Into the critical pond presided over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and
Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic values were in deliquescence, and
he was greeted with cheers when he began to revise his former estimates
and with eulogies when he died untimely. Much may be said for the
three critics I have taken as big frogs in this puddle: do not forget
the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the historical consciousness
and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable scavenger-work of Mr.
Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no fertility in the
viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the failure of Mr.
Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic ideas, the
failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image of
themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing
forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape
sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look
at their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s
masters.
Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his
style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said
of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably
showing that it is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising
great central ideas than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr.
Lewis Mumford, who is a pleasing writer on architecture, a literary
critic who seizes on the romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and
Whitman and repeats with spirit what his predecessor has said, a
thinker whose general terms are vague, and who is impractical because
of his credulity as to what modern letters can actually effect in
modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr. Brooks’s, is a
certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here! Without
a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding stress
on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff.
And the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an
æsthetic school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra
Pound and the T. S. Eliot who wrote _The Sacred Wood_. For after all
Mr. Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted
self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.
We have, it would seem, come to the end of a decade and a half of
exuberance. Enter mournfully Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch to confess the
disillusioned after-thoughts of the modern romanticist. It is a
supine admission he makes, without blushes be it added, when he
says in beginning his account of the modern temper or mood: “I have
been compelled to make references to many facts or supposed facts
in biology, psychology, and anthropology. Obviously no person is
qualified to assert them all with authority and obviously I am much
less qualified than many others, but when I state them I do so not as
facts, but simply as commonplaces which we have been taught to believe.
My subject is not any series of objective facts, but a state of mind,
and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not
for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which
I and my contemporaries have been led to hold ... if the tenets of
Freudianism or the hypotheses of the Darwinian theory are false, they
have at least been so accepted as to influence the modern temper quite
as unmistakably as if they were true ... these supposed facts have an
emotional significance. That is as far as it is necessary to go if
they are to be used as I use them, only in the effort to account for a
mood.”[69]
Shades of the heroes of the mind! Here is a critic who can entertain
the possibility that much of our contemporary “knowledge” is untrue,
and then merely wring his hands elegantly in the melancholy produced
by _assuming_ that it is true. In _The Modern Temper_ (1929) romantic
criticism in America culminates in weak despair.
As we should expect, there have been departures lately. There is Mr.
Walter Lippmann,[70] as able a cartographer of the Kingdom of Whirl as
Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent of civilisation is in
collapse because society has no common human aim, no hold, that is,
on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure. “The effect
of modernity, then,” he says in _A Preface to Morals_ (1929), “is to
specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all things
were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family,
the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the
individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art,
and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of
celebrating, of applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution
of the universe. In the modern world institutions are more or less
independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture
is really a collection of separate interests each sovereign within its
own realm.”[71] And the remedy he proposes, who can quarrel with it?
The “good life,” he says, is an _acquired_ disposition,--surely an
advance over the implication of the other critics we have mentioned
that somehow the “good life” would _naturally_ come to pass, if one
could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions and flow with one’s desires.
No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop “detachment, understanding, and
disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” We must enter
into a new asceticism--who would have anticipated five years ago such
a phrase from our new critics?--defined as “an effort to overcome
immaturity.”
This is excellent in that it perceives the problem and the goal of the
clear-insighted modern man, but does not Mr. Lippmann underestimate
the enormous psychological difficulties that block the passage from
unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling that his is a paper
solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for psycho-analysis
as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire. The aim of
psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann adopts
the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment”
in practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the
following of the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments
by beings to an environment progressively unfavourable mean the
progressive deterioration of a species: ultimately adjustment means
extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs can give us a lesson in the fallacy
of adjustment. It is farcical for this critic to patronise Pythagoras,
for instance, who “could not have known any tested method either of
equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything besides a
crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as long as we can
contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of surmounting
the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of adjusting
(merely reacting) to it.
Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others has articulated what will
probably be the fundamental position of American criticism in the
next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking and acting
chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can “learn
to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant but
eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution
of the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave
of Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within
the grave of a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned
to the all-important question of a method of realising Wholeness in
fact as well as in concept. You will find his method outlined at
the close of _The Re-discovery of America_ (1929). It is, I fear,
hastily constructed, and more than smacks of amateurishness and of
the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in where sages fear
to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a method for the
development of human potentialities into open discussion.[72]
The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer us “a way
out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper to
repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of
the formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus
far, the new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up
against them. In passing, I may say that I have before this dipped
my freelance pen to the humanists in salutations of great respect
mingled with a few misgivings, and I have not the least hesitation in
volunteering to defend them against the oblique attack of Mr. T. S.
Eliot.
This painstaking critic owes much to Professor Babbitt, far more than
does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much overlapping between his views
and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue between the new humanists
and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the question of Authority.
Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas and we shall see
the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish may compare
it with the new humanists’ position. In _The Sacred Wood_ (1921) he
began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of criticism
upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist.
Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for
certain decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the
essay on _Tradition and the Individual Talent_, in which the idea of
“creative imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious?
Matters became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr.
J. Middleton Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were
the instabilities and insufficiencies of private judgment and private
experience that a man should discipline himself in allegiance to some
outside Authority, and for the literary critic this meant loyalty to
the classical literary tradition. Something was here given away: the
strict corroboration by personal experiment of classical wisdom was
left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist
(with some romantic elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary
authority.
The next step for him, as a man too intelligent and too serious to
evade the problems of social and moral chaos, was to acknowledge that
criticism in our age could not be so limited as it was conceived to be
in _The Sacred Wood_. On the contrary, the critic he saw must become
philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here again he was
neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in politics and
in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter Anglo-Catholic.
Turn to his essays on style and order entitled _For Lancelot
Andrewes_. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but not,
not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The
distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere[73] analysed the
structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly
judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and
discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final
elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a
full-bodied prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen,
but the prose of a judge conscious of the weight of authority _behind_,
not in, him. Now observe that in _For Lancelot Andrewes_ Mr. Eliot,
like a learned judge and with an air of profundity, is continually
pointing to the tradition of a Church, set up as an authority external
to himself. He is at his best when he presents comparatively narrow
ideas, ideas about literary style for the most part, as in his
exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’ prose. At his most
disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place generality, as
when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with great and
permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr. Eliot
never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the
stuff itself of moral conflicts.
Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write about
religion: he points to _a_ Church and the intellectual riches of its
history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of course Christianity;
and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a Church.” And
again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”--but
we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter gives
us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what
Mr. Eliot calls “_Ersatz_-religion”: the two, spirit and letter,
must correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this
examination turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and
therefore necessarily inactive: he points out where Authority may be
found, but one may doubt from the evidence of his writing whether
Authority resides in him.