tcmoves mountains.
— Georg Brandes
THE REALLY COMPETENT CRITIC must be an empiricist. He must conduct his exploration with whatever means lie within the bounds of his personal limitation. He must produce his effects with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his saw. If the saw won't cut, he seizes a club.
— H. L. Mencken
AH, IF WE only had decent critics! — Anton Chekhov
FOR I AM nothing, if not Critical!. — lago
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
This abridged edition lacks two of the original chap- ters, those dealing with Edmund Wilson and Christopher Caudwell, as well as the selected bibliography and a small amount of background and relatively peripheral material, all of which can readily be consulted in the unabridged edition. Having chosen to keep the book a record of a re- markable quarter of a century of critical flowering rather than make it a continuing account, I have not attempted to bring it up to date. A number of errors and infelicities have been corrected, though I do not doubt that many more have been retained. Again, my debt of gratitude to friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who have helped and advised me in cutting and alteration is too substantial to be individually acknowledged.
If my views about these matters have changed since I wrote this book, the change has been in the direction of less hopefulness about the triumph of method over inadequate sensibility, rather than toward any lessened faith in the utility of method itself. As the principal change in my views, I would now incline to see the act of evaluation not as a superstructure erected upon analysis, but as an in- formal procedure antecedent to analysis, in determining whether any given work warrants the expenditure of that much critical labor.
S. E. H. North Bennington, Vermont February 1955
PREFACE
The aims of this book are comparatively simple: first, to study the nature of modern critical method as exemplified by selected contemporary literary critics; second, to note the ancestry of their techniques and procedures, both as disciplines in themselves and as gradual developments in the history of criticism; third, to suggest some possibilities for an integrated and practical methodology that would combine and consolidate the best procedures of modem criticism. ("Integrative" is the good word, Kenneth Burke remarks in one of his books, for a method that the reader who preferred a bad word could call "eclectic") The third aim, which is the least fully treated in this book, is probably the most important, in so far as modem criticism, as it has become increasingly specialized and efficient, has become increasingly partial and fragmentary. A number of con- temporary critical methods in actual fact require the critic to know only one thing well, his own discipline, and to have read only one book, the one under discussion. An integrated method would require the knowing and reading of "all," or at least a good deal more. To each contempo- rary critic's limited "efficiency," an integrated method would thus oppose a "counter-efficiency" in a wider con- text, so that the Freudian, the Marxist, the scholar, the folklorist, etc., would have to become a Freudian plus, a Marxist plus, etc. The possibilities for such an integrated method, however, can only be sketched out here in the most tentative fashion.
The things it is not the intention of this book to do can be demarcated with equal sharpness. It is not a study of aesthetic or philosophic theory, of critical theory or defini- tions, or of specific literary judgments by critics. The im- portant question, for this book at least, is not what the critic says but what he does, and chiefly the principal thing he does, the "essence" of his work. Thus where some writ- ers on Yvor Winters have emphasized his activities as a moralist, and others his activities as a technical or logical
PREFACE ix
critic, these seem clearly secondary to his function as an evaluator; and so forth. At the same time, except inci- dentally, this book is not a study of critics, but of method as exemplified in the practice of critics, the only place it can be exemplified or discussed at all. In the attempt to take the emphasis off the man and put it on the method as far as possible, most of the following chapters contain a section on the development of some aspects of the method in the past, and a section discussing a few other contempo- rary critics who use a comparable method with greater or lesser success.
There is no claim that the ten critics here discussed are the only modern critics, or the best, or the best using their respective methods, or that their methods are the only ones, or the best. They are all, however, serious men and women doing something of significance, and among them are a number of our finest practitioners of the art. Beyond that, they have been selected simply for their use- fulness as illustrating techniques and procedures that seem fruitful. It is thus a matter of deep regret that a number of important American critics, among them F. O. Matthies- sen, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Ezra Pound, and others, have been omitted, because their work either does not illustrate a significant method, or does not illustrate it as clearly as the work of someone else; and the same thing is true of valuable British critics like John Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, G. Wilson Knight, the Scrutiny group, and others. Some attempt has been made to discuss the work of these men briefly in the relevant chapters. In addition, it has proved impractical to devote chapters to the work of men who have not published a body of criticism available in book form, thus entailing the neg- lect of several very significant critics, such as William Troy and Morton Dauwen Zabel, who have not so far published volumes of criticism, as well as of a number of greatlv promising younger men. In addition, no chapters are de- voted to contemporary critics writing in any but the Eng- lish language (although a number of European critics are treated briefly in the relevant chapters). This is due in part to my inadequate familiarity with contemporary European criticism, in greater part to the fact that, on the basis of that inadequate examination, the phenomenon discussed
X PREFACE
in this book as "modem" criticism does not seem to exist to any degree at this time anywhere but in England and America, although its sources are to be found in almost every European literature.
Finally, this book makes no attempt to be stylistically impressive: it is written in as simple a style and vocabulary as possible, as befits an explanatory work; it makes no at- tempt to be impartial, but is frankly both biased and opin- ionated, with my own bias and opinions; and although it attempts to explain what a number of contemporary critics are doing, neither its information nor its opinions are au- thorized in any fashion: it makes no claim to speak offi- cially for the critics it examines, or even that they would agree with its contentions, and no chapters were submitted for the approval of their subjects or result from any con- sultation with them on other than a few purely factual matters.
I hope in the future to be able to illuminate and docu- ment some of my contentions and provide an accompany- ing volume of examples, by compiling an anthology or sym- posium of critical essays to illustrate the methods here discussed. I additionally hope that some attempt will be made by others to examine the applicability of some of the methods and principles treated in this book to other fields of criticism besides the literary — among them music, the graphic and plastic arts, the theater, and the dance — since that ability is at the moment, and will perhaps always be, beyond my competence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parts of this book have appeared in Accent, The Antioch Review, The Kenyan Review, The New Mexico Quarterly Review, Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, and The Western Review, and are reprinted through the kindness of the edi- tors. Two passages from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" are printed with the kind permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company. I have drawn freely and gratefully on a number of reference and survey works for some of the information in my background sections, especially on George Saints- bury's History of Criticism, J. E. Spingarn's A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, and Herbert J. Muller's Science and Criticism. Throughout I have tried to acknowledge the source of any observation not original with me, but one of the special problems of dealing with literary critics is the likelihood that in a number of cases I have remembered their ideas or even their phrasing as my own, and for all such neglected attributions I hereby apolo- gize.
My personal indebtedness is extensive. I am grateful to my former students at Bennington College, both in my Criticism class and elsewhere, for teaching me a good deal more than I taught them; as well as to Mrs. Gladys Leslie, Miss Polly Hopkins, and the staff of the Bennington Col- lege Library, for kindnesses of every sort. Bernard Smith, formerly with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Herbert Wein- stock and members of the present staff, have been more than helpful. My friends and various colleagues have assisted in every possible fashion: providing me with in- formation or correcting my misinformation, lending or giv- ing me books and other material, advising me on matters of every sort, helping me to read copy and proof and to transfer corrections, toning me down or stirring me up as the occasion warranted, criticizing and suggesting, and in many cases even telling me what to say and how to say it — although they are far too many to list by name, I would like each of them to know my gratitude. Without The
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Seven Bookhunters, who seemed at times to suspend every other activity in order to find me needed books, this work would have been far more difficult; and without June Mirken, who kindly typed it for me and made the index, it would have been impossible.
Three of my debts are so great that no expression of gratitude can do them justice. One is to Harold Ross and William Shawn of The New Yorker, whose unparalleled kindness allowed me to combine working for them with writing this book. To Leonard Brown, who is, as Ascham said of Sir John Cheke, "teacher of all the litle poore learn- ing I haue," I am obligated, quite literally, for anything of value the book may contain. Finally, the book's indebt- edness to my family is as great as such things can possibly be: to my children, who somehow bore with it over the years; to my parents, who facilitated it in every way pos- sible; and most particularly to my wife, Shirley Jackson, who did everything for me that one writer can conceivably do for another and whose patience and kindness in regard to it are worthy of a far better work.
S. E. H. North Bennington, Vermont January 1948 ,
CONTENTS
PAGE
introduction: Modern Literary Criticism 3
I. Its Nature 3
II. Its Ancestry 12
1. Yvor Winters and Evaluation in Criticism 23
2. T. S. Eliot and Tradition in Criticism 54
3. Van Wyck Brooks and Biographical Criticism 92
4. Constance Rourke and Folk Criticism 114
5. Maud Bodkin and Psychological Criticism 132
6. Caroline Spurgeon and Scholarship in Criticism 161
7. R. P. Blackmur and the Expense of Criticism 197
8. William Empson and Categorical Criticism 237
9. I. A. Richards and the Criticism of Interpretation 278
10. Kenneth Burke and the Criticism of Symbolic
Action 327
conclusion: Attempts at an Integration 386
I. The Ideal Critic 386
n. The Actual Critic 394
INDEX follows page 402
The Armed Vision
A STUDY IN THE METHODS OF MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
INTRODUCTION
Modern Literary Criticism
/. Its Nature
The literary criticism written in English over the past quarter of a century is qualitatively different from any previous criticism. Whether you call it the "new" criticism, as many have, or "scientific criticism," or "working criti- cism," or, as this book does, "modern criticism," its only relation to the great criticism of the past seems to be one of descent. Its practitioners are not more brilliant or alert to literature than their predecessors; in fact they are clearly less so than giants like Aristotle and Coleridge, but they are doing something radically different with literature, and they are getting something radically different from litera- ture in return. What modem criticism is could be defined crudely and somewhat inaccurately as the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature. The tools are these methods or "techniques," the nuggets are "insights," the occupation is mining, digging, or just plain grubbing. The non-literary techniques are things like psychoanalytic associations or semantic translations, the non-literary bodies of knowledge range from the ritual patterns of primitives to the nature of capitalist society. And all of these result in a kind of close reading and detailed attention to the text that can only be understood on the analogy of microscopic analysis. The key word of this definition is "organized." Tradi- tional criticism used most of these techniques and disci- plines, but in a spasmodic and haphazard fashion. The relevant sciences were not developed enough to be used methodically and not informed enough to have much to
4 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
contribute. The bodies of knowledge of most usefulness to criticism are the social sciences, which study man func- tioning in the group (since literature is, after all, one of man's social functions), rather than the physical or bio- logical sciences (since literature is not a function of the human structure in the sense that walking or eating is, but a part of the cultural or societal accretion). Although Aristotle clearly aimed to turn what we now call the social sciences on drama and poetry, to study them in terms of what he knew of the human mind, the nature of society, and primitive survivals, he had few data to apply beyond his own empiric observations, brilliant as they are, and unverified traditions. The miracle Aristotle performed, the essential rightness of his criticism, based almost entirely on private observation and keen sensibility, is a triumph of critical insight hitting largely by intuition on a good deal later discovered and developed. Even by Coleridge's time, two thousand years later, not much more was known accurately about the nature of the human mind and society than Aristotle knew.
A good deal of criticism, of course, is contemporary without being modem in the sense defined above; that is, it makes no organized critical use of any of this material (it is surprising, however, how much unconscious use it makes). Although such criticism has a place, and fre- quently an important one, it is by definition another kind of thing and not our concern here. At the same time, be- sides its special functions or the special degree to which it does things done only haphazardly and informally be- fore, modem criticism does a number of things that criti- cism has always done: interpreting the work, relating it to a literary tradition, evaluating it, and so on. These are relatively permanent features of any criticism (evaluation, we might note, has largely atrophied in the serious criti- cism of our time), but even where a modern critic tends to specialize in one of these niore traditional functions, he does so along with other less traditional things, or in a fashion profoundly modified by the characteristic devel- opments of the modern mind.
John Crowe Ransom, who has been chiefly influential in popularizing the term "the new criticism" with his book of that name, insisting on its qualitative difference from
Its Nature 5
earlier criticism (on the basis of the modem detailed read- ing in "the structural properties of poetry"), has claimed that ours is an age of more than usual critical distinction, and that in depth and precision contemporary critical writ- ing is "beyond all earlier criticism in our language." There is, I think, little doubt of this, but we cannot flatter our- selves that the superiority lies in the caliber of our critics as opposed to their predecessors. Clearly, it lies in their methods. Modern criticism has vast organized bodies of knowledge about human behavior at its disposal, and new and fruitful techniques in its bag of tricks. To the extent that some of this can be consolidated and the erratic, sometimes unbalanced and incomplete, if brilliant work of a number of isolated critics co-ordinated and integrated, vistas for the immediate future of criticism should be even greater, and a body of serious literary analysis turned out in English of a quality to distinguish our age.
Among the methods and disciplines that have been es- tablished as useful for literary criticism, the social sciences come to mind first, a reservoir so vast that it has hardly yet been tapped. From psychoanalysis critics have bor- rowed the basic assumptions of the operations of the sub- conscious mind, demonstrating its deeper "wishes" through associations and "clusters" of images; the basic mecha- nisms of dream-distortion, such as condensation, displace- ment, and splitting, which are also the basic mechanisms of poetic-formation; the Jungian concept of archetypes, and much else. They have taken the concept of "configu- rations" from the gestaltists; basic experimental data about animal and child behavior from the laboratory psycholo- gists; information about the pathological expressions of the human mind from the clinical psychologists; discoveries about the behavior of man in groups and social patterns from the social psychologists; and a great deal more, from Jaensch's "eidetic images" and similar purely subjective material to the most objective physical and chemical data reported by neurological and endocrinological psycholo- gies. From competing sociologies criticism has borrowed theories and data regarding the nature of society, social change, and social conflicts, and their relation to literature and other cultural phenomena; and from anthropological schools, theories and data regarding primitive societies and
6 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
social behavior, from the sweeping evolutionary generali- zations of theorists like Tylor to the meticulously observed detail of the Boas school. An offshoot of anthropology, the field of folklore, has also been of particular fruitfulness to criticism as a source of information about the tradi- tional popular rituals, tales, and beliefs that underiie the patterns and themes of both folk art and sophisticated art.
In addition to the social sciences, a number of other modern disciplines have been very fruitful, or are poten- tially so. Literary scholarship, although hardly a new field, has by our century accumulated so great a body of accu- rate information and so exact a body of procedures that with the addition of critical imagination it has been made to produce a type of scholarly criticism completely "mod- em" in the sense used above. The traditional scholarly areas of linguistics and philology, with the addition of the modern field of semantics, have opened up to criticism enormous vistas, only slightly explored. The physical and biological sciences have provided criticism with such basic ingredients as the experimental method itself, as well as theories of great metaphoric usefulness, like "evolution" and modern physical "relativity," "field," and "indetermi- nacy" concepts. Philosophy, although traditionally con- cerned with literature only in the guise of aesthetics, has proved of use to criticism, particularly in ethical and meta- physical formulations with which it can confront questions of ultimate value and belief; and a number of critics have even turned the doctrines and insights of religion and mysticism on literature. Besides these bodies of theory and knowledge, modern criticism has developed a number of specialized procedures of its own and methodized them, sometimes on the analogy of scientific procedure. Such are the pursuit of biographical information, the exploration of ambiguities, the study of symbolic action and communica- tion in literary works, and close reading, hard work, and detailed exploration of texts in general.
For the most part these new critical techniques and lines of investigation depend on a small number of assump- tions that are basic to the modern mind and characteristic of it, assumptions that are principally the contributions of four great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers — ^Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and Freud. A few of those key
Its Nature 7
assumptions, relatively new to literary criticism in our cen- tury, can be noted here at random, with the reservation that probably no single modern critic would accept them all. From Darwin, the view of man as part of the natural order, and of culture as an evolutionary development. From Marx, the concept of literature as reflecting, in how- ever complex and indirect a fashion, the social and pro- ductive relations of its time. From Freud, the concept of literature as the disguised expression and fulfillment of repressed wishes, on the analogy of dreams, with these dis- guises operating in accord with known principles; and underlying that, the even more basic assumptions of men- tal levels beneath consciousness and some conflict between an expressive and a censorship principle. From Frazer, the view of primitive magic, myth, and ritual underlying the most transcendent literary patterns and themes. Other basic assumptions would include Dewey's doctrine of "con- tinuity," the view that the reading and writing of literature are forms of human activity comparable to any other, answerable to the same laws and capable of being studied by the same objective procedures; the behaviorist addition that literature is in fact a man writing and a man reading or it is nothing; and the rationalist view that literature is ultimately analyzable. Negatively modern criticism is equally distinguished by the absence of the two principal assumptions about literature in the past: that it is essen- tially a type of moral instruction, and that it is essentially a type of entertainment or amusement.
Operating on these assumptions, modern criticism asks a number of questions that have, for the most part, not been asked of literature before. What is the significance of the work in relation to the artist's life, his childhood, his family, his deepest needs and desires? What is its rela- tion to his social group, his class, his economic livelihood, the larger pattern of his society? What precisely does it do for him, and how? What does it do for the reader, and how? What is the connection between those two functions? What is the relation of the work to the archetypal primi- tive patterns of ritual, to the inherited corpus of literature, to the philosophic world views of its time and of all time? What is the organization of its images, its diction, its larger formal pattern? What are the ambiguous possibilities of
8 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
its key words, and how much of its content consists of meaningful and provable statements? Finally, then, mod- em criticism can get to the older questions: what are the work's intentions, how valid are they, and how completely are they fulfilled; what are its meanings (plural rather than singular); and how good or bad is it and why?
All of these, obviously, are questions asked about lit- erature, either in general or of a specific work. Neverthe- less, modem criticism for the most part no longer accepts its traditional status as an adjunct to "creative" or "imagi- native" literature. If we define art as the creation of mean- ingful and pleasurable patterns of experience, or the ma- nipulation of human experience into meaningful and pleasurable patterns, a definition that would probably get some degree of general acceptance, it is obvious that both imaginative and critical writing are art as defined. Imagi- native literature organizes its experiences out of life at first hand (in most cases); criticism organizes its expe- riences out of imaginative Hterature, life at second hand, or once-removed. Both are, if you wish, kinds of poetry, and one is precisely as independent as the other, or as de- pendent. "No exponent of criticism . . . has, I presume, ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic art," T. S. Eliot wrote in 1923, in "The Function of Criticism." Whether or not anyone had made that "pre- posterous assumption" by 1923, modem criticism, which began more or less formally the following year with the publication of I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criti- cism, has been acting on it since.
As R. P. Blackmur has pointed out, however, criticism "is a self-sufficient but by no means an isolated art," and in actual practice modern criticism has been at once com- pletely autotelic and inextricably tied to poetry. That is, like any criticism, it guides, nourishes, and lives off art and is thus, from another point of view, a handmaiden to art, parasitic at worst and symbiotic at best. The critic requires works of art for his raw material, subject, and theme, and in return for them performs such invaluable secondary functions on occasion as helping the reader un- derstand and appreciate works of art; helping the artist understand and evaluate his own work; and helping the
Its Nature 9
general progress and development of art by popularizing, "placing," and providing standards. The critic also, in spe- cial cases, calls up a generation of poets, as Emerson or the early Van Wyck Brooks did; assigns subjects for writ- ers as Gorky or Bernard DeVoto do; changes the course of art or attempts to, with Tolstoy and the moralists in the latter category, and Boileau and perhaps the romantic critics in England in the former; or even furnishes the artist (sometimes himself) with specific themes, tech- niques, and usable formulations, as do a number of con- temporary critics of poetry.
In one direction literary criticism is bounded by review- ing, in the other by aesthetics. The reviewer, more or less, is interested in books as commodities; the critic in books as literature or, in modem terms, as literary action or be- havior; the aesthetician in literature in the abstract, not in specific books at all. These are thus functional rather than formal categories, and they are constantly shifting, so that the reviewer who ignores the commodity aspects of the book under discussion to treat of its significance as a work of literature becomes, for that review at least, a critic; the critic who generalizes about the abstract nature of art or the beautiful becomes, temporarily, an aesthetician; and the aesthetician who criticizes specific works of literature in terms of their unique properties is at that time a critic. One of the most remarkable features of our time is the number of ostensible critics, like Henry Seidel Canby or the brothers Van Doren, who on examination turn out to be disguised reviewers.
Another feature of contemporary criticism worth re- marking is that each critic tends to have a master meta- phor or series of metaphors in terms of which he sees the critical function, and that this metaphor then shapes, in- forms, and sometimes limits his work. Thus for R. P. Blackmur the critic is a kind of magical surgeon, who operates without ever cutting living tissue; for George Saintsbury he is a winebibber; for Constance Rourke he is a manure-spreader, fertilizing the ground for a good crop; for Waldo Frank he is an obstetrician, bringing new life to birth; for Kenneth Burke, after a number of other images, he has emerged as a wealthy impresario, staging
10 MUUHKIS LI I tLKAK r IJ K I 1 I ij I S M
dramatic performances of any work that catches his fancy; for Ezra Pound he is a patient man showing a friend through his library; and so forth.
The methods and techniques of modern criticism noted above filter through these master metaphors and also filter through something even more intangible, the critic's per- sonal apparatus of intelligence, knowledge, skill, sensibil- ity, and ability to write. No method, however ingenious, is foolproof, and almost every technique of modern criti- cism is used brilliantly by brilliant critics and poorly by stupid, ignorant, incompetent, or dull ones (as the suc- ceeding chapters of this book will attempt to demonstrate). On the other hand, a good man possessed of the critic's virtues may operate well or brilliantly, today as at any time, with no method but the application of his own intel- ligence and sensibiHty. He would not be a modern critic in our sense of the term, however, and is not our concern here. Any critic, no matter what his method, needs the intelligence to adapt it specifically to the work with which he is dealing; the knowledge, both literary and otherwise, to be aware of the implications of what he is doing; the skill to keep from being picked up and carried away by his method to one or another barren and mechanical monism; the sensibility to remain constantly aware of the special values of the work he is criticizing as a unique aesthetic experience; and the literary ability to express what he has to say. There is no test for these personal characteristics. Even Shakespeare, the traditional touch- stone, is not much help: the two men who have most distinguished themselves in contemporary criticism by dis- respect for Shakespeare have been Waldo Frank, a profes- sional exhorter to piety only slightly concerned with lit- erature of any sort, and John Crowe Ranson, one of the subtlest and most acute critical minds of our day. In the last analysis, these personal capacities are incalculable, and in a discussion of critical method objectified and ab- stracted from the living critic they can only be presumed or, more honestly, prayed for.
One of the principal implications of modem criticism is its development toward a science. In the foreseeable fu- ture, literary criticism will not become a science (we may
Us Nature 11
be either resigned to this or grateful for it), but increas- ingly we can expect it to move in a scientific direction; that is, toward a formal methodology and system of pro- cedures that can be objectively transmitted. As an experi- ment can be copied and checked from the report, at any time and place by anyone capable of the necessary manip- ulations, so will critical procedures be capable of repeti- tion by anyone with the requisite interest and ability. The private sensibility is unique with the critic and dies with him; his methods will increasingly be capable of objective transmission. The reproducer, it goes without saying, will need a sensibility and other qualifications roughly compa- rable to the originator's, in a sense that has not been true of physical science since the beginnings of the experimental method. (That is, a fool and a boor, granted elementary competence, by repeating Boyle's experiments will get the same results that Boyle did.) Furthermore, no matter to what extent the method of critical analysis becomes a body of objective procedures, with the words "evaluation" or "appreciation" the critic will always be entering a purely subjective area: whether the good man's reasonable super- structure built on objective analysis or the bad man's inde- fensible whim or whimsy.
The other principal implication of modem criticism is its development in the direction of a democratic criticism, Edmund Burke's hopeful doctrine of "every man his own critic." Burke writes in his essay on The Sublime and Beautiful: "The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the •truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights." This is, piously, the view that the unaided powers of any man make him a critic. The directly contrary view is Francis Bacon's in Novum Organum, that the adoption of his method would equalize all minds, as a compass or a rule equalizes all hands. Somewhere between the two lie the democratic possibilities for modern criticism: by extending method, more men can be capable critics, in most cases not professionally, but in their private reading and their
12 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
lives. And the vested interests that possibility menaces are much bigger game than the priesthood of literary criti- cism.
//. Its Ancestry
Modern literary criticism, we might say, begins with Plato and is continued and extended by Aristotle. Actually, of course, they were its great forerunners, anticipating, as they anticipated so many things, much of contemporary critical practice. Plato turned his dialectical philosophic method, as expounded in Books V and VII of The Re- public, on poetry, as well as psychological and social assumptions about its origin and functions. If his conclu- sion was to reject it philosophically as too far removed from the true Platonic reality, and socio-psychologically as harmful to the good society, his method was nevertheless the modem method of bringing to bear on it all the organized knowledge he had. In Aristotle's case there has been a recent effort, by the neo-Aristotelian school of criticism at the University of Chicago, to insist that he applied no deductive knowledge or principles whatsoever to poetry, but merely examined poems inductively as for- mal organizations unique in themselves. This view has been demolished by, among others, John Crowe Ransom (in "The Bases of Criticism," in the Sewanee Review, Autumn 1944) and Kenneth Burke (in "The Problem of the Intrinsic," reprinted as an appendix to A Grammar of Motives). Burke in addition demonstrated that not only was Aristotle thoroughly "Platonic" in his practice, but that so are the neo-Aristotelians, surreptitiously, precisely at their most successful. It takes no more than a reading of the Poetics to establish that, although Aristotle worked as inductively and close to the specific text as the neo- Aristotelians would have him, at the same time he con- tinued much of Plato's approach, deepening Plato's charge of mimesis or imitation to give poetry philosophic validity, and substituting a sounder socio-psychological concept, catharsis, for Plato's inadequate concept of poetic function as harmful stimulation of the passions. In addition to ana- lyzing poetry by means of these remarkably explicit philo- sophic, social, and psychological a priori assumptions,
Its Ancestry 13
Aristotle also turned on it an embryonic anthropology, traditions of the primitive origins of Greek drama, that has turned out to be surprisingly accurate to later anthro- pological, archaeological, and philological research (de- spite such inevitable flaws as his concept of the choric song as a mere "embellishment" to tragedy) . Aristotle thus anticipated the chief features and techniques of the lit- erary criticism we have come to call "modern."
Later classical and medieval critics continued one or another of these modern strains, from Aristarchus and the scholiasts in the second century before Christ, writing an embryonic social criticism, to Dante, Petrarch, and Boc- caccio in the fourteenth century, furnishing allegorical in- terpretations of literature very close to what we would now call "symbolic" readings. The modern environmental criti- cism of literature began with Vico's New Science in 1725, which includes a social and psychological interpretation of Homer; it developed more fully (apparently independ- ently of Vico) in Montesquieu's work, particularly The Spirit of Laws in 1748. After this Italian and French ori- gin, the movement spread principally in Germany through the latter half of the eighteenth century, shifting its focus from history and law to literature and art. In the work of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder it became an aspect of burgeoning German nationalism. Winckelmann began it in 1764 with his History of Ancient Art, which studies Greek plastic art in terms of its political, social, and philo- sophic background; Lessing continued it, principally in his Laocoon two years later, with particular emphasis on the relativity of forms in historical usage and the importance of Aristotle's principles; Herder developed the environ- mentalist approach still further, increasing the method's relativism by opposing folk art and Gothic to the classic- worship of Winckelmann and Lessing, extending Vico's dynamic historical concepts in his own Philosophy of His- tory and emphasizing Montesquieu's comparative method in all the fields he touched (making him the ancestor of our modem fields of comparative philology, comparative religion and mythology, and comparative literary study).
All of this flowered in the next century in the work of the first really great modem critic, Coleridge, in England, and in a substantial school in France. The Biographia
14 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
Liter aria, published in 1817, is almost the bible of modem criticism, and contemporary critics have tended to see it, with Arthur Symons, as "the greatest book of criticism in English," and, with Herbert Read, as "the most consid- erable." On its first page it announces the manifesto for modem criticism: the application of Coleridge's political, philosophic (including psychological), and religious prin- ciples to poetry and criticism. The Biographia was thus a century in advance of its time, and only the inadequacy of the knowledge available to him kept Coleridge from founding modern criticism then and there. He is, how- ever, with the exception of Aristotle, certainly its most important progenitor. His work found no one to carry it on, unfortunately, and when the doctrines of environmen- talist criticism reappeared in England, in H. T. Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857, they were derived not from Coleridge but from his German prede- cessors and his French successors.
Meanwhile, the German doctrine of literature as an expression of society was brought to France by Madame de Stael in Literature in Relation to Social Institutions (1800), which was responsible in part for such diverse progeny as the rationalist history of Guizot, the populist history of Michelet, and the skeptical history of Renan, as well as for the biographical literary criticism of Sainte- Beuve and the sociological literary criticism of Taine. Sainte-Beuve was the point at which the whole earlier tradition split in two. On the one hand, he saw criticism as a social science, "the natural history of literature," with a methodical procedure that studies the author, in the words of MacClintock in Sainte-Beuve' s Critical Theory, in relation to "his race, his native country, his epoch, his family, his education and early environment, his group of associates, his first success, his first moment of disintegra- tion, his peculiarities of body and mind, especially his weaknesses," and much else. This is the tradition that continues in Taine, Brandes, Brunetiere. On the other hand, Sainte-Beuve insists, in his criticism of Taine, in "M. Taine's History of English Literature," that the critic must also "continue to respect and inhale the scent of that sober, deUcately perfumed flower which is Pope's,
Its Ancestry 15
Boileau's, Fontanes'." This second tradition has been con- tinued in the line through Arnold, Babbitt, and Eliot, equally indebted to him. Sainte-Beuve defines the combina- tion of the two schools as the formula for the perfect critic, but admits that the hope of this reconciliation in one man is "an impossibility," "a dream."
Taine himself claimed the historical imagination of Lessing and Michelet as part of his ancestry, and in the incidental literary analyses in the latter's History of France, some of them sharp class-anglings (like the read- ing of Manon Lescaut as an expression of the small landed gentry before the Revolution), the resemblance to Taine is obviously more than a matter of historical imagination. At the same time Taine's three principal criteria for criti- cism— race, moment, milieu — had all been anticipated by Sainte-Beuve, who got them from Hegel's Zeit, Volke, Umgebung, which were in turn derived from Herder. Taine thus brought to a focus most of the earlier tenden- cies toward a scientific criticism, and his work logically enough became the target for all attacks on these tenden- cies. The Goncourts, for example, wrote very supercili- ously on meeting him: "This was Taine, the incarnation in flesh and blood of modern criticism, a criticism at once very learned, very ingenious, and very often erroneous beyond imagining." Perhaps the sharpest and most percep- tive recognition of his weaknesses and the weaknesses of a good deal of modem criticism, more perceptive than Sainte-Beuve's strictures, came from Flaubert, who wrote in one of his letters, on the History of English Literature:
There is something else in art besides the milieu in which it is practiced and the physiological antecedents of the worker. On this system you can explain the series, the group, but never the individuality, the spe- cial fact that makes him this person and not another. This method results inevitably in leaving talent out of consideration. The masterpiece has no longer any sig- nificance except as a historical document. It is the old critical method of La Harpe exactly turned around. People used to believe that literature was an altogether personal thing and that books fell out of
16 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
the sky like meteors. Today they deny that the will and the absolute have any reality at all. The truth, I believe, lies between the two extremes.
In 1869 Flaubert wrote to George Sand on the subject of critics: "At the time of La Harpe they were grammarians; at the time of Sainte-Beuve and Taine they were historians. When will they be artists — really artists?"
The next major development in modem criticism came in 1912 and the years immediately following. That year Jane Ellen Harrison, a lecturer in classical studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, published Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. The book in- cludes "An Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy" by Gilbert Murray, to whom the book is dedicated, and "A Chapter on the Origin of the Olympic Games" by F. M. Comford, one of Miss Harrison's col- leagues at Cambridge. Although most of it is Miss Harri- son's independent work, Themis thus constituted a kind of collective manifesto of what is known as the Cambridge school of classical scholarship, which completely revolu- tionized the study of Greek art and thought by turning on it the knowledge and theories of comparative anthropol- ogy. In addition to printing and using Murray and Corn- ford, Miss Harrison drew heavily on unpublished work by another colleague, A. B. Cook, and by others. Shortly afterwards, the same year, Cornford published From Re- ligion to Philosophy, a similar anthropological tracing of the ritual origins of Greek philosophic thought. ^ In 1913 Murray published Euripides and His Age, a study of Eu- ripides and his drama against the background of the ritual origin of tragedy, and Miss Harrison published Ancient Art and Ritual. The following year Cornford published The Origin of Attic Comedy, which analyzes Greek com- edy in the same terms, and Cook published the first vol- ume of Zeus, an application of anthropological material to still another area. Finally, in 1920, Miss Jessie Weston, with great success, tried the method of the Cambridge school on non-Greek material in her From Ritual to Ro-
^1912 was a watershed year for more than this. It also saw the pub- lication of F. C. Prescott's "Poetry and Dreams" in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the first detailed and authentic application of psychoanalysis to poetry by a literary man.
Its Ancestry 17
mance, an anthropological exploration of the origins of the grail romances in ritual terms and Bertha Phillpotts did a similar job on northern epic poetry in The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama.
Although these books, for all practical purposes, are modern literary criticism, as the work of scholars writing in fairly specialized fields they failed to attract the atten- tion of literary men sufficiently to inaugurate the new movement. In America in 1919 Conrad Aiken turned Freudian and other psychologies on poetry in Scepticisms and clearly formulated the basic assumption of modem criticism, that poetry is "a natural, organic product, with discoverable functions, clearly open to analysis." Like the Cambridge group, however, he lacked the literary influence to set criticism following out his assumption. It remained for I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924 to constitute the formal beginnings of modem criti- cism with a variant of the same statement: that aesthetic experiences are "not in the least a new and different kind of thing" from other human experiences, and can be studied in the same fashion. It was, as we have noted, no new doctrine (not only had Aiken specifically anticipated it five years before, but John Dewey had stated substan- tially the same thing as his doctrine of the "continuity" of experience as early as his Studies in Logical Theory in 1903, and Aristotle had clearly operated on that assump- tion), but this time it was supported by the tremendous prestige of Ogden and Richards's The Meaning of Mean- ing, published the year before, it carried general convic- tion, and it bore fruit in a quarter of a century of modem literary criticism.
The battle, of course, is not yet won. The past century has seen critic after critic quarrel with every assumption or method of modern criticism, including every type of knowledge that might be brought to bear on literature, and even the basic assumption of continuity. At one end of the scale these attacks are the simple pettishness of James Russell Lowell in a review of Longfellow, mocking the modem critical view that "the form of an author's work is entirely determined by the shape of his skull, and that in turn by the peculiar configuration of his native terri- tory," and Ludwig Lewisohn, in his Preface to Rank's Art
18 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
and the Artist, dismissing all modern criticism since Taine offhand for leaving Hamlet out of the play. At the other end of the scale they include the reasoned skepticism of Chekhov, writing to Suvorin in November 1888, noting the amount of "rubbish" by "blockheads" that scientific criticism, working from irreproachable principles, has pro- duced; or of Anatole France, in a criticism of Brunetiere in La Vie litteraire, proposing the same balance and reser- vations Sainte-Beuve had earlier proposed:
As a matter of pure theory a critical method is con- ceivable that, proceeding from science, might share the latter's certainty. . . . All things in the universe are inextricably intertwined. In reality, however, the links of the chain are, in any given spot, so jumbled that the devil himself could not disentangle them, even if he were a logician. . . . One cannot foresee today, whatever one may say, a time when criticism will have the rigorousness of a positive science. One may even believe, reasonably enough, that that time will never come. Nevertheless the great philosophers of antiquity crowned their cosmic systems with a poetics. And they did wisely. For it is better to speak of beautiful thoughts and forms with incertitude than to be forever silent. Few things in the world are so absolutely subject to science that they will let science reproduce or predict them. And one may be sure that a poem or a poet will never be among those few. . . . If these things sustain a relation to science, it is to one that is blended with art, that is intuitive, restless, forever unfinished. That science or, rather, that art exists. It is philosophy, ethics, history, criticism — in a word, the whole beautiful romance of man.
A number of critics have found themselves sharply split on the matter. Thus John Middleton Murry, in The Prob- lem of Style, attacks "the fantastic dream" that criticism "might be reduced to the firm precision of a science," and "the vain hope" of giving its language "a constant and invariable significance," but later in the same book pro- poses an equally scientific (or mechanistic) social and economic criticism, including a one-to-one correlation be- tween economic and social conditions and artistic and
Its Ancestry 19
literary forms, and even An Economic History of English Literature. Allen Tate, an outstanding product of the as- sumptions of modem criticism and practicer of its meth- ods, in Reason in Madness attacks the social sciences as the fundamental menace, as well as modern criticism it- self, which he calls "the historical method," and in which he lumps, along with history, the use of the physical, bio- logical, social, and political sciences in criticism. Similarly, John Crowe Ransom has at one time or another attacked the use of science in criticism, been violently opposed to social sciences Uke anthropology, and announced that he does not share Max Eastman's "sanguine expectations" for psychology, while himself drawing brilliantly on all three in his own criticism.
Probably more damaging to modern criticism than the attacks by good men and the ambivalence in some of its practitioners has been its enthusiastic defense by men whose own practice ranges from weak to execrable. Thus Louis MacNeice, in Modern Poetry, announces a watered- down form of Richards's continuity doctrine, that poetry is a normal activity, the poet being "a specialist in some- thing which every one practices," but then fails to follow up that assumption in the book by turning any knowledge whatsoever on poetry. It would be hard to find two more violent enthusiasts for scientific criticism in recent times than Max Eastman, writing a manifesto in The Literary Mind for "a department of science which will have litera- ture as its object of study," and V. F. Calverton, in The New Ground of Criticism, eloquently advocating a criti- cism that will synthesize psychology, sociology, and an- thropology— and it would be equally hard to find two worse or more infuriating critics in our time. A compar- able mistrust is inspired by Henri Peyre. He makes the very shrewd statement in Writers and Their Critics: "Mod- ern criticism is still groping for its method and enthusias- tically experimenting with several techniques. It has not yet outgrown the primitive stage in which physics simi- larly fumbled before Bacon and Descartes, chemistry be- fore Lavoisier, sociology before Auguste Comte, and phys- iology before Claude Bernard." Then in the book Peyre reserves his sharpest attack for precisely those methods— of social, psychological, textual, and other analysis — and
20 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
precisely those critics — Richards, Empson, Burke, and Blackmur — who most clearly represent the attempt of criticism to outgrow the primitive stage he describes.
At the same time modem criticism has been regularly under attack by the invested enemy, the reviewers and the professional obscurantists. A characteristic illustration of the first, worth quoting for its typicality, is a review by Orville Prescott that appeared in the New York Times, March 28, 1945. The book under discussion is Florence Becker Lennon's study of Lewis Carroll, Victoria through the Looking-Glass. Prescott writes:
Miss Lennon has performed prodigies of research, but in spite of her conscientious labors her book is disappointing and tedious. The enchanting magic of the Alice books defies analysis. To seek its source in Freudian probings into Carroll's complexes and re- pressions is as fruitless as to attempt to find explana- tions for a butterfly's flight or the lightning's choice of a target. Genius mysteriously exists; and flowers into enduring treasures as inexplicably.
That Carroll lived a blameless bachelor life is true; but then some men are bachelors from choice and quite content with their lot, in spite of Miss Lennon's Freudian suspicions. That Carroll liked the company of little girls better than that of boys or adults is also true, and rather odd of him. But all Miss Lennon's solemn pryings into his psyche, into the sexual sym- bols of his books, just don't seem to get anywhere.
. . . But Lewis Carroll, to whom "hardly anything ever happened," led a singularly blank life. . . .
But Lewis Carroll led a life without exterior con- flict of any kind, and with few inner ones (just those vague religious hesitations) . He knew neither love nor close friendships. He was a good man and a good Christian. He tried to get his own salary reduced and he insisted on a publishing contract that insured that he himself would bear any possible loss. But his life was dull and colorless. . . .
As these quotations should make clear, in the course of attacking Miss Lennon's psychoanalytic study Prescott gives all the reasons why a psychoanalytic study seems
Its Ancestry 21
very much to the point, and in the course of insisting that Carroll's life was uneventful fills it full of the most re- markable events. Like many contemporary reviewers, Pres- cott attacks modern criticism seemingly not so much out of malice as out of simple ignorance. In other cases, such as J. Donald Adams's weekly column in the Sunday Times and his book The Shape of Books to Come, malice and a kind of shrill venom are added, and the picture clearly is of the happily superficial reviewer fighting to preserve his status and investment in what he thinks is criticism against a mob of sans-culottes.
The attack by the professional obscurantists is a more complicated matter. Perhaps the best example is Mark Van Doren, whose approach to criticism, consistent with his St. John's College approach to education, is opposed to the inroads of any modern knowledge whatsoever. In the Preface to The Private Reader Van Doren has written the most complete and eloquent attack on modern criti- cism with which I am famiUar. He describes it as "deserts of ingenuity and plateaus of learning," reproaches it with "doing all it can to arrest the lyric in its flight," concludes that "it is at best a faulty science . . . not an art." To it Van Doren opposes a pure obscurantism: "Arnold was wrong in the emphasis he placed upon ideas"; "We do not know that much about poetry, and we never shall"; "undiscussable," "the mystery," and so on. The piece is remarkable for its tone of bitter elegy, beginning on a theme of exile ("contemporary criticism, a house in which I no longer feel at home"), rising to a wail of keening ("Our literary age is sick"), and ending on the imagery of self -extinction ("My only ambition as a critic is hence- forth to be one of those nameless strangers with whom writers dream that they communicate. Poetry itself can do with silence for a while"). The final comment on Van Doren's slogan of "private reading," the bringing of noth- ing to bear on literature but the reader's attention, was made accidentally by I. A. Richards. He writes in Inter- pretation in Teaching:
The remedy, I suppose, is growth, which will occur if testing occasions enough force the adolescent sur- vivals of the child's dream-world habit to withdraw
22 MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM
into their proper place. Unluckily, private reading — when it is only a partially controlled form of dream- ing— is a protection from such tests. It too often be- comes a romantic preserve for mental processes which are relatively extinct in fully waking life.
Contemporary with modem criticism, along with em- battled reviewers and obscurantists, are the violently con- troversial schools of aesthetic and philosophic doctrine that have enlivened the literary magazines in the past: impres- sionists and expressionists, neo-humanists and naturalists, classicists and romanticists, positivists and anti-positivists, etc. Their current successor seems to be the largely point- less quarrel between the neo-Aristotelians and the neo- Platonists or neo-Coleridgeans. All of these schools and controversies have their function, but it tends to be one of debating large generalities and saying little so far as actual method is concerned. In one way or another they are all contemporary blind alleys for the man really con- cerned with the analysis of literature. While the bricks are flying overhead, the serious modern critic will tend to be down in the mine, digging away. He gets his hands dirtier, but he may also turn up a nugget now and then.
CHAPTER 1
Yvor Winters
and Evaluation in Criticism
To the extent that the evaluation of works of art has not become an extinct critical function in our time, credit must be largely due to the redoubtable labors of Yvor Winters, poet, professor of English at Leland Stanford University, and the author of four remarkable volumes of literary criticism: Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938), The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), and Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946).^ Winters is a serious man, and in some respects quite a useful one, and it is regrettable that to a generation of writers younger than himself he has become largely a comic figure, the man who thinks that Elizabeth Daryush is our foremost living poet and that Edith Wharton is a better writer than Henry James. Winters has made these statements, and others more extreme, but he is our foremost and perhaps sole representative of a vanishing art, Johnsonian criticism, and he is well worth careful study.
Winters is very much in earnest about the act of evalua- tion, which he sees as the crowning glory, the ultimate reason for being, of critical analysis. He has listed in detail the processes, culminating in evaluation, that constitute literary criticism as he sees it. He writes:
It will consist (1) of the statement of such histori- cal or biographical knowledge as may be necessary in order to understand the mind and method of the writer; (2) of such analysis of his literary theories as we may need to understand and evaluate what he
^The first three of these were republished, somewhat revised, in one volume in 1947, along with an essay on Hart Crane's "The Bridge," as In Defense of Reason.
24 YVOR WINTERS
is doing; (3) of a rational critique of the para- phrasable content (roughly, the motive) of the poem; (4) of a rational critique of the feeling motivated — that is, of the details of style, as seen in language and technique; and (5) of the final act of judgment, a unique act, the general nature of which can be in- dicated, but which cannot be communicated precisely, since it consists in receiving from the poet his own final and unique judgment of his matter and in judg- ing that judgment. It should be noted that the purpose of the first four processes is to limit as narrowly as possible the region in which the final unique act is to occur.2
For "poem," of course, we read "any work of art," and we observe that inasmuch as art itself is the act of evaluat- ing experience for Winters, he sees criticism as a remark- ably complicated double judgment, secondary in evaluating the poet's evaluation of his experience (the "subject" of the poem) and primary in evaluating the critic's own ex- perience (the poem itself).
To this difficult and subtle task Winters brings a set of persuasive principles. The critic should display "reasonable humility and caution" in evaluating, and even at that, "it is only fair to add that few men possess either the talent or the education to justify their being taken very seriously, even of those who are nominally professional students of these matters." However, "every literary critic has a right to a good many errors of judgment." Whether or not Winters actually displays "reasonable humility and cau- tion" in evaluating, and whether he has not, as he charges against Poe, far exceeded his generous quota of errors, are other questions.
Winters's dogmatic evaluations are most striking in the case of the half-dozen writers he admires almost to the point of worship. One of those is Edith Wharton. He has written that Mrs. Wharton, at her best, is nearly the per-
' We might note that Winters himself seldom does any of these fine things, in most cases merely announcing the evaluation itself, as a flat obiter dictum, with no evidence for it given and in terms so semantically meaningless as to preclude discussion. This failure in practice should not, however, detract from the relevance of his state- ment of intentions.
and Evaluation in Criticism 25
feet example of an effectiveness in the novel that Jane Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Fielding, and Defoe can only exemplify after making allowances for "limitations of scope and defects of procedure." In terms of the celebrated comparison with James, he believes that Mrs. Wharton gives a greater precision to her moral issues than James was ever able to achieve, and that the prose of at least The Age of Innocence and The Valley of Decision is certainly superior to the prose of James. The Age of Innocence, because of its superior prose and because it "corrects a defect" in James's conception of the novel, is undoubtedly "the finest single flower of the Jamesian art." Not to slight The Valley of Decision, however, it also "might be defended as superior to any single work by James."
Perhaps the highest praise in Winters's vocabulary has been reserved for the work of Robert Bridges. Bridges's poetry is superior to that of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Wil- liam Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and practically every other modem poet, "incomparably" superior to that of Ezra Pound, and superior to and more original than that of Gerard Manley Hopkins in every respect. Moreover, Bridges is a "more civilized" and a "saner" man than any of his contemporaries. To bring him into comparison with his equals, he has written a number of poems that "will stand the most scrutinizing comparison with any of Shake- speare's sonnets," he is "probably the most finished and original master of blank verse since Milton," and he has written at least two fine occasional sonnets that "would cast no discredit on Milton" and a formal ode "no whit inferior" to Dryden's "Ode on the Death of Mistress Anne Killigrew." "It seems to me beyond all question," Winters writes, "that Bridges' two plays on Nero are the greatest tragedy since The Cenci and (if we except that furious and appalling composition, Samson Agonistes, which, though a tragedy, is no play) are quite possibly superior to any English tragedy outside of Shakespeare." Furthermore, Winters has classified Bridges's poetry, for the convenience of lazy readers, into "short lyrics, first level" (ten poems), "short lyrics, second level" (twelve poems), "longer lyrics at a slow tempo, first level" (three poems), "second level" (one poem), plus two fine epigrams, two admirable di-
26 YVOR WINTERS
dactic poems of some length, "of which the second is nearly on the first level," and the above-mentioned two fine occasional sonnets and formal ode.
"The nearest rival to Bridges since Shelley," in Winters's belief, is T. Sturge Moore. Moore has written poetry "that has been equalled by not more than two or three living writers, and more great poetry than any living writer has composed." He is a far greater poet than William Butler Yeats without Yeats's "talent for self-dramatization," and he has "revised and greatly improved two of the most con- fused poems of Gerard M. Hopkins." ^ Moreover, he is a "perfectly lucid mind," he has written at least one poem of which each line is "a masterpiece in itself," and "he has more to teach us of our present literary difficulties than has any other writer of our century."
To conclude Winters's trinity, "the finest British poet since T. Sturge Moore" is Mrs. Elizabeth Daryush, who, as Robert Bridges's daughter raises at least the possibility that the quality Winters has isolated as greatness is trans- missible genetically. (It is worth noting, perhaps, that 1 had never heard of her until I encountered her name in Winters's first book, and have never seen her mentioned elsewhere except in reference to Winters's critical opin- ions.) "She is one of the few great poets living," he writes, and to clinch the argument, with the comment that "the medium could not be used with greater beauty than in this poem," he reprints a sonnet of hers entitled "Still-Life," of
3 It might be instructive here to look at what Sturge Moore did to Hopkins. Winters is referring to an essay, "Style and Beauty in Litera- ture," in the Criterion, July 1930. Moore takes the opening lines of Hopkins's "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo":
How to k^ep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away? and rewrites them as:
How to keep beauty? is there any way? Is there nowhere any means to have it stay? Will no bow or brooch or braid, Brace or lace Latch or catch
Or key to lock the door lend aid Before beauty vanishes away? Moore explained that he had retained most of Hopkins's felicities while discarding "his most ludicrous redundancies."
and Evaluation in Criticism 27
which the most charitable opinion possible is that it is a gentle, rather pedestrian piece of rhymed prose.*
In 1946, without much previous warning. Winters added a fourth deity to his trinity, in his Edwin Arlington Robin- son, written for New Directions's Makers of Modern Liter- ature series. Robinson is a "great and austere poet," who has written, in "The Wandering Jew," "one of the great poems not only of our time but of our language," "perhaps as great as one can easily find," as well as ten other short poems that can be equaled "in the work of only four or five English and American poets of the past century and a half"; one long poem, Lancelot, which is "one of the few deeply impressive narrative poems written in English in more than two hundred years"; and some poems of medium length, of which two "rank among the greatest of their kind in English," two others are simply "great," two others are "successful," and a few more are "memorable." In general, Robinson is "on certain occasions one of the most remarkable poets in our language," and his best work ranks with the greatest work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, and Bridges, among whom Robinson "seems at moments to find his closest relatives and quite possibly his closest rivals on this side of Milton and Dry- den; and his position in relation to these poets is not that of the lowest."
Where a new reputation for an obscure or inferior poet cannot be stimulated by this kind of pressure. Winters is perfectly willing to pretend that one already exists, as where he remarks that Adelaide Crapsey is not only "cer- tainly an immortal poet," but "has long been one of the most famous poets of our century."
Probably the highest single point of Winters's praise for his favorites, however, is found in Post Scriptum V of The Anatomy of Nonsense, where he lists the seventeen Amer- ican poets of his own and the subsequent generation he chiefly respects, and names their forty-eight best poems (two of them modified by "perhaps"). His own name is omitted, as is that of his wife, Janet Lewis (he explains in a footnote that although he believes her to be "one of the
* One of the worst features of Winters's violent dogmatism is that it inevitably provokes an equally violent counterdogmatism. Mrs. Dary- ush would probably not seem as bad as that, encountered elsewhere.
28 YVOR WINTERS
best poets of her generation, as well as one of the best fictionists," he endeavors, "on general principles, not to discuss her work"). Nevertheless almost half the names on the list are of his friends, disciples, or students; almost all the generally accepted major poets of our day are omitted; and the choice of poems seems whimsical or worse. All in all, the list is one of the most curious documents of con- temporary critical writing.^
Winters is fully as dogmatic in evaluating the poets he detests. High on the list are Eliot, Yeats, and Ezra Pound. Eliot is the author of "purely derivative poetry," he does everything Pound does "with less skill," he is markedly inferior to William Carlos Williams, among others, and at least one passage of his, from "The Hollow Men," is dis- missed with the charitable sentence: "There are few at- tempts more pathetic than this in modem literature to keep on going, line by line, in spite of everything." Pound is simply "a barbarian loose in a museum." Yeats is a poet full of "melodramatic emotionalism," and in another place, with no great straining after consistency, a poet with sensibilities so chilled as to be benumbing. All three of them, naturally, are vastly inferior to Bridges, Sturge Moore, and Winters's other favorites.
For all his passion and dogmatism, Winters's opinions are something less than stable. In The Anatomy of Non- sense, published in 1943, Winters describes Wallace Stevens as the corruption and degradation of a great poetic talent, a man who had written nothing first-rate since the publi- cation of Harmonium in 1923. Yet in Primitivism and Decadence, published in 1937, or after Stevens had been on the downgrade for fourteen years, according to Win- ters, Stevens was simply "probably the greatest poet of his generation," and in 1939, in a review. Winters predicted that the year 2000 would see Stevens and Williams estab- lished as the "two best poets" of their generation. It is interesting to compare Winters's literary opinions in an early essay, "The Extension and Reintegration of the Hu-
^This sort of claque operation works both ways, of course. Alan Swallow, his current publisher, has identified Winters as "the greatest critic of the recent critical renaissance," and Lincoln Fitzell, one of Winters's seventeen elect poets, has called him "the fine poet and critic," who, "although not a native of the West, likes the country and at least some of the people."
and Evaluation in Criticism 29
man Spirit through the Poetry Mainly French and Amer- ican since Poe and Baudelaire," published in The New American Caravan in 1929, with his later opinions, pub- lished during this decade. In 1929 Allen Tate was "with- out the skill" of Archibald MacLeish, the novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts ranked above those of Henry James, a chapter of Dr. Williams's In the American Grain was superior "to any other prose of our time and most of the verse," the trio of living Americans who excited Winters most were Williams, Crane, and Tate (unskilled as he was), and Lawrence was the only major poet in Eng- land since Hardy. By 1943 Tate was "surely" one of the major talents of our time, MacLeish "wears thinner and thinner with time," Williams and Crane were victims of the "Whitmanian fallacy" of national expression, pan- theism, and so forth, and Lawrence is nowhere mentioned, having been succeeded by Bridges, Moore, and Mrs. Daryush. Miss Roberts's novels also go unmentioned. Win- ters having killed them off as early as 1933 with the charge of "mannerism."
Winters tends to make his obiter dicta in extreme detail, isolating one poem or even a few lines for special evalua- tion. Wallace Stevens may be afflicted with a "hedonist degeneracy," for example, but his "Sunday Morning" is "probably the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and is certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English"; Tate's "Shadow and Shade" and "The Cross" are "two of the great lyrics of our time"; and Herrick's "Gather Ye Rosebuds" is "clearly superior" to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The passage of nine lines in Eliot's "Gerontion" beginning: "I that was near your heart was removed therefrom" is Eliot's "one passage of major poetry"; a poem of Robinson Jeffers's has no quot- able lines "save perhaps three," and those "heavy with dross"; and a poem by Bridges is described as having all its power concentrated in the middle paragraph {sic), while another by Williams is chiefly carried by eight good lines. A poem by Robinson has six stanzas that "show less strength" than seven others, and another is turned into "perfect tragedy" by two fine lines.
Winters's comparative evaluations, like Eliot's, have the capacity for cutting across barriers of time as well as wide
30 YVOR WINTERS
differences of type in the quest for similarity. "My ov n preference for Pope and Blake remains unshakable," he writes typically. Winters's pose is that of a mind flashing across the whole corpus of poetry in English in the search for a comparison, and he is perfectly capable, in one pas- sage, of placing Byron by comparisons with aspects of Jonson, Campion, Googe, Turberville, Lawrence, and Poe, or, in another, of discussing the difference between Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams in terms of the Petrarchan rhetoric of the sixteenth century, the meta- physical verse of the seventeenth century, the sonnets of Shakespeare and Donne, and the poetry of Fulke Greville, Vaux, Googe, Gascoigne, Turberville, Daniel, and Dray- ton.
In all this welter of comparison, dictum, evaluation, and posturing Winters retains one constant point of view, that of "morality." Art is moral, he has written, and criticism must necessarily be the same. Precisely what he means by "moral" in this connection is vastly complicated and con- tradictory, and will be discussed later in more detail, but some sense at least of how he sees the process of moral evaluation operating in art can be obtained from a key pas- sage in The Anatomy of Nonsense. Winters writes:
According to my view, the artistic process is one of moral evaluation of human experience, by means of a technique which renders possible an evaluation more precise than any other. The poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, to state his under- standing, and simultaneously to state, by means of the feelings which we attach to words, the kind and degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding. The artistic result differs from the crude experience mainly in its refinement of judg- ment: the difference in really good art is enormous, but the difference is of degree rather than of kind.
Implicit in this view of the moral nature of art and criticism is the obligation on the critic to "correct" tradi- tional opinion in so far as he believes it to be wrong. Without question, this wearying ethical burden is in part responsible for some of Winters's wilder evaluations. His attempt in Maule's Curse to estabhsh Jones Very as the
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superior in every way of Emerson — an attempt doomed to failure when he printed twenty-two of Very's poems as an appendix to the volume — is only a small part of the vast plan Winters defines with unusual humility in the Fore- word to the book. "My ultimate hope," he wrote, "is to establish a critical basis for a fairly complete revision of the history of American literature, a plan which may require a good many years of labor." Inasmuch as Winters in another place refers to Churchill, Gascoigne, and John- son as "great masters obscured by history," and has for years been carrying on a running campaign to ensure Gascoigne, as well as Bamabe Googe and Turberville, their "rightful" place in the literary hierarchy, there is at least a possibility that after disposing of American literature he looks forward to rearranging the history of English literature or even of world literature.
Into this giant project in the correction of opinion only now beginning to emerge, all of Winters's critical writing is designed to fit. Primitivism and Decadence, he has ex- plained, is a study of the moral significance of forms, with writers discussed merely to illustrate them; Maule's Curse complements it, as a study of the moral significance of individual writers; The Anatomy of Nonsense is a study of what Winters believes to be the four "most influential tendencies in the literary practice of our time, and as far as may be the most influential minds themselves." (That this is a shaky eminence for John Crowe Ransom and Wallace Stevens at least, if not for T. S. Eliot and Henry Adams, goes without saying.) Alan Swallow, an admirer of Winters, in an appreciation in the Rocky Mountain Re- view for Fall 1944, has added to this list what he considers to be a fourth major work, Winters's long article "The Sixteenth Century Lyric in England" in Poetry: A Maga- zine of Verse for February, March, and April of 1939. Mr. Swallow puts this forward as Winters's chief essay in construction rather than destruction, "a study of the his- tory of what he considers the wiser tradition of method and idea." Since then Winters has added what would seem to be a similar essay in construction, the study of Robinson.
Winters is nothing if not a patient and far-sighted worker, as is demonstrated (according to his account) by
32 YVOR WINTERS
the seventeen years he spent working on the five long essays that make up Primitivism and Decadence: revising them constantly, working most of his periodical writing into them, conferring on them with everyone available, and even changing his attitude toward modern poetry com- pletely and carrying on. Opposite the title page of Maule's Curse Winters listed two further volumes of literary criti- cism "in preparation": Studies of the American Historians and Critics and A Brief Outline History of the Rhetoric of the Short Poem in English. The Anatomy of Nonsense is presumably a thin slice of the first, but what has become of the rest of it and of the entire second project in the years since 1937, only Winters knows. Significantly, perhaps. The Anatomy of Nonsense, issued by the same publisher five years later, carries no listing of works in preparation. If Winters has discarded them, there is no doubt that it is only because some other part of the literary canon seems in more desperate need of reconditioning and overhaul at the moment.
2. For detailed study of the evaluative method at work, Win- ters's second book, Maule's Curse, is probably best, since it is his only book concerned primarily with writers, the first having dealt with forms, the third with ideas, and the fourth with a single poet. It is also probably his most sub- stantial, although certainly not his flashiest, piece of work. The "curse" of the title is the prophecy in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables: "God will give him blood to drink!" predicted for Colonel Pyncheon by a man he had wronged. Winters believes that our great writers of the last century, from Cooper to James, suffered from this figurative curse; specifically, that having been cut off from their true literary heritage, they were "abnormally sensitive to the influence of European romanticism," and thus drank blood — their own. To an extent, the book's unity around this cure is factitious, since in one sense every writer, even the most severe classicist, drinks his own blood, and in another sense our major nineteenth-century writers, who produced a line of genuinely great works from
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The Scarlet Letter through Moby -Dick to The Ambas- sadors, can hardly be considered to have been cursed at all, at least not unless Winters is prepared to ask still greater work of them or establish it as within their poten- tialities.
(This, incidentally, is the stumbling-block that largely shattered the early work of Van Wyck Brooks, as well as a good deal of sociological criticism by other writers: the fact that before you can show James or Twain, Haw- thorne or Melville to have been the victims of a hostile en- vironment, you have to establish that they were capable of finer work than they achieved; that is, you have to demand a better book than Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn. It is obvious that in a more favorable social environment they would have produced vastly different works, and probably, in the case of James particularly, works for a much broader public, but that is about as far as environmental criticism alone can go.)
Take Winters's book, then, merely as a series of critical essays on nineteenth-century American writers, or, as it is subtitled. Seven Studies in the History of American Ob- scurantism. The seven essays deal with Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville, Poe, Emerson and Jones Very, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James. Winters's procedure in each chapter, roughly, is to discuss the writer's mind, analyze examples of his work with specific evaluations and extensive quota- tion, and, finally, summarize the values of his work and ideas.
Hawthorne comes through as fundamentally a failure, a man who produced "one of the chief masterpieces of English prose," The Scarlet Letter, then sank into inane romanticism; Cooper as a man who embodied a great social ideal, but was corroded by romantic sentiment and can hope to survive only in isolated great fragments; Melville as "the greatest man of his era and of his nation," a man who faced down the fruition of Maule's curse in the character of Ahab, comprehended and mastered it; Poe as a man of remarkable consistency in his criticism and crea- tive writing and of exceptional worthlessness in both; Emerson as vastly inferior to Jones Very (who had "moral intelligence"), and the source of much of our literature's
34 YVOR WINTERS
confusion;® Emily Dickinson as "a poetic genius of the highest order" and "one of the greatest lyric poets of all time," nevertheless impoverished by tastelessness and crudity; and Henry James as a monstrous failure whose aims and incidental abilities were so vast as to make him a phenomenon of unequaled interest. To me, at least, these judgments (which have been presented as fairly as possible, but always with the reservation that the total judgments inherent in Winters's long and ambiguous essays cannot be summarized in a sentence) seem beautifully and exactly right in the cases of Melville and Poe, vastly unfair to Emerson and James, far too kind to Cooper, and in the cases of Hawthorne and Miss Dickinson at least debatable.
The good things in Maule's Curse are valuable critical work. The fine surgical job on Poe, for example, was long overdue, and should have given our contemporary Poe- worshippers, among them Edmund Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks, the literary equivalent of cauliflower ears. Winters displays Poe's ignorance and pretension to learning as a critic; explores the vulgar sentimentality of his mind; regis- ters reasonable shock at the corrupt and mechanical nature of his poetics, which reduce poetry to "triviality and char- latanism" and constitute a formal aesthetics of obscur- antism; exposes the absurdity of his metrical theories and the crudity of his ear; lists his fantastic evaluations of writers; and finally demolishes his poems and tales, with particular attention to the puerility of his style. All to- gether, it is a remarkable job of deserved butchery, and the possibility that it was all done for the wrong reasons, the suggestion on almost every page that Winters's chief objection to Poe is Poe's opposition to the concept of art and criticism as acts of moral evaluation, cannot detract from it. (Even the reader's awareness that there is more than a little kinship between Poe and Winters, that Win- ters's evaluations of writers are equally fantastic and his metrical theories almost as absurd, besides pointing up the familiar irony of the pot and the kettle, do nothing to vitiate a solid critical achievement.)
Whenever he is able to take time off from the respon-
"By Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946), Emerson has emerged as the great enemy, and almost everything bad in Robinson is "Emersonian."
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sibilties of moral evaluation, Winters is impressive as a close and imaginative reader, and several critical readings in the book, particularly a detailed analysis of the allegori- cal symbolism in the scene from The Scarlet Letter where Hester and Pearl wait in Governor Bellingham's mansion and see themselves distorted in a mirror, are quite pene- trating. Despite Winters's dubious theories of metrics, particularly his theory of the metrical basis of free verse (discussed below), he sometimes produces remarkably stimulating metrical analyses, of which one in Maule's Curse, of three of Emily Dickinson's poems, is a fine ex- ample. The book is also useful for sharp analyses of various aspects of American cultural history, the best example being Winters's discussion of the "Puritan Paradox," the belief in predestination combined with action on the basis of a belief in free will. For the details of this idea Winters seems to be indebted to Henry Bamford Parkes, to whom he acknowledges a wide debt on many aspects of American thought, but his specific application of it to the strain of allegorizing in New England writers from Cotton Mather to Henry Adams is a genuine achievement.
Just as his treatment of Poe is probably the most con- vincing thing in the book, Winters's vast overestimation of Fenimore Cooper is easily the least convincing. Winters attempts to establish Cooper as a realistic writer, defending the factual accuracy of such things as the feats in the Leatherstocking Tales, when it is obvious (as D. H. Lawrence, John Macy, and others have pointed out) that the only possible basis for treating Cooper with any serious- ness is as a symbolist. He quotes most of a scene from The Deerslayer, paragraph after paragraph of Cooper's stilted and heavy-handed prose, with such commendations as: "probably as great an achievement of its length as one will find in American fiction outside of Melville," or "the prose suddenly takes on a quality of universality and of grandeur such as to prepare one for the metaphysical quality of the action shortly to follow." Winters's chief praise, however, is for Cooper's novel The Water-Witch, which he evaluates moderately as "certainly one of the most brilliant, if scarcely one of the most profound, mas- terpieces of American prose." There seems little doubt
36 YVOR WINTERS
that the actual basis of Winters's praise for Cooper lies in Cooper's undemocratic and aristocratic political ideas, and his cognate "rhetorical grandeur"; Winters devotes the first section of his essay to praising and defending Cooper's "public morality" in detail, and concludes his estimate with what must be surely one of the most plaintive rallying-cries for reaction ever uttered: "He embodies a social ideal that in his own lifetime was so far gone in decay that his de- fense of it cost him his reputation, and that it may scarcely be said to have survived him to the extent of two decades."
Winters's evaluations in the book are possibly most of- fensive in his offhand dismissals of major figures. He sees Thoreau and Alcott only as two harmless Emersonian eccentrics, referring to "the pastoral idiosyncracies of Thoreau" and "the mild idiocy of Alcott," and if the word "madness," used repeatedly, means anything at all, he thinks Henry James was as insane as his characters. How- ever, every chapter of Maule's Curse contains Winters's usual quota of flat evaluative dicta about individual works, passages, or even lines, all of them highly subjective and few of them documented. To choose a few examples at random, he dismisses everything of Hawthorne's except The Scarlet Letter as either "failures" or "slight perform- ances"; chooses the seventh chapter of The Deerslayer as probably "the best single passage of prose in Cooper," and the first and last chapters of The Prairie as "the next best" prose; lists "the greatest works of Melville, aside from Moby-Dick," as Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, and Billy Budd; enumerates the only passages of Poe's verse that are "fairly well executed," a total of fewer than a hundred lines scattered over five poems; prints the three poems of Emily Dickinson's that combine "her greatest power with her finest execution"; and points out that a man named Frederick Goddard Tuckerman is "much like the Haw- thorne of the last romances, except that he writes better," and that the poems of Jones Very, "an impressive writer," are as excellent, "within their limits," as those of Traherne, Herbert, or Blake.
Winters deserves particular praise for his treatment of Herman Melville, to whom (almost alone of contemporary critics, with the honorable exception of F. O. Matthiessen)
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he has at last given his rightful due as America's greatest writer and one of the world's supreme novelists. Winters is weak, or at least too limited, in interpreting the deeper meanings of Moby-Dick, but in detailed symbolic inter- pretation of passages he is invaluable. He seems to be totally unaware, for example, of the elaborate homosexual imagery running through Melville, especially concentrated in his favorite short novel, Billy Budd (a particularly surprising limitation in view of the fact that Winters is one of the few critics who have commented on homo- sexuality in print, and he has even noticed a possibly homosexual theme in a Robinson poem). Winters's study of Melville is nevertheless a remarkable piece, if only for its full and excellently chosen quotation, and despite the possibility, as in the case of his Poe study, that Winters is actually evaluating the man accurately for the wrong reasons, for a "morality" that seems to be his chief in- terest in all of the works of Melville's he praises.
A few additional points about Maule's Curse deserve mention. First, the matter of "obscurantism," the key word of his subtitle and a charge at least as frequent in the book as "romanticism," to which Winters closely relates it. By "obscurantism" Winters means "the development of feeling in excess of the motive," which is more or less what the Greeks thought of as "hysteria" and regarded as a specifi- cally female complaint, seated in the womb. On the basis of this definition. Winters sees all his seven writers as af- flicted with obscurantism in some form, and in fact sees it as the chief phenomenon of what he calls "the romantic period," from 1750 to the present. Needless to say, the "obscurantism" phrasing of Maule's curse holds no more water than does the blood-drinking phrasing of it, and the position of a man indicting two centuries of literature in toto, except for such anachronisms as Bridges and Sturge Moore, is at best precarious. Secondly, it should be re- marked that the treatment of Henry James in the book, quite apart from Winters's tortured and contradictory evaluation of him as both a monstrous failure and the greatest novelist in English after Melville, is one of the most completely inadequate in critical writing of our time.
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3. The systematic aesthetic evaluation of works of art as the principal aim of criticism did not come into literary his- tory until after the Renaissance, but in the modern period, until the present century, it has been the dominant tradi- tion. The Greek and Roman critics were chiefly interested in poetics and analysis of the social nature and effects of art; medieval critics devoted their principal attention to moral and allegorical interpretation; and Renaissance criticism, particularly in England, centered on the moral justification of imaginative literature. By Jacobean times in England, however, criticism began to assume the con- centration on evaluation it was to display for three cen- turies, as it did throughout Europe after the Renaissance and in America, following a natural lag, about the time of the Revolution.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England evaluative criticism flowered, and figures like Thomas Rymer, John Dennis, and Samuel Johnson reached heights of dogmatic statement that even Winters has never equaled. Rymer, whom Macaulay called with some justice "the worst critic that ever lived," has come down to us as a complete joke, his name a synonym for abysmal critical stupidity, but in his day he was remarkably in- fluential. Readers were impressed when he dismissed Chaucer with the statement that "our language was not then capable of any heroic character," rewrote Beaumont and Fletcher according to his idea of classical correctness, or tore Othello apart as a tissue of nonsense, "a bloody farce without salt or savor," written by a man who thought a noble-born Venetian woman could love a blackamoor. In tragedy, Rymer wrote, Shakespeare "appears quite out of his element; his brains are turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of reason, or any rule to control him, and set bounds to his frenzy." As for his poetry, "the neighing of a horse or the howling of a mastiff possesses more meaning."
John Dennis, who considered Rymer's censures of Shakespeare, despite some disagreement, "in most of the particulars very sensible and very just," and who "im-
and Evaluation in Criticism 39
proved" The Merry Wives of Windsor into The Comical Gallant, was a somewhat more moralistic critic, convinced that the principal aim of poetry is the reformation of the sinful human mind. His dogmatic evaluations, particularly of his bete noire, Alexander Pope, or the remarkable going- over he gave Addison's Cato, were just as arbitrary, and his general dicta on literature somewhat more detailed.
Dr. Johnson's vigorous evaluations of writers, in con- versation with Boswell and in his Lives of the Poets, should be too well known to need retelling, but some of his lesser- known statements may be worth noting. In an essay in the Rambler, Johnson flayed Spenser's "vicious style" and the "difl&cult, unpleasing, and tiresome*' Spenserian stanza, and even in his reverential Preface to Shakespeare he listed such defects as "in his comick scenes he is seldom very successful" and "his declamations or set speeches are com- monly cold or weak," and added that, considering the condition of Shakespeare's life and the barbarity of his age, readers should "make some allowance for his igno- rance."
The great dogmatic evaluator of the nineteenth century, the successor to Rymer, Dennis and Johnson, was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was capable of slapping Vergil for a phrase "scarcely Latin," announcing that of Politian's poems "one only has merit," attacking Coleridge viciously, dismissing French literature in toto, particularly French tragedy and Voltaire, and slaughtering Pope and Byron. Explicitly carrying dogmatic evaluation to its logical con- clusion, as Winters only has by implication, Landor stated of his own work that his ten worst Imaginary Conversa- tions could not be equaled by the most talented of their attackers in ten years of labor, and that the two fingers that held his own pen had more power than the two houses of Parliament.
It is obvious that Yvor Winters is directly in the line of these men — that, like Landor, he is a throwback to the violent oracular tradition of an earlier century. Like all of these men Winters bases his evaluations in classicism and traditionalism, and like most of them he enlists his evalua- tions in the cause of political reaction. Some of these com- parisons have been made in print before. Cleanth Brooks compared Winters with Rymer in The Kenyon Review for
40 YVOR WINTERS
Spring 1944, for "sheer guts and blindsides," and many reviewers, perhaps following Winters's own lead in calling Johnson the only critic in Enghsh who deserves the epithet "great," have noted the parallel with Johnson. No one, however, seems to have noticed the more startling parallel with Dennis. When Dennis attacks the poets he finds bad, not only as faulty artists but as wicked men, enemies of morality, or remarks: "And when a man is sure, 'tis only his duty to speak with a modest assurance," he might al- most be an earlier incarnation of Winters, so little have two centuries and a half altered the manner of literary evalua- tion. The vocabulary and examples of Winters's criticism are contemporary, but his heart and mind seem firmly back in the London of 1700.
Winters himself has furnished another genealogy for his criticism. "This view of poetry in its general outline is not original," he writes in Primitivism and Decadence, "but is a restatement of ideas that have been current in English criticism since the time of Sidney, that have appeared again in most of the famous apologists for poetry since Sidney, especially in Arnold and Newman." He means, of course, the line of moral critics of literature which began with the earliest Greek writers, a tradition sometimes coin- ciding with that of dogmatic evaluation, sometimes veering away. Obviously, Winters is in this tradition as well, although it comes as something of a shock to find him identifying his violent and uncharitable dogmatism with the gentleness of Sidney or Newman. The identity with Arnold is much closer, and, although Winters might deny it indignantly, his central doctrine, the concept of art as "the permeation of human experience by a consistent moral understanding," seems to be no more than a rephrasing of Arnold's concept of art as "the criticism of life" through the application of moral ideas.
There are, of course, other moral criticisms of Hterature that Winters tactfully does not mention. There is Macau- lay's stuffy and utilitarian Whig morality, Tolstoy's fanatical hatred of any art obscure to a nineteeenth-century Russian serf, the timid prudishness of William Dean Howells proposing that fiction include nothing a novelist would not say to a young girl, and many others as bad. It would be unfair to put Winters's aloof morality in a class with these.
and Evaluation in Criticism 41
Nevertheless, all of them are implicit in the tradition of moral criticism, just as Rymer's worst excesses are im- plicit in the tradition of dogmatic evaluation, and a man who merges within his work both traditions, like Dennis or Winters, can be saved from falling into either priggishness or pontifical foolishness only by being invariably right. There should be no need to point out that Winters is hardly that.
4. in our own time there are other types of critical evaluation, most of them somewhat less moral than Winters's, if fully as dogmatic. On the level of journahsm there is (or was, since he seems to have given up literary criticism perma- nently) that redoubtable foe of the booboisie, H. L. Mencken. His dogmatic evaluations seem almost always the product of simple ignorance, yet, in a curious fashion, they parody Winters's. Mencken has described Poe and Mark Twain as "the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters," has announced that Lizette Wood- worth Reese "has written more sound poetry, more gen- uinely eloquent and beautiful poetry, than all the new poets put together," has claimed that in Henry James America achieved its own "Horace Walpole," and has im- mortalized one of the two or three creative thinkers of undoubted genius in America, Thorstein Veblen, as "a geyser of pishposh." The basis for Mencken's evaluations, in presumable contrast to Winters's, is probably only his honest inability to comprehend serious writing, and he is the lifelong enemy of any form of morality, but it is re- markable how close his statement about Poe and Twain is to Winters's about Cooper, or how much his estimate of Lizette Reese resembles that of Winters on Elizabeth Daryush.
The other principal fount of dogmatic evaluation in our criticism is Mencken's long-time friend Ezra Pound. Long before his stage of Fascism-cum-paranoia Pound was print- ing obiter dicta beside which Winters's best look pale. Pound has described Paradise Lost as a conventional melodrama written by a "coarse-minded," "asinine," "dis- gusting," and "beastly" man; dismissed the literature of the
42 YVOR WINTERS
nineteenth century in toto; announced his preference for Whistler's drawing of young Miss Alexander to all the "Judaic drawings" of Blake; consigned Tasso, Ariosto, and Spenser "to the scrap heap"; discarded Dry den as a "lunkhead" and his work as "outstanding aridity"; an- nounced that Herodotus is literature and Thucydides "journalism"; and attacked the "hedging, backing and filling" of a man he calls sometimes Aristotle and some- times "Arry Stotl."
It is at least possible, however, that Pound himself doesn't believe these judgments. Referring to a statement he had made to the effect that Catullus was in some ways a better writer than Sappho, Pound once explained: "I don't in the least know whether this is true. One should start with an open mind," and he has put on record both a fine and detailed study of James's genius and the state- ment: "for sheer dreariness one reads Henry James."
One of the most curious aspects of Pound's evaluations is that almost every time he praises a good writer or work he has managed to couple him with a poor writer as equally good. He has discussed Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the same terms, spoken of "Mina Loy and Marianne Moore," and referred to Joseph Gould and William Carlos Williams as two fine modern poets. (Incidentally, Waldo Frank, an- other passionate evaluator, has had the same unhappy result with such pairs as "Sherwood Anderson and Man- uel Komroff," "D. H. Lawrence and J. D. Beresford," and those two "comedic talents" Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce.) Probably this yoking of a great writer and an inferior one, hack or fool, in the same adulatory sen- tence displays a more fundamental, and certainly more dangerous, want of taste than would praising only fools and hacks.
Another leading type of critical evaluation in our time is what might be called "the correction of opinion." On the Mencken level one of the most distasteful examples of this is Ernest Boyd's book Literary Blasphemies, an attempt to revise downward the traditional estimates of a number of authors from Shakespeare to Hardy, by such expedients as describing Milton as a paranoid albino whose blindness was undoubtedly the result of hereditary syphilis,
and Evaluation in Criticism 43
or Henry James as an Anglomaniac social climber who spent all his time inventing euphemisms for the word "typewriter." On a more scholarly level, practically every professor of literature who has ever written a book has tried his hand, either directly or indirectly, at suggesting writers he believes should be ranked higher and lower. This is a more or less pointless form of activity, since the critic rarely, and the professor never, succeeds in altering literary taste, but except for the arbitrary venom the cor- rector of opinion seems almost always to feel toward the holder of any established reputation (Winters's own activities here are unfortunately typical), it is harmless enough, a mild professorial form of goldfish-eating.
5. Probably the most important single question to consider about Winters's evaluations is precisely what he means by the word "moral." He has defined or used it to mean almost a dozen different things, some of them completely incon- sistent with others and some of them simply meaningless. He has equated it with "striving toward an ideal of poetic form," with classical as opposed to romantic, with tradi- tional as opposed to experimental, with "just feeling, properly motivated," with "personal form and controlled direction," and, in at least one place, with "human." Sometimes it seems to be a technical literary term, very close to Arnold's "grand style" or "high seriousness," sometimes it means didactic, sometimes it is ordinary ethics or good taste, sometimes it means simply "reac- tionary," and in many cases it seems to mean nothing more than that Winters liked the work and thought it good. The only conceivable thread on which all these usages can be strung is the theory that originally "moral" meant one clear thing to Winters, perhaps some personal, artistic discipline equivalent to the neo-humanist's "inner check," and then gradually extended in usage until it applied to the results of this control and finally to any work or attitude where the control could be presumed, that is, to any work Winters likes or any attitude he respects.''^
'In Winters's recent work, "moral" seems to have become almost entirely a matter of the attitudes expressed in the paraphrasable prose
44 YVOR WINTERS
Another way of getting at what Winters actually means by moral is noting what he regards as immoral. First, of course, the opposite of all his synonyms for morality: formlessness, romanticism, experimentalism; extravagant, hysterical, or "improperiy motivated" feeling, "obscur- antism," and so on. Principally, he detests two things he calls "primitivism" and "decadence." "Primitive" poets, as Winters defines them, are "those who utilize all the means necessary to the most vigorous form, but whose range of material is limited," while "decadents" are "those who display a fine sensitivity to language and who may have a very wide scope, but whose work is incomplete formally ... or is somewhat but not too seriously weakened by a vice of feeling." The primitive poet, Winters explains, is thus the major poet on a smaller scale, while the decadent poet is the major poet with some important faculty absent. He regards William Carlos Williams as an example of the former, Wallace Stevens as an example of the latter.
These distinctions are valid, and although his use of the terms, like his use of "obscurantism," is almost wholly arbitrary, bearing no particular relation to the etymological origins of the words or their traditional usages, there is probably no reason why he shouldn't call "primitive" and "decadent" what another writer might call "minor" and "defective" or a third "X" and "Y." However, Winters creates confusion by also using "decadent" in a more traditional sense, as where he says that Sidney and Spenser are decadents "for they are concerned with relatively meaningless fabrications of procedure," or attacks Henry Adams as the decadence of Puritanism and Swinburne as "the decadence of a literary tradition." Finally, the partic- ular enemy of Winters's morality is something he calls "hedonism," which led Cleanth Brooks to tag him a Stoic, and which he finds in its purest form in Stevens (on the very flimsy basis, incidentally, of reading "Sunday Morn- ing" on the level of paraphrasable content alone, as he has
content of the poem. Thus Robinson's "choice of matter," "subjects," and "themes" frequently constitute his morality, and a poem like "Hillcrest" appears to be moral and "counter-romantic" largely because "it tells us that life is a very trying experience, to be endured only with pain and to be understood only with difficulty." In other words, a stoic poem dealing with "the endurance of suffering" and taking an approved attitude toward it is a "moral" poem.
and Evaluation in Criticism 45
come increasingly to read poetry, although elsewhere he explicitly condemns the method). The end-product of hedonism, he says, is "ennui," just as the end-product of Adams's decadence is "confusion," and into one or the other of those pits, Winters believes, any literature not firmly based in morality must inevitably fall.
For his moral emphasis, the core of his critical position, Winters seems chiefly indebted to the neo-humanists, partic- ularly to Irving Babbitt (from whom he also inherits the example of dogmatic and intemperate judgments). Winters has confessed to admiring Babbitt and having "learned a good deal from him," as well as acknowledged specific indebtedness to a number of Babbitt's ideas and analyses, but he seems to have little use for any of the other neo- humanists, and he has announced that he does not con- sider himself to be one of them. Moreover, in an essay in C. Hartley Grattan's symposium. The Critique of Human- ism, Winters bitterly attacked the neo-humanist movement and many of its spokesmen for "bastard impressionism" and "moral mechanism," not to speak of bad writing, intem- perate violence (an amusing charge), ill-breeding and "spiritual bankruptcy." Nevertheless, Winters's central op- position to romanticism as seeking to "free" the emotions rather than "control" them is the key doctrine of the move- ment, and Winters is certainly closer to the neo-humanist position than he is to any other.
Next to Winters's "morality," his metrical theories probably most need explanation. Winters pays a good deal of attention to scansion, particularly in Primitivism and Decadence, and many of his metrical analyses, like his above-mentioned work on three of Emily Dickinson's poems, are genuinely valuable. However, two serious errors vitiate much of his metrical theory and some of his metrical practice. The first is what might be called the fallacy of imitative rhythm, the idea that meters and metrical varia- tions alone serve to suggest (rather than to reinforce) meaning or mood. This theory has been exploded so often and so efficiently (by Richards, among others), by the simple substitution of other words or nonsense syllables in the same rhythm, in which form the rhythm produces none of the suggestion that was claimed for it, that it is surprising to see Winters apparently still believing it. His
46 YVOR WINTERS
second error is the theory that free verse is regular and scannable in terms of a long foot containing one heavy accent and any number of light accents and unaccented syllables; that is, that it is not free verse at all but accentual verse. To the establishment of this theory Winters has devoted a long section of Primitivism and Decadence and has created a vast and elaborate rationale, permitting so many types of exceptions and irregular lines that they cover anything that does not fit into his scansion. Winters takes up the inevitable, and utterly damning, question of why any passage of prose, including his own, could not be scanned in the same fashion, but except for the argu- ments that the syllabic arrangement of prose is accidental, while the same syllabic arrangement in free verse would presumably be intentional, and that some sense of the rhythm he describes is felt in free verse and not in prose, he has no answer to it.
The "science" of metrics has always been, to the extent that most of it exists in the scanner's mind and not on the page, a form of sleight-of-hand (so that, for example, Hopkins could scan anything in a falling rhythm by the simple expedient of beginning each foot with the accented syllable — he could have scanned everything in a rising rhythm just as easily by beginning the feet a syllable later), and on that basis Winters's scansion of free verse is probably no more illegitimate than most arbitrary scan- sions. When he writes free verse, however, on the basis of his own system of scansion. Winters is roughly in the posi- tion of a magician off the stage whose pocket handkerchief still stubbornly keeps turning into the American flag.^
Any general estimate of Yvor Winters must take account of his failings and limitations. One of the most apparent is the narrowness of his knowledge. Winters is fairly well read, but seemingly only within a very restricted compass, specifically the English and American novel and English, American, and modern French poetry. He seems to be
^ It is not within the province of this essay to examine Winters's poetry, but it may be in order here to note that what of it I have read seems always remarkably consistent with his critical principles: that is, traditional in form, moral, heavily classical, and somewhat old-fashioned. Much of it is occasional or dedicatory in nature, all of it is restrained, and it simply depends on one's personal preference whether it seems graceful and quietly moving or academic and deadly dull.
and Evaluation in Criticism 47
totally unfamiliar with any Continental literature other than the French, and except for Dante I can recall no mention in all his critical writing of any imaginative au- thor who did not write in English or French, and the French references are limited. To choose a few names at random, Winters has never mentioned Dostoyevsky or Pushkin, Boccaccio or Petrarch, Goethe or Heine, Cer- vantes or Lope de Vega, or even Stendhal or Villon. This is not to insist that he discuss foreign writers, particularly since he seems to be scrupulous about not referring to a man he is unable to read in the original, but simply to make the point that it is absurd to list the great novelists or poets, as Winters has done endlessly, and make them all English and American.
Even in his own specialties there are curious gaps in Winters's knowledge. He did a long and detailed chapter on Hawthorne without seeming to know of the existence of Hawthorne's extremely realistic and reportorial Journals, let alone having read them. He makes a number of highly debatable statements about the history of English poetry without offering any evidence or documentation for them, as Ransom has pointed out, and, as Horace Gregory has charged, seems not to know the difference between Eliza- bethan and early Tudor verse.
Along with his limitations of knowledge, Winters fre- quently suffers from a refusal to use his mind. There are enough real contradictions in Eliot's critical thought, for example, to make it unnecessary for Winters to invent others, as he has done by the simple process of finding two superficially contradictory passages and refusing to resolve them by reading them on any level except the literal. Taking an apparent pride in ignorance. Winters has cited a sonnet of Edwin Arlington Robinson's, "En Passant," "for which I am unable to offer an explanation," and has boasted that the significance of the title of Stevens's poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," "I regret to say, escapes both my learning and my ingenuity." It did not, however, escape the learning and ingenuity of R. P. Blackmur, who published, in the Hound & Horn in 1932 and on page 101 of The Double Agent in 1935, a remarkable and com- pletely satisfying interpretation of the title. One might wish that where Winters refuses to think he would at least
48 r VUR W INTERS
consent to draw on the thought of others, particularly when it has been available to him for a decade.^
The products of this occasional ignorance and mental rigidity are a number of opinions that are not so much overdogmatic or eccentric as simply ridiculous. Winters has descrit)ed Shakespeare as having written Macbeth and Othello in order to put a moral evaluation of sin on record. He has announced that Henry Adams's History of the United States is "the greatest historical work in English," with the exception of Gibbon, not by way of praising Adams, whom he detests, but in order to club Adams's other books with it. (Adams himself, incidentally, al- though Winters does not mention and may not know it, wrote that he preferred a dozen pages of his novel Esther to the whole history, "including maps and indices.") Win- ters has identified Matthew Arnold as "one of the great poets of the nineteenth century" and "one of the worst poets in English" in the same sentence. He finds Carlyle so literally unmentionable that the only reference to him in Winters's work is a footnote: "I am simply taking it for granted that my reader feels, as I do, that the less said about Carlyle the better," reinforced by omission from the book's index. Finally, he has found the "tone" of Yeats and Robinson Jeffers similar, and has traced T. S. Eliot's theories of poetry back to those of Edgar Allan Poe.
Winters's political and social ideas also seem to have a bearing on his critical opinions. "Winters' position is that of the Christian," Alan Swallow writes of him in the Rocky Mountain Review, but although advocating "the discipline fostered by the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches," Winters has identified himself as "one of the unregenerate; I am not a Christian," and he prefers Irving Babbitt's label "reactionary," used as a term of highest praise. Winters would probably deny making literary
'T. Weiss, in his brilliant analysis of Winters's critical failings in "The Nonsense of Winters' Anatomy," in the Quaiteily Review of Literature, Spring 1944 and Summer 1944, comes to a conclusion somewhat more extreme than mine, that Winters's troubles stem from a fundamental "inability to read,'- "inability to write," and "inability to understand poetry." I am indebted to Weiss's excellent study for a number of insights, I am in general agreement with almost everything it says, and I am not at all certain that Weiss is not right on this point too.
and Evaluation in Criticism 49
judgments on the basis of political prejudice, but, to choose two obvious examples, it is hard to interpret his bitter at- tack on Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought and Bernard Smith's Forces in American Criticism, in Post Scripta II and III of Anatomy of Nonsense, as made on any but that basis.
Like Babbitt, his mentor (who once wrote: "there are tastes that deserve the cudgel"). Winters is neither the gentlest nor the best-bred controversialist imaginable. Some of his worst invective is reserved for Henry Adams, who occupies approximately the same position in Winters's cos- mos that Rousseau does in Babbitt's or that Satan does in that of the Fundamentalist Christian. He has described Adams as "the radical disintegration of a mind," and has attacked him with such moralist name-calling as "hedonist," "nihilist," "neurotic," "childish," and "insolent," and, a little below the belt, charged that the suicide of his wife was the logical outcome of Adams's position. Suicide for an opponent is a favorite suggestion of Winters's, whose taste is perhaps not quite all that a moralist's should be, and he has proposed "the suicide of a gentleman" at least twice in print, once for Robinson Jeffers and once for Eugene Tolas. When Winters warms up to a controversy he runs to bitter sarcasm, and tends to make remarks on the order of "my acquaintance with the minds of my literary contemporaries is extensive . . . and to my regret I have found that many of the most brilliant of them understand simple matters only with the greatest of dif- ficulty," or "in failure to note my criticism of these lines [his opponent] adhered rigidly to a convention of contem- porary literary controversy against which it would ill be- come a very young writer like myself to protest."
Winters is, in fact, a wicked man to tangle with in print, and at one time or another he has quarreled with a good percentage of contemporary critics and reviewers. He seems to read every scrap of print that mentions his name, and replies to reviews with counter-reviews of the reviewer, articles with counter-articles, and chapters in books with counter-chapters in his books. He never forgets an attack, although he may wait years to reply, but sometimes he manages to forget details of what he originally wrote. His controversy with Theodore Spencer is instructive. In
50 YVOR WINTERS
Hound & Horn, April 1933, in a review of T. Sturge Moore's poetry, Winters claimed that Moore was a greater poet than Yeats. In Hound & Horn, October 1933, Spencer picked up Winters's remark and quietly demolished it by the simple expedient of printing the first quatrain of Moore's "Apuleius Meditates," which Winters had praised very highly, along with the first four lines of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan." In The Anatomy of Nonsense, in 1943, Winters continued the controversy, charged Spencer with misquoting him, and completely misstated his original con- tentions! (Any reader who doubts this statement is invited to check what Winters actually said about Yeats and Moore against his account of his remarks a decade later.) When tactics like this will not work. Winters descends to simple abuse. He answered a review by William Troy, who had been neither harsh nor personal, with "This is merely illiterate foolishness," and charges of "careless examina- tion, amateur thinking, pretentious pedantry, and aimless innuendo." His reply, in Volume II, Number 2, of the Quarterly Review of Literature, to T. Weiss's review (which, it must be admitted, was both harsh and personal) rose to a real height of hysteria, shrieking "ignorance," "low-grade abuse," "he cannot understand a sentence," "misrepresentation and abuse," "deliberate dishonesty," and concluding gently: "Weiss is an ignoramus, a fool, and a liar." One sentence of Winters's reply is so revealing as to require quotation:
The reasons for answering him are threefold: I believe that what I have written in my book is im- portant, and I do not wish to see issues confused; I earn my living as a scholar, and my professional reputation is impugned by this kind of thing, and there are unfortunately a few persons in my profes- sion, and occasionally in places of power, who believe everything they see in print — I speak from experience, not as a theorist; and finally there is too much of this kind of reviewing going on at present and it ought to be labelled for what it. is.
Here, perhaps, in a patent and rather frightening in- isecurity, lies the basic clue to both Winters's personality and his criticism. It seems to be this insecurity that under-
and Evaluation in Criticism 51
lies his grandiose and pretentious projects announced and never pursued; his sweeping judgments given without a shred of evidence, and altered from one year to the next; his need to impress by any means; his private hierarchies of merit and minute authoritative gradings; his desperate need for a claque as well as his extreme susceptibility to any criticism; his insistence on such external props and rigidities as "moral," "logical," "rational," "discipline," "control," "reactionary"; his feeling that his poetry has been unappreciated and the consequent resentment, bitter- ness, and projection into obscure and unappreciated figures like Jones Very and Elizabeth Daryush; his vaunting of ignorance and his posturings in general; his bad manners and abusive snarlings. It adds up to what might be called the "baroque personality," ^^ which occurs, like baroque in general, at the end of a line, when all functional pos- sibilities seem exhausted, and the only way to counteract consequent insecurity and sense of failure is through more and more massive and grandiose ornamentation. Many of the dogmatic evaluators preceding Winters, from Rymer and Dennis to Mencken and Pound, seem baroque and insecure in precisely this fashion, as does a good part of the neo-humanist contingent Winters so much resembles, Irving Babbitt in particular.
In terms of this baroque personality, many of Winters's concepts and ideas become more readily comprehensible. For example, one of his contributions to modern criticism (inherited from Babbitt, but chiefly developed and prop- agated by Winters) is the concept of "the heresy of expressive form," which he defines as the belief that dis- integration can best be expressed by a disintegrated or chaotic form, rather than by an ordered or disciplined form. He sees it as the outstanding characteristic of modern literature, particularly evident in Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, and traces it to Coleridge's doctrine of "organic form." As Weiss and a number of others have pointed out, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and similar modem writers are not using a disintegrated or chaotic form, but a disintegrated-^^emm^ and chsiOtic-seeming form that arises organically out of the
^° For this concept of the "baroque personality" and many of the ingredients that constitute it I am indebted, as for so much else in this book, to Leonard Brown.
52 YVOR WINTERS
nature of their subject-matter, but which is nevertheless carefully contrived, disciplined, and ordered {Finnegans Wake has so much order we don't know what to make of it, Weiss points out) in a sense and to an extent that a good deal of contemporary literature in traditional forms, including Winters's own verse, is not. Winters's problem here would seem to be that, himself requiring an externally imposed form and discipline to support his own self- doubts and the weight of his baroque ornamentation, he cannot conceive of an internally imposed form arising naturally and organically out of the artist's material.
Winters has contributed a number of things of value to contemporary criticism: some good metrical analyses; some brilliant close reading and studies of poetic structure (particularly in The Anatomy of Nonsense: of Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," Tate's "Death of Little Boys," and two lines from Browning's "Serenade at the Villa"); a salutary insistence on "the intellectual and moral signifi- cance of literary forms," and the relationship between beliefs and forms (although most of the specific relation- ships and significances he points out are foolish). Mosf important, he has, almost single-handedly, kept an impor- tant critical function, evaluation, alive for us. His eval- uations tend to be made in terms that are semantically meaningless, contradictory, purely subjective, and never de- fined: "great," "superior," "major," "masterpiece," "sane," "flawed," "defects," "limitations," "civilized," "lucid," "first level," "second level." He gives only his conclusions, al- most never with any evidence approaching adequacy, and in a form in which it is impossible to argue with him or even understand what he is trying to say. Nevertheless, he does evaluate, does compare, contrast, grade, rate, and rank, at a time when most serious criticism only analyzes and interprets, and when the reader of a critical article has to go to the newspaper reviewer to find out whether the work is any good or not (and then is misinformed more often than not). What criticism can adopt from Winters is his vigor and boldness of evaluation, while making sounder evaluations than his, making them on a basis of more significance to literature than his concepts of "ra- tionality" and "morality," and with them giving the reader the whole structure of analysis, to serve as a basis for the
and Evaluation in Criticism 53
reader's checking the evaluation or making his own on the evidence. Winters's own five-stage process culminating in evaluation (see above) is a fairly good basis for such a process. Winters himself has seldom taken advantage of it. Testing it first by turning it on him, as this essay has attempted to do, it works out pretty well. We find Yvor Winters, in a "unique act of judgment" dogmatic and im- polite enough to flatter his methods, an excessively irri- tating and bad critic of some importance.
CHAPTER 2
T. S. Eliot
and Tradition in Criticism
T. S. Eliot's contribution to the new criticism has been chiefly, as John Crowe Ransom once phrased it, "the re- covery of old criticism." His influence in this direction has been very great, and although it is hard to tell how much of this is the influence of the criticism itself and how much is respect for his authority as one of the fore- most living poets, Eliot is undoubtedly our chief spokes- man for a critical viewpoint that can be roughly called "traditional." He is a critic after the fashion of the poet- critics of earlier centuries, not so much a professional analyst of literature as a professional poet with a public function to perform. All his volumes of criticism are ar- rangements and rearrangements of the seventy-odd essays, reviews, prefaces, and lectures he has thought worth pre- serving, of the several hundred he has written, and almost none of his criticism has not first either appeared in a periodical, prefaced someone else's work in a book, or been delivered from a platform.
Eliot believes that criticism functions as a service to the reader of poetry and has spoken of the "preposterous as- sumption" that it is an autotelic activity. He sees this reader-service as dual, one function "the elucidation of art and the correction of taste," the other "to bring the poet back to life." The "tools" of the critic, with which he performs these functions, are "comparison and analy- sis," and the end of criticism is to establish a "tradition," a continuity, between present literature and taste and the literature of the past.
The word "tradition" is undoubtedly the key term in Eliot's critical writing, and what he means by it is at least as shifting and complex as what Winters means by "moral"
Tradition in Criticism 55
or what Empson means by "ambiguity" (though Empson, unlike Eliot and Winters, recognizes the ambiguity of "ambiguity"). Sometimes, like Winters's "moral," Eliot's "traditional" means no more than "good," that he likes the work; and sometimes, as Ransom has pointed out, the concept of "tradition" is simply a metaphorical way of telling a writer not to be "too new." Actually Eliot's "tra- dition" is a utilitarian concept, and he constantly empha- sizes the using of the tradition. He writes, for example, of Jonson: "We can even apply him, be aware of him as a part of our literary inheritance craving further expression." The best way to find out what Eliot means by tradition, then, would be to watch it operating in his work.
Perhaps Eliot's most detailed use of tradition in a rela- tively pure literary sense is the second half, entitled "The Hawthorne Aspect," of his essay "Henry James," written for the James number of the Little Review in 1918 and not included in the Selected Essays in 1932. He exhibits James against the background of Hawthorne; thus illumi- nating the fiction of both of them by the comparison, asserting James's basic Americanism, and showing in de- tail what permanencies and what modifications are revealed in a literary tradition when it carries over a period of time.
A different and more characteristic use of tradition, this time for essentially nonliterary ends, is found in such essays of Eliot's as the ones on Bishop Andrewes and Archbishop Bramhall in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), where he attempts to refurbish, amplify, and even arti- ficially provide an Anglican literary tradition. He claims that Andrewes's sermons "rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time," and are superior to Donne's because Donne's motives were "impure" and he lacked "spiritual discipline," a deficiency that has had the effect of making Donne's sermons more widely known. Thus, at one blow, Eliot establishes a literary tradition on the basis of criteria that are wholly ethical, attacks a great writer, as writer, with a whispered hint of apostasy or at least careerism in his clerical profession, and exalts a right relation to the English Church as the fount not only of salvation in a future life but of the best prose here and now. Eliot does a similar job with Bramhall, beginning
56 T. S. ELIOT
with his philosophic usefulness as the scourge of Hobbes's materialism ("so similar to that of contemporary Russia") and ending with Bramhall somehow secure on a pinnacle of prose excellence.
Even at its broadest (that is, in the earlier essays), Eliot's tradition is highly exclusive. It seeks out the classic and excludes the romantic, and by "romantic" Eliot means a great many writers he does not like: the classic is "com- plete," "adult," and "orderly" where the romantic is "frag- mentary," "immature," and "chaotic." This is not quite the same as dismissing the nineteenth century in toto, as Pound did (contrary to popular opinion, and unlike the much more consistent classicist Pound, Eliot tends to praise the poetry of Milton, Blake, Keats, and Tennyson and dislikes that of Pope), but Eliot in general sees his task as the substitution of his "tradition" for theirs: rescu- ing the Elizabethan dramatists from Lamb and Swinburne, combating the verdict of Hazlitt and Pater on Dryden, and in general reversing the nineteenth century's hierarchy.
Eliot carries a good share of the weight of tradition in his criticism by his prose style. It is formal, reserved, eloquent without ever becoming shrill, and at once highly stylized and transparently clear; an eighteenth-century style larded with twentieth-century terminology. It gives the effect, frequently delusive, of being far removed from the tawdry concerns of the present in a concentration on the timeless. In part, of course, this effect is obtained by Eliot's resolute refusal to print in book form (with a very few exceptions) his criticism of contemporaries. His Har- vard lectures in 1933 on James, Pound, Joyce, and Law- rence, for example, still languish unprinted, and he has never collected his six appreciations of Pound, his pieces on other modern writers, or the various introductions he has written for contemporary books.^ The sense Eliot's
^ Some of Eliot's published pieces on his more distinguished contem- poraries warrant listing, for those who might be interested in looking them up. He has done at least six on Pound: Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, a pamphlet published in 1917; "A Note on Ezra Pound" in Today, September 1918; "The Method of Mr. Pound" in the Athenaeum, October 24, 1919; the Introduction to Pound's Selected Poems in 1928, which he edited; an article in the Dia], January 1928, entitled "Isolated Superiority"; and "Ezra Pound," in Poetry; A Magazine of Verse, September 1946. He has written on Joyce in "Ulysses, Order and Myth," in the Dial, November 1923, and an
and Tradition in Criticism 57
prose gives of being non-temporal is so sharp, in fact, that coming on footnote references to contemporary literary controversies in his work is always a shock. This emeritus quality, incidentally, has not developed with time. The first essays Eliot published, in his twenties, gave the same courtly-old-gentleman effect, and in fact the work of the past few years is relatively mellow and informal by com- parison.
The chief fault of Eliot's tradition lies in its omissions. Not only has he paid almost no attention to contempo- raries (which might be excusable in a critic like Sainte- Beuve, since biographical data is never rounded out until the subject's death, but is certainly inexcusable on the basis of any method that claims to judge the new against a background of literary tradition), but he has dealt with few Americans of any period (Poe is perhaps the only one he mentions with any frequency). Except for a few pref- aces to books by such authors as Pound, Marianne Moore, and Djuna Barnes (in some cases, I believe, Criterion re- views reprinted) he seems never to have devoted an essay to any American creative writer but Henry James, and never reprinted that after its first publication. Despite F. O. Matthiessen's noble effort, in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, to place him in the American tradition — Puritanism, Dante scholarship at Harvard, similarity of theme and manner to Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and James — Eliot seems almost entirely blind to the American tradition, if not in flight from it.
Just as the Americans are omitted, a noble literary roster could be compiled of the authors who do not seem to be in Eliot's tradition. As Matthiessen has pointed out, "there is a conspicuous lack of comment on Chaucer in Eliot's criticism," as there is on Skelton and almost all pre- Elizabethan English poets. He has written on no Italians but Dante and Machiavelli, no Romans but Seneca, no Greeks but Euripides, no French authors (curiously enough, since French poetry has greatly influenced his own
Introductory Note to his selection of Joyce's prose, Introducing James Joyce, in 1942; on Proust in the Criterion, October 1926; on Yeats in the Southern Review, Winter 1942 (a published lecture) ; and on Valery in an Introduction to an English edition of Le Serpent in 1924, and in the Quarterly Review of Literature, Volume III, No. 3 (a brief obituary tribute reprinted from Cahiers du Sud).
58 T. S. ELIOT
work) but Baudelaire and Pascal, and on little imaginative prose of any sort. In Eliot's tradition there is seemingly no room for Homer, Villon, Goethe, Cervantes, or any of the great masters of the novel except James.
The two chief personal faults that limit Eliot's criticism are a fuzzy and contradictory thinking that results in key terms that are meaningless or nebulous (or a nebulous terminology that results in fuzzy and contradictory writ- ing, depending on how you look at it), and an extra- literary irritation, grown more frequent of late, with his subjects. The first is central to his thought and it is im- possible to read Eliot's criticism for very long without beginning to feel that he is making statements in a lan- guage in which it is impossible to discuss the matter with him. In one of his finest essays, "Experiment in Criticism,'* which appeared in the Bookman for November 1929 and which he has never reprinted,^ Eliot states: "There is an urgent need for experiment in criticism of a new kind, which will consist largely in a logical and dialectic study of the terms used." Despite this excellent avowal, which he may not have meant for himself, Eliot has constantly refused to study or even define the terms he uses, resorting to such evasions as: "In making this statement I refuse to be drawn into any discussion of the definitions of 'per- sonality' and 'character,' " or "But if any one complains that I have not defined truth, or fact, or reality, I can only say apologetically that it was no part of my purpose to do so, but only to find a scheme into which, whatever they are, they will fit, if they exist." Sometimes Eliot writes passages that appear to be entirely meaningless manipula- tions of terms cloudy enough to give the semblance of conveying a critical judgment, like the following, of Ros- tand:
Not only as a dramatist, but as a poet, he is supe- rior to Maeterlinck, whose drama, in failing to be dramatic, fails also to be poetic. Maeterlinck has a literary perception of the dramatic and a literary per- ception of the poetic, and he joins the two; the two are not, as sometimes they are in the work of Ros-
* Originally a lecture to the City Literary Institute of London, it was published with related lectures by others in Tradition and Experi- ment in Present-Day Literature (1929).
and Tradition in Criticism 59
tand, fused; his characters take no conscious delight in their role — they are sentimental. With Rostand the centre of gravity is in the expression of the emotion, not as with Maeterlinck in the emotion which cannot be expressed.
Principally as a result of Eliot's use of terms like these, almost every writer who has ever discussed his criticism has caught him in contradictions. Lionel Trilling, for ex- ample, found Eliot making a distinction between "poetry" and "verse," for Kipling's benefit, in his introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse, which Eliot had himself de- molished in his Dryden essay many years before, as made by Arnold against Dryden. Yvor Winters, in a chapter in The Anatomy of Nonsense that charges contradiction after contradiction in Eliot's critical thinking (many of them, it must be admitted, based on no more than Winters's own refusal to read clearly, in context), has noted at least one actual howler, Eliot's damning as "heretical" in After Strange Gods (1934) a statement of Herbert Read's that poetry is the product of our personality, which we should not attempt to remake, and then in the same book de- fending himself against charges of inconsistency between his poetry and prose with a variant of Read's heretical argument.
One of the reasons for these contradictions is a trick Eliot undoubtedly learned from Pound, of proposing theo- ries he doesn't himself believe, just to hear the roar. In at least one place he has been explicit about this. He writes in "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca":
I propose a Shakespeare under the influence of the stoicism of Seneca. But I do not believe that Shake- speare was under the influence of Seneca. I propose it largely because I believe that after the Montaigne Shakespeare (not that Montaigne had any philosophy whatever) and after the Machiavelli Shakespeare, a stoical or Senecan Shakespeare is almost certain to be produced. I wish merely to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare before he appears. My ambitions would be realized if I could prevent him, in so doing, from appearing at all.
60 T. S. ELIOT
After which, naturally, he goes on to demonstrate the influence of the stoicism of Seneca on Shakespeare, which he returns to again and again in his work.
Another reason for the contradictions Eliot has ex- plained himself. "I can never reread any of my own prose writings without acute embarrassment," he writes in "The Music of Poetry." "I shirk the task, and consequently may not take account of all the assertions to which I have at one time or another committed myself; I may often repeat what I have said before, and I may equally well contradict myself." This could conceivably be a joke, except that it would be a quite uncharacteristic joke (Eliot is addicted to being deprecatory about his own work, but not comic), and that Eliot has repeated it at various times, among them a particularly solemn occasion, his Memorial Lec- ture for Yeats. It is almost certain that Eliot is using it as a perfectly serious apology for contradictions, with no sense of its pettishness compared even to Whitman's silly but rather grand: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
Eliot's peculiar irritation with the subjects he is criti- cizing results in another rather untraditional trick, his pretense of not understanding simple poetry. He has pro- tested that he is able to make no sense whatsoever of the fifth stanza of Shelley's "To a Skylark," the messy but certainly understandable :
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere. Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see — we feel that it is there.
He has maintained that Keats's line: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," "means nothing to me," and so on. It is obvious that this sudden pose of duU-wittedness is meant as So- cratic irony, both from the examples he chooses (always the fuzzier sentiments of romantic poets), and from the fact that he has praised F. H. Bradley for "his habit of discomfiting an opponent with a sudden profession of ig- norance." It is ironic that one of his bitterest critics, Yvor Winters, should have attacked him almost exclusively in that fashion.
and Tradition in Criticism 61
The other form Ehot's growing irritation with writers takes is his habit of reproaching them for not being some- thing else he would have found more satisfactory. Blake and Shakespeare should have had a better philosophy, the Victorian poets shouldn't have written so much, Goethe shouldn't have written poetry at all ("his true role was that of a man of the world and sage — a La Rochefoucauld, a La Bruyere, a Vauvenargues"), Shakespeare should have written Othello so Rymer couldn't have raised his objec- tions, Shelley should have been a better man, and so on.
2. A rewarding way to study Eliot's work in detail is to annotate his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which was first printed in 1917 and which after more than a quarter of a century is still his most important essay and the key to all his later work. Implicit within it are all the later developments, and some attempt will be made in this section to note a few of those implications.
(1) Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immedi- ate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be dis- couraged.
Eliot seems to hold a curious doctrine that tradition always skips the preceding generation. In the essay "Bau- delaire in Our Time" in For Lancelot Andrew es he has documented this with an arbitrary and rather foolish list- ing of the last five literary generations: (1) Baudelaire, (2) Huxley, Tyndall, George Eliot, and Gladstone, (3) Symons, Dowson, and Wilde, (4) Shaw, Wells, and Lytton Strachey, (5) Eliot and his school. Eliot claims that his continuity embraces (1), (3), and (5), and he leaves (2) and (4) to embrace each other.
(2) It [tradition] involves, in the first place, the his- torical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but
62 T. S. ELIOT
of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous ex- istence and composes a simultaneous order. This his- torical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the tem- poral together, is what makes a writer traditional.
Eliot is using "historical" here in a curious sense, and the ambiguity of the word has made for something of a critical controversy over whether or not Eliot's critical method is "historical." Edmund Wilson, in Axel's Castle and in an essay on "The Historical Interpretation of Lit- erature," has discussed Eliot as the very type of the un- historical critic, one who treats all literature as though it coexisted simultaneously, comparing and judging it by ab- solute standards, in a temporal vacuum. John Crowe Ran- som, on the other hand, chose Eliot as his example of "The Historical Critic" in The New Criticism, pointing out that Eliot "uses his historical studies for the sake of lit- erary understanding." Obviously, the parties in the con- troversy are using "historical" in two different senses: Wilson meaning the use of contextual or relative criteria. Ransom (and apparently Eliot himself) meaning historical knowledge or awareness of the past. Even in Wilson's sense, Eliot is sometimes a historical critic, in a Spengler- ian fashion, as when, in "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," he finds a common factor of social dissolution in Elizabethan England and imperial Rome and then proceeds to show its reflection in their literatures. Gen- erally, however, he is laughably non-historical in this sense, and when he writes: "Whether the arts flourish best in a period of growth and expansion, or in one of decay, is a question that I cannot answer," the word "best" is almost the ultimate in non-historicity. Considering Eliot's addi- tional statement that he cannot understand why poetic drama seems to have died, it might be suggested as a tentative resolution of the controversy that Eliot does not know enough history, in Ransom's sense, to be a consistent historical critic in Wilson's sense.
and Tradition in Criticism 63
(3) Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English Uterature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
Here are a number of Eliot's key ideas. "Order" later became "orthodoxy," just as "disorder" became "hetero- doxy" or "heresy"; the idea of "altering" past literature became a whole body of critical work aimed at revising the history of literature to emphasize his "tradition"; and the concept of "directing" the present by the past flowered in his religious, social, and political reaction.
(4) To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. . . . The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished repu- tations.
However true this may be of his poetry (which has al- ways been rather more catholic), it has certainly not been true of the tradition Eliot has created in his criticism. His tradition has sometimes been an indiscriminate bolus, the dead writers en masse; it has always been one or two private admirations, principally Dante and Dryden; it has always been a preferred period or two, principally the Elizabethan dramatists and the Metaphysicals; and al- though it has not been the most distinguished reputations, it has not been the main current, either, or at best only fragments of it.
(5) I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my program for the metier of poetry. The ob- jection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. . . . Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.
64 T. S. ELIOT
Eliot sometimes plays a little game of pretending that he is the simple uneducated poet or critic awed by scholar- ship and writes such modest demurrers as: "It is not fit- ting that a literary critic should retrace all this labor of scholarship, where either his dissent or his approval would be an impertinence." Nevertheless, Eliot's ideal has always been the one he inherited from Pound (who once de- scribed himself as a philological instrument "of the utmost refinement"), the scholar-critic. By the standards of con- temporary criticism, particularly in America, Eliot's learn- ing is remarkable, although nowhere near as comprehen- sive as that of critics like George Saintsbury, who are primarily scholars. Eliot studied under Babbitt and Santa- yana at Harvard, did graduate work there in philosophy, read French literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, read Greek philosophy at Oxford, and spent two years studying Sanscrit and Indie philology and one year studying Indian metaphysics. Although he is not polylingual to the extent Pound is, he reads five languages besides English: Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Sanscrit, with greater or lesser facility, and in them his reading is undoubtedly both broader and deeper than Pound's, just as his philosophic and scientific background is undoubtedly superior.
(6) What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self- sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
This is another of Eliot's key ideas, his theory of the impersonal nature of art. Poetry, he writes in another place in the essay, "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of per- sonality, but an escape from personality." The poet strug- gles "to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and im- personal"; the dramatist's effort is "the process of trans- fusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character." Although this has a general metaphoric truth, on the literal level it is obviously the aesthetic of a suffering man. Eliot has a positive terror of personality, including his own, and the overpowering discipline of a literary tradition is his refuge from it. For
and Tradition in Criticism 65
many years the literary romantics' glorification of person- ality seemed to be the menace, but eventually he realized that basically the enemy was Protestantism. He writes in After Strange Gods:
What I have been leading up to is the following assertion: that when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy — ^that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church — and when each man is to elaborate his own, then personal- ity becomes a thing of alarming importance.
Obviously, it is Eliot, rather than society, that is "alarmed."
(7) ... the more perfect the artist, the more com- pletely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
Not only is art a "transmutation" of suffering and pas- sion, Eliot suggests, but the better the art, the more com- plete the transmutation. This is an artist's catharsis to match Aristotle's audience-catharsis and is actually, al- though Ehot seems never to have noticed it, the very quintessence of romantic individualism and Protestantism, a utilitarianism that finds the value of art in its services to one superior individual, the artist, and thus the farthest extreme from the tradition and from Catholic criteria of "communion."
(8) The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings.
Eliot's distinction between "emotion" and "feeling" is both very important and very obscure. It seems to be that emotion exists in the poet, while feeling inheres for the writer "in particular words or phrases or images." The doctrine of the "objective correlative," which Eliot devel- oped later in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems," is related to this theory, in that the objective correlative is a situation, containing inherent "feehngs," that expresses the poet's "emotion" and evokes a similar "emotion" in the
I
66 T. S. ELIOT
reader. Thus the emotion-feeling distinction is a way of ■ barring "emotion" from poetry, in keeping with the im- personal and traditional theories, and then sneaking it back under another name and (perhaps) another form. \
(9) And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.
This is a hint of another basic belief of Eliot's, closely ' related to "impersonalism," the belief that art is funda- '. mentally a closed system, and that criteria of belief or '\ correspondence to reality are irrelevant to it. The fact that i Dante had a coherent system of thought behind him and that Shakespeare did not (as Eliot believes) is "an irrele- vant accident"; the poet "makes" poetry organically and without belief, the way the bee makes honey or the spider secretes a filament; "genuine poetry can communicate be- fore it is understood," or in fact if it is never understood; ! the poet may express the mood of his generation "by some strange accident while at the same time expressing a mood ] of his own quite different" (here Eliot implies his own experience with The Waste Land), and so on. Eliot has formulated these beliefs in a theory, closely related to i that of I. A. Richards, that poetic "assent" at the moment \
of reading is quite apart from questions of "belief," and ^ has gone Richards one better by adding that anything the poet chooses to believe is automatically "established," "for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its :
truth in another sense is proved." It is thus perfectly satis- \ factory if the poet believes nothing whatsoever but merely " "uses" any handy belief. |
Here, then, are all the themes that were to develop into j
Eliot's critical theory and practice: the "tradition" that '
later became "orthodoxy," and the "order" that later be- came "the idea of a Christian society"; the emphasis on certain preferable literatures in the past; the necessity for erudition and historical knowledge; and the four key con- i
cepts: impersonalism, irrelevancy of belief, emotion versus I
feelings, and the objective correlative. Apparently these key concepts arose out of the necessities involved in ab- i
stracting a tradition from its historical context and throw- !
ing it into ours, but in actual fact the process may have i
been reversed, and the concept of "tradition" itself have j
and Tradition in Criticism 67
been developed to legitimize a personal necessity for an art that "extinguishes" the personality, "transmutes" suf- fering, and can "use" beliefs without believing them. The driving necessity in Eliot's criticism would then seem to be the need to erect a scaffolding of objective, traditional, unemotional, and formal elements he could use to sustain himself, much the way Hopkins confessed that in the final period of his creative life only the rigidity of the sonnet form permitted him to write at all.
All of Eliot's essays can be regarded as illustrations of the ideas and traditional method sketched out in "Tradi- tion and the Individual Talent," a kind of vast appendix of applications and examples. We can see Eliot's tradition in action as early as The Sacred Wood (1920), his first collection of critical essays, in which "Tradition and the Individual Talent" appears. F. O. Matthiessen, in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, begins the modem "detailed intensive re-examination of the quality and function of poetry" with The Sacred Wood, and the book had a his- torical effect far greater than the effect it produces on a present-day reader. One of the book's virtues was the con- stant quotation of poetic texts, so that the essays are prac- tically copious quotations from a writer, larded with com- parison, exegesis, and evaluation. Eliot believed then that poetry is "a superior amusement," its chief purpose "to give a peculiar kind of pleasure," and that the chief func- tion of criticism is to increase the enjoyment of poetry. "If we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it," he wrote, pettishly but accurately, of the criticism of the time. Looking backward on The Sacred Wood from the distance of his 1928 preface, Eliot observed:
It is an artificial simplification, and to be taken only with caution, when I say that the problem appearing in these essays, which gives them what co- herence they have, is the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing. At that time I was much stimulated and much helped by the critical writ-
68 T. S. ELIOT
ings of Remy de Gourmont. I acknowledge that in- fluence, and am grateful for it; and I by no means disown it by having passed on to another problem not touched upon in this book: that of the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times.
This is not precisely accurate, since The Sacred Wood clearly defines the tradition that later flowered as Eliot's religious and social ideas, but the quotation does hint at one significant change: that with the later shift in interest from "poetry as poetry," the quotation of texts diminished almost to the vanishing-point. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot's last book dealing principally with literature, quotes fewer than a hundred lines of poetry, or less than he would have quoted in any one essay in The Sacred Wood.
"It is part of the business of the critic to preserve tra- dition— where a good tradition exists," Eliot wrote in the Introduction of the original volume, and later in the book he makes it clear that a good one did exist, that it was "the literature of the great ages, the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries." All the threads of his tradition appear in The Sacred Wood in detail except the Metaphysicals, who turned up a year later (1921) in a review of Grier- son's anthology of metaphysical poetry, and Dryden, whom Eliot first wrote about in 1922. Besides "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a general discussion, Eliot devotes specific essays to Dante, four Elizabethan dramatists (Mar- lowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger), critics who have attempted to use a tradition similar to Eliot's (in- cluding Charles Whibley, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Julien Benda), and various aspects of poetic drama, a major preoccupation of Eliot's and a major element in his tradition. Two essays and a part of a third in the book sketch out what Eliot regards as the opposing tradition, Swinburne and Blake. Blake is treated with moderation and a great deal of admiration, as a "poet of genius" who missed being a "classic" like Dante by being born into the wrong environment, but Swinburne, as poet and critic, is slaughtered, and in general the "romantic" tradition is opposed and overturned throughout.
and Tradition in Criticism 69
3. The source of Eliot's tradition may be a literary need, but its ends are social and religious, and the social and re- ligious application and extension of his tradition is worth examining. One of the chief of these, of course, was his conversion to the Anglo-Catholic Church. Harry M. Camp- bell, in a study of Eliot in the Rocky Mountain Review for Summer 1944, claims, on what evidence I do not know, that Eliot's conversion occurred as early as 1922, the year he published The Waste Land and became editor of the Criterion. In any case, the first public statement on his conversion with which I am familiar occurred in 1928, when Eliot wrote a new preface to The Sacred Wood, re- nouncing "poetry as poetry," and published For Lancelot Andrew es, with its famous Preface announcement that he was a classicist in literature, an Anglo-Catholic in religion, and a royalist in politics. The royalism has hardly been heard from again, the classicism, in so far as it meant any- thing at all, was not news, but the Anglo-Catholicism grad- ually asserted itself as his major preoccupation and flow- ered into a broad social position.
When Eliot republished For Lancelot Andrew es as Essays Ancient and Modern in 1936, he omitted the Pref- ace, "which has more than served its turn." This was far from a repudiation of the beliefs. He later explained in After Strange Gods that his objection had been to the injudicious phrasing of the statement, which permitted the inferences that the three subjects were of equal importance to him, that he accepted them all on the same grounds, or that they all hang or fall together. On reconsideration, one is "the Faith" while the other two are merely a "po- litical principle" and a "literary fashion." The particular danger is in putting these things forward as "a dramatic posture."
That last phrase gives some sense of the difficulties Eliot seems to have encountered in his conversion. A man's re- ligious beliefs and his relations with his Maker (if he be- lieves he has one) are his private concern, but when they become a point of view and a source of propaganda in literary criticism, they warrant discussion. Eliot has never
70 T. S. ELIOT
chosen to explain his conversion in writing, but some sense of difficulty is obvious in his later poetry and in such nettled and patently self -referent statements as the one on Hopkins's conversion: "To be converted, in any case, while it is sufficient for entertaining the hope of individual salvation, is not going to do for a man, as a writer, what his ancestry and his country for some generations have failed to do." Writing as far back as 1927, in The Ameri- can Caravan, Francis Fergusson pointed out some of the contradictions in Eliot's make-up: "a romantic individual- ism in morals and a strict discipHne in art; of a passionate faith and an equally passionate agnosticism, and of a profound comprehension of the creative act and an ina- bility to escape the personal in his own poetry."
R. P. Blackmur has also described the contradictions be- tween Eliot's nature and his conversion. Speaking of Eliot's mind, he writes: "It is the last mind which, in this cen- tury, one would have expected to enter the Church in a lay capacity. The worldliness of its prose weapons, its security of posture, its wit, its eye for startling fact and talent for nailing it down in ffight, hardly go with what we think of today as English or American religious feel- ing."
Eliot's conversion has led him into some strange posi- tions. Unlike Ransom, who admits being chiefly attracted by the ritual in religion, Eliot, like Hulme before him, is chiefly attracted by the dogma, the letter that "giveth life" while "the spirit killeth." He is, however, greatly interested in the liturgy, which seems chiefly important to him as the origin and basis of the drama (a scale of values with a faint Alice in Wonderland air). On the one hand, Eliot is powerfully drawn to Rome, and occasionally his Church is so High you can't get over it, as when in "Thoughts after Lambeth" he "regrets" that the Anglican bishops "have placed so much reliance on the Individual Con- science" in their birth-control position. On the other hand, Eliot has powerful survivals of the Puritan Protestantism of his early life, he is constantly resisting authority in favor of his own revelation, and he has even enunciated a doctrine of "every man his own critic" (amusingly, in the same address on "Religion and Literature") that seems almost the essence of Protestantism ("and we should all
and Tradition in Criticism 71
try to be critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers").
Eliot's religion has social implications for him ranging from the feudal to the directly fascist.^ He has sketched out an ecclesiastical authoritarian state with education by monastic teaching orders, birth control in the hands of the Church, censorship at Lambeth Palace, and so on. This pattern seems markedly like that of such states as Spain and Vichy France, and it is a matter of some amusement that in a Letter to the Editors in Partisan Review for March-April 1942 Eliot took great pleasure in announcing a rumor that his writings had been condemned by the Vichy government, a rumor that seems not to have been substantiated since. His ideal state, in fact, is explicitly feudal, and his lectures on The Idea of a Christian Society, as well as more recent essays, sketch out at some length an idealized feudal community (words like "ideal" and "idealized" are essential, since Eliot confesses that his title uses "Idea" in the Platonic sense), "a small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil and having its interests centred in a particular place."
In all of this, aristocracy has a definite part. Eliot be- lieves literally in "royal blood," which produces "kingly and steadfast behaviour," in an "aristocracy of birth," in an "elite," and so on. He certainly believes in imperialism, even of the naked Kipling variety. He is "instinctively in sympathy" with such reactionary economic panaceas as distributism, credit reform, American Southern agrarian- ism; and what is worse, "for I have no gift whatever for abstruse thinking," is perfectly willing to blend the doc-
' Forced to choose between them, it must be admitted, EHot some- times chooses the social implications rather than the religion itself. For a number of years in the twenties he supported Charles Maurras and his Action franjaise in the Criterion, printing an article by Maurras him- self in the January 1928 issue, and generally praising him as a better example than Mussolini for British fascists to follow. When Maurras and the Action frangaise were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for advancing a doctrine that Catholicism is "useful" to a monarchical or authoritarian state, Eliot defended him with the state- ment that Maurras "simply is concerned with the aspect of the Roman Church which is not necessarily Christian, because his point of view is that of an agnostic philosopher." As Delmore Schwartz has pointed out, the possibility that a man may be a Catholic and "not necessarily Christian" (but satisfactory if he is a royalist) is rather an interesting one.
72 T. S. ELIOT
trines of Chesterton, Major Douglas, Donald Davidson, and "several Scottish nationalists" in one giant pot and simmer to taste, Eliot certainly believes in a variety of racism, and his Christian society would not permit "an influx of foreign populations" and "foreign races" that have ruined parts of the United States, particularly New York; it would find "any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable," and so on.
All of this adds up, not quite to fascism, but to a kind of tentative and embarrassed flirting with it. The morality of fascism, he writes, "is capable of great good within limits"; there "is" a fallacy in democracy while there oniy "may be" a fallacy in dictatorship; fascism offers imme- diate, "though perhaps illusory," relief; General J. F. C. Fuller, a self-identified "British Fascist," "has as good a title to call himself a 'believer in democracy' as anyone else"; the Nazis were right in relegating women to kitchen, children, and church; Eliot favors "the corporative state" if it is not "pagan" (that is, presumably, he favored Franco's, Salazar's, Mussolini's, Petain's, and rejected Hit- ler's), and, in any case, fascism is only "the extreme degra- dation of democracy."
The doctrine of tradition in Eliot's criticism seems pri- marily a weapon for achieving this unattractive society. The function of traditional criticism, he writes, is the establishment of order, and the enemy is disorder. In purely literary terms, this makes the critic the scourge of the "romantic," the "hysteric," and so on; in Eliot's later usage it makes him a heresy-hunter, a witch-finder. He issues general jeremiads — "The whole of modem literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism"; it is doubtful whether the reader of modern literature "would be made a better man" — and announces his role frankly as that of the "moralist." He hunts out specific "heretics," and in fact his series of lectures After Strange Gods, subtitled, A Primer of Modern Heresy, is a discussion of modern lit- erary heterodoxy supplemented with a rather amusing appendix of four "heretical" passages drawn from such diabolical sources as Herbert Read and the London Times. The aim of literature, he proclaims, is to fight liberalism, and when Eliot's niggling criticisms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest and thus theoretically estimable,
and Tradition in Criticism 73
finally reduce to the statement that in this struggle "Hop- kins has very little aid to offer us," Eliot signalizes the absence of any dispassionate aesthetic concern whatsoever.
It is interesting to conjecture how much of Eliot's con- cern with a more popular poetry is purely propagandistic — ^that is, how much he wants merely to have a larger au- dience for his social and religious ideas. There is no doubt that Eliot is obsessed with the question of a larger public for poetry. "I believe that the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as pos- sible," he writes, and "it is the half-educated and ill- educated, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his way: I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write." He modified and developed this later into the theory that the writer needs three concentric publics: "a small public of substantially the same education as himself, as well as the same tastes; a larger public with some common background with him; and finally he should have something in common with everyone who has intel- ligence and sensibility and can read his language."
One of the chief forms this concern with a larger au. dience for poetry takes is Eliot's interest in poetic drama His own verse dramas serve a complex of functions. As Eliot has recognized, the characters in a drama "are some-, how dramatizing, but in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet," and thus writers torn by conflict tend to work it out in the dialec- tical form of drama. EUot's verse dramas obviously do this, with Murder in the Cathedral a patent example. Also, as F. O. Matthiessen has pointed out in a review of Four Quartets, Eliot has made his later poetry, particularly the Quartets, less dramatic, more meditative (that is, more "resolved") than his earlier poetry by concentrating his dramatic impulses into purely dramatic poems.
But more important than these private functions is the public function of drama for Eliot, the fact that it can cross poetry and propaganda in the guise of popular en- tertainment. He asks for the theater a verse medium "in which we shall be able to hear the speech of contemporary human beings, in which dramatic characters can express the purest poetry without high-falutin and in which they can convey the most commonplace message without ab-
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surdity." As a basis for his hope, Eliot has a theory, obvi- ously related to his theory of the poet's three concentric audiences, that a mature play, say one of Shakespeare's, has several "levels of significance": "For the simplest au- ditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the char- acter, for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for audi- tors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually." In line with this he has elsewhere written that Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, not to speak of (Edipus Tyrannus, have "thriller interest" akin to that of our contemporary detective drama.
One of EUot's most significant essays is "Marie Lloyd," in which, in the guise of writing about a distinguished English music-hall performer and the loss occasioned by her death, he defines his ideal relationship between artist and audience, the audience a cohesive social class to whose life and aspirations the artist gives voice, raising them to the level of art and giving them dignity; the artist appre- ciated, loved, and always understood; the two, artist and audience, collaborators in the creation of art. Not far beneath the surface here is the writer of complex and ob- scure poetry yearning to be widely read and appreciated in large areas of society that tend never to hear of him, but there is also an element of conscious propagandistic design. Some years before Eliot had written in The Sacred Wood:
The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a. good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment and sub- ject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best ma- terial.*
* A much more remarkable document is a fragment from a letter to Ezra Pound which was published in the Townsman, July 1938. Its far greater frankness on the subject, combined with its unusual style, makes it a fascinating sample of the published Eliot-Pound correspond- ence we may eventually get:
Opinion about the writing of a play is simply this:
1. You got to keep the audience's attention all the time.
2. If you lose it you got to get it back quick.
and Tradition in Criticism 75
4. Few critics have been so conscious as Eliot of the fact that they were creating and using a tradition. But every critic, in his explorations into the past, abstracts those writers and writings that have meaning for him in the present, and to that extent creates a functioning tradition or part of one for himself and other writers. In our day a number of critics, some of them as consciously "tradi- tional" as Eliot, have reinterpreted our literary past, and the wide variations in their results make it obvious that Eliot has furnished a tradition rather than the tradition. (Eliot's assistant editor on the Criterion, Herbert Read, has, in fact, attempted to balance Eliot's with a precisely opposed "romantic" tradition, omitting almost everyone between Shakespeare and Wordsworth, in Phases of Eng- lish Poetry and other books.) The chief grouping of these traditions seems to be political, with one large body of them organizing a usable past for the Right and another for the Left, but there is a third body of traditional re- interpretations that seems non-political or only remotely political, designed chiefly to create a usable, politically neutral past for the artist.
Besides Eliot's, the chief contemporary traditional criti- cism for the Right has been the work of the Southern school of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, a loose group that roughly includes Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, as well as several other younger critics of distinction. At one time, when it had a more or less con- crete political program of Southern regionalism and agrar- ianism, the group looked to Donald Davidson as its leader. The advantages that this group has over such iso- lated reactionary traditionalists as Winters, Pound, Wynd- ham Lewis, and Eliot himself are that it has a number of
3. Everything about plot and charactyar and all else what Aris- totle and others say is secondary to the forgoin.
4. But IF you can keep the bloody audience's attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they ain't looking, and it's what you do behind the audience's back so to speak that makes your play immortal for a while.
If the audience gets its strip tease it will swallow the poetry.
5. If you write a play in verse, then the verse ought to be a medium to look through, and not a pretty decoration to look at!
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co-operating talents; that it has had a base to work from, in two or three Southern universities, as well as what amount to "colonies" in Northern universities; that it has always had one or two excellent literary organs, first the Southern Review under Brooks and Warren, from 1935 to 1942, then the Kenyon Review under Ransom, begun in 1939 and still continuing, then the Sewanee Review, taken over by Tate in 1944 and continued by others, all of which have made a practice (like Eliot's own Criterion) of giving space to the widest latitude of opinion and variety of point of view, along with their own people.
The leader of the group at present is probably John Crowe Ransom, who taught Tate at Vanderbilt College, and who, on the basis of a scientific training, a philosophic bent, a wide learning, and a first-rate mind, has been the group's outstanding theoretician. Ransom has written a book in defense of orthodox religion, God without Thun- der (1930), which despite odd gaps in knowledge (he is perhaps the only writer on theology, for example, who ever confused the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth) is an excellently reasoned and dramatistic attack on the enemy: Comte, naturalism, science (particularly anthropology), and liberalism. He defines his purpose in the book as "to win back by new tactics," and this Jesuit principle seems to have carried over into his two subse- quent volumes of literary criticism, The World's Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941). Ransom's literary tradition shares with Eliot's a vast respect for Donne, and differs from it chiefly in an equally great respect for Mil- ton and an unusual scorn for Shakespeare (who, lacking the "university discipline" and learning of Milton and Donne, is an "amateur," a writer of "ill-constructed" son- nets, and generally an inferior poet). Ransom's key word for criticism is "ontological," by which he seems to mean the critical study of poetic structure, or the logic of the poem, and its relationship to what he calls poetic "texture," or the local detail of the poem. As a result of this con- cern with structure and structure-texture relations Ransom has been a leading advocate of the closer reading of poetic texts (having a position somewhat analogous to that of F. R. Leavis in England). Although he himself has pro-
and Tradition in Criticism 77
duced a disproportionately small amount of it, devoting much of his attention to poetics and philosophic problems of belief and cognition in poetry, his influence has been pervasive, and what close reading he himself has pro- duced has been generally excellent. Although Ransom's tradition involves a religious and political orientation, he has insisted, in opposition to Eliot, that moralistic criteria in criticism are an intrusion (as are scholarly, linguistic, historical, impressionist, and other criteria) and that the critic's only concern must be aesthetic, technical. (It is amusing to note in this connection that his two favorite poets, Donne and Milton, were respectively a divine and a religious and political propagandist, whereas the poet he so much undervalues, Shakespeare, was about as close to a narrowly "aesthetic" writer as we have.)
Allen Tate has continued a number of Ransom's tend- encies (some of which. Ransom has acknowledged, he helped to originate) as well as developed some of his own. Working from Ransom's "aesthetic of regionalism," Tate has attempted some specifically regional criticism, inter- preting, say, Emily Dickinson's work as primarily a prod- uct of New England. He has not, however, developed the tradition much in a specifically literary direction, and a large proportion of his two collections of essays and re- views. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936) and Reason in Madness (1941), is devoted to social, po- litical, and educational problems. He has developed a pro- gram calling for "reaction" and "violence" (although in fairness it must be admitted that his "violence" seems to be less machine guns in the streets than a verbal violence) and he has announced his opposition to science, positivism, and scientific criticism in even sharper terms than Ran- som's. Again like Ransom, the comparatively small amount of close technical reading of poetry he has done has been on a high level.
The member of this group who has most consistently applied its ideas to literature is Cleanth Brooks, who more than any of his associates shows the influence of Eliot. In his first book of criticism, Modern Poetry and the Tradi- tion (1939), Brooks attempted, like Winters, to "revise" the history of EngUsh poetry, along lines similar to Eliot's
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less explicit attempt and Leavis's Revaluation. Brooks is a confessedly eclectic critic of real acuteness, and with the help of almost every important modern critic he con- structed a tradition of "wit" embracing principally the seventeenth century: Donne and the Metaphysicals, Jon- son, Herrick, and others; and the twentieth century: Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and a number of other contempo- raries. Unlike Eliot's, Brooks's tradition in his first book would skip most of the late seventeenth century and the entire eighteenth as well as the nineteenth (with the ex- ception of a few isolated figures like Swift, Gay, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Hopkins) would slight Dry den and Pope, and would accept only the metaphysical or "witty" fragments of such poets as Milton. While creating this tradition, the book illustrates its nature by detailed close reading, fairly eclectic and acknowledging insights from a great number of other critics, of poetic texts, especially Eliot's Waste Land and some of Yeats's lyrics. In 1947 Brooks published a second book, The Well Wrought Urn, continuing both these directions. Subtitled Studies in the Structure of Poetry, the book includes readings of ten important poems, from Donne's "Canonization" to Yeats's "Among School Children," displaying varying degrees of elaborateness. At the same time it extends Brooks's earlier tradition and modifies it substantially in the direction of greater catholicity, so that Pope's "Rape of the Lock," Gray's "Elegy," Wordsworth's "Ode," Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and even Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears," are "now poems which most of us will feel are close to the central stream of the tradition." The earlier Eliot- inspired emphasis on "wit" has been broadened to include "irony," "paradox," "symbolism," "ambiguity," and "dra- matic structure," so that almost any poem can now be treated as a kind of metaphysical poem. Nevertheless, as might be expected, the studies of poets like Donne, Shake- speare, and Pope are much fuller and better examples of close reading than the studies of poets like Milton (a par- ticularly dull and pointless essay) and Tennyson. The book is by definition an application of Ransom's ideas, in its technical exploration of poetic structure, its concen- tration on the elaborate reading of texts, and its emphasis
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on Donne and the Metaphysicals, so that it is amusing to see Ransom moderately attacked, in one of the book's appendices devoted to general critical questions, for inelas- ticity of ideas and over-admiration for Donne.
In 1938 Brooks and Robert Penn Warren compiled an anthology for college students entitled Understanding Po- etry, which sponsors a certain amount of close reading and structural analysis as well as Brooks's "tradition" (fre- quently the latter, incidentally, by choosing the examples, loading the questions, and generally stacking the cards on behalf of Donne and metaphysical poetry against Shelley and romantic poetry). Warren's own criticism, which has not been large in bulk and has not yet been collected in book form, has been less concerned with a literary than with a moral tradition. This has ranged consistently from his essay "The Briar Patch" in the agrarian symposium I'll Take My Stand in 1930, where he argued from im- peccable moral principles that equality, higher education, and such luxuries are wrong for the Negro, to his intro- duction to an illustrated edition of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1946, which reads the work as a complicated moral allegory and introduces criteria of "truth" into Coleridge's concept of "pure imagination."
Undoubtedly the chief contemporary creator of a tra- dition for the Left was Vernon L. Parrington, whose giant three-volume work. Main Currents in American Thought, cut short by his untimely death, is one of the monumental creations of an American tradition. Subtitled An Inter- pretation of American Literature from the Beginning to 1920, it is not so much that as a history of American social and economic ideas, reflected in that literature, with "literature" used in the broadest sense. Parrington rescued the vital American tradition of radicalism and democracy running from Roger Williams, Franklin, Sam Adams, Tom Paine, Jefferson, through Whitman and the Abolitionists, to the radical writers of our century. Parrington wrote as a confessed liberal and Jeffersonian, a defender of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights against the Constitution, his point of view an economic deter- minism derived more from Taine and an obscure professor
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named J. Allen Smith (whose The Spirit of American Government appeared in 1907) than from Marx's semi- deterministic "historical materialism."
His book is weak and deficient aesthetically: Parrington ignores Poe (consigning him to the psychoanalyst and the "belletrist"), distorts Melville by following Weaver's ab- surd biography, sees Thoreau chiefly important as an eco- nomic experimenter, fails to do justice to Hawthorne, and slaughters Henry James. This might all be by design, since Parrington is concerned with ideas and admits "with aesthetic judgments I have not been greatly concerned," except that in the same book one can read the twenty-five pages he devoted to James Branch Cabell, "the supreme comic spirit thus far granted us," "as whimsical as Shaw, as provocative as Chesterton," a man to be compared with Carlyle and Twain.
Furthermore, even on his own terms, Parrington's book is full of faults: he ignores the Negro contribution to American history and literature, slights John Brown, drops economic determinism to praise Cooper (an obvious spokesman for the landed tories) because he happens to like his work, is capable of writing of Bryant: "He may not have been a great poet, but he was a great American," and finds Bancroft a greater historian than Prescott, Mot- ley, or Parkman because they were "Brahmins," "aloof," and Bancroft was "the only militant Democrat among them." Nevertheless, Parrington's book is a fine and im- portant job, with a vast influence on his own and the subsequent generation of literary critics, and it created perhaps the first rounded radical democratic-social tradi- tion for American writers to match the reactionary-aristo- cratic-religious tradition of Eliot, Ransom, Winters, et al.
A third group of tradition-creators, more or less ignor- ing political purposes, have been chiefly interested in erect- ing a usable past for the creative writer, sometimes them- selves. Two of the best books in this category have been D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, a highly personal reinterpretation along the lines of Law- rence's mythic, "blood-knowing" ideas, and a book much influenced by Lawrence's, William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain. The WilUams book is actually a re-
and Tradition in Criticism 81
interpretation of American history rather than literature, with only one professional writer, Poe, discussed, but it is explicitly designed to erect a tradition for the American writer. "Because the fools do not believe they spring from anything," Williams writes, and although his judgments are generally unorthodox, glorifying such figures as Morton of Merrymount and Aaron Burr, Williams's book has been recognizably influential on writers, outstanding among them Hart Crane and an impressive novelist named John Sanford. Williams polarizes American history into the groupings Indian-French-Catholic and white-English-Prot- estant, identifying freedom, gaiety, and artistic creation with the former, and Puritan doumess, repression, and prudery with the latter. His view of Puritanism is over- simple and falsified, a characteristic of the twenties, when Puritanism was the artist's enemy and meant Anthony Comstock rather than John Brown, but the book itself is not only one of the finest prose works of our time but a stimulating and invigorating reappraisal.
A final and somewhat limited group of traditional critics is the group that might crudely be called "literary genealo- gists," the critics interested in showing the specific literary descents of writers. This has always been one of the ways critics found to occupy their time, at least since Dryden, who not only found Spenser the poetical son of Chaucer, and Milton the poetical son of Spenser, but with great eclat traced Waller back to Edward Fairfax. Probably the fore- most contemporary tracer of literary genealogies was the French critic Ferdinand Brunetiere, who attempted to apply a literal evolutionism derived from Darwinian biol- ogy, and whose work shows forms and influences grow- ing, proliferating, evolving, and becoming extinct like so many animal species. A number of English and American critics, however, have developed genealogy-tracing as a method without carrying it to that extent. Horace Gregory, for example, will spend two pages tracing the influence of Byron's Don Juan into Beyle's Julien Sorel, Ibsen's Gregers Werle, Shaw's Juan, Robinson's Miniver Cheevy, and Eliot's Prufrock. Cecil Day Lewis's essay A Hope for Poetry is an elaborate study in literary genealogy, using Auden's concept of "my uncle, my ancestor," and rooting the poetic movement that included Auden, Spender, and
82 T. S. ELIOT
himself in such various "ancestors" as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, and Eliot. For Day Lewis the "ancestor" expresses "the only possible patriotism, the one necessary link with the past, and the meaning of tradition." Another young English poet and critic, Francis Scarfe, is constantly genealogical, tracing Dylan Thomas to Joyce, Freud, and the Bible; literary surrealism to Rimbaud, Ner- val, and Lautreamont, and so on. The specialists in com- parative literature, like Mario Praz, are consistently genea- logical, but more as a matter of scholarship than criticism.
5. Eliot has digested his influences so smoothly and with such Uttle apparent effort that he seems almost a primary source, yet his work is highly derivative, and a number of contemporaries have affected his criticism greatly. Chief on the list, of course, is Ezra Pound. From Pound, Eliot inherited his translative method, his method of compara- tive study, and the concept of the scholar-critic, and it is worth noting that Eliot's call, in one of his earliest essays, "Euripides and Professor Murray," for a timeless scholar- ship "which can assimilate both Homer and Flaubert" is almost a paraphrase of Pound's earlier demand for "a literary scholarship to weigh Theocritus and Mr. Yeats with one balance." Moreover, Eliot is indebted to Pound for a number of his specific doctrines, among them the concept of impersonalism and, according to Mario Praz, the doctrine of the objective correlative. Praz finds its origin in Pound's statement in The Spirit of Romance that poetry is "a sort of inspired mathematics which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions."
Eliot has had a respect amounting to veneration for Pound, despite a basic religious disagreement and other quarrels, and regards him as not only one of the greatest of contemporary critics but "probably the most important living poet in our language." ^ Nevertheless, it is ironic
^ One factor at least in this seemingly excessive respect was finally ex- plained in Eliot's essay "Ezra Pound" in Poetry, September 1946. Eliot writes: "It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manu- script of a sprawling, chaotic poem called The Waste Land which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it
and Tradition in Criticism 83
that Eliot's most famous tribute, his dedication of The Waste Land to Pound, "// miglior fabbro'^ should be so generally misunderstood. "// miglior fabbro" "the better craftsman," is Dante's description of Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio (put in the mouth of Guido Guinicelli), but it carries a sense of ironic, courteous overpraise now (if it did not then), since even if Dante did not know he was a better, greater craftsman than Arnaut, we know it. Thus used by Eliot in speaking of Pound, it is at once a polite tribute and an implied boast of superior potentiality.
An influence on Eliot probably second only to Pound was T. E. Hulme, who was killed in the war in 1917 at the age of thirty-four and whose work was not published until 1924, when Herbert Read edited a collection of his papers as Speculations. Hulme was a translator of Berg- son and Sorel, a rationalist Catholic, classicist, militarist, and premature fascist. His notebooks circulated among friends in manuscript, and it is certain that Eliot, Pound, and a number of other critics were familiar with them long before their publication. From Hulme, Eliot to some extent derived his classical tradition, his concept of dogma as being the vital element in religion, for the sake of which it is possible to "swallow" sentiment and ritual, and his principal example of art and criticism in the service of re- ligious orthodoxy and political reaction. Hulme was pos- sibly the only contemporary critic who could have wholly agreed with Eliot's perverted doctrine that the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life. Hulme, in the quarter-century since his death, has acquired a reputation as the standard- bearer for traditional criticism. Besides Eliot, his influence is marked on Pound (who has put on record an offensive conversation with Hulme where he is the teacher and Hulme the awed student), Allen Tate and others of the Southern school, the neo-humanists, T. Sturge Moore, and, in the other camp, Richards and Herbert Read.
Despite their basic opposition, I. A. Richards has been a third major influence on Eliot's critical thought. Eliot
appears in print." When, later in the piece, he says of the Cantos; "There is nobody living who can write hke this: how many can be named, who can write half so well?" the statement makes no more objective sense than variants of it did before, but now at least it makef a good deal of subjective sense.
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has frequently acknowledged indebtedness to Richards and similarity in their ideas, has found his work "of cardinal importance in the history of literary criticism," and has undoubtedly derived from the early Richards one of his basic concepts, the theory of the irrelevancy of belief to poetic appreciation, both in the reader and (with reserva- tions) in the poet. Eliot has resisted Richards's basic scientific orientation, frequently with sharp attack, while at the same time borrowing many of its concepts and a good deal of its vocabulary.
One of the chief problems raised by T. S. Eliot's crit- icism is the problem of the critic who also happens to be a creative writer of importance. Of the critics studied in this book, several seem to do no writing other than critical or scholarly, among them Brooks, Richards, Caroline Spurgeon, and Maud Bodkin; a number, such as Winters, Blackmur, Empson, and Burke, are poets or novelists of varying degrees of importance and literary excellence, but only Eliot is a first-rate creative writer of major impor- tance. As Matthiessen has reminded us, Eliot is in "the main line of poet-critics that runs from Ben Jonson and Dryden through Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold," and it is this quality of being a craftsman talking of what he knows at first hand that has given Eliot his authority.
In our day, characteristically, the chief glorifier of the poet-critic has been Pound, who remarks in one place: "Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work," and in another: "If you wanted to know something about an automobile, would you go to a man who had made one and driven it, or to a man who had merely heard about it? And of the two men who had made automobiles, would you go to one who had made a good one, or one who had made a botch?" Nevertheless, all argument is not on the side of the poet- critic. Winckelmann's argument, that the artist criticizing art tends to make difficulty overcome the test of achieve- ment, has never been satisfactorily answered, and the cur- rent practice of literary periodicals, particularly the liberal weeklies, in giving poetry automatically to poets for review has revealed that Winckelmann's objection only applies to the best examples, while in the worst examples the poet-
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critic is only concerned with matters of private squabbling, log-rolling, jealousies, and revenge.
A glance at some types of criticism indulged in by creative writers of importance may cast some light on the matter. The most notable example of such criticism in our time, by general agreement, is the Critical Prefaces of Henry James. James combined insight into his own creative processes, detailed self-revelation, and remarkable gen- eralizing ability to furnish us with one of the most valuable records of the creative mind ever penned. He lacked that insight, however, into the creative processes of other writers, and despite a sensitivity to craft perhaps greater than any in our time, he never achieved, in discussing any other writer, the same results he got in self-analysis.
The James tradition of critical self-revelation has been continued in a number of poet-critics of our day. Out- standing among them are Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. (Curiously enough, Eliot himself, despite such statements as: "I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism," has put very little of this on record, and almost never discusses his own work openly, preferring to write of "the poet" in general). In a remarkable article called "Narcissus as Narcissus" in Reason in Madness Allen Tate has analyzed his own poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" in twenty pages of detailed commentary. It is a tremendously useful analysis, fit to rank with Hart Crane's letter interpreting his poem "At Melville's Tomb" as a study of the contem- porary poetic mind, but it is almost impossible to discuss as criticism, if only because the poet dealing with his own work has a monopoly on any facts he cares to furnish.
John Crowe Ransom, a different case, deals in critical self-revelation somewhat more subtly. As a critic he has created a poetics that seems chiefly based on his own procedure in writing poetry. It involves his distinction be- tween the "structure" and the "texture" of a poem, and a further opposition between meter and meaning. The poem is thus a compromise between structure and texture, and a further compromise is achieved when the intended mean- ing has to be altered to fit the meter, and the intended meter to fit the meaning. These distinctions are un-
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doubtedly valid in the case of Ransom's own writing or the work of a man like Yeats (who wrote first in prose and then hammered the work into verse), but in the case of a poet whose composition flows freely, say Shakespeare or the early Keats, they would be extremely inappropriate. What Ransom has done, in creating a poetics in his own pattern, is what any poet-critic must inevitably do, but his pattern seems somewhat too specialized to be of much help.
In these few examples of the poet-critic, among the best our age has to offer, some of the problems involved emerge. The creative writer is (under certain circum- stances) best equipped to discuss his own work, but in that case no one else is equipped to discuss it with him, and criticism becomes as isolated an art as autobiography. If, instead of discussing his work, he erects a theory of com- position on it, that theory may suffer from his own atypi- cality, since to some extent and in one way or another all writers are atypical. If he discusses the work of others, from the inevitable specialization of his work he is very likely to lack the knowledge and theoretical background of the professional critic, as does E. M. Forster in his literary pieces, or to be disqualified as an ordinary reader by greater craft awareness while unable to speak purely as a critic or craftsman, as was the case with Virginia Woolf in The Common Readers. He may be debarred by personal taboos from frankly discussing his own work, like Eliot, or unable to bring the same insight to bear on anyone else's, like James. He may be, finally, too obsessed with his own formula, jealous, or afflicted with any of the other vices of the poet-critic suggested above. In view of these objections and others, it might be suggested that first-rate objective criticism may accidentally arise from a first- rate creative writer, as in the case of Eliot, but that as a general rule the best criticism, like the best of anything else, will be the work of professionals. (This is not to deny one of the basic principles of criticism, which is that the critic requires some experience as a creative writer or he cannot possibly understand the problems involved, or to attack the great importance as literary documents of such pieces as James's Prefaces or the Tate article.)
and Tradition in Criticism 87
"His essays are his conscious thoughts about the kinds of work he was doing," Eliot has written of Dryden, and in introducing the concept of the poet writing criticism as the conscious poet, he has proposed the view from which he would like to be considered. Eliot plainly considers some critical quality, which he sometimes speaks of as "the historical sense," to be indispensable to the survival of a poet "beyond his twenty-fifth year." Having himself con- tinued to write past that crucial year (the statement was made at twenty-nine), Eliot can be presumed to find it in himself. Nevertheless, he would draw a definite line be- tween the content of a poet's poetry and his criticism. "I would say that in one's prose reflexions one may be legiti- mately occupied with ideals," he writes, "whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal with actuality." This was, so far as I know, Eliot's first reply to the constant charge of inconsistency between his poetry and his crit- icism. This attack ranges from Ernest Boyd's pigheaded "his aesthetic theory bears no relation whatever to his practice" to Ransom's sympathetic:
And the poet clashed with the critic. The critical Eliot was Jekyll, the poetical Eliot was Hyde; and it was wonderful to imagine that somewhere in Jekyll's pervasive wisdom was the word which justified the Hyde; both the Jekyll and the Hyde were studied the harder in the effort to harmonize them. I think it cannot be done, and the word was not there. The drift of the criticism was heavily against the drift of the poetry.
F. O. Matthiessen, almost alone, has been moved to defend Eliot's consistency. Beginning by conceding "Eliot's preference for a very different kind of poetry from that which he is capable of writing," Matthiessen has main- tained that "his criticism steadily illuminates the aims of his verse, while his verse illustrates many aspects of his critical theory." By the time Four Quartets appeared, Mat- thiessen had come to believe that the best understanding of Eliot's poetry was derived from the criticism, and pointed out that Eliot's essay "The Music of Poetry" "throws the most relevant light upon his poetic intentions, and is thus a further piece of refutation to those who
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persist in the fallacy that there is no harmony between his 'revolutionary' creative work and his 'traditionalist' criti- cism." 6
Despite a good deal of nonsense from all parties, there is a serious point involved, the organic unity of a human personality. The critics who find no such consistency in Eliot's work are inevitably dissociating a man out of all semblance of meaning, if not of life, while on the other side Matthiessen errs in making the relationship too simple, the criticism a handy guidebook or trot for the poetry. Eliot's own position is soundest on some of the possible ways a poet's criticism can complement his verse. "The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create poetry," he wrote in an early essay, noting the most obvious rela- tionship. He has also recognized the poet projecting and defending in the critic: "Arnold was, perhaps, not al- together the detached critic when he wrote this line; he may have been stirred to a defense of his own poetry." By 1942 Eliot had stopped implying detachment in his own work and wrote: "But I believe that the critical writings of poets, of which in the past there have been some very distinguished examples, owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that at the back of the poet's mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, he is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write." That is, the criticism does a number of jobs for the man, just as the poetry does, is in fact another kind of poetry, and these two poetries may overlap to vary- ing degrees without ever being wholly dissociated or wholly identical.
In recent years, however, they seem to have been grow- ing more and more dissociated. Eliot's latest essays, done in the forties, have tended to confront the religious, educa- tional, social, and political aspects of his tradition frankly rather than through the medium of poetic texts. The Clas- sics and the Man of Letters, his presidential address to the
^The Quartets seem to have won many more people to Matthies- sen's view. Since this chapter was written, several statements of it have appeared, among them Miss M. C, Bradbrook's in T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writing by Several Hands (1947), which argued that "the criticism is often the best commentary on the poetry" with persuasive documentation, and William York Tindall's in The American Scholar, Autumn 1947, which insisted that Eliot's criticism is, "whatever its ostensible subject, a criticism of his own practice."
and Tradition in Criticism 89
Classical Association, published as a pamphlet in 1942, centers on problems of "Christian culture"; and his intro- duction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse, published the same year, is chiefly a political defense of Kipling's "im- perial patriotism" and racism (Eliot "cannot believe he held a doctrine of race superiority") J "Notes toward a Definition of Culture," published in the New English Weekly in 1943 and reprinted in Partisan Review, Spring 1944, continues the tendencies in The Idea of a Christian Society, with more emphasis on the cultural and educational aspects of Eliot's ideal ecclesiastical totalitarianism. "The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe," reprinted in the Sewanee Review, Summer 1945, from the Norwegian Norseman, is a proposal that men of letters as a class agree on such public matters as culture and education; and "What Is Minor Poetry?," an address to an association of Welsh Bookmen, published in the Sewanee Review, Winter 1946, taking an educational rather than a critical approach and patronizing in tone, devotes a good part of its space to classifying the functions performed by an- thologies and little magazines. The recent essay on Pound and the obituary for Valery are concerned, respectively, with what of Pound and what of Valery's Europe will survive (Valery had said ''L' Europe est finie"), and here we can imagine a certain amount of projection. Finally, a number of Eliot's recent writings are directly religious or political: a pamphlet on Church union, an introduction to an anonymous book. Dark of the Moon, about the Rus- sian mistreatment of Poland, and so on. Since "The Music of Poetry" in 1942, I am not aware of any criticism by Eliot that focuses on literature as literature (except per- haps for a recent lecture in New York on Milton, which revised upward his former estimate). The pattern of all Eliot's recent work seems to be one of the tradition gradu- ally overcoming the literary concern from which it sprang, just as the political reaction (in cases like that of Maurras) sometimes overcomes the religious view it was once de- signed to support.
Despite all Eliot's protest to the contrary, the man Eliot
"^ Under pressure from a review by Lionel Trilling, Eliot explained in the Nation, January 15, 1944: "I am not aware that he cherished any particuiariy anti-Semitic feelings" (italics mine).
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is of course the clue to both the poetry and the criticism, just as in the last analysis the "tradition" seems to be reducible to a personal need. Another literary controversy, quite as bitter and fruitless as the debate over his prose versus his verse, is the question of the degree to which Eliot's poetry is autobiographic. Matthiessen has legiti- mately slapped critics like Granville Hicks and C. Day Lewis, who have had Eliot writing his social autobiography respectively in "Gerontion" and "Prufrock," and it is ob- vious that Eliot as an Aged Eagle in his early forties is a little ridiculous. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read certain passages, notably in the Quartets, as anything but direct personal statements from the poet, written in the tone of almost conversational prose. He writes in "East Coker":
That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory; A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion. Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter. It was not (to start again) what one had expected. What was to be the value of the long looked forward to. Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age?*
And a few pages later:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty
years — Twenty years largely wasted, the years of Ventre deux
guerres — Tr)'ing to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in
which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.*
* From "East Coker" in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright, 1943, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Comnanv. Inc.
and Tradition in Criticism 91
The chief emphasis here, even to the "feeling" and "emo- tion" banished from poetry a quarter of a century ago, is on suffering, the suffering EUot once proclaimed, in his book on Dante, as not only the source of poetry but its only material. He has confessed that after writing poetry he feels "a sudden relief from an intolerable burden," and remarked in another place: "We all have to choose what- ever subject-matter affords us the deepest and most secret release." It is easy enough, certainly, to see the suffering man in the famous statement: "We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph," or in Eliot's "Last Words" for the Criterion in 1939, on giving up the magazine after sixteen years:
In the present state of public affairs — which has in- duced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion — I no longer feel the enthusiasm neces- sary to make a literary review what it should be.
The personality that emerges finally is not, as we should expect, that of the triumphant great artist who has achieved, in the Quartets, one of the authentic master- pieces of our time, but that of a sick, defeated, and suffer- ing man; the discipline and impersonality of the poetry, the "tradition" of the criticism, chiefly props to sustain him. "Traditional" criticism can yet be, unlike Eliot's, turned with hope toward the future, but it will want different things of literature and it will have to choose a different tradition.
CHAPTER 3
Van Wyck Brooks
and Biographical Criticism
In the case of Van Wyck Brooks it is particularly difficult to abstract a usable critical method from the rest of the man and his work. It has been at least a decade since anyone concerned with literature took him very seriously, and in that decade he has at once achieved an enormous popular success (The Flowering of New England "headed best-seller lists for fifty-nine consecutive weeks") and become a narrow and embittered old gentleman with a white mustache. He has entered the lists against "coterie literature" — that is, James, Joyce, Eliot, and the rest of the serious moderns, who represent the "death-drive" — opposing to them "primary literature" — that is, Sandburg, Frost, and Lewis Mumford, who represent life and health. "Literature has been out on a branch. We must return to the trunk," he remarked pontifically, and, spurred on by Archibald MacLeish's wartime Kulturkampf, suggested burning German books and announced that writers in the democratic countries had poisoned the minds of their readers and sapped France's will to resist Hitler. He has emerged as increasingly xenophobic, his early resentment of immigrants, particularly "young East Siders," with their "alien wants" bewildering "hereditary Americans," hardening in the later books to a kind of Yankee racism, so that New England declined when "alien races pressed on the native race," and in the last books "race" and "racial" are scattered thick as nuts in fudge. At the same time he has become increasingly preoccupied with gene- alogy, with the pursuit of "one's forbears," with "the burgher-aristocracy, the Van Wycks" (Brooks wrote of Alcott: "He was much concerned with his genealogy. At
Biographical Criticism 93
fifty-four, why not?"), and the footnotes of New England: Indian Summer are chiefly long lists of the family lines of writers, or which writers went to Harvard and which to Yale. He was now "convinced" by Spengler, devoted to "the great Hans Zinsser" and Dr. Alexis Carrell.
Brooks has made so many switches in his forty years of writing and his nineteen books that it is difficult to perceive any consistent pattern. He has been an aesthete, a socialist, a Freudian, a manifesto-writer, a Jungian, a Tolstoyan book-burner, and finally a compiler of literary pastiche and travelogue for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He has moved from total arty rejection of America and its culture to total uncritical acceptance. He has occupied almost every political and philosophic position of our time, and called them all "socialism." Nevertheless, there is a consistent pattern in his work, from his first book to his last, but it is a method rather than a viewpoint, the method of biographical criticism.
The basic assumption of biographical criticism is that the chief clues to a man's work can be found in the study of his life, personality, and character. "The only fruitful approach is the personal approach," Brooks wrote in America's Coming-of-Age, and a quarter of a century later, in The Opinions of Oliver Allston, he defined what he meant by the personal approach in biography and distin- guished it from the scientific approach:
But these facts [of psychoanalysis] are no more useful than other facts, and all his facts are useless until the biographer has reconceived them in the light of his intuitive faculty, with its feeling for reality and proportion. This is a different mental organ from the intelligence, which actually paralyzes its operation. It is not the causes that matter in biography, it is the character itself, which belongs to the moral and aes- thetic sphere, a sphere that