Following the course of Sherman, we entered the professional literary
world and explored its criticism, coming finally to Mr. T. S. Eliot,
whose latest departure turns our eyes outwards again to the academic
world, to Professor Babbitt and humanism, or to the worlds of religion
or philosophy. It appears to me that our purely literary critics have
at one point or another all failed fundamentally: they are all leaders
by default only and not by essence. Either they are bound to move
towards the position of Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, who realises that “all
the bases upon which modern despair rests were laid joyously by people
who were quite sure that they were serving humanity, and all the chains
by which we are now bound so much more firmly to earth than we want
to be were forged amidst shouts of triumph,” or they are spying some
loophole which on inspection seems not to exist. But in either case,
and this is a hopeful sign, they are all converging toward a common
realisation that King Whirl must, if possible, be deposed. The goal is
seen: the reconstructed human spirit. But without adequate leadership
how may we start to approach it?
Well, it is easy to exaggerate the power of literary criticism. If
certain things in our culture have gone dead, criticism cannot revive
them. The essential “about-ness” of the critical activity limits it
to the guidance, stimulation, and judging of things in which there
is still some life. But assuming that a funeral ceremony such as Mr.
Krutch has conducted is still premature,--and it is premature so long
as any doubt exists of final decay,--we may then try to conceive of
what a genuine leader in critical thought would be like, and by this
ideal measure ourselves.
Objectivity in judgment would be one of the principal marks of the
leader. That requires a sufficient scale of values to stand outside
not only the frame of one’s century but outside the frames of all
centuries. It means the ascertainment of _primary_ laws in our field,
which may be possible as it has been possible in physics to say that a
few laws are true regardless of what frame of time and space one may
be in. Objectively considered, literature may be found to have been
in decline, not just for a century and a half or just for six hundred
years but almost from its classical sources and from the Scriptures of
ancient lands. Is this depressing? It is not depressing to contemplate
a magnificent mountain from its base.
On the contrary, a real view of the heights of Parnassus and Olympus
may inspire an uncommon elevation of aim--a second mark of the critical
leader; it seems to me unnecessary to argue that the critics we have
looked at do not realise how high man has ascended in the past or can
conceivably ascend now. Their ideas of human greatness are small.
Really, _are_ we practitioners of literary criticism distinguished by
any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No one can believe it.
Nor can I believe that we approximate the ideal critic in passion, in
a burning unquenchable indomitable love of perfect things. This is
the spirit that giveth life to standards that otherwise would seem
too skeletal, too non-human to be glamorous and magical in their
remoteness: this is the spirit that killeth despair and compromise.
Infused with it, our imagined critic becomes single-minded and proof
against deviations and resting-places.
Finally, he would, I conceive, be distinguished by an immense capacity
for relating deeds to words. His interest would not cease with a
beautiful formulation, but would continue until the formulation was
embodied in experience. Not words alone, not deeds alone, but words
_and_ actions would be his great desideratum.
Of whom am I thinking? It is dangerous in calling attention to concepts
or principles to cite examples until the concept or principle or, in
our case, ideal has been thoroughly understood, and I dare not hope
for that within the space of this paper. But with a caution not to
debate the achievements of him but only to study his framework, I take
the risk of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the build of a great
critic. We need in our national letters a critic of the stamp and
dimensions of Arnold.
V