It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits and closing now in
disillusion and pathos. Three representative players have been Mr. Joel
Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L. Mencken: a study of
their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of contemporary American
criticism. The influence of the first of these is a most curious
phenomenon in our recent history.
In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the leisured gentleman and scholar who
adorns all too rarely our national society. His interests are wide: for
a number of years he was in politics and he has distinguished himself
by his generous efforts in behalf of the Negro: he has been an army
officer and has, one fancies, a spark of the old-time gallantry of the
military man. For us, however, he is the wealthy amateur of the arts
and philosophy; but what, one may still ask, are his claims to critical
leadership?
Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a number of years teaching in an
academic environment. He specialised in the history of literary
criticism, producing the three-volume compilation, _Critical Essays
of the Seventeenth Century_ (1909) and the volume, _Literary
Criticism in the Renaissance_ (1899), which pleased certain Italian
thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented
by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than
the usual competent product of academic industry and research: Mr.
Spingarn himself revolted against the type of sterile scholarship
they represent. In 1910 he delivered his famous lecture, _The New
Criticism_. He declaimed it at the climax of a spree, for he had
intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory of Benedetto Croce: he
was in full cry against academic dry rot. Consequently his statements
at the time were more extreme than those he would probably make on the
same theme to-day.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of a record, we must write down such
pronunciamentos in this lecture, in the addenda to it in _Creative
Criticism_ (1917), in his article, _The Seven Arts and the Seven
Confusions_, and in his contribution to _Civilization in the United
States_ (1921) as bear on the following topics: the essence of art, the
function of the artist, the duty of the critic.
Literature, he said, pointing to the trend of nineteenth-century
criticism, “is an expression of something, of experience or emotion,
of the external or internal, of the man himself or something outside
the man; yet it is always conceived of as an art of expression.” As for
the artist, he bade him know that “madness and courage are the very
life of art.... For the madness of poets is nothing more or less than
unhampered freedom of self-expression.... To let one’s self go--that
is what art is always aiming at, and American art needs most of all.”
The duty of the critic? To ask and answer these questions: “What has
the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his intention? What is
he striving to express and how has he expressed it? What impression
does his work make on me, and how can I best express this impression?”
With the flourishes of a platform speaker who knows instinctively that
it is not straight hard thinking which sways an audience so much as
the verve with which possibly dubious generalities are pronounced, Mr.
Spingarn exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have done with the
whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies, and moral
judgments.
This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement of romantic
æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s essential
response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always withheld
what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or judgment.
(It _is_ hard to make concrete statements about the so-called æsthetic
emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the “æsthetic
response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn had
written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers.
This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just
at the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his
reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality
in the documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing
to the Crocean doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing
in it. He did not even apply it, abstaining, then and since, from
concrete criticism of individual works. He merely proclaimed it. And a
widespread revolt against standards followed in American criticism. So
hearty, and eventually so wilful and silly, was the revolt that in 1922
its opponents were entertained by the issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a
restraining manifesto entitled _The Younger Generation_. This time,
recoiling from the destructiveness of the young men, Mr. Spingarn would
herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to “discipline, character,
morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often before, romantic
expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a soberer
Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and
doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.”
It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained
scholar, man of feeling, who can detain us, for there is literally
nothing in his writing for the mind to work on: as a thinker, he is
thoroughly derivative and weak on definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn
stands for, the theory of self-expression, still needs a scotching.
“Self-expression” is simply a magical catchword of the black variety.
It is a good catchword in that it emphasises the self, but it is
pernicious to the best interests of the self. For to express one’s
self means no more than just to manifest oneself, and if we say
self-manifestation instead of self-expression, we see at once how
paralysing the latter term has been. It has placed the emphasis, one
sees, on the artist _as he is_ and not on his possibilities of growth:
thus it has a static effect. Think now: impulses, people say, arise in
them or occur to them; no one claims to create his own impulses, to
self-induce his inclinations; in a manner of speaking, our impulses
come to us from the outside. Therefore, advice to be spontaneous, to
let oneself go without check, to follow one’s impulses is necessarily
advice--to do what?--_to live as unconsciously and mechanically as
possible_. The romantic may just as well hand himself over to the
Behaviourist psychologist, saying, “Here am I, a creature of whim
and impulse, the living proof of your thesis of automatism.” But the
romantic is not sternly logical. He has been proof against the question
as to the value of the self that is being expressed, and not only proof
against it: self-expression as a theory has encouraged his conceit and
sometimes fostered megalomania, thus pitching him deeper into bondage
to _external_ conditions, for conceit makes one exaggeratedly sensitive
to the environment.
To identify one’s self with the mechanical temperamental flux of
one’s existence and call that freedom is surely strange, and it is no
wonder that it is a strange “science” which has risen to support this
identification. I am of course referring to psycho-analysis, spoken
of respectfully by Mr. Spingarn, utilised as a probing instrument in
biography by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and championed by Mr. Mencken. It
does not seem necessary here to make a serious attempt to discredit
psycho-analysis, for that is being done rapidly enough by such
critics of it as Dr. Trigant Burrow, by the Behaviourists, by the
academic psychologists themselves. The facts have never been other
than these: that psycho-analysis is admittedly experimental (and
therefore speculative in its procedures, unsure of itself), that its
central conception, the unconscious, not to speak of its many little
metaphors like the “censor,” has never been objectively established,
and that it has no ideal of psychological health toward which to guide
its adherents (in lieu of such an ideal, the analyst has either gone
in for an excessive relativity or he has taken the “reality” of the
statistical average to be the norm). These are the undeniable facts
and one who would like to take pride in the sturdy commonsense of
the literary profession must regret that they were not kept in mind.
Literary men to-day, one must conclude, are no less gullible than any
other group. Naively, they welcomed the psycho-analytical dramatising
of inhibitions as the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought
was a sublimation of sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate
function of man, they wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul,
the unconscious. Ah, my highly suggestible writers, it is easy come,
easy go with your ideas: within a decade you will be sneering at
psycho-analysis as now you sneer at Christian Science.
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and biographical
interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is not the
sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but shy
of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a
persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to
use the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his
humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions,
temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness.
Who would dispute Mr. Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an
acquisitive society provides unfavourable conditions for the
development of the artistic life? Of course it does. It badly
nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost obsessed
with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure,
as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was
continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions
in the history of America which had hampered and throttled their
predecessors: he showed how frontier life had made the machinery
of existence, the actual getting of a living, paramount and from
this necessity had originated the contempt for the arts of enjoying
existence, and how this split had perpetuated itself in the divorce
between the world of practice (“lowbrow”) and the world of theory
(“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his pleading. For
struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe that
the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They
are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is
precisely the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though
he casually said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through
the development of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers
themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be
an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world
of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause,
the world of his own creation.” But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent
on this theme. He seems rather to have the sweet wistfulness and
yearning of one pledged to a lost cause. This mood of wistfulness and
yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast, lonely and eager, has
not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the
American writer.
Was it fortuitous, as in the example of Mr. Spingarn, that Mr. Van Wyck
Brooks should have held a certain leadership, should have put far more
than most of his generation his impress upon American taste and thought
in literary matters? It would seem that he has been a leader _faute de
mieux_, for although a charming minor critic, he has never managed to
awake an indomitable desire among his followers to master the odds. He
voiced the sentiments of a wistfully rebellious generation but shed no
light on the object of their rebellion, the achievement in a democracy
of real individuality.
That is the problem Mr. H. L. Mencken has at least perceived, and
his bold tone better fits a leader in our present straits than Mr.
Brooks’s gentle accents, but alas! He “solved” the problem of being
an individual in a “democratic” nation simply by striking an attitude
of swagger, and like Midas he is cursed with a touch that changes all
objects into some one thing else. It is easy--and this is the secret
of his influence--to adopt Mr. Mencken’s attitude toward the current
affairs of men. Let me quote his _Catechism_ and you will have it
in one simple lesson. “_Q._ If you find so much that is unworthy of
reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? _A._ Why
do men go to zoos?” But let us observe the man in the zoo, traipsing
open-mouthed and superciliously from cage to cage, grinning in silly
patronage at the imprisoned beasts who at least are true to the laws of
their being, and shall we not mock at man’s cheap sense of superiority
based not on what he (poor lunatic!) has done for himself but only
on what Nature has made of him? No, no, it is not by contempt for
the inferior that man will grow but by dissatisfaction with himself.
The net effect of Mr. Mencken’s writings, however, is to produce
self-satisfaction and a feeling of false superiority, and this
naturally enough makes for personal passivity.
As for the Mencken touch! It turns everything to horse sense (not to be
confused with the hard-won virtue of commonsense) and it is admirable
when it is applied to current cant, as this: “Law Enforcement becomes
the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can
hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying,
by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound
to yield it respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To
question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.”
But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with
master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say,
a clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology,
one that has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century
since the _Poetics_ was introduced into European thought, is the
Aristotelian conception of _katharsis_. Hear Mr. Mencken after the
sages and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment
affords _katharsis_ to modern societies. “_Katharsis_, so used, means
a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A
schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical
chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A
bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit
$10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday,
is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber to a
newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a
lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not
buy Liberty bonds. This again is _katharsis_.”[68] And this again is
cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is clodhopperism. Something like
this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers the diamond ideas of the
world; the process of degrading intellectual grandeur to horse sense
began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years ago.
By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do
not forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also
given to fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists.
Mr. Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_, he says, is “the most
eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly national volume of
poetry published in America since _Leaves of Grass_.” Conceivably, it
may be the third, but is it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments
are not uncommon when Mr. Mencken feels a praising mood come on.