“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims
to _be_ something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to
_value_ something. Criticism is talk _about_ something with a view to
passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing
the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his
fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the
state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and
in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of
consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this
period.”
“So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about
has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle,
that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and
intensity of his awareness of life.”
But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I must dig with
my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided should be
my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of American
literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new phase in
our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well drenched
in blood and the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed in 1915--events that were
vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s _The “Genius”_ came out, and the
next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference
to the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively
challenged. American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism
had hopefully established the _New Republic_. Mr. P. E. More in the
year previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the _Nation_.
Afterwards there came our participation in the war: the crushing
of liberalism: post-war disillusion. There came a ferment of new
magazines and new publishers, captivating the sons and leaving the
fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic novels, a foam of _vers
libre_, a roar of essays attacking the genteel tradition. Since 1915
the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and Eugene
O’Neill--to name only enough to establish a contrast with the writers
of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable
journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade
and a half an American literary renaissance.
To me, on reviewing these years, they seem more like a tragi-comedy,
almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned my premeditated first sentence I
spoke of the tragi-comedy of American criticism. But even if our recent
criticism has been very often foolish, we are to take it seriously for
reasons outside itself,--if my voice out of the air is to be believed.
I must now try to develop the line of thought that moves out from the
opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial counsellor deserted me.
I
There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy of American
literary criticism.
The leading critics of our nation have not been villains--that is,
amazing men of initiative, strength, and will bent on destruction--but
rather they make us think of well-intentioned bookish gentlemen
gyrating in the fields of certain hidden sociological magnets and
vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic attractions. On behalf of
a potential human greatness, there are perhaps great errors in the
present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but there are with
us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other words, our
critics are not germinative but derivative.
I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am
not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains,
for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the
intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain
epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic
world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully.
Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any
relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being
currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a
laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American
literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up
the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international
interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt
and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the
assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the
academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but
with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something
like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P.
Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from
the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the
world of professional criticism.
Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew
Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his
entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the
students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this
affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is
the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is
democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the
feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy
manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following
typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an
American Type_: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the
library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the
shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience,
into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of
Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel
is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has
none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.
I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman,
a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so
lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of
the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises
that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined
religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us.
Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it
is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop
his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted
from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds
have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what
purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is
worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough
question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of
life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour
that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and
lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection.
In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative
critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C.
Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of
desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his
mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt
he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas
he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics
Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a
great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society.
He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth
century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century
minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his
perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.
Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and
the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his
style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine
styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues
that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to
issues that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he
should seem not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher
discoursing with men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of
progress, but that he should seem to be a contemporary with a touch
of conservatism, crying with other average men for Prohibition and
vituperating with them our one-time Teutonic enemies. My reader, are
you now chiding me for drawing an unsympathetic portrait? Recall then
one of the pieces in _Americans_ (1922) and then say, if you can,
that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am wrong. The piece in
evidence is _An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More_, wherein,
after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman complained: “But
he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen.” In
fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating statement, “Mr. More
has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master
of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality,
flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his
substance arrives.”[64] It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to
reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him
to be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s
rôle than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on
ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values,
then as is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values.
Consider the following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More
had loved the aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went
on, “Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be
a leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would
be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the
fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman, that Socrates at his trial spoke
of his brief experience in politics and explained scathingly why he
had thereafter abstained from politics, I say that what has occurred
here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication of two men so
uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply critical of
us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be, to put
it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do
not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an
undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of
ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman
eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of
cant. “If ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which
he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than
anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism
is the _religion of democracy_, consisting of a little bundle of
general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a
bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in
which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as
with fire; etc.”[65]
In the lexicon of contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase,
“unselective sympathy.” I think it applies to what Sherman meant when
he said “religion of democracy,” else why does he base so much of his
message on the statistical average man? He could, like Mr. More, have
appealed to the latent common sense of man, which is not a visible
property of the average man to-day any more than it characterises his
leaders, or he could, like M. Charles Maurras, have tried to conceive
clearly of a perfect and normal man and argued for a closer approach to
normality in human affairs;[66] but no--there was working in Sherman
an element of “unselective sympathy” and it made his grasp relax on
enterprises of perfection. It was no divine average man he espoused.
When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York _Herald
Tribune_, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our milieu
sorely lacks, a vigorous _conservative_ literary review. But what he
organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal
review with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were,
for instance, already identified as reviewers for the _Nation_. We
have followed Sherman from the academic world to the professional
literary world, and it would seem to a superficial glance that Sherman
changed remarkably in his transit from one to the other. He had been an
assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism: he was to praise _An American
Tragedy_. He had sneered, and not very well, at the “moderns”: he was
to become their friendly counsellor. He had learned, he said, that it
was a certain “vitality,” no matter under what guise, that he wanted in
letters, and this platform enabled him to do a great deal of explaining
away of his altered views. He became less provincial.
But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of leadership.
For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him which he
called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a fear
of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to
be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors
who are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they
will compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel
_defensive_ about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on
the defensive in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no
marked force in himself, on him the registry of environment would be
speedily and plainly made. In an academic environment he had fought the
New York critics. He came as an editor to New York and the environment
quickly persuaded him to blend with it.[67]
When Sherman died, the professional literary world eulogised fulsomely
the _émigré_ from the academy. That already tells us a great deal about
this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with which Sherman
assimilated.