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An Age of Criticism
1900-1950

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE IN AMERICA

GENERAL EDITORS

WILLIAM VAN O'CONNOR, PH.D.

University of Minnesota

FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN, PH.D.

University of Wisconsin

Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900-1950
by ALAN s. DOWNER, of Princeton University

The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950

by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950
by LOUISE BOGAN, poet and critic

The Short Story in America, 1900-1950
by RAY B. WEST, JR., of the University of Iowa

An Age of Criticism, 1900-1950

by WILLIAM VAN O'CONNOR

American Non-Fiction, 1900-1950
by MAY BRODBECK, of the University of Minnesota
JAMES GRAY, of the University of Minnesota
WALTER METZGER, of Columbia University

An Age of Criticism

1900-1950

William Van O'Connor

University of Minnesota

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY

CHICAGO : 1952

Copyright 1952
HENRY REGNERY COMPANY

Chicago 4, Illinois

Manufactured in the United States of America

For
GERTRUDE AND DONALD

PREFACE

THE ARGUMENT or controlling idea in the fol-
lowing chapters is, I hope, clear. Perhaps only as a Platonic
essence or Idea is there such a thing as pure literary criti-
cism, but insofar as there is, it is concerned with the struc-
ture of the literary work, the way meaning and emotion
are discovered in their appropriately imagined and created
forms. Certain critics, like Henry James and Joel Spingarn,
manage to stay close to pure criticism, or at least to urge
upon other critics that this is their essential task, and a
number of the analytical critics associated with the move-
ment called the "new criticism" have striven to make this
their primary function. Unfortunately, the limits beyond
which the pure critic should not venture are not easily de-
fined. Literature is concerned with ideas (or what some
aestheticians call "life values") as well as with forms, and
they exert a pull away from the literary object toward phi-
losophy, or politics, or ethics, or social questions. Thus one
finds criticism that concentrates primarily on milieu or
ethics or politics, using the literary work largely as a step-
ping-off point into a discussion, for example, of the national
mind, or into a justification of, or pleading for, certain
ethical, political, or social views. In such instances the lit-
erary work is often praised or berated on the grounds of
its serving or not serving a cause, and it tends to disappear
as a literary object. But when such criticism manages to
stay close to the literary work itself, its value resides in
showing how factors out of a milieu or principles from an

Vlll PREFACE

ethical system quicken the literary work. The job of such
a literary history as this, therefore, is to describe the gen-
eral character of various critical movements, to observe as
far as possible the degree of success and failure engendered
by specific methods. Again, the individual critic does not
always fit easily into one category or another and some-
times he turns up in two or three different groups or move-
ments.

Another problem in writing such a history as this is that
American literature from the 1890'$ to about 1920, espe-
cially as it includes minor literary figures, is a kind of twi-
light period. There are no detailed or full-length studies
of the "genteel tradition" in its own terms, nor as it has
been interpreted by twentieth-century writers of liberal
persuasions. Nor are there detailed studies of the influence
of nineteenth-century European modernism on American
writers prior to World War I especially modernism in
its self-consciously sophisticated and cosmopolitan lines.
Again, almost no attention has been given to the influence
of such French critics as Hippolyte Taine and Ferdinand
Brunetiere. Therefore, anyone attempting to indicate the
way in which literary criticism has been affected by these
major movements and influences is in danger of falling into
errors that subsequent study of a more detailed kind will
uncover.

For the most part, the works of criticism I have not men-
tioned or discussed belong to two groups: scholarly or his-
torical studies, in which there is a considerable amount of
criticism, and analytical criticism or detailed studies of lit-
erary works. The bulk of the former prohibits such atten-
tion, and similarly, the number of analytical studies is so
great that only the major texts and the general issues could
be treated.

PREFACE IX

Among those who have helped me in the writing of this
study I am especially indebted to Frederick ]. Hoffman,
Joseph Kwiat, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Horn-
berger, Henry Nash Smith, and Robert Spiller. Two of
these sections, in somewhat different form, appeared in
the New Mexico Quarterly and in College English.

WILLIAM VAN O'CONNOR
Minneapolis

CONTENTS

I
II

in

IV

v

VI

VII

VIII

IX

PREFACE Vll

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 3

SOPHISTICATION AND IMPRESSIONISM 19

REALISM AND THE AEGIS OF SCIENCE 37

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 56

THE NEW AWARENESS OF AMERICA 73

THE NEW HUMANISM 02

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 1 1O

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 132

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 156

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 176

INDEX 177

THE GENTEEL TRADITION

T

JX-HE

term ''genteel tradition*' resists easy
and neat definition. Apparently coined by George Santa-
yana, it was taken up quickly by critics and novelists inter-
ested in loosening the American mores. In the period before
and after World War I, it became a term of opprobrium.
Sinclair Lewis, in his Nobel Prize speech in 1930, could use
William Dean Howells and the genteel tradition as the re-
actionary enemy over which the liberal and realistic writers
had won their now officially recognized victory. In his own
period, however, Howells had helped win a victory for real-
ism, had sponsored (although somewhat reluctantly) the ac-
ceptance of a novelist like Emile Zola, and had encouraged
young Stephen Crane. One begins to suspect that there are
two genteel traditions: the one that might exist for the dis-
interested historian and the one that was mythologized by

4 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Lewis and his contemporaries. This is not to say, of course,
that the contemporaries of Lewis were wholly imagining
their enemy in order to give an air of valorous achievement
to their own work. They did create a rather grotesque effigy
of the genteel writer and critic, but it was true that the
group they opposed, insofar as it was homogeneous, 1 did
not encourage the expression in literature of the bristling
vigor, the commercialization, the scheming and plodding
in American life, or of the realist and pragmatic forms of
idealism that developed out of this part of the American
mind. Many members of the group that Lewis was attack-
ing did look upon themselves as part of an aristocracy of
culture and intellect and even as a distinct social class. By
and large, the tradition they supported came out of New
England and had in it the idealism of Ralph Waldo Emer-
son as modified by the generations of the cultivated that
had followed him. Even though the group's assurance that
they were the representatives and arbiters of culture seems
supercilious and arbitrary to a later generation, it must
be recognized that they usually believed themselves to be
following some such doctrine as Emerson's on the "inner
light/' and that they looked upon themselves as eminently
moral. In fact, if there is one characteristic that can be said
to pervade all others, it is their moral sense. Aesthetic, in-
tellectual, economic, and political considerations are almost
invariably bathed in the light of ethical considerations. This
fact undoubtedly controls what a later generation of read-
ers likely to see as the peculiarly idealistic tone with which
they discuss all subjects, whether it be environmental fac-
tors in literature, scientific procedures in writing criticism,
or a determination to write realistically.

1 One of the difficulties in generalizing about the group is that it was not
of one mind about all of the characteristics one may justly label "genteel."

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 5

Such a tone is pervasive in almost all of the essays in an
anthology edited by William Morton Payne, American Lit-
erary Criticism. 2 It is evident, for example, in the selection
from The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892) by Ed-
mund Clarence Stedman, who prided himself on the scien-
tific foundations of his criticism:

Distinction ever hath been achieved through some form of
faith, and even the lesser poets have won their respective meas-
ures of success, other things being equal, in proportion to their
amount of trust in certain convictions as to their art, themselves
and the "use of it all." The serene forms of faith in deity, justice,
nationality, religion, human nature, which have characterized
men of the highest rank, are familiar to you. . . . Homer cheer-
fully recognizes the high gods as the inspirers and regulators of
all human action.

And the tone is evident in the selection from Criticism and
Fiction (1891) by William Dean Howells, a critic who be-
lieved that literature should tell the truth and whose dictum
was: "Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the
truthful treatment of material." Howells is writing about
Shakespeare:

To the heart again of serious youth uncontaminate and exigent
of ideal good, it must always be a grief that the great masters

2 (New York, Longmans, 1904.) This collection, which includes only the
work of critics born before 1850, affords an easy way of seeing the major
lines in late nineteenth-century criticism. Payne recalls that Edgar Allan
Poe, insofar as he had a single master, derived from Samuel Taylor Cole-
ridge; that the early Dial (1842-44) gave such critics as Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, and George Ripley a vehicle for "their idealism, their impatience of
tradition, their zeal for intellectual discovery, and their passion for political
reform"; that James Russell Lowell, despite his keen intellect and occasional
valuable insights, was without method or direction in his criticism; that
Sidney Lanier strove, but with only limited success, to give a scientific basis
to the study of verse and the novel; and that a critic like Hamilton Wright
Mabie "has been unwearying in exhorting us to keep in touch with our
Homer and Plato, with our Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe."

6 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

seem so often to have been willing to amuse the leisure and
vacancy of mean men, and leave their mission to the soul but
partially fulfilled. . . . Few consciences, at times, seem so en-
lightened as that of this personally unknown person, so with-
drawn into his work, and so lost to the intensest curiosity of
after time; at other times he seems merely Elizabethan in his
coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfect sympathy.

Around Howells when he was associated with The At-
lantic Monthly (1866-81) was a group of critics dedicated
to sponsoring realism in fiction. 3 It is interesting to observe
how frequently their nominal or intended acceptance of
realism threatens to, or actually does, become an adverse
criticism of it. Thus, Thomas Sergeant Perry says that the
melancholy of Turgenyev is "to be explained by some per-
sonal, immediate cause, [rather] than by his wilful con-
tempt for the great laws which have made literature the
consolation that it is." He then explains that "despair . . .
is not what readers want . . . ," but rather a way of escaping
"the harassing, sordid cares of the world." Literature should
show the inevitable progress that is the reward of human
struggle. Perry and some of his colleagues would have fic-
tion describe the everyday world, but they wished that only
optimistic and hopeful themes be used to interpret and,
therefore, to soften any harshness that the improperly tu-
tored mind might infer.

The aspirations and attitudes of the genteel writers, from
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Henry van Dyke, Lewis's
immediate opponent, differ with each individual; but com-
mon to almost all are a kind of melancholy optimism, a

3 There is a valuable survey of this group by Dorothy M. Forbis in a
University of Texas M.A. dissertation (1942), "The Concept of Realism in
the School of Howells." Members of the group included R. M. Keeler, Har-
riet W. Preston, Edwin P. Whipple, Thomas W. Higginson, Horace Scud-
der, H. T. Tuckerman, and Thomas Sergeant Perry.

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 7

wan elegance, and an unwillingness or sometimes a strong-
minded refusal to discuss the gross, the vulgar, the indec-
orous. The element of melancholy in the optimism prob-
ably derived from the deliberate and therefore frequently
unnatural cheerfulness. Again, the melancholy was inevi-
table in a literature that preferred not to involve itself with
the subject of ineradicable and pervasive evil, with the tragic
view. Van Dyke referred to poetry as "idealism set to music."
And in some of the poetry and criticism, at least, man's chief
aspiration seems to be to turn ethereal and insubstantial.

By and large, the criticism leveled against the genteel cri-
tics by a Marxist writer in the 1930'$ seems to be true. He
found that despite occasional promises to relate literature
to American environment, the genteel critics generally ig-
nored environmental factors and instead abstracted litera-
ture from life, associating it with genteel forms of idealism.
He might have added that when they treat environmental
forces, the harsher aspects seem not to obtain. He found that
they had a respect for tradition that precluded acceptance of
the new or experimental. (He might have added that their
respect for the cultural tradition of which they saw them-
selves as the custodians often tricked them into pompous
stylistic mannerisms and terribly solemn assertions about
human dignity.) He also found that the tradition implied
a provincialism that assumed American culture was British
and was transmitted to the rest of the country through the
good offices of New England. 4

4 Useful but diverse accounts of the genteel spirit are to be found in the
following: G. E. De Mille, Literary Criticism in America (New York, Long-
mans, 1931); Ludwig Lewisohn, Story of American Literature (New York,
Random House, 1939); F. I. Carpenter, "The Genteel Tradition: A Rein-
terpretation," New England Quarterly, XV (September 1942), 427-43; Wil-
lard Thorp, "Defenders of Ideality," Literary History of the United States,
ed. Robert Spiller, et al. (New York, Macmillan, 1948), pp. 809-26; Howard
Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N. Y., Cornell

8 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Because of this New England provincialism the genteel
tradition made its way easily in the schools and colleges*
Lowell, to whom George Woodberry, Hamilton Wright
Mabie, Charles Eliot Norton, and later the New Humanists
were indebted, had taught modern languages at Harvard.
Professor Fred Lewis Pattee once proposed that Barrett
Wendell's A Literary History of America (1900) be retitled
A Literary History of Harvard College, with Incidental
Glimpses of the Minor Writers of America. Similar in tone,
however, were such Eastern professors as William Peterfield
Trent, author of A History of American Literature, 1607-
1865 (1903) and Brander Matthews, author of innumerable
volumes. Similar, too, were many of the leading editors and
critics outside the academy: Bayard Taylor, Richard Stod-
dard, William Winter, at whom H. L. Mencken liked to
poke fun, and Richard Watson Gilder, a special target of
Vance Thompson and the aesthetes.

To account fully for the origins of and the reasons for
maintaining the attitudes common to the genteel critics
would be extremely difficult for the obvious reason that
human motives can be complex and are often obscure. In-
evitably behind some of the attitudes were prejudices or
biases of various sorts, such as for Anglo-Saxondom and the
culture of New England, for one's own social or economic
class, for one's own philosophical tenets or aesthetic prin-
ciples, or for a combination of them. William Charvat, a

Univ. Press, 1948); After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since
1910, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, Norton, 1937); Arthur Hobson
Quinn, "The Foundations of American Criticism," The Literature of the
American People (New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), pp. 384-423.

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 9

careful student of an early period in nineteenth-century
American criticism, 5 lists a number of attitudes or prin-
ciples which he found pervading critical literature, and
which the twentieth century was to label "genteel." In other
words, some of the genteel attitudes, among them the fol-
lowing, are of long standing:

Literature must not contain anything derogatory, implicitly or
explicitly, to religious ideals and moral standards.

Literature should be optimistic: it should not condone philo-
sophical pessimism or skepticism.

Such terms as "discipline," "restraint," and "idealism" oc-
cur commonly in the literature of the period.

In his account of the general pattern of early nineteenth-
century criticism, Charvat says that the critic almost in-
variably saw his primary function to be the protection of
the established social order. Literature was not to question
religious ideals or standards because individuals lack "the
judgement to decide between right and wrong" and reli-
gion is "the disciplinary force which makes social life pos-
sible." Literature was to foster optimism because gloom was
thought to be a selfish thing, "a product of too much intro-
version and a lack of proper social feeling." Much of the
criticism, as Charvat demonstrates, was written by men who
had a stake in keeping the social order stable, and it is quite
possible that behind the attitudes or principles of their criti-
cism were economic or social interests. To some extent such
interests undoubtedly influenced later critics like Gilder or
W. C. Brownell. But, as George Santayana has suggested,
other motives must have operated also. And, while we are

6 The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia,
Univ. of Pa. Press, 1936).

10 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

concerned with the motives behind principles, we should
observe that Santayana's own view, which is not a very sym-
pathetic one, comes out of a Spanish and Catholic tradition,
which prevented his assimilating or even accepting the New
England world in which he grew up. Primarily, Santayana
has looked for motives related to the religious inheritances
and the philosophical antecedents of the genteel tradition.

In "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,"
given as a lecture in 1911 and then incorporated into Winds
of Doctrine (1913), Santayana makes the point that America
at the end of the nineteenth century was a young country
with an old mentality. Industrially and socially it was a new
country, but in its emotions, literature, and philosophy it
was trying to live with the doctrines of its fathers. No phi-
losophy, he continues, is genuine that does not express the
deepest feelings of those who hold it. The wisdom of the
genteel tradition therefore seems "thin and verbal, not
aware of its full meaning and grounds." It had left a part
of the American mind floating "gently in the backwater,
while alongside, in invention and industry and social or-
ganization the other half of the mind was leaping down a
sort of Niagara Rapids."

In this essay as well as in The Genteel Tradition at Bay
(1931), he makes a good deal, not without a little malice,
of the religious and philosophical origins of the tradition.
One of the elements which colonial America had inherited
was the "agonized conscience" of Calvinism, out of which
had come three major assertions:

that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is beautiful that
sin should exist to be punished. The heart of Calvinism is there-
fore divided between its tragic concern at its own miserable con-
dition, and tragic exultation about the universe at large. . . .
Human nature, it feels, is totally depraved: to have the instincts

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 11

and motives that we necessarily have is a great scandal, and we
must suffer for it; but that scandal is requisite, since otherwise
the serious importance of being as we ought to be would not
have been vindicated.

But by the middle of the nineteenth century, he continues,
Americans had lost the sense that men and God are natural
enemies, that man is depraved. The American had become
convinced "that he always had been, and always will be,
victorious and blameless." The sense of propriety, for ex-
ample, remained, but its original justification had largely
disappeared. And a considerable part of the changed atti-
tude w&s owed to transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism proper, Santayana said, is not a sys-
tem of dogma, nor even a collection of facts; it is a method,
a way of looking at the world out of self-conscious eyes.
"Transcendentalism is systematic subjectivism." Emerson,
who practiced the method in its purity, did not insist on
his notions; he asked every morning, as it were, how the
world appeared. He watched the energy or spirit of nature
working in himself. In Nature, as their romantic impulse
compelled them to emphasize it, transcendentalists like Em-
erson found a kinship with their very own elements. In
nature they found solace and refreshment. And in their de-
sire to submerge or lose themselves in landscape, winds, or
clouds they contributed another element to the genteel tra-
dition:

Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for instance), are
the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but when a gen-
teel tradition forbids people to confess that they are unhappy,
serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by that;
and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts,
where human circumstances are lost sight of, and human prob-
lems dissolve into a purer medium.

12 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

By refusing to acknowledge evil or man's being caught in
the "destructive element," the transcendentalists were limit-
ing what one was free to acknowledge about his own nature.
This fact caused the genteel critics no end of difficulty in
having to avoid frank discussions of the human body, or,
more specifically, of sex.

Bliss Perry's Walt Whitman (1906), for example, has a
Janus-faced treatment of "Calamus" and the general cele-
bration of sex. Perry seems to have accepted Whitman's
bragging about his six illegitimate children as fact. "In one
sense, comment upon this phase of Whitman's life is as
superfluous as it is painful. Sins against chastity bring their
own punishment." But a page or so later these sins are ac-
cepted as the source of the poetry: "Its roots are deep down
in a young man's body and soul: a clean, sensuous body and
a soul untroubled as yet by the darker mysteries." Except
for his inability to come to terms with this question, Perry's
book is valuable, a fair-minded evaluation of Whitman's
work. In The American Mind (1912) he said that American
literature might not be great but it at least has the virtue of
being clean. After admitting that the critic is likely to tem-
porize about the badness of much of our writing by em-
phasizing certain non-literary values, he adds:

Like the men and women described in Locker-Lampson's verses,
Americans

. . . eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod
They go to church on Sunday;
And many are afraid of God
And more of Mrs. Grundy.

Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most desirable of literary
divinities, but the student of classical literature can easily think
of other divinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Roman
verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 13

George Edward Woodberry, the student of Lowell and
in turn the teacher of Joel Spingarn, protested the Ameri-
can rejection of the nude in sculpture and painting, "for-
feiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, but
to the prejudice, also, of human dignity, as it seems to me/'
In America in Literature (1903), The Torch (1905), and
Two Phases of Criticism (1914) he furnished clear exposi-
tions of available critical methods and surveyed a good deal
of the literature of his period. (His Collected Essays were
published in six volumes in 1921.) But Woodberry's good
will and emphasis on literature as the "treasury of man's
spirit" and the means whereby we may discover "eternal
reality" impelled him to move beyond discussion of given
literary works to vague discussions of the ideal. It is clear
also that he felt the genteel tradition, with which for the
most part he was allied, was being killed by American in-
difference to the life of idealism or the soul, as he under-
stood these terms.

Among the best of these critics was W. C. Brownell, who
apparently wanted to be an American Matthew Arnold.
After several years in France in an effort to assimilate a
greater knowledge of European culture and of French art
in particular, he wrote French Traits (i 889) and French Art
(1892). Like Arnold, he was an apostle of culture and stand-
ards and was concerned with culture in relation to de-
mocracy. His comments on American in comparison with
French culture strongly favor the French. The French gen-
uinely accepted the Revolution, he said, and as a people
held to the "reforming and revising instinct." Democracy
in France had become a network through which the social
instincts are free to flow. Society furnished the ideal, and
the individual aspired to rise above his baser inclinations.
Literature and art flourished because they served and were

14 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

served by the society. If Americans were prepared to follow
the implications of their belief in democracyto give them-
selves to the life of the mind they would improve not only
their art but their society.

Brownell's best-known books are Victorian Prose Masters
(1901) and American Prose Masters (1909). In these studies
he frequently employed Sainte-Beuve's method of searching
for the faculte maitresse, finding the key to John Ruskin,
for example, in the "predominance of the emotional sense
over the thinking power," or to Emerson in the presence
of "light" but the absence of "heat." In Criticism (1914),
Standards (1916), The Genius of Style (1924), and Demo-
cratic Distinction in America (1927), Brownell was con-
cerned with standards for cultural life in the United States.
"To an intelligence fully and acutely alive its own time
must, I think, be more interesting than any other," and he
said that literature is in direct dependence on the life of
the times that produced it. But Brownell also believed that
the principles inherent in the art of a democratic society
should be consonant with the highest possible cultural
achievements, by which he meant the ideals of the genteel
tradition. Therefore, he was not prepared to accept the nat-
uralism and impressionism of his own time.

Because of his insistence that personal temperament re-
strict and discipline itself (which accounts for his disap-
proval of the impressionists), Brownell is sometimes listed
among the New Humanists. This passage from Standards
(characteristic of his tendency to be pretentious) might sug-
gest such an allegiance:

There is running through currents and eddies of the movement
in France, which boil rather than flow, a clear stream of tem-
peramentally conservative criticism, that clarifies and purifies

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 15

and carries along to the ocean of general appreciation the sweet-
ness without the sediment of troubled waters through which it
passes, while at the same time it tranquilly transports its own
freight of principles and standards.

But Brownell dissociated himself from the humanists be-
cause he found Irving Babbitt's doctrine of self-restraint
too negative, and in Democratic Distinction in America he
made his reason explicit:

The age certainly has need of self-control, but self-control in
the sense of self-discipline to the end of self-direction must to us
wear a fairer face than the self-restraint that, though undoubt-
edly an incidental, is plainly not the driving force, of self-de-
velopment.

Some of the critics of the 1920*5 and 1930*5, especially
Ludwig Lewisohn, have treated Brander Matthews as the
personification of the genteel tradition in criticism, but he,
like Howells, belonged to two worlds; he could maintain
the manner and employ the tone of the genteel critic but
at the same time be aware, sometimes sympathetically, of
the new forms in literature. Part of the impression he cre-
ates is the result of his possessing only slight imaginative
strength. He could say, for example, that drama should
be "ingenious and clean, adroit and agreeable, neat and
shrewd/' And his interpretation of Henrik Ibsen in In-
quiries and Opinions (1907) seems weak and dated because
it is not related to the profound sense of the modern world
that Ibsen, whatever his exaggerations, possessed. Ibsen,
Matthews wrote, does not belong with Sophocles, Shakes-
peare, or Molire for this reason: "There are few of his
social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint
of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this

l6 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

is the reason why the most of them fail to attain the dignity
of true and lofty tragedy." He saw in Ibsen an able techni-
cian, but he was unprepared to see the hard substance, the
passion in lieu of sentiment, and the ignoring of the tra-
ditional heroic protagonist about which eighteen-year-old
James Joyce had been thinking and writing in 1900. Mat-
thews and many of his colleagues were unprepared to read
Ibsen sympathetically because their sensibilities had been
formed in the genteel tradition.

John Jay Chapman, whose sensibilities were also formed
in this tradition, was at least partially able to transcend it.
His literary criticism is almost an incidental part of his
work, concerned with politics, education, and religion, but
it is distinguished by vigor and perspicacity. In Memories
and Milestones (1915) he expressed a low opinion of Shaw,
finding him deficient in taste and without reverence; but,
however unfair he may have been to Shaw, there is nothing
genteel in his expression. "Ibsen reasoned thus: 'If you want
to give emotion to the average playgoer, you must take a
rusty blade from an old razor, attach it to a brick, and there-
with suddenly shave off one of the man's toes. That is art/
Shaw has the same rake and saw theory." In one of his let-
ters there is this comment on Lowell: "His prefaces some-
times very nice, in spirit- but his later prefaces are so ex-
pressiveOh my, so expressive of hems and haws and creased
literary trousers. I feel like running him through in the
belly and singing out Hulloo! old cockolorum." Perhaps
Chapman's best collection of papers is Emerson, and Other
Essays (1898), and the shrewdest of his comments is that in
which he finds Emerson "a faithful exponent of his own
and of the New England temperament, which distrusts and
dreads the emotions. ... If an inhabitant from another
planet should visit the earth he would receive, on the whole,

THE GENTEEL TRADITION 17

a truer notion of human life by attending an opera than
he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn
from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this,
after all, is probably the fact with which the education of
a stranger ought to begin." Chapman wrote about twenty-
five books before his death in 1933, but his ghostly roots pre-
vented his acceptance of the America known to his younger
contemporaries. In a Preface published in 1909 he said:

The spiritual life in New England has never been luxuriant. It
is one-sided, sad and inexpressive in many ways. But it has co-
herence, and this is what makes it valuable for the young Ameri-
can. Every young person in the United States ought to be sent
to Massachusetts for some part of his education.

Chapman found only a very small audience. His was cer-
tainly not a wasted career, but it does seem unmistakably
clear that his involvement in the genteel tradition caused
him to withdraw from the world around him and made
him seem merely a victim of exacerbated nerves, a crank
in rather than a critic of a new world.

in

Writers in the genteel tradition had divided experience
into two major spheres. On the one side was love, art, and
the ideal; on the other, sex, everyday experience, and the
forces of materialism. They were unwilling to acknowledge
that love and a frank view of sex were not incompatible;
that art expressed in appropriate form, language, or idiom
might arise from the everyday world; and that valuable
ideals could grow in a world dominated by science, busi-
ness, and industrialism. The genteel critics were writing

l8 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

out of a tradition that was evaporating, but they were also
actively opposed and sometimes ridiculed by critics who
prided themselves on being aware of the new European tra-
ditions and by critics who felt that the methods and infor-
mation furnished by science were applicable to the study
and the creation of literature.

SOPHISTICATION AND
IMPRESSIONISM

A

AMERICAN literature at the end of the
nineteenth century was not quite ready to assimilate or to
borrow intelligently from the decadent movement in Eng-
land and from the subjectivist and often esoteric movements
in France. Borrowings tended to have an artificial look and
to be self-conscious. The exotic line that runs from Lafcadio
Hearn to Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell pro-
duced mostly wax flowers. Imitations of Verlaine and others
by Richard Hovey and William Bliss Carman, for example,
seem, in retrospect, presentations through a glass transcen-
dentally. Yet, as the new century progressed, such borrow-
ings, from the symbolists especially, helped make possible
the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Al-
len Tate, and Hart Crane J The American criticism indebt-

2O AN AGE OF CRITICISM

ed to these subjectivist movements suffers from bohemian
posings and cosmopolitan airs, but some of it is sensitively
and intelligently impressionistic. Even the bohemian and
cosmopolitan criticism which indulged in its own kind of
stereotypes and cliches claimed to be highly personalized
and to evoke the character and quality of the original work
in a word, to be impressionistic, after the manner of Ana-
tole France and Walter Pater^/

Anatole France was the enemy of those who would im-
pose any system as the truth. Skeptical of all values, he be-
came dependent upon irony. Only after many centuries, he
said, will it be possible to have true sciences. The comple-
tion of the sciences is only in the mind of Auguste Comte,
the founder of the positivist line in modern philosophy. As
yet there is no science of biology, much less of sociology.
"Aesthetics," he wrote in La vie litteraire (1888-93), * s
based on nothing solid. It is a castle in the air. Some have
tried to base it upon ethics. But there is no such thing as
ethics." There are no acceptable systems, but fortunately,
as France would have it, the ironic mind enables us to live
with our illusions and prevents our being outrageously vic-
timized by them. (If the eighteenth century in its neoclassic
aesthetic and its rationalistic philosophy overemphasized
permanence, stability, and law, then the subjectivist move-
ments of the nineteenth century may be said to have gone
to extremes in emphasizing impermanence, instability, and
the absence of law. Impressionism obviously was a part of
this reaction.)|/The good critic is one who relates the "ad-
ventures of his soul among masterpieces."/ Beauty is an il-
lusion or a dream in which man finds it necessary to live.
France's aesthetic appealed strongly to American critics like
James Huneker and Lewis E. Gates. The cold, dignified
precision of Walter Pater's manner won respect, but the

IMPRESSIONISM 21

disintegrating irony of France won humble followers/Even
so, Pater furnished them a valuable and neat exposition of
the function of the impressionist critic. //

Studies in the History of the Renaissance is undoubtedly
the classic of impressionist criticism in English. The critic,
Pater wrote, should not concern himself with definitions.
The important thing is that he have "a certain kind of tem-
perament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence
of beautiful objects." Pater, profoundly aware of the world
as flux, wrote in the "Conclusion" that "to regard all things
and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has
more and more become the tendency of modern thought."
The more conservative elements of the Victorian society
overemphasized the solidity and permanence of "things and
principles of things," but Pater tended, in the "Conclusion"
at least, to overemphasize the "whirl of thought and feel-
ing." At first, he wrote, we have a sense of "sharp and im-
portunate reality" in the presence of objects and experi-
ences. But upon reflection these externalities dissolve, "each
object is loosed into a group of impressions color, odor,
texture in the mind of the observer." Language gives ob-
jects and principles a solidity and permanence which in
our consciousness become "jmpressions unstable, flickering,
inconsistent."! Impressionist criticism JxHijidL itsjnr onst.fr pt
center in "thj^jmpressionsjofjhe.mdividual in his isolation,
each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dreamjxt
a wocld." Ideas or systems which bring us to a stasis in which
abstract theory and rule supersede the qualities, the sub-
tle discriminations, even the ecstasy of the given moment
should, Pater concluded, have "no real claim on us."

Edgar Saltus, more genuinely impressionist in his fiction
than in his criticism, is perhaps the most egregious poseur
among the cosmopolite writers. He said that in literature

22 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

only three things count: "style, style polished, and style re-
polished." He was even capable of faking esoteric sources,
but when he chose he could write sensibly and with re-
straint. Saltus began his career with a modest biographical
and critical study, Balzac (1884), most notable for its asides
on realism in fiction. An era's realism in letters is simply
its sentiments and attitudes about "the obvious and true/'
Imitation or copying by lesser writers enervates the sense of
the real. The innovator, like Balzac, establishes a new way
of seeing, which in its turn will be copied. Saltus's The Phi-
losophy of Disenchantment (1885) is an account and ex-
tension of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and
The Anatomy of Negation (1886) is an account of anti-
theism, ranging from India, Greece, and Rome to nine-
teenth-century France. Each is, for Saltus, unpretentious,
and each is well written. The closing chapter of The Anat-
omy of Negation implies a need for an exquisite art in lieu
of belief, and evokes a sense of the ennui pervading the
poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire, and Leconte de Lisle.
"Morality in Fiction" in Love and Lore (1890) furnishes
one of our first attacks on the puritan spirit in American
literature. And in the same book he spoke of romanticism
being a corpse from which the warmth has not departed. In
1917 he published Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression. In
its twenty-six pages Saltus catches not merely Wilde as a
man but the sickly elegance of much fin de siecle literature,
including a great deal of his own. Like Wilde, with whom
he was acquainted, Saltus believed that the only important
question for the critic was to distinguish between good writ-
ing and bad.

Vance Thompson was also a mannered aesthete, the man
with a monocle. In the Preface to French Portraits (1899)
he said that for "many years, now, the dear Lord has pre-

IMPRESSIONISM 2$

served me from the sin of inutile reading/' The editorial in
the first issue (1895) of M'lle New York, which he edited,
stated that it was the ambition of the magazine to "disin-
tegrate some small portion of the public into its original
component parts the aristocracies of birth, wit, learning,
and art, and the joyously vulgar mob." With approval he
quotes a minor French decadent: "I wish to play with this
life that has been given me, in all its beauty, richness, lib-
erty, elegance; je suis un aristocrate." For himself, he adds:
"There are two races of men. And the one is beautiful,
luxurious, heroic, cruel, ravished by the splendid banality
of life; the other is gray, patient, drowsy, dutiful, the race
of pitiful men." The method of Thompson's criticism is also
given in the Preface: "In these appreciations of the writers
of young France I have not, I trust, laid undue stress upon
what they have done, slighting what they are. I should like
you to see across these pages Verlaine hobbling to his cafe
in the Bou' Mich', Mallarm jogging by in his donkey-cart,
Eckhoud fondling his rabbit, or, it may be, Signoret, im-
possibly young, promenading his pale soul in the autum-
nal alleys of Versailles." After writing French Portraits,
Thompson became a popular journalist, turning out be-
hind-the-scenes articles and finally writing uplift books.

Lewis Gates, a professor of English at Harvard and a sober
student of modern literatures/sought in Studies and Appre-
ciations (1900) to characterize and account for the public
favor in which impressionist criticism had recently found
itself. )He acknowledged Arnold and especially Pater as be-
ing in the impressionist tradition which insists upon "deli-
cacy of perception, mobility of mood, reverence for the
shade, and a sure instinct for the specific integrating phrase,
and for the image tinged with feeling." Yet no single critic,
he said, is responsible for the tradition; it is rather that

24 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

since the eighteenth century we have cultivated a sense of
the particularized, specific detail; in place of the typical sea-
sons of James Thomson and thegeneralization^of Addison
we have come with the romantics to value the fleeting mood
and to enjoy the unique experience of critical appreciation
(no one feels exactly the same way twice in the presence of
a work of art). {Impressionist criticism at hsjbest, hejcon-
tinues, is the record of a single temperament at a particular
moment in tKFpresence of literary-work capable of arous-
ing spiritual energies.jBut Gates warned in " Impression-
ism and Appreciation" that when the egoism of the reader
moves on a tangent from the work the resulting commen-
tary can hardly be called criticism/Impressionism too often
moves on a tangent. (Therefore, we need the "appreciative
critic,'* one who is not whimsical. The appreciative critic,
Gates says, takes into account the objective and permanent
nature of a work. And since an understanding of the his-
torical context is necessary if he is to know a work intimate-
ly, he seeks a detailed historical knowledge. Similarly, so
far as possible, he tries to recreate the consciousness of the
artist at the moment he evoked his images, "charged them
with spiritual power, and called into rhythmical order
sound-symbols to represent them henceforth for ever/' The
appreciative critic will learn what he can from aesthetics,
but he is well advised to avoid being caught in the meshes
of a priori theories. He will learn what he can of normal
or typical responses, but he will remain an individual and
rely on his own impressions./Knowing all he can about the
milieu and psychological origins of a work, the impres-
sionist and appreciative critic will neither judge nor dog-
matizehe will enjoy^His function is "to realize the mani-
fold charm the work of art has gathered into itself from all
sources, and to interpret this charm imaginatively to the

IMPRESSIONISM 25

men of his own day and generation." Gates, the professor of
English literature, pays his respects to the historical method,
the students of the biographical origins of a work, and "the
science of aesthetics"- but in the end he throws in his lot
with Anatole France. There is an "enchanting fickleness"
in literature as there is in life and in the "temperament that
confronts it."

Joseph Percival Pollard, like James Huneker, his col-
league on Town Topics, helped in the popularization and
acceptance of Continental literary movements. For an Amer-
ican edition (1905) of Oscar Wilde's Intentions he wrote
the Introduction in which he said: "Literature is an adver-
tisement of one's attitude toward life. It is the record of a
mood. It is the impress, writ in wax, of some mask we wore
at some moment." Pollard's critical accounts in Masks and
Minstrels of New Germany (1911) are little advertisements
for Nietzsche, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and others.^He con-
cludes with a brief confession of faith in impressionist criti-
cism: "Only as we ourselves have vividly felt this or that
sensation in life or the arts, can we pass such sensation onj!
fWhat this book has tried to convey is the personal impres-
sion of one who believes in only individual taste and appre-
ciationTyThere is little, however, that is really idiosyncratic
in Pollard. His are fairly commonplace judgments. For all
his enthusiasm he has little of the artiness, attitudinizing,
and pretentiousness that now make Vance Thompson's com-
parable volumes almost unreadable.

It is Huneker, more than any other critic, who has made
Americans aware of Wagner, Strauss, Rodin, Degas, Stend-

26 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

hal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Hauptmann, and Ib-
sen. He wrote tirelessly for newspapers and magazines: the
Sun, the Times, Scribner's, and Town Topics. Through
them he had his greatest influence. His books, Iconoclasts
(1905), Promenades of an Impressionist (1910), Ivory Apes
and Peacocks (1915), and the others did not sell well, even
though they were influential among those interested in the
currents and whirlpools of modernism. Huneker, a modest,
humble man, was also highly respected, not merely by his
American colleagues, but by Remy de Gourmont and Georg
Brandes.

It is easy to be unfair to Huneker, to lump him with those
eclectic critics who serve their time as public relations men
for avant-garde movements, then are overtaken by oblivion.
His manner and method may have derived from his desire
to serve primarily in publicizing the arts or from the refusal
of newspaper and magazine editors to encourage analytical
and sharp criticism. Huneker in manner was pleasant, en-
thusiastic; in method he was rhapsodic, anecdotic, and al-
lusive. Most often his essays are conversational he remem-
bers something he has heard about the man's student days;
this reminds him of something in the Imitation of Christ,
and how better isolate the characteristic genius of the work
than by suggesting how much it has in common with the
work of three other artists? This is a passage on Anatole
France:

Here, too, we recognize the amiable casuistry of Anatole Vol-
taire. And there is something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aure-
villy's piety of imagination with impiety of thought, in France's
pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom reversed; from his golden
mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.

Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life,
all feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric,

IMPRESSIONISM 27

France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of
life, occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the
blood of his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some
grim cavern beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the
blank spaces of theory and the ugly spots of reality. A student
of Kant in his denial of the objective, we can never picture him
as following Konigsberg's sage in his admiration of the starry
heavens and the moral law. Both are relative, would be the re-
port of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical about things tangi-
ble, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim the existence
of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the hal-
lucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of
surprising life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as
oblique as that of Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater,
his is "one of the happiest temperaments coming to an under-
standing with the most depressing of theories."

A slightly different sort of essay is the sensible and illumi-
nating "A Visit to Walt Whitman," a mixture of humorous
anecdote and observations about his own response to Leaves
of Grass. Whitman, Huneker said, had a great capacity for
recording the surface of things, for tactile images yet he
seldom managed a poetic synthesis. His celebration of sex
was good for his time, for the sexless world of Emerson, Poe,
and Hawthorne. "But women, as a rule, have not rallied to
his doctrines, instinctively feeling that he is indifferent to
them, notwithstanding the heated homage he pays to their
physical attractions." He was a great poseur and he was also
quite lovable. Huneker tries to be fair:

With all his genius in naming certain unmentionable matters,
I don't believe in the virility of these pieces, scintillating with
sexual images. They leave one cold despite their erotic vehe-
mence; the abuse of the vocative is riot persuasive, their raptures
are largely rhetorical. This exaltation, this ecstasy, seen at its
best in William Blake, is sexual ecstasy, but only when the mood

28 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

is married to the mot lumi&re is there authentic conflagration.
Then his "barbaric yawp is heard across the roofs of the world";
but in the underhumming harmonics of Calamus, where Walt
really loafs and invites his soul, we get the real man, not the
inflated humbuggery of These States, Camerados, or My Mes-
sages, which fills Leaves with their patriotic frounces. His phi-
losophy is fudge. It was an artistic misfortune for Walt that he
had a "mission," it is a worse one that his disciples endeavor to
ape him.

Within its limits, Huneker's chatty, allusive, and impres-
sionistic manner isjsucces&ful.

ArouncTH u neker l there formed an influential group of
critics: H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, Benjamin De
Casseres, Carl Van Vechten, Lawrence Gilman, and Paul
Rosenfeld. Most of them were interested in painting, drama,
music, and literature. They were eclectic, journalistic, ele-
gant, modern before all else, cosmopolitan, and impression-
istic. Mencken, Nathan, and Willard Huntington Wright
(later S. S. Van Dine) as contributors to and later editors
of Smart Set added bumptiousness and impudence. They
kept up a running attack on American provincialism. If a
subject had been untouchable, they delighted in sponsor-
ing hearty discussions of it.

H. L. Mencken became literary editor, with Nathan as
drama critic, of Smart Set in 1908. The two became editors
of it in 1914. Under them, Smart Set succeeded in pushing
over the internally weakened but seemingly still eminent
structure of gentility. The romantic primitivism of Jack
London, the somber realities of Theodore Dreiser and Ed
Howe, the radicalism of Upton Sinclair, and the seemingly

l There are interesting studies of the prose styles of a number of writers
in the Huneker tradition in Joseph Warren Beach's The Outlook /or Ameri-
can Prose (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1926).

IMPRESSIONISM 89

wicked ironies of James Branch Cabell were welcomed. In
19^3, Mencken and Nathan founded American Mercury.
Nathan resigned after one year, but Mencken continued
with it until 1933.

Through his editorials in American Mercury, his series
^.Prejudices, as well as through his other articles and books,
Mencken popularized such phrases as "Boobus America-
nus," "booboisie," "Bible Belt," "Sahara of the bozarts," and
"smuthound." Like Shaw, whose plays were the subject of
his first book (1905), Mencken found his chief delight in
attacking whatever was conventional or held sacred.

His second book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1908) gave Mencken a chance to introduce one of Hu-
neker's cultural heroes and to attack organized religion,
conventional morality, and democracy. Mencken reduced
Nietzsche's philosophy to eight propositions, the last being:
"That human beings of the ruling, efficient class should
reject all gods and religions and with them the morality at
the bottom of them and the ideas which grow out of them,
and restore to its ancient kingship that primal instinct which
enables every efficient individual to differentiate between
the things which are beneficial to him and the things which
are harmful." In "Puritanism as a Literary Force," included
in A Book of Prefaces (1917), he described the puritan force
as relentlessly "against the rise of that dionysian spirit, that
joyful acquiescence in life, that philosophy of the Ja-sager,
which offers to Puritanism as in times past, its chief and
perhaps only antagonism." Mencken's strength was in his
willingness to affirm native American voices with few or no
apologies for their artistic deficiencies, his willingness to
do battle with the representatives of propriety who would
impose their bigotries and repressions in the name of vir-
tue. But the individualism in Mencken that could attack

30 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

puritanism could ridicule economic reform as the sentimen-
tality implicit in democracy.

The crudeness in Mencken or his willingness to oversim-
plify made him an able pamphleteer. Edmund Wilson has
said that in the igso's he was "a sort of central bureau to
which the young looked for tips to guide them in the cul-
tural confusion." Mencken had a gusty self-assurance that
served the moment and gave him a style that those desiring
to be equally brash could not resist imitating. Wilson de-
scribed the style as "a blend of American colloquial speech
with a rakish literary English that sounded as if it had come
out of old plays of the period of Congreve and Wycherley;
and a tone that was humorous and brutal in the combative
Germanic manner."

Mencken's "Footnote on Criticism" (1921) exhibits his
tendency to be intellectually vulgar. The literary critic as
such, he said, is one who uses the work of art as an excuse
for writing an essay of his own like the nineteenth-century
reviewers who used a book given for review as occasion or
excuse for writing a long paper of their own. The critic sets
up "shop as a general merchant in general ideas, i.e., as an
artist working in the materials of life itself." The reviewer,
"hollow as a jug," retails the ideas of his superiors, the
artists. "Like writing poetry," reviewing is "chiefly a func-
tion of intellectual immaturity." Several years earlier in
"Criticism of Criticism of Criticism" (1918) he had called
the critic a catalytic agent. The untutored spectator has no
intelligible reaction to the work of art until the critic causes
it to live for him. The most feasible method, he had said, is
to be found in certain chapters of Huneker, wherein a "sen-
sitive and intelligent artist recreates the work of other ar-
tists." In one sense, however, Mencken belongs less with the
impressionist critics than with those, like Van Wyck Brooks

IMPRESSIONISM 31

and Carl Van Doren, who help to liberalize the American
mores. He is a social critic first and a literary critic only
incidentally.

George Jean Nathan, Mencken's alter ego, was the most
determinedly naughty of the cosmopolite critics. Except for
The American Credo (1920), which he did with Mencken,
The New American Credo (1927), which he did alone, and
the autobiographical Friends of Mine (1932), Nathan's
thirty-odd books are composed mostly of pieces about fash-
ions in the theater and his collected reviews. He has written
of the theater, he said in The World in Falseface (1923), "as
a man criticizes his own cocktails and his own God." He is
the gentleman ironist: "I do not take it seriously; nor on the
other hand do I take it too lightly, for one who takes noth-
ing very seriously takes nothing too lightly." The theater
for Nathan was "excellent diversion," occasion for a witty
review. A few of his witticisms have proved durable, most
notably the characterization of J. M. Barrie as "the triumph
of sugar over diabetes," and of Maeterlinck as "the Belgian
Belasco." Nathan has attacked academicism and prudery,
and he has helped "discover," or at least encourage the re-
ception given, Eugene O'Neill, Sean O'Casey, and the ear-
lier works of Paul Vincent Carroll and of William Saroyan.
It may be that the immaturity and crudity of most Ameri-
can plays has precluded any serious criticism from Nathan.
Yet his assertion that drama, "a thing of suggestion and
illusion," should not be scrutinized too closely can certainly
be read as an essentially frivolous statement. With Mencken,
he helped to make America self-conscious about artistic val-
ues, but in refusing to subordinate his personality to writing
about drama as an art he has presented himself as a sophisti-
cate and cosmopolite whose interests and opinions too often
are trivial.

32 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Carl Van Vechten, a lesser Huneker, has also written of
the seven arts. The aesthetic life in its dilettante aspects has
been his subject. He worked as hard as any of his fellows to
make the dream of an unending holiday flourish in postwar
America. Art was not selection and brooding upon experi-
ence until it came to aesthetic form and significance; it was
experience itself limited to decor, epigrams, and gilt ele-
gance. It was the wealthy Caribbean world of Joseph Her-
gesheimer's novels, the pastiche that was Elinor Wylie's
Augustan England, the Poictesme of Cabell's dream, and
the alcoholic and money-ridden set from which F. Scott
Fitzgerald was never quite able to free himself. Van Vechten
in his novels wrote the story of a decade in which man-
nerisms, eccentricities, cynicism, and eroticism were ex-
perimented with and investigated. In retrospect the gaiety
seems artificial and the cynicism forced. In 1930 he gave
up his novels and criticism, except his continued promotion
of Gertrude Stein, for photography. His literary criticism,
rather slight in bulk, was the counterpart of his fiction. Most
of it, now largely unreadable, appears in The Merry-Go-
Round (1918), and Excavations (1926). Still usable, both for
its commentary as well as its data, is " Edgar Saltus" in The
Merry-Go-Round. Van Vechten places Saltus in the tradi-
tion of Gustave Moreau: one finds in Saltus's works "the
same unicorns, the same fabulous monsters, the same virgins
on the rocks, the same exotic and undreamed of flora and
fauna, the same mystic paganism, the same exquisitely jew-
elled workmanship. One can find further analogies in the
Aubrey Beardsley of 'Under the Hill/ in the elaborate styl-
ized irony of Max Beerbohm." Van Vechten's study of Saltus
is written in the tapestry prose he admires in the work of
Saltus, but, as with most of the novels it celebrates, the old
luster is gone.

IMPRESSIONISM 3J

The sudden eminence of James Branch Cabell was a sign
of the times. The immediate occasion was the censorship
otjurgen in 1919, but almost inevitably he would have been
acclaimed as an American voice speaking in the accents of
French aestheticism. Cabell was overpraised because certain
readers were looking for the wit, the irony, and the sophis-
tication associated with writers like Anatole France. Ca-
bell's Beyond Life (1919) and Straws and Prayer-Books
(1924) express the vanity of human affairs and the need
to believe in romantic dreams. Man "hurtles into these vari-
ous roads from reality, precisely as a goaded sheep flees with-
out notice of what lies ahead."

Among the countless internecine animals that roamed earth,
puissant with claw and fang and sinew, an ape reft of his tail,
and grown rusty at climbing, was the most formidable, and in
the end would triumph. It was of course considered blasphe-
mous to inquire into the grounds for this belief, in view of its
patent desirability, for the race was already human. So the pro-
phetic portrait of man treading among cringing plesiosauri to
browbeat a frightened dinosaur was duly scratched upon the
cave's wall, and art began forthwith to accredit human beings
with every trait and destiny which they desiderated. . . .

This irony is hardly that of Anatole France, who could see
such a situation as the pursuing of dreams in more subtle
and complex ways. Cabell's assumption of the ironic man-
ner always seems a little forced. Cabell is more romanticist
than ironist. He states a partial truth and then rests on it:
"And romance tricks [man] but not to his harm. For, be
it remembered that man alone of animals plays the ape to
his dreams. . . ." It is about tomorrow that "romance is
talking, by means of parables. And all the while man plays
the ape to fairer and yet fairer dreams, and practice strength-
ens him at mimicry."

34 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

/Paul Rosenfeld was among the best of the impressionists/
Unfortunately, his inability in his later years to write ob-
jective, less evocative criticism apparently made his work
unacceptable to most editors, and his career in this respect
suggests the dissolution of Huneker's kind of criticism. The
center of a painter's or a poet's work was evident to him
and he could probe it for deficiencies or test its strength.
He was among the first of his generation to perceive the
strengths and weaknesses of Van Wyck Brooks. And he had
the great virtue of giving himself without excess to his en-
thusiasms. But Rosenfeld also tried to re-create in his prose
an approximation of the work, whether a painting or a
poem, he was criticizing. Marsden Hartley's "New Mexico"
has a "strange depraved topography. . . . strawberry-pink
mountains dotted by fuzzy poison green shrubs, recalling
breasts and wombs of clay; clouds like sky-sailing feather-
beds."

In order to re-create the work, Rosenfeld too frequently
extended words beyond their capacities and he dislocated
phrases. The critic's appreciation seems forced on us. It is
a little like Pater's insistence that the color, odor, texture
be experienced to the full by an observer who must enjoy
himself at all costs during his brief existence. Perhaps this
is why Port of New York (1924) and Men Seen (1925) seem
a little dated.

in

But impressionism in the hands of imaginative critics,
who seem more often than not to be poets, has made pos-
sible a criticism free from the rigors of fixed systems. The

IMPRESSIONISM 35

level of criticism in magazines like The Symposium, The
Dial, Poetry, and Hound and Horn in the days when Qn-
temjgorary criticjgn was trying to find itself frequently de-
pended on such critics^ Conrad Aiken's Scepticisms, Notes
on Contemporary Poetry (1919) exhibits a consistently high
level of impressionism as well as a knowledge of current
aesthetic and psychoanalytical theory. Marianne Moore, one
of the best critics in this tradition, has often caught the
quality of a work by judicious quotation as well as by little
asides that suggest the nature of the writer's perceptions.
Her criticism is most effective when she is examining writ-
ers like James or Stevens with whom she has close affinities.
Similarly, Louise Bogan has managed to write a highly
perceptive criticism without identifying herself with a
group or school. She is especially good at borrowing an in-
sight from or pointing up parallels with music or the other
arts, and she has a keen sense of milieu. For example, in
a few sentences she can create a sense of the world of 1904
which Joyce evoked in Ulysses: a feeling "of untoward
squalor and specialized glitter; a sad and ugly pathos and
an outmoded and nai've gaiety; a sense of the hidden mas-
siveness of institutions opposed to the extreme particular-
ization of individuals. . . . Colors are dark or muddied: mus-
tard brown and magenta. There is a pervasive smell of beer,
horses, and human sweat. It is a period without outlet."
/'These critics have the highly refined sensitivity which
makes perceptive criticism possible, and in the absence of
which formal rules quickly become rigid categories. Prob-
ably it is true that all worth-while criticism is in some sense
impressionistic, in the sense that the critic lends himself
to the work, trying to see it in its own terms, to sympathize
with it, and to give the reader some understanding of the

36 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

kind of excitement it can generatdjf But to be seen disinter-
estedly a work has also to be subjected to the kind of analy-
sis that is open to critics who are aware of ways in which the
given work is like or unlike those in the genre to which it
belongs and who, possessing a fairly complex knowledge of
critical theory, can discuss the structure of the given work.

REALISM AND THE AEGIS
OF SCIENCE

-s A CRITICAL term, * 'realism' ' is not
very useful. It does suggest the exclusion of a certain type
of subject matter, such as fantasy, Utopias, tales of Gothic
horror, and the like. In the latter part of the nineteenth
century it meant, more specifically, opposition to tales in
which * 'girls were shrinkingly modest and yet brave in emer-
gencies," as well as opposition to novels like Ben Hur and
Uncle Tom's Cabin. (Henry James said that American read-
ers of fiction had not made up their minds whether the truth
could be told, and Howells said that truth " unvarnished"
is "almost the rarest thing in an Anglo-Saxon book.") But
to say what realism is, is quite another matter. The realism
of Howells is not the realism of James or Hamlin Garland
or Stephen Crane. Common to all of them was the desire

38 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

to tell the truth, but each of them was likely to discover
reality in different forms and to search for his truth in di-
verse sources. The following passage from Howell's Criti-
cism and Fiction is his version of what the eyes of the honest
critic should see:

In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and
character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He can-
not look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing
unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a
fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry.
He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of
men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and
ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives.

In the passage are echoes from Emerson and the latter's rev-
erence for each object in the living world. Obviously Crane
would not have formulated his understanding of the con-
cept of realism in any such idealistic or genteel terms. The
truth about the complexity of the problem of realism was
put neatly by James in "The Art of Fiction": "Humanity
is immense, and reality has a myriad forms; the most one
can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odor
of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance how
your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair."
Some of James's contemporaries, however, believed that
by drawing upon the truths of science, or those which sci-
ence would eventually furnish, the artist could know in
advance how a literary work should be composed, how re-
ality could be caught and fixed. They were, of course, living
in a period in which for many science had become the reli-
gion of reason; and even for those who saw it in a different
light the prestige of scientific modes of thought was neces-
sarily high. One frequently finds critics trying to model
their own methodology on the methodology of science (or

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 39

what they think the methodology to be) or trying to estab-
lish as literary ideals the ideals of the scientist.

Surprisingly enough, one finds that even a man like How-
ells could be so awed on occasion by what he understood to
be scientific methodology that he could abjure his right to
make judgments about literary worth. Apparently, his de-
sire to be of his age, and therefore scientific, induced him
to make comments that contradict the position he takes
when expressing himself as the genteel idealist that at heart
he was. There is a contradiction, for instance, between his
emphasis on a genteel morality and his comments on the
function of scientific criticism. He was willing to have ex-
pressions of the "beast man" dropped from literature, "as
they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent peo-
ple." On the other hand, he sometimes wrote of literature
as being the inevitable product of milieu. The function of
the critic, he once said, was to report on what he found.
"There is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling
on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as
in the botanist grinding a plant underfoot because he does
not find it pretty/' It should be his concern "rather to iden-
tify the species and then explain how and where the speci-
men is imperfect and irregular." When he was not being so
fashionably scientific Howells could state his doubt that
formlessness, whatever its roots or causes, should be ac-
cepted as inevitable. "Something, it seems to me, may be
contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness
everything spills and wastes away. This is what I find the
fatal defect of our American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose
way is where artistic madness lies." But this conflict, how-
ever minor in Howells, is an important clue to the minds
of his critic contemporaries. The appeal for a realistic lit-
erature was frequently made on the ground that it was
scientific.

40 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

It

The battle waged, and finally won, over the excesses of
Emile Zola's naturalism the battle which helped make it
possible to write the truth rather than make-believewas
conducted largely on the grounds of its being scientific. The
translation of Nana 1 in 1880 had been called obscene, sor-
did, and nauseous. Magazines like The Literary World and
The Atlantic Monthly had scoffed at Zola's claim in Le
roman experimental (1881) that he was like the medical
scientist concerned with the sickness of man socially in
order to help restore him to health; the former said Zola's
interest "must be that of a man of science watching with
abhorrent fascination some hideous larva crawling in the
filth of a dung hill," and the latter assumed that any French
novelist claiming "to have purpose with a capital P" un-
doubtedly "intends to be particularly indecent." (The bat-
tle was won partly, of course, by the sympathies Zola aroused
through his support of Alfred Dreyfus. Whereas L'assom-
moir had been violently decried for its low life and moral
contagion, later books, such as La terre, L' argent, and La
debacle were read as painful accounts that were moral in
intention and ignored by respectable people at their peril.
Zola won new respect in 1898 with his famous letter ]' ac-
cuse, in Dreyfus's behalf. It is obvious, The Nation said,
that he is "a devoted champion of civil justice." When he
died in 1902, Zola, by and large, was treated with respect
by the literary commentators.) Zola and his followers made
their appeal for acceptance on the grounds that they were
scientific writers. One of the key statements in Le roman

l See A. J. Salvan, Zola aux Etats Unis (Providence, R. L, Brown Univ.
Press, 1943).

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 41

experimental, translated by Belle Sherman in 1893, is this:
"The experimental novelist is therefore the one who ac-
cepts the proven facts, who points out in man and in society
the mechanism of the phenomena over which science is mis-
tress, and who does not interpose his personal sentiments,
except in the phenomena whose determinism is not yet set-
tled. . . ." The tone of the whole essay is suggested by this:
"The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is trans-
formed by the advent of the physiological man/' In his pri-
vate notes Zola had written for his own guidance: "Study
men as simple elements and note the reactions," and: "What
matters most to me is to be purely naturalistic, purely physi-
ological. Instead of having principles (royalism, Catholi-
cism) I shall have laws (heredity, atavism)." Men and women
are subject to inexorable and indifferent laws, economic,
social, and biological. The American novelists who were or
seem to have been influenced by Zola stress his objectivity
and cool disinterestedness. Frank Norris, for example, said
"no one could be a writer until he could regard life and
people, and the world in general, from objective points of
view until he could remain detached, outside, maintain
the unswerving attitude of the observer." But most of them
managed, thanks to evolution as treated by Herbert Spen-
cer, to maintain a romantic optimism about the future of
mankind collectively despite the rank hopelessness of the
individual caught and crushed by the dramatic inexorable
forces. 2

2 For accounts of the somewhat contradictory theories of the naturalists,
see C. C. Walcutt, "The Naturalism of Vandover and the Brute," Forms of
Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minne-
sota Press, 1948); Robert Spiller, "Toward Naturalism in Fiction," Literary
History of the United States f pp. 1016-38; and, Malcolm Cowley, " 'Not
Men': A Natural History of American Naturalism," Kenyon Review, IX
(Summer 1947), 414-35* and his "Naturalism in American Literature," Evo-
lutionary Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons (New Haven, Yale Univ.
Press, 1950).

42 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

McTeague and Vandover and the Brute are indebted to
Zola for specific scenes as well as doctrine; the respect for
hereditary influences, the preoccupation with disease, espe-
cially nervous diseases, character rigorously determined by
environment, a liking for brutal and violent scenes, huge
primitive men and healthy, vigorous women, the careful
accumulation of detail to establish an air of actuality, and
so forth. "Terrible things must happen," Norris wrote in
The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), "to the char-
acters of the Naturalistic tale. . . . Everything is extraor-
dinary, imaginative, grotesque even, with a vague note of
terror quivering throughout like the vibration of an omi-
nous and low pitched diapason." But Norris knew that
naturalistic fiction was not a transcript of life; it was a pe-
culiar kind of adventure story. To write such stories, it
helped to be able to think of modern businessmen as de-
scendants of the aggressive Anglo-Saxons carrying out their
fighting instincts, not in war, but in trade. Occasionally
Norris could talk of the real struggles of the poor, of eco-
nomic inequality and social injustices, and he could write
of the need for the novelist to have a purpose. But Norris
was primarily concerned, it seems, to write good stories. The
aesthetic principles of the naturalistic school, as he chose to
interpret them, served him. Naturalism, Norris noted with
perceptiveness, "is a form of romanticism, not an inner cir-
cle of realism." Zola's laws, as Norris knew, were not ab-
solutes; they were factors, partial truths that the artist ex-
aggerated and stylized for his aesthetic purposes. By calling
them laws and appealing thereby to the prestige of science
the stories took on a greater air of reality.

Perhaps the critic who best summed up Zola's impor-
tance, and at the same time suggested why the search for
realism was in the air, was Harry Thurston Peck in "Emile

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 43

Zola," done for The Bookman in 1902 and later published
in Studies in Several Literatures (1909). Peck said that Zo-
la's assertions about the novelist writing as a scientist were
long since "whistled down the wind." No one cares, he
said, what theory or fancied theory helped make his novels
possible. Peck also gave a neat summary of realism, the
movement which had burst into the intensities, the efflores-
cence, called naturalism. Realism is a phenomenon as old
as Euripides among the Greeks and Petronius among the
Romans. It usually follows a period of romanticizing, as the
picaresque tales followed the chivalrous romances, or as
Henry Fielding followed the sentimentalities of Samuel
Richardson. The present movement, he pointed out, may
be seen in Stendhal or Rousseau, men who perceived the
power in the naked truth. "Realism, however, was not a
creation or a rediscovery by any one particular man. Its
germ was in the air. . . . Democracy in politics, rationalism
in theology, materialism in philosophy and realism in litera-
ture, are very closely linked together." Even in Chateau-
briand, the so-called father of romanticism, and in Victor
Hugo one finds strong evidences of the developments later
to be called realism and naturalism. The general drift of the
realistic movement begins with Stendhal, carries through
Balzac, the Goncourts, and "reaches absolute perfection
with Madame Bovary. . . . Realism, as such, can never go
beyond what Flaubert carefully wrought for us in this one
exquisitely-finished etching, of which every line is bitten
out as by an acid upon metal, and of which, in consequence,
the sombre memory can never die." Flaubert brings the
movement to its perfection. "After Flaubert came Zola
not to work further miracles in the name of Realism, but
to give Realism a new development and to call it Natural-
ism."

44 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Like Peck, many critics felt that the scientific movements
were related to attempts to write truthfully, realistically. In
1904, Brander Matthews in "Literature in the New Cen-
tury" listed some of the ways in which science had already
influenced the writing of literature. Ibsen found in "the
doctrine of heredity a modern analogy of the ancient Greek
idea of fate"; Ghosts has something of the inexorable in-
evitability found in the tragedy of Sophocles. The doctrine
of evolution has altered our theory of literary history; Bru-
netiere "has shown us most convincingly how the several
literary forms the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its ille-
gitimate descendant, the modern novel in prose riiay cross-
fertilize each other from time to time, and also how the
casual hybrids that result are ever struggling to revert to
their own species." Disinterestedness, an ideal of scientists,
makes for a "lofty curiosity" in the search for knowledge,
"helps the creative artist to strive for a more classic direct-
ness and simplicity" and to abhor the "freakish and ab-
normal." Respect for science means respect for "the reign
of law; it establishes the strength of the social bond, and
thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is
ever young and ever true, what is known as 'neo-romanti-
cism,' with its reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-
social, and therefore probably immoral."

Matthews warned, however, that although the study of
science could give the writer a sense of actuality it might
tempt him, already had tempted him in fact, "to dwell un-
duly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim
not at a rich portrayal of the actions of men and women, but
at an arid analysis of the mechanism of their impulses." Mat-
thews was also aware of what we have come to call "sci-
entism"; he quoted Thomas Huxley's warning that history

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 45

tells us it is the "customary fate of new truths to begin as
heresies, and to end as superstitions/ 1

Vida Scudder, writing as an orthodox Christian, had de-
voted a part of The Life of the Spirit in the Modern Eng-
lish Poets (1895) to asking whether the influence of science
is an unmixed good. If it is, she replies, it is hard to explain
why it is accompanied by influences "which tend insidi-
ously to destroy the life of poetry by robbing it of its char-
acteristic powers/' The love of fact and of minute observa-
tion restricts the imagination and encourages a confined
art. How else, she asks, explain the preoccupation with sor-
did facts and with a "dismal fatalism." But there were many
critics, unlike Vida Scudder, who had the utmost faith in
the powers of science to unlock the secrets of art and to im-
prove its very nature.

With more critics than not, the appeal to science meant
that reality could be seen, understood, and stated in literary
and critical terms. We find that the concept of evolution
was to unlock the secrets of literary history; that a knowl-
edge of scientific laws would eventually enable the novelist
to control his plot as he would a reaction in chemistry; that
to know the factors operating in a milieu was to know the
character of the literary work produced in it; and that the
acceptance of a scientific milieu meant the end of romantic
make-believe and the writing of a literature in which ob-
jectivity, a cool disinterestedness, and an understanding of
scientific laws would make it possible to tell the truth.

in

Although no one has yet published a full-scale study of
the influence of Hippolyte Taine on American literature,

46 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

both fiction 3 and criticism, the frequency with which his
name is mentioned and his works referred to in critical
studies 4 suggests that the influence was broad and deep. At
least five Americans translated one or another of his works,
and one of them, John Durand, translated several.

William Morton Payne, as already suggested, held Taine
in great respect. He had republished in Little Leaders
(1895) the editorial article in which he had commemorated
Taine as a brilliant exemplar of the "scientific method in
historical criticism." Payne admits that many observers had
pointed to limitations in Taine's method. Even so, the
"tendency of modern criticism is unquestionably towards a
scientific method; in history and philosophy it has already
reached such a basis; that in art and literature it will eventu-
ally come to such a basis we may hardly doubt." A scientific
method "must show itself productive of similar results when
employed by many different observers, and it must fulfill
the supreme test of enabling us to forecast the future with
certainty." Literature depends, according to Taine, on the
race, moment, and milieu that produced it, and is, there-
fore, rigorously determined. Virtue and vice, like vitriol
and sugar, he had said, are the products of material causes.

Anyone who attempts to study Taine's influence will un-
doubtedly have a difficult job separating the strands of his
influence from those deriving from earlier social critics.
That literature cannot be wholly understood by a reader
who knows little or nothing of the milieu in which it was

3 Hamlin Garland, for example, acknowledged how important to him
Taine's History of English Literature had been, and Edward Eggleston said
Taine's History of Art in the Netherlands led him to employ local manners
and local speech in his fiction.

4 In their An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criti-
cism (1899), C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott said: "The brilliancy of Taine's
style and the glib simplicity of his system, have made his theories better
known in this country than those of any other foreign writer."

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 47

written was implicit in J. C. Herder's Ideen (1784-91); also,
Mme de Stael in On Literature Considered in Relation with
Social Institutions (1800) had claimed that romanticism
and Protestantism go together because both exalt the in-
dividual, whereas classicism and Catholicism go together
because both respect formal discipline and exalt tradition.
But Taine enlarged the conceptions of Herder and Mme de
Stael, codified them, and made them explicit in his formula.
The formula, modified or qualified, has been widely influ-
ential. Tairie belonged also to a world that prided itself on
its scientific realism, its positivism. It had an awesome re-
spect for the powers of environment and heredity. Zola, fol-
lowing Taine, had attempted to find a scientific way to write
novels.

Subsequent criticism and scholarship have tended to re-
duce Taine's triad to milieu, but under that to include
social, political, and climatic environment as well as na-
tionalism, regionalism, and traditionalism. Even biographi-
cal studies in which an author is investigated in psycho-
logical terms tend to be subsumed under milieu studies.
Taine's shadow hovers in the background. How much he
contributed to the Zeitgeist and how much he was himself
a product of it seems difficult to decide. A simpler matter
is to restate what some of the critics consciously borrowed,
accepted, or rejected after reading his work.

Sainte-Beuve was among the first to state the general criti-
cism that has been directed against Taine's formula: "After
every allowance is made for general and particular elements
and circumstances, there remains place and space enough
around men of talent to give them every freedom of moving
and turning." Interestingly enough, we have in some detail
Henry James's reaction to Taine. He reviewed H. Van
Laun's translation of History of English Literature (pub-

48 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

lished 1864; translated 1871) for The Atlantic Monthly.
James appreciated the "massive work" but he was not un-
aware of its limitations. "[Taine's] aim/' James said, "has
been to establish the psychology of the people. ... It is a
picture of the English intellect, with literary examples and
allusions in evidence. ... Its purpose is to discover in the
strongest features of the strongest works the temper of the
race and time, which involves a considerable neglect not
only of works but of features." In an aside, James observes
that Taine's triad has "lately been reiterated to satiety."
But the will to method, James implies, is an invitation to
oversimplifications. "The truth for M. Taine lies stored
up, as one might say, in great lumps and blocks, to be re-
leased and detached by a few lively hammer blows; while
for Sainte-Beuve it was a diffused and imponderable es-
sence, as vague as carbon in the air which nourishes vegeta-
tion, and, like it, to be disengaged by patient chemistry . . .
and we cannot but think his frank provisional empiricism
more truly scientific than M. Taine's premature philos-
ophy. One may enjoy many incidental judgments if one
neglects to hold Taine to his premises. There is a constantly
visible hiatus between his formula and his application of
it." Taine, as James implied, had an inordinate haste to
reach conclusions.

Some American readers of Taine were less critical than
James. Hamilton Wright Mabie made proper acknowledg-
ment in his Short Studies in Literature (1893) to the critical
genius of Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, and Sainte-Beuve
before making his bow to Taine. His chapters on race, sur-
roundings, and time, despite their genteel tone, are further
evidences of his acceptance of Taine as a master critic. Lewis
E. Gates, in whose class at Harvard the young Frank Morris
wrote Vandover and the Brute, published an article in The

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 49

Nation the year Taine died in which he called the History
"a magnificent achievement and a work of the greatest pos-
sible significance/' Gates was primarily an impressionist,
but in his article, which he republished in Studies and Ap-
preciations (1900), he said that Taine ''stands as the one
great representative of scientific method in the study of lit-
erature/' Similarly, in the Introduction written for the 1900
edition of the History, J. Scott Clark said that scholars owed
a great deal to Taine. Hitherto they had spent their time
writing vague generalities about a writer, but now, thanks
to Taine, "the movement toward a true scientific method is
already begun." Fred Lewis Pattee's A History of American
Literature (1896) had, according to the Introduction, at
least an avowed intention of following Taine's method. The
actual debt to Taine seems slight. Bliss Perry's The Ameri-
can Mind, published a number of years later, is profoundly
indebted to Taine's method. In "Race, Nation and Book,"
the opening chapter, Perry says that whatever racial homo-
geneity develops or has developed will be an amalgam of
all our immigrant peoples and their multiple traditions;
each work will have a regional or local as well as a national
character; certain writers will have European models, others
will write out of their feeling about the political aspects of
the American mores; and some will appear almost to have
escaped the time spirit. These possibilities should be kept
in mind by anyone looking for the representative character
of American books. Perry himself concludes that the "most
characteristic American writing" is a "citizen literature," 5
the "Federalist, and Garrison's editorials and Grant's Mem-
oirs." It is not the "self-conscious literary performances of

5 In The Atlantic Monthly for May 1901, J. D. Logan had found Ameri-
can prose part of a "citizen literature," the chief characteristic of which is
vigor and "manliness."

50 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

a Poe or a Hawthorne." Perry has chapters on American
idealism and individualism and fellowship. Perry's obser-
vations, despite the genteel tone which tends, incidentally,
to belie his thesis, are useful in the way a sociologist's or cul-
tural historian's observations would be useful. That his
thesis and method are not adequate to his subject, literary
criticism, becomes evident when he is forced to treat the
work of Poe or Hawthorne as "performances." Perry's book
augurs Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in Ameri-
can Thought. The study of literature is the study of milieu.
In Perry's thesis, citizen literature is both the more admir-
able and the more characteristic part of the milieu. The
status of the work as literature is largely irrelevant.

There were, of course, a few voices like James's raised in
warning against any too wholehearted acceptance or too
narrow application of Taine's method, but almost always
his critics acknowledged that his had been a major contri-
bution to modern criticism. In The Masters of Modern
French Criticism (1912), Irving Babbitt said that Taine
possessed a great capacity for generalizing but added that
Taine usually pushed his generalizations too far. Also, ac-
cording to Babbitt, there was little evidence in Taine's criti-
cism of any very deep spiritual or aesthetic insight. Brown-
ell's Criticism (1914) furnished perhaps a fairer view of
Taine's virtues and limitations. Brownell said that, fol-
lowing Taine, it was impossible to see a purely belletris-
tic approach to literature as other than antiquated. But
Brownell was aware of two tendencies that inhered in
Taine's method:

It tends generally to impose its historical theory on the literary
and esthetic facts, to discern their historical rather than their
essential character; and, as inelastically applied, at all events, it

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 5!

tends specifically to accept its "documents" as final rather than
as the very subjects of its concern.

Taine's method of inferring characteristics of a milieu as
they are evident in a piece of literature and of explaining
the nature of the literature in terms of what it takes from
the milieu is now a commonly accepted practice in the
study of literature. Even when unacknowledged or forgot-
ten, the influence of Taine has been very great. The in-
fluence of Brunetiere, on the other hand, was for the most
part only temporary, a part of the fascination caused by
the concept of evolution.

IV

The doctrine of evolution, wrote William Morton Payne,
in " American Literary Criticism and the Doctrine of Evo-
lution," 6 is the master key to the secrets of nature and hu-
man life. Evolution has given us a new geology, a new an-
thropology, a new sociology, a new psychology, a new sense
of brotherhood, and other boons. Has it, Payne asks, given
us a new literary criticism? Yes, it has given us a scientific
criticism to replace classical or judicial criticism (Boileau)
and romantic criticism which exhibits the character of the
work being discussed (Sainte-Beuve). Scientific criticism,
like other intellectual disciplines in the new era, seeks to
understand by asking how the phenomenon, the literary
work, came about: the work is studied in its antecedents,
the conditions under which the artist developed, the opin-
ions current at the time, the psychological and physical pe-
culiarities of the writer, and so forth. Taine and Brunetiere
best exemplify such criticism. Taine, a pre-Darwinian, was

6 International Monthly, II (July 1900), 26-46 and 127-53.

52 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

scientific in that he studied literature as a product of race
and environment, but it remained for Brunetire to add
evolution to the formula, to make it "scientific in the most
modern sense."

Brunetire (who had visited the United States in 1897)
had written the Preface for an English translation of Man-
uel de I'histoire de la litterature in which he tried to sum-
marize the virtues in his new method. Payne quotes the
following passage with little or no realization that Brune-
tire was far too willing to let analogy run riot:

A given variety of literature, the English drama .of the six-
teenth century, or the French comedy of the seventeenth cen-
tury, or the English novel of the eighteenth century is in process
of development slowly organizing itself under the double influ-
ence of the interior and exterior environment. . . . Suddenly,
and without its being possible to give the reason, a Shakespeare,
a Moliere, or a Richardson appears, and forthwith not only is
the variety modified, but new species have come into being:
psychological drama, the comedy of character, the novel of man-
ners. ... It is in vain that the older species attempt to strug-
gle; their fate is sealed in advance. The successors of Richard-
son, Moliere, and Shakespeare copy these unattainable models
until, their fecundity being exhausted and by their fecundity
I mean their aptitude for struggling with kindred and rival spe-
ciesthe imitation is changed into a routine which becomes a
source of weakness, impoverishment, and death for the species.
I shall not easily be persuaded that this manner of considering
the history of literature or art is calculated to detract from the
originality of great artists or great writers. . . . Other advantages
could be enumerated, but this is the principal: the combination
or conciliation of "hero-worship," as understood by Emerson or
Carlyle, with the doctrine of slowly operating influences and the
action of contemporary circumstances.

Awed by the concept of biological evolution, Brunettere,
and Payne with him, made far too much of this thesis and

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 53

neglected to consider many of the ways in which analogies
from biological evolution do not work in discussion of liter-
ary history: certain literary works forgotten or dead for gen-
erations or centuries may suddenly reproduce. So-called
"hybrid" forms like the novel or tragicomedy do reproduce
their kind. And neither of these hybrids has shown any
tendency to revert to either of its parent species. Further,
no one can say whether Pope or Gray or Shakespeare is more
characteristic of the English as a racial type, and even if
one could, there is no accompanying formula for judging
literary worth. Payne was an egregious voice of the new age,
willing to see final and absolute answers in the latest forms
of knowledge, but he was hardly alone in his enthusiasm.

Aristotle, Horace, and most of the Renaissance critics had
said that the "astonishing" and the "marvellous" are neces-
sary attributes of literature, but Hjalmar Boyesen, study-
ing the evolution of the German novel, Essays on German
Literature (1892), was prepared in the name of the spirit
of science to give up any such nonsense. "Fortunately, the
beneficent scientific movement of recent years has revealed
and is revealing to a constantly increasing number of men
the true logic of existence, and teaching them to order their
lives in accordance with certain ascertainable laws which
will govern them either with or without their consent."
What these laws are, Boyesen does not say. He does sug-
gest, however, that the acceptance of the scientific spirit
leads one to prefer the normal to the unusual. Those who
rid themselves of their unscientific feelings will undoubt-
edly "prefer Thackeray to Dickens, and perhaps Turgenieff
to both." They could not be induced to read detective stor-
ies (of the "astonishing" variety) "and they have at heart
more respect even for Zola than for some of his sentimental
confreres." The German novel, he says, has evolved, pro-

54 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

gressed from a concern with the miraculous to the probable
and normal. The novelist of today puts this question re-
garding the incidents of his plot: "Are they likely to hap-
pen?" The novelist of the future, however, will be satisfied
with nothing less than assurance that "his premises given
nothing else could have happened." 7

If Boyesen could allow his faith in the ultimate powers
of science to suggest an inevitable and rigorous determi-
nism, he could, on the other hand, see that the novel of the
future should more than likely require the complexity of
form necessary to refract and evoke a sense of the complexi-
ties of society:

Evolution, according to one of the several definitions presented
by Herbert Spencer, is a development from the homogeneous to
the heterogeneous, and if the novel is to keep pace with life, it
must necessarily be subject to the same development; it must, in
its highest form, convey an impression of the whole complex
machinery of the modern state and society, and, by implication
at least, make clear the influences and surroundings which fash-
ioned the hero's character and thus determined his career. To
explain all these things in explicit language would, of course,
require an encyclopedia, but there are yet other ways of making
them present to the reader's consciousness. Thus in Thackeray's
"The Newcombes," "Pendennis," and "Vanity Fair," we seem
to hear the rush and roar of the huge city in which the scene is
laid. The vigorous blood of the nineteenth century throbs and
pulsates through every scene and chapter, and we have a sub-

7 Boyesen, of course, was not alone in his narrow determinism. Theodore
Dreiser, as he recalls in A Book About Myself, discovered very early in the
i8go's Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy (First Principles). Spencer,
Dreiser wrote, "quite blew me, intellectually, to bits." After such knowledge
he could believe only this: "Of one's ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows
and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions, some-
thing for which for some inexplicable but unimportant reason responded
to and resulted from the hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. Man was a
mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one
at that."

REALISM AND AEGIS OF SCIENCE 55

consciousness of the noisy metropolitan life even in the quietest
domestic episodes.

In the latter part of the quotation Boyesen is saying pretty
much what James said in "The Art of Fiction": that one
knows the whole pattern from the suggestive detail, but it
is interesting that Boyesen introduces the name of Herbert
Spencer as authority for part of his statement.

v

Advocates of the spirit of realism found themselves look-
ing into the relationship between realism and the life of
the common man and therefore of democracy and socialism.
Perhaps the realism of a critic like Howells is best explored
in such terms. It is nonetheless true that many of the advo-
cates of realism in criticism, as well as in fiction, frequently
made their appeals in the name of science. More specifically,
they made their appeals through such terms and concepts
as environment, heredity, determinism, evolution, and ob-
jectivity. Sometimes the appeals are to analogies that are
irrelevant to literary considerations. When not employed
irrelevantly or reductively, however, a number of the con-
cepts introduced by scientific-minded critics make for use-
ful insights, and they also give one a sense of dealing with
reality as it appears to the twentieth-century mind.

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM

.HILOSOPHERS, moralists, and literary cri-
tics have held heated arguments over the opposition be-
tween beauty of form and the truth of philosophical prin-
ciple and moral law. The quarrel is ancient and apparently
continuous. It is in Plato, Boethius, Boccaccio, Sidney, Mil-
ton, Shelley, Arnold, Tolstoy, Wilde, James, Croce, and
Babbitt. In recent years, however, critics have generally
avoided the worst extremes.

Traditionally, at least after Horace, the key terms seem
to have been "utile" and "dulce." The terms are misleading
because they suggest the sweetening or the making palata-
ble of a useful subject. "Form" is preferable to "dulce" if
it suggests, as it should, the discovering and evoking of mul-
tiple meanings and significances in a subject matter. Utile
and dulce invite the assumption that a subject is somehow
actual, achieved, or complete to begin with and requires

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 57

merely a little reorganization and an entertaining or beau-
tiful style to become literature. The terms do not suggest
the process whereby the writer creates his subject.

Utile leads to stressing moralistic, didactic, or utilitarian
purposes as the center of criticism. Dulce, as the Vart pour
I' art theorists exemplify, leads to stressing the enjoyment
and inutility of art. The Victorian world for the most part
accepted these extremes and took sides. H. B. Fuller could
have one of his characters say to a young artist: "Some of
your work is not without traces of style; and I suppose style
is what you are after. But meat for me." And Hamlin Gar-
land insisted that "truth [is] a higher quality than beauty."
James McNeill Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Ene-
mies (1890) was an important document in the quarrel,
deliberately baiting those who found art moral and use-
ful. And George Santayana in his influential The Sense
of Beauty (1896) said, "beauty is an ultimate good. . . .
Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a
pleasure. These two circumstances sufficiently separate the
sphere of esthetics from that of ethics." Santayana was right
in emphasizing that literature is an art of expression, but
an investigation of literary art in terms of organic form or
expressive form would have precluded the separation of
aesthetics and ethics.

Twentieth-century criticism in America inherits the prin-
ciple of organic form from Coleridge and his American dis-
ciple Poe (from Poe's theory rather than his practice). As a
matter of fact, it can be found in a number of places. F. O.
Matthiessen in American Renaissance (1941) finds it, in
similar terms, in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman:

In developing his proposition that "it is not metres, but a metre-
making argument that makes a poem," Emerson held that the

58 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

essential thought from which a poem rises must be "so passion-
ate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has
an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."
Thoreau said in the Week: "As naturally as the oak bears the
acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem . . . since his
song is a vital function like breathing, and an integral result
like weight." . . . Thoreau spoke of a poem as a "natural fruit,"
as "one undivided, unimpeded expression fallen ripe into litera-
ture," a sentence that found extension in the first preface to
Leaves of Grass: "The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems
show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as
unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take
shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges, and
melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form."

The term "organic form'' is useful, but the analogy with
natural growth is undoubtedly inexact, because it neglects
the conscious, critical element in composition and stresses
or overemphasizes the unconscious, romantic side. Further-
more, neither Emerson, Thoreau, nor Whitman discusses
the way in which form helps to discover and evaluate sub-
ject matter. Henry James, on the other hand, did furnish
such discussion.

Perhaps Henry James, more clearly than any of his Vic-
torian contemporaries, understood the issues criticism was
facing. His own curiosity, intelligence, and education made
this understanding possible. As early as the i86o's he was
writing reviews for The North American Review, The Na-
tion, and other journals; he was examining the assumptions
of the Victorian novelists and beginning to search out the
principles of the art of fiction. After reading George Eliot
and Balzac, for example, he considered some of the prob-
lems of morality in fiction and some of the meanings of
realism. Living in France, he became acquainted with
Turgenyev, Flaubert, and Daudet; he learned the history

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 59

of, and was witnessing contemporary attempts to merge,
naturalistic and symbolist theories of fiction. A part of his
education in these matters is recorded in French Poets and
Novelists (1878) and Partial Portraits (1888). In Hawthorne
(1879) he had considered the novelist's relationship to the
soil, manners, and traditions of his own country. Through
his friendship with and admiration for Robert Louis
Stevenson and Joseph Conrad he could sympathize with at
least two kinds of romance denied him by his own experi-
ences and subject matter.

James was able to rise above the conflicting schools to
consider the elements of truth, or the partial truths, in the
cults of I' art pour l'art } to consider the elements of the real,
of documentation, and of scientific and moral determinism.
James did not accept any of the easy formulations. In a
characteristic and quite moving passage he defines the cri-
tic's function:

To lend himself, to project himself, to feel and feel till he un-
derstands, and to understand so well that he can say, and to have
perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing
as the air, to be infinitely curious and incorrigibly patient, and
yet plastic and inflammable and determinable, patient, stoop-
ing to conquer and yet serving to direct these are for an active
mind, chances to add the idea of independent beauty to the
conception of success. Just in proportion as he is sentient and
restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and
penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

By centering the act of criticism in the individual work
and bringing to it not merely sympathy but general knowl-
edge and a trained sensibility, James implied that opposing
the real and the true or the beautiful and the useful was a
fallacious view of the literary object, the work of art.

6o AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Early and late in his criticism James says there is no sub-
ject matter forbidden the artist. His own perceptions, taste,
and sensibility must be depended upon. Without them he
cannot create "a sense of life" and if he cannot do that he
is not an artist. Repeatedly James refers to the special case,
free from fixed moral or social conventions and free from
fixed formulas for fiction. The subject matter becomes a
novel only after the novelist has transformed it. After the
vision of the novelist is bodied forth it is then subject to
criticism in terms of the quality of the discriminations, and
in terms of the success with which the artist has brought his
idea vividly and fully alive. Behind these insistencies was
James's opposition to the hoary fallacies, first, that moral
literature is a simple and fixed truth pleasantly or beauti-
fully uttered, and, second, that the reality of the subject
matter or story is somehow lessened or made unreal by a
preoccupation with the techniques of fiction.

In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady we have his in-
sistence that moral issues involve discriminations inside the
given case (and his favorite novel, The Ambassadors, is es-
sentially a dramatization of this particular point):

Here we get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary
form its power not only, while preserving that form with close-
ness, to range through all the differences of the individual rela-
tion to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on
life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions
that are never the same from man to man (or, as far as that goes,
from woman to woman), but positively to appear more true to
its character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with
a latent extravagance, its mould.

James separated morality and artistic processes, but he did
not separate morality and inspiration or morality and artis-

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 6l

tic effect: "It is in reality simply a part of the essential rich-
ness of inspirationit has nothing to do with the artistic
process and it has everything to do with the artistic effect."
James knew that the faculties of the mind influence one an-
other and are mutually dependent. "There is one point/'
he said, "at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie
very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious
truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be
the quality of the mind of the producer. 1 *

James also knew that the fear of technique and the fear
of style (because they were said to alter reality, that is, the
objective subject matter or story) implied a naive concep-
tion of the process of creating fiction. His clearest statement
of this matter is in "The Art of Fiction" (1884), an answer
to an article by Walter Besant:

"The story," if it represents anything, represents the subject,
the idea, the donnee of the novel; and there is surely no "school"
Mr. Besant speaks of a school which urges that a novel should
be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be some-
thing to treat; every school is intimately conscious of that. This
sense of the story being the idea, the starting point, of the novel,
is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as some-
thing different from its organic whole; and since in proportion
as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it,
informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctua-
tion point contribute directly to the expression, in that propor-
tion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may
be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel,
the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never
heard of a guild of tailors who recommend the use of the thread
without the needle, or the needle without the thread.

Realism is not merely the delineation of observed experi-
ence.

62 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

This does not mean, of course, that James completely
deplored the movement in fiction which, before all else,
wanted to reflect actuality. He admired the spirit behind
documentation and accumulating knowledge. He said that
a story should achieve a "saturation of reality." He did de-
plore those novels, indifferent to form, which were com-
posed without a controlling or with an ill-understood in-
tention. He did not believe there was any irreconcilability
between fact and mind, between reality and imagination.
The imaginative mind moves toward ideal constructions
in order that "true meanings" can be "born." The thematic
line or idea in a story, James said, was a more or less gen-
eral truth. Usually it can be expressed in a sentence or two.
The artist, considering the "given case," must extract a pat-
tern of significant meaning. Life itself "has no direct sense
whatever for the subject." James disagreed with those who
find large "amounts of life" the most important part of fic-
tion. A sense of life, a feeling of actuality should permeate
it, but James would have the theme and the pattern it in-
formed and quickened "washed free of awkward accretions
and hammered into sacred hardness."

James influenced a few of his fellow writers, most notably
Edith Wharton 1 and Ford Madox Ford, but the effect of
his criticism, during most of his own lifetime, apparently
was not great. When he was writing the prefaces (1907-9)
for the famous New York edition of his stories, he wrote to
Howells of the "almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence" of
a discriminating criticism. This, of course, was toward the
end of his career. But the prefaces, especially after they
were collected by R. P. Blackmur under the title The Art

l Her The Writing of Fiction (1925) repeats many of the discussions to
be found in James's essays and prefaces. It is a useful and intelligent volume,
but it lacks the intensity and highly refined perceptivenebs that characterize
James's criticism.

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 6j

of the Novel (1934), have been influential. The many sub-
jects and principles James treats or touches on in them
cannot be gone into here, but as a sample one can call at-
tention to his discussions of "foreshortening" and observe
that it, too, relates to his lifelong concern that neither plot
nor "huge amounts of life" be equated with the story, the
objective reality. Foreshortening conduced, he said, "to the
only compactness that has charm, to the only spareness that
has a force, to the only simplicity that has a grace those, in
each order, that produced the rich effect." Obviously, fore-
shortening implies an act of intelligence on the part of the
novelist, 'a control of the story by heightening the quality
of the representation and quickening the intensity and real-
ization of the theme. Similarly, one finds that the frequent
discussions of art in relation to morality or art in relation
to life always include a recognition on James's part that
there is no "guild of tailors who recommend the use of
the thread without the needle, or the needle without the
thread."

n

James, by showing how theme, intelligence, morality, and
a sense of life "compose one structure," might be thought
to have answered the content versus form question for some
time. That it was not settled is evident from Spingarn's
"The New Criticism" (1910) and Creative Criticism: Es-
says on the Unity of Genius and Taste (1917). "Every poet,"
Spingarn said in "The New Criticism," "re-expresses the
universe in his own way, and every poem is a new and in-
dependent expression." Style, he continued, "cannot be
dissociated from art." Spingarn was a disciple of Benedetto
Croce, but there is little in his criticism that is foreign to

64 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

the principles formulated by Coleridge and James. Each
would have agreed with him that the "technique of poetry
cannot be separated from its inner nature."

Yet neither Coleridge nor James would have felt under
the necessity, as Spingarn did in this early essay, of refusing
to admit general discussions of technique, of genre, of the-
ories of style, or of literature as social or moral document. 2
Spingarn concluded that the "identity of genius and taste
is the final achievement of modern thought on the subject
of art." The critic who can identify himself with the genius
evident in the work of art is a creative critic. But Spingarn
neglected to say that only a critic with the necessary na-
tive sensibility and a wide knowledge of techniques, genres,
styles, and so forth, could have the requisite taste. 3

One of Spingarn's most pointed and effective analyses of
organic form is "Prose and Verse," a chapter in Creative
Criticism. In this essay Spingarn insisted that the newer
aesthetic criticism has made it clear "that rhythm and metre
must be regarded as aesthetically identical with style, as
style is identical with artistic form, and form in its turn is
the work of art in its spiritual and indivisible self." Spin-
garn, for example, considered that the advocates and the
opponents of free verse were conducting their quarrel on
the same assumptions namely, that anapaests, trochees, he-

2 One of the best criticisms of "The New Criticism" was written by Ran-
dolph Bourne, then an undergraduate, in "Art and Suicide," Columbia
Monthly (March 1911), pp. 189 If.

3 Some years later, in "Scholarship and Criticism" (1922), Spingarn ad-
mitted that in "The New Criticism" he had not stressed "all the phases of a
critic's duty." In 1910, he said, the pedants and the professors had been in
the ascendant. Most of them knew the history of criticism but were generally
indifferent to the poem itself in its livingness as art. He had therefore stressed
the oneness of criticism and creation, appearing to be quite close to those
impressionists who reproduced the work in order to understand and judge
it. By 1921 the amateurs and journalists were in the ascendant and it was
then necessary to "write an Essay on the Divergence of Criticism and Crea-
tion."

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 65

roic couplets, or iambics signify mathematical succession of
beats or accents. A series of iambic lines, he pointed out,
whether by the same poet or collected from different poets,
will "differ in the degree of their regularity of rhythm.
There can be infinite variations in the stresses or pauses.
No two lines probably are ever quite the same. There is a
fundamental distinction between the mechanical whirr of
machinery, or the ticking of a clock, and the inner or spirit-
ual rhythm of human speech/' The classifications of rhythms
are mere conveniences, like speaking of tall men and short
men or large books and small books, "without assuming
that the adjectives imply fundamental distinctions of qual-
ity or character." To confuse such abstract classifications
with artistic realities is "to confuse form as concrete expres-
sion with form as ornament or a dead husk." The poet
writes out of himself. Every subject is a new subject because
it is made so by the imagination and the stamp of the in-
dividual poet.

/Spingarn's early program for the creative critic seems, as
he later recognized, very close to the program of those among
the impressionists who were more concerned to re-create the
work than to exhibit their own delicate sensibilities/ Spin-
garn wanted the critic to be intimately sensitive to each of
the details in a literary work. It may be worth noting that
James held Sainte-Beuve in high esteem largely because he
could penetrate a work in such a fashion:

Sainte-Beuve had nerves assuredly; there is something feminine
in his tact, his penetration, his subtlety and pliability, his rapid-
ity of transition, his magical divinations, his sympathies and
antipathies, his marvelous art of insinuation, of expressing him-
self by fine touches and of adding touch to touch.

But James added that these faculties were reinforced by
others of a more masculine stamp

66 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

the completeness, the solid sense, the constant reason, the mod-
eration, the copious knowledge, the passion for exactitude and
for general considerations.

James, of course, knew that "general considerations,'' even
rules, providing the spirit not the letter is observed, are
necessary. In "Scholarship and Criticism," Spingarn said
that the "anarchy of impressionism is a natural reaction
against . . . mechanical theories and jejune text-books, but
it is a temporary haven and not a home." Criticism needs
scholarship and it needs rigorous thought in aesthetics. But
Spingarn had not entirely quit the impressionists. Judg-
menTTs ^necessary, but IFIs i possible ^orJIy^tcTa mffrpf^aste.
Therefore,"^ the third arid~greatest need of American criti-
cism is a deeper sensibility, a more complete submission to
the imaginative will of the artist, before attempting to rise
above it into the realm of judgement."

Later still, in one of his "Literature and the New Era"
lectures (1931) at the New School for Social Research, 4
Spingarn also modified or at least clarified his earlier re-
marks in "The New Criticism" on morality in literature.
"We have done," he had written, "with all moral judge-
ment of art as art. ... It is not the inherent function of
poetry to further any moral or social cause, any more than
it is the function of bridge-building to further the cause
of Esperanto." The tone of Spingarn's commentary on the
place of morality invited misunderstanding, and, as a mat-
ter of fact, he did overstate his case. Morality, as James said,
is part of the "inspiration," the original conception, and it
is a part of the effect of a literary work. Spingarn, in one of
the 1931 lectures, made it clear that he had not intended to
say that morality is not inherent in a literary work:

4 Only one of these lectures has been published: "Politics and the Poet,"
The Atlantic Monthly, CLXX (November 1942), 73-78.

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 67

You will see ... that I object to a distinction which Professor
Irving Babbitt has made between what he calls the ethical and
idyllic imagination. Great works of art have the ethical im-
agination, he says, and ordinary second-rate works of art have
merely the idyllic imagination. Of course the imagination in
the sense in which it creates a kind of order out of chaos in itself
may be said to be moral in the sense in which any ordering or
concept of ordering the universe is a moral order. In that sense,
of course, to speak of ethical imagination is the same as speak-
ing of edible food because you see in a real sense the moral con-
science behind every personality, behind the idyllic imagination
and behind the ethical imagination.

Spinga'rn's position, like Croce's, is an expression of philo-
sophical idealism. Implicit in certain expressions of realism
in literature has been the assumption that external nature
is the real world, and that the writer, therefore, is obligated
to see, feel, and express it as it actually is. Philosophical
idealism, of course, finds reality in the mind, including the
mind's power to transform matter. All the subjectivist move-
ments in literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
riesromanticism, symbolism, impressionism, and so forth
are likely to insist on expressive form.

in

Remy de Gourmont, for whom Eliot and Pound ex-
pressed the highest admiration (and who was represented in
Ludwig Lewisohn's A Modern Book of Criticism [1919]),
pointed out in Le probleme du style (1902) that "style and
thought are one." (Neither Pound nor Eliot, however, has
especially noted this part of his work.) The style of Ernest
Kenan's La vie de Jesus wavers, Gourmont said, because
the conception is uncertain. Works which are well thought
out are invariably well written. "It is a mistake to try to

68 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

separate form from substance/' Seen in relation to the in-
dividual writer, style is a "specialization of sensibility/' This
emphasis caused him to be concerned with what Pound, in
"Rmy de Gourmont" (1919), discussed as the modality of
the individual voice. And it caused him, as Eliot observed
in The Sacred Wood (1920), to inquire and elucidate to
avoid legislating before generalizing. Gourmont is in the
tradition of Aristotle and Coleridge rather than of Horace
and Boileau. If Gourmont, as Eliot says, has been the "criti-
cal consciousness of his generation," the reason undoubt-
edly lies in his insistence on examining a work as the ex-
pression of an individual sensibility.

Eliot's own description in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" (1917) of the poet as one capable of forming new
wholes from unlike elements or from diverse situations,
from "the noise of the typewriter [and] the smell of cook-
ing," implies that the poet creates and forms his material-
there is no ready-made subject for him. And Pound's bril-
liant insight into the nature of the image "An image is
that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time" also implies the view of artist as
maker. In other words, the poetic practice and critical the-
ory of Eliot and Pound 5 imply the principle of expressive

5 The criticism of Ezra Pound is difficult to evaluate. Eliot stated his
gratitude for Pound's blue-penciling of The Waste Land, and Ernest Hem-
ingway has acknowledged his perceptiveness in criticizing fiction manu-
scripts. Pound was a generous admirer of the critical or artistic gifts of his
elders and contemporaries-of James, Ford, Gourmont, T. E. Hulme, Joyce,
William Carlos Williams, or Eliot. And in a sense he gave himself to his
generation. His letters and articles in Poetry, Reedy's Mirror, Blast, The
Dial, The Egoist, The Exile, or The Fortnightly Review, and the many
others are filled with advice, some of it bombast, some of it indirect self-
acclaim, and some of it brilliant insights into the nature of art and the
needs of modern art. Reading through books such as Pavannes and Divisions
(1918), Instigations (1920), How to Read (1930), or Make It New (1934) one
feels in the presence of issues and battles fought long ago. Perhaps a part of
the Pound tragedy was his inability to stay with a movement imagism,
objectivism, or vorticism until he had systematized his insights. His was a

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 69

form. Whether or not they consciously derived their theory
from Gourmont is of no considerable moment.

Throughout the twenties there were occasional protests
against the rather frequent assumption that transcripts from
experience were viable as literature. Carl Van Doren in
"Document and Work of Art" 6 (1925) said that in their
zeal to tell the truth about their age some novelists had
"got into the habit of thinking that a document is an end
in itself." The reverence for raw material had, he con-
tinued, become a superstition. Yet Van Doren in the same
essay could mention content and form as though they were
quite distinct and separate entities.

Such a confusion was not peculiar to Van Doren. It was,
in a sense, forced on a society which wanted facts, docu-
mentation, or what James called "huge amounts of life."
Even Clive Bell, the English art critic who gave his con-
temporaries the phrase "significant form," could, at least
in his conception of literature, divorce content from form.
"Significant form," he had said, consists of the expression
of the artist's emotion, which is unrelated to "life values"
or to delight in representation. Significant form may appear
in pictures that represent something (a beautiful woman or
a vase) but the "esthetic emotion" which is peculiar to gen-
uine works of art is aroused only by "arrangements and
combinations"; the representative element, however inter-
esting, is irrelevant. But in an article, "The 'Difference' of

disordered but a suggestive, seminal mind. It could well be that there is
no brief statement that better suggests the nature of the modern aesthetic
than his "An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time." See, for example, his article on vorticism
in The Fortnightly Review (September 1914). Ray West has summarized
Pound's criticism in "Ezra Pound and Contemporary Criticism," Western
Review, V (1949), 192-200.

6 This article is available in Contemporary American Criticism, ed. J. C.
Bowman.

7O AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Literature/' for The New Republic (1922) he said that al-
though "significant form" accounted for almost everything
in the art of painting it apparently counted for little in the
art of literature:

The fact is, subject and the overtones emanating from it,
wit, irony, pathos, drama, criticism, didacticism even qualities
which in painting count for little or nothing do seem to be
the essence of literature. . . . So, when a writer tries to confine
himself to territory which he can cultivate in common with
painting and music, when he reduces content and its overtones
to a minimum, when he sets himself to create form which shall
be abstractly beautiful, he invariably comes short of greatness;
what is worse, he is apt to be a bore.

Llewellyn Jones, reviewer for the Chicago Evening Post,
undertook to answer Bell. Mr. Jones's article was entitled
"Art, Form and Expression," and it also appeared in The
New Republic in 1922. Mr. Bell is surely wrong, he said,
in saying that in literature

content is more than form and different from it. ... That the
content is invariably molded by form is nicely shown by A. C.
Bradley in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry. He quotes Byron's
lines:

Bring forth the horse! The horse was brought.
In truth he was a noble steed.

Now we could change the form and leave the content intact by
reading "steed" to begin with, the "horse" in the last line. Try
it and see what happens. Is the content the same?

Jones concluded the article by rehearsing a theory of ex-
pressive form based in part on Croce. William Brownell
also asserted the importance of the principle in The Genius
of Style (1924), referring to it as "architectonic" and apply-

ORGANIC AND EXPRESSIVE FORM 71

ing it to music, architecture, and art as well as literature.
The writer, he said in his rather pretentious way, "vitalizes
the parts by permeating them with a sense of the whole, and
thus gives everywhere the feeling of completeness, of forces
in the repose of equipose in contrast to stagnation or even
stasis." So too did Stark Young, one of the best drama critics
of the period, insist on the principle of substance and form
being one. He found Street Scene (1929) "a farrago of living
matter with the sting taken out of it," adding that "it must
be a very elementary principle that the essential idea of a
work of art goes through it, and that the themes and con-
ceptions to be expressed must lie inherently in the sub-
stance of it, and that they are to be expressed in creation,
not in superimposed sentiments." Similarly, Young found
the last act of Winter set (1935) to be bad poetry and bad
drama on the same grounds that conception and expres-
sion are inseparable: "The defects in Winterset, in the last
act especially, are not due to the fact that the poetic form
is being employed, but rather that the poetry is bad, bad
either per se or bad in relation to the scene it comes to the
same thing." But perhaps Paul Elmer More's discovery in
his essay "Lycidas," in On Being Human (1936), of the con-
tent versus form problem is indicative of a general uncon-
cern.

A few years earlier in Counter-Statement (1931), Kenneth
Burke, a close student of Gourmont's criticism, had noted
that the seeming breach between form and subject is a con-
sequence of introducing scientific criteria into matters re-
quiring aesthetic judgment. He observed that a contempo-
rary writer had objected to Joyce's Ulysses on the ground
that there is more information about psychoanalysis in
Freud! Presumably Burke is also saying that the breach is a
consequence of our wanting to believe that fact or content

72 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

in literature is, like laws of physics or known chemical reac-
tions, objective and that verified truths can be put inside a
pleasing form. Such assumptions, of course, are not applica-
ble to literature. They do not allow for the basic consider-
ation that a given theme is worked out in terms of the given
case, and in accordance with the author's own values. The
author employs all the minutiae of style, as Burke suggests,
to discover the potential meanings in a subject and to evalu-
ate them not as information merely but as information
realized in a convincing and moving way.

The critics of Burke's generation seem to have found in
the criticism of James not merely the principle of organic
form but a methodology, terms and concepts, for getting in-
side the work. They have returned less often, if at all, to
Spingarn's work because he did not leave such a method-
ology. R^my de Gourmont they have assimilated, for the
most part, indirectly. All three, but James especially, have
been of great importance because they helped make it pos-
sible to avoid an allegiance to utile and content on the one
hand or dulce and form on the other, the recurrent and
ancient fallacies of content versus form and truth or mor-
ality versus beauty.

THE JVEW AWARENESS
OF AMERICA

WILSON somewhere notes that
the generation before his own grew up with a vision of
America after the Civil War as arid, incapable of produc-
ing literary work of merit, and even suspicious of anything
that did manage to bloom. John Macy, for example, had
made pretty much the same point in The Spirit of Ameri-
can Literature (1913). Our literature, he said, was an off-
shoot of English; it lacked an American spirit. "American
literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely
finished/' W. C. Brownell, true to the spirit Wilson de-
scribes, could decline Van Wyck Brooks's America's Com-
ing-of-Age (1915) for Scribner's, apparently because it had
the quality of the new America which was attempting to

74 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

discover and define itself. Nonetheless, the affirmation of
the new America was soon under way in various parts of the
country. Critical studies of American writers done in the
new spirit began to appear, such as Amy Lowell's Tenden-
cies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Joseph Warren
Beach's The Method of Henry James (1918), and Carl Van
Doren's Contemporary American Novelists (1922). Harry
Hansen's Midwest Portraits (1923), half reminiscences and
half literary criticism, provided a good account of the vital-
ity of the Chicago renaissance, with valuable sketches of the
many novelists, poets, critics, and editors who took part in
it. Academic figures like John Erskine and Henry Seidel
Canby, as well as the Van Dorens, took their scholarship
into the field of literary journalism. Thereafter at least a
portion of literary scholars tried to find a meeting ground
with the educated public. There was a new spirit in the air
which, earlier, John Butler Yeats had caught in a mem-
orable phrase: "The fiddles are tuning all over America."
Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford,
Paul Rosenfeld, and other critics associated with them made
America self-conscious about its intellectual life and cul-
ture in a way that academic critics in the genteel tradition
of Lowell, the sophisticated tradition of Huneker, or the
scientific-minded tradition of Taine had been unable to
do. There is no highly consistent pattern in their work, but
they provided useful terms and attitudes. They wrote about
the need for an intelligentsia to furnish criticism and a body
of literature. They alternately ridiculed the genteel tradi-
tion and saw great virtues in the American past. They saw
in socialism a means of ending an era of economic exploita-
tion. They employed the terms "unity," "wholeness," and
"organic" in attempts to create a myth in which Whitman's
optimistic dream about a democratic land with spiritual

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 75

and creative values might be urged into being. They were
extremely useful and influential despite their frequent em-
ployment of hortatory tracts and a gospel tone and their
willingness to be carried away from an explicit concern
with literary texts. Less given to the creating of literary
myths than those centering around Bourne and Brooks was
a somewhat similar group, under the reluctant leadership
of Carl Van Doren, who contributed to The Nation.

Members of both groups would have agreed with Stuart
Pratt Sherman's note in the Herald Tribune in 1924 that
"the most fascinating aspect of American life today is the
ascent into articulate self-consciousness of that element of
our people which Emerson called 'the Jacksonian rabble'
and the relative decline toward artistic inexpressiveness
of that element which Barrett Wendell called 'the better
sort.' "

Randolph Bourne, a legendary figure during a decade
or more following his premature death in 1918, belongs,
so far as literary history is concerned, with the Van Wyck
Brooks of America's Coming-of-Age. Like Brooks, he was
attempting to understand and then destroy anything pre-
venting America's cultural development. 1 There should be,
he said, a "Trans-National America." There were diverse
racial and cultural traditions that had not been assimilated.
The indigenous Americans Emerson to Howells "are ele-
vated to eminence by our cultural makers of opinion," who
also cause immigrants to drop their Old World heritage
and thereby create "hordes of men and women without a

1 When Bourne returned from Europe in 1914, where he had traveled
on a Columbia University fellowship, he wrote articles on city planning,
feminism, college reform, and books: The Gary Schools (1916) and Educa-
tion and Living (1917). As an undergraduate he had published Youth and
Life (1913). Following his death James Oppenheim edited Untimely Papers
(1919), and Brooks edited The History of a Literary Radical and Other Es-
says (1920).

76 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without
standards but those of the mob/' The solution, he added,
should not be sought in another "weary old nationalism/'
but in cosmopolitanism. "In a world which has dreamed of
internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been
building up the first international nation." America, he
said, was coming to be a "trans-nationality, a weaving back
and forth ... of many threads of all sizes and colors."

In the service of American culture one had to oppose not
only the older critics who served a petrified tradition but
also the "pachydermous vulgarisms" of "Mr. Mencken and
Mr. Dreiser and their friends." Bourne was opposed to the
study of classical languages, but he also felt it necessary to
look into the Latin writers if only to inoculate himself
against the genteel orthodoxy he was attempting to destroy.
The sensibility of a new, a cultivated American critic would
be formed by the modern world by Gorky and Chekhov as
well as by Twain. The critic needed "an abounding sense of
life" and a "feeling for literary form." Borrowing from
abroad, he would work to interpret American life. Eventu-
ally a new classicism would evolve, but it would be "some-
thing worked out and lived into."

The prophets of the prewar years H. G. Wells, Shaw,
Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, and John Dewey were also
Bourne's. As Seward Collins noted in defending the New
Humanists from attacks by the young humanitarians,
Bourne tended to identify allegiances to the past with ob-
scurantism. He apparently sensed nothing ingenuous in his
stating that "youth [is] the incarnation of reason pitted
against the rigidity of tradition," nor in his asking "why
bother with Greek when you get Euripides in the marvel-
lous verse of Gilbert Murray?" The new freedom for chil-
dren in elementary and secondary schools, he believed,

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 77

would lead to throwing off further shackles. But the chief
road to the New Jerusalem was socialism: "Abolish this
hostile attitude of classes toward each other by abolishing
class struggle. Abolish class struggle by abolishing classes."
Bourne's belligerent pacifism after America joined the Al-
lies and his constant carping about the faults of the state
also suggest that there may have been a deep-seated per-
versity in his mind.

Had he lived, Brooks believes, Bourne would have turned
from politics and social concerns to a more strictly literary
criticism. What his value might have been after he had
matured as a critic it is impossible to say. There are, how-
ever, suggestive bits that may indicate where his allegiances
would have been: he urged that modern literature be taught
in the colleges; he wanted critics and writers to discover
a "usable past" in Thoreau, Twain, Whitman, in those writ-
ers "not tainted by sweetness and light"; and he defined the
classics as "power with restraint, vitality with harmony, a
fusion of intellect and feeling." Quite possibly the legend
that immediately grew about Bourne had several causes.
He could write a corrosive prose, and he was a brilliant con-
versationalist. He was a slight little gargoyle, a hunchback
in a flowing black cape, who was capable of making his ac-
quaintances forget his disabilities and give him their strong
loyalty. He was also a radical and a pacifist. As his friends
matured in the 1920*5 and pacifism and radical activities
grew, the memory of Bourne grew with them. John Dos
Passos gave him a place in [/. S. A., and Horace Gregory
wrote a poem about him. By those who do not belong to
that generation, Bourne is likely to be remembered only
as one who helped lead the assault on tradition in educa-
tion, economics, government, and literature, as one who
took great pride in opposing his elders, in being a modern.

78 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Van Wyck Brooks, after fumbling attempts in his first
volumes, succeeded in formulating a point of view and
stating an ideal which developed and extended the criti-
cism Bourne had written. The Wine of the Puritans (1908),
published in England where Brooks spent a year and a half
after his graduation from Harvard, is a dialogue between
two effete young men. They find America gauche, ugly, and
low-brow, a land with the spirit of Barnum. Its intellectual
life and literature were vaguely ideal, unrelated to the ugly
vigor that spawned new millions, built factories, and threw
out mile after mile of railroad tracks. Practical America was
the wine of the Puritans; the aroma was the vague idealism.
His next volume The Malady of the Ideal (published in
London in 1913; in the United States not until 1947) was
a further reaching toward his chief subject the relation of
the artist to his society. In this volume Brooks sees each
of his three figures, Amiel, S^nancourt, and Maurice de
Gu^rin, as living in sickly relation to an ideal order which
prevented him from taking hold of the vulgar but actual
world.

Two biographies followed: John Addington Symonds
(1914) and The World of H. G. Wells (1915). With Sym-
onds, Brooks is still preoccupied with the type of man he
saw as committed to life as an artist, frustrated by it and cut
off from the life of ordinary men. He was apparently not
interested in Symonds, who is caught as a subject only inso-
far as he illustrates a thesis. Wells is seen as a writer formed
by his early life in the home of a lower middle-class shop-
keeper, and his work is interpreted as the inevitable prod-
uct of a man attempting to lift himself higher and higher
in the world through the sheer power of his intellect and
ambition. The study of Wells took Brooks nearer to the
method best suited to his talent, criticism-as-biography.

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 79

America's Coming-of-Age (1915), which he later repudi-
ated, was one of the most influential of his studies. (Its thesis,
incidentally, is similar to Santayana's in "The Genteel Tra-
dition in American Philosophy.") He presented for his con-
temporaries to ponder an America in which intelligence
and idealism attempted to live as though detached from the
body of the civilization. America had two types, low-brow
and high-brow. The former, the man of action, "dedicates
himself to the service of a private end which knows nothing
of theory, which is most cynically contemptuous of ideals."
The latter is typified by the professor of economics who
dedicates .himself to "the service of a type of economic the-
ory that bears no relation to the wicked world, leaving all
the good people who are managing the economic practice
... to talk nonsense in the wilderness." There could be no
ripe, no serene knowledge, no genuinely aesthetic aware-
ness or expression in a society where intellect lived in an
idealistic dreamworld and practical-minded men developed
a sense of reality that was narrow and untouched by imagi-
nation.

Having described this dichotomy, Brooks proceeded to
interpret American literature. Men like Bronson Alcott
were pathetic, charming, futile. Men like Emerson were
forced to assume a "sort of idealism whose essence lay in the
very fact that it could have no connection with the practical
conduct of life." Men like Poe created a non-human world,
"cold, blasted, moonstruck, sterile," foreign to actual ex-
perience. Men like Hawthorne imagined exquisite fables,
quite unrelated to a "practical Yankee world." The writers
of belles-lettres lived, he said, in a drowsy idealism, while
the ruthless industrialists and businessmen, like Rockefeller
and Morgan, lived in the practical world.

Later, in 1934, Brooks noted in his earlier writings an

80 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

"oft-recurring mistake, that of attributing to one's country
the faults of human nature in general." But the Brooks of
America's Coming-of-Age was right. The American civili-
zation he had analyzed, though cruder, had a great deal in
common with Victorian England. Like England, America
was a victim of industrialization. In both countries men
were troubled by an idealism that they seemed unable to
relate to the new scientific-industrial way of life. In Whit-
man's poetry, Brooks believed, was the way out of this di-
lemma. In his poetry "action, theory, idealism, business"
had been "cast into a crucible," from which they "emerged,
harmonious and molten, in a democratic ideal based upon
the whole personality." Unfortunately, the American so-
ciety and its writers after the Civil War had ignored
Whitman. The new force was pragmatism, a philosophy
of adjustment, not a philosophy of idealistic and realis-
tic striving. America, Brooks said, needed more poets like
Whitman to lead her in "the task of building up a civili-
zation."

America's Coming-of-Age was the catalytic agent in the
consciousness of the editors and many of the contributors
to The Seven Arts (1916-17). The editors, James Oppen-
heim and Waldo Frank, were joined shortly by Brooks.
The contributors, among others, were: Sherwood Ander-
son, John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Paul Rosenfeld, H. L.
Mencken, John Dos Passos, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg,
and Eugene O'Neill. The articles which Brooks contributed
to the magazine were collected in Letters and Leadership
(1918). In them he had written about the difficulties of be-
ing an artist in the United States, had attacked the academic
critics, had deplored the utilitarian spirit in America, and
had called for a new and great literature peculiar to the
soil and hopes of Americans. The magazine was discon-

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 8l

tinued because of opposition to its antiwar policy, as well
as for other reasons.

Brooks spent the next two years in California writing
The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920, revised 1933), a volume
that has furnished a battleground for students of Twain.
In it, as in The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), he at-
tributes the failure of our writers to the cultural poverty
of their America. Despite his unfairness to such writers and
the distortions into which he allowed his thesis to betray
him, Brooks must be given credit for contributing to the
critical awakening which has been labeled the period of
America's Coming-of-Age. But at this point in his career
Brooks ceased to have a voice that his fellow critics found
compelling. For a time he merely repeated himself, causing
Paul Roserifeld in 1924 to observe sadly that Brooks had
ceased to have anything new to say to his young contem-
poraries. By the 1930*5, Brooks had completely reversed his
early position. Works like The Flowering of New England,
1815-1865 (1936), New England: Indian Summer, 1865-
1915 (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The
Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Con-
fident Years, 1885-1915 (1952) are hardly criticism at all.
They are genteelly chauvinistic histories in which the Amer-
ican past is presented in a delicate amber haze.

Yet Brooks left a firm imprint on American criticism.
Two of his themes the isolation of the American artist and
the need for discovering a "usable past" 2 have had a con-
siderable history. Harold Stearns's America and the Young
Intellectual (192 1) treated the theme of the alienated Amer-
ican artist. Matthew Josephson's Portrait of the Artist as
American (1930), more nearly employing the tone Brooks
himself would employ, developed it further:

2 "On Creating a Usable Past," The Dial, LXIV (1918).

82 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

There is the obscure tragedy of Melville, a genius who passed
half his life in silence as a clerk in the customs office of New
York. Doomed, uncomprehending, hating the age, he wandered
in the anonymous crowd, resigned to his disappearance from
the world; he is a sphinx-like figure, living for thirty years in
a tomb. And there are all the other ill-starred careers: James
Whistler dies in London; Lafcadio Hearn in Japan; Stephen
Crane meets death in Germany, early in life; Ambrose Bierce,
as an old man, is killed by guerrillas in Mexico; Henry James
seeks to obliterate his origin in a long London life and becomes
a British citizen in the days of the World War; Henry Adams,
in despair of all else, haunts the Gothic cathedrals of France,
worshiping the beauty and the logic of medieval art. The record
is long and convincing. ...

Alfred Kazin echoes this passage in the "American Fin
de Sicle" chapter in On Native Grounds (1942). The
theme, whether in Brooks's tone or not, is met in various
forms throughout contemporary criticism, as in Delmore
Schwartz's "The Isolation of Modern Poetry," 3 R. P. Black-
mur's "The American Literary Expatriate," 4 or Karl Sha-
piro's Essay on Rime (1945).

Both of Brooks's themes were the concern of Constance
Rourke. "The American" from American Humor (1931)
modified the thesis that Henry James was a failure be-
cause of America's cultural poverty. She found him a pri-
mary writer of magnificent achievement. The failure was
in America's inability to produce a sequence of writers
capable of developing what James had begun. The other
side of her work, an attempt to discover a "usable past,'*
was largely unfinished at her death, but she had written a
number of books preliminary to her proposed history of

3 Kenyan Review, III (Summer 1945), 209-20.

4 Foreign Influences in American Life (Princeton, N. J., Princeton Univ.
Press, 1944), pp. 126-45.

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 83

American culture. In Charles Sheeler (1938), for example,
she said that the native American tradition lies in form not
in subject matter. As stated by Stanley Edgar Hyman in his
chapter on her contribution to criticism in The Armed
Vision (1948), her thesis is that the tradition lies in "the ab-
straction of a Jonathan Edwards sermon, a Navaho blanket,
a John Henry feat, and a Vermont hooked rug; and that
it is Marin who is painting in it, not Norman Rockwell."
Her posthumous volume The Roots of American Culture
(1942), for which Brooks wrote the Introduction, is a col-
lection of essays in which Miss Rourke tried to analyze
the charatter of popular and folk patterns in American arts,
with the expectation apparently of relating them eventu-
ally to higher and more self-conscious levels of art. 5

Lewis Mumford, perhaps the best of the critics who fol-
lowed leads suggested by Brooks, has been only incidentally
concerned with literature. His real subject is the culture
of America, especially the influences of technology on urban
life. The titles of some of his books suggest the nature of
his interests: The Story of Utopias (1922), Sticks and Stones
(1924), The Golden Day (1926), Herman Melville (1929),
The Brown Decades (1931), and The Condition of Man
(1944). The essentials of Mumford's thesis are these:

Our mechanical and metropolitan civilization, with all its gen-
uine advances, has let certain human elements drop out of its
scheme; and until we recover these elements our civilization will
be at loose ends, and our architecture will unerringly express
the situation. Home, meeting place, and factory, polity, culture,
and art have still to be united and brought together, and this
task is one of the fundamental tasks of our civilization.

5 Discussions of a "usable past" are also to be found in "The Situation
in American Writing," Partisan Review, Vol. VI (Summer 1939), a sym-
posium to which a considerable number of writers contributed.

84 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

In the American past Mumford found certain guides. In
the golden day of New England the village expressed the
common religious, social, and political life. Into the houses,
for example, there went careful workmanship, and the great
elm trees furnished shade and modified the simplicity of
the architecture. Whitman and Melville had furnished pro-
phetic visions, the one of "cosmic faith," the other of "cos-
mic defiance." Much of Herman Melville is devoted to
developing Brooks's thesis that American artists have been
injured or defeated by our business civilization. Mumford
has helped students of American culture see the interrela-
tionships between a country's social life and its art.

Waldo Frank in Our America (1919) continued Brooks's
attack on materialism. With the puritan had begun the de-
nial of the body and the intellectualizing of our energies.
With the pioneer had begun our demand for material suc-
cess at the expense of the whole man. The most interesting
chapter in the book, "The Puritan Says 'Yea,' " contains
little studies of Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and Henry
Adams in relation to the spirit of New England, a spirit
which was being dissipated and was losing its mastery over
the rest of the country. Salvos (1924) is composed of scat-
tered reviews and informal essays, but the Introduction,
"For a Declaration of War," seems to be the beginning of
Frank's somewhat grandiose role as cultural historian and
prophet. The Re-Discovery of America (1929) continues the
search for wholeness. (Incidentally, the Appendix gives a
thumbnail account of Frank's contemporaries in the "little
magazine" movement.) In the American Jungle (1937) de-
velops the thesis that the rationalist, product of a scientific-
minded philosophy, denies the mind its right to poetic and
religious expression. Frank's language, somewhat maunder-
ing even in his first books, is often depressingly vague and

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 85

misty. And the strictly literary considerations in his criti-
cism, early and late, are infrequent. The lack of a delimited
subject matter, an unwillingness or inability to be precise,
has seriously hampered Frank as a critic. 6 Yet, like Bourne,
Brooks, and Mumford he was instrumental in making Amer-
ica self-conscious about what it was, what it had been, and
what it was likely to become.

An instructive example of the influence of these critics
is found in the career of Stuart Pratt Sherman, whom they
helped to convert from the ranks of the New Humanists.
"Read Stuart P. Sherman/' Bourne once wrote, "on con-
temporary literature and see with what a hurt panic a young
gentleman, perhaps the last brave offshoot of the genteel
tradition, regards these bold modern writers." Sherman, a
student of Babbitt's, had published On Contemporary Lit-
erature in 1917. He was also a fairly eminent Arnoldian,
having published Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him.
Supported on one side by Arnold and on the other by Bab-
bitt, Sherman had given battle against Philistia and Natu-
ralism. From both men he took a strong sense of moral
mission. His text for his book on the moderns was: "The
great revolutionary task of the nineteenth century thinkers
was to put man into nature. The great task of twentieth
century thinkers is to get him out again." Thus Dreiser was
anathema, "the vulgarest voice yet heard in American lit-
erature," and with him, though lesser culprits, were Wells,
George Moore, and John Millington Synge. Mark Twain
was also dismissed as a vulgarian because he does not help
us to realize "our best selves."

The next step in Sherman's development was toward an

6 An important exception to this is Frank's essay on Winesburg, Ohio in
the September-October 1941 issue of Story, a subject to which he could bring
a sympathy impossible to critics who find Anderson's lack of cogency an al-
most insuperable barrier to acceptance or admiration.

86 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

extremely narrow nationalism. For Americans (1922) he
examined ten writers for the purpose of encouraging "read-
ers to keep open the channel of their national traditions
and to scrutinize contemporary literature in the light of
their national past." The chief tradition which Sherman
found was twofold: Puritanism and Anglo-Saxondom. To
Sherman the puritan was not the bluenose creature on
whose head Mencken was raising bloody welts, he was "an
iconoclast, an image breaker." Puritanism, said Sherman,
"is a formative spirit, an urgent and exploring and creative
spirit."

There was more than a hint of a new Know-Nothing
movement in Sherman's comment that those critics with
names out of the melting pot who praise the modern Scan-
dinavian, German, or Russian writers could hardly "be ex-
pected to hear any profound murmurings of ancestral voices
or to experience any mysterious inflowing in meditating on
the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln,
Emerson, Franklin and Bradford." Ernest Boyd, writing
in The Nation, labeled Sherman's view "Ku Klux Kriti-
cism."

In The Genius of America (1923), Sherman attempted
to answer Spingarn's principle that literary criticism is not
concerned with moral truth or democracy. Sherman says
he thinks he understands the point Spingarn is making in
a supersubtle Italian fashion, but every American school-
boy would, if he could understand it, feel it to be false to
the history of beauty in America. He would know that
beauty "vitalizes and gives permanency to the national
ideals." From this point on, Arnold and Babbitt were wan-
ing influences. Sherman was becoming a Rotarian. Points
of View (1924) is a discovery of American "ideals": Cleanli-
ness, Health, Swift Mobility, Publicity, and Athletics. Sher-

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 87

man was also beginning to see virtues in novelists like
Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and Lewis, but he could wish they had
a little more affection for things American. My Dear Cor-
nelia (1924) concludes that the younger generation, except
for its ignoring of the Eighteenth Amendment, is worthy
of its forebears. In the same year Sherman assumed the lit-
erary editorship of the Herald Tribune. Critical Woodcuts
(1926) is filled with appreciations of the new men from
Oscar Wilde to Wells. He had dropped his allegiances to
the humanists. Perhaps it is not unfair to say that Sherman
did not grow so much as he changed, but his career, pre-
maturely ended in 1926, has considerable historical sig-
nificance.

The affirmation of the new America was also carried on
in the liberal magazines, The Nation, The New Republic,
and The Freeman. Saturday Review of Literature, under
Canby, also took on a liberal tone. Behind them, of course,
were The Masses of Dell and Eastman, and Reedy's Mir-
ror. Under Carl Van Doren's editorship (1919-22) the liter-
ary criticism of The Nation, especially, took on vigor and
forthrightness, even though Van Doren, as Lewisohn later
complained, was unwilling to commit himself to a definite
critical position. It is true that in reading most of the criti-
cism published in The Nation and in the other magazines
as well one feels that critical intelligence and sensibility
were frequently dissipated for lack of a method, for lack
of a complex knowledge of the ways in which life gets into
literature. Van Doren later summed up the critical position
of most of his associates in this statement: "We were held
together by a shared passion for literature as an art so in-

88 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

terwoven with life that neither could be understood with-
out the other. This passion set the tone of criticism in the
new Nation and has marked it ever since." It is true, ob-
viously, that art and life interpenetrate, but art is life se-
lected and usually distorted, refracted, not flatly mirrored.
The way in which literature differs from life is also im-
portant.

One of the most astute of the liberal critics was Ludwig
Lewisohn, drama critic for The Nation. He had studied
the whole range of criticism and he had imagination, sensi-
tivity, and fervor. He wrote valuable studies of modern
German literature, of French poetry and experiments in
European drama, and he edited A Modern Book of Criti-
cism (1919), which included American, English, French,
and German critics. As drama critic for The Nation he
held up the ideal of the "eternal poet struggling with the
mysteries of the earth," and he derided playwrights and
directors who knew only the theater. His fervent demands
for individual liberty and his image of the artist as one
struggling against the bonds of society found receptive audi-
ences, but it also became clear that Lewisohn was not deeply
concerned in examining literature in terms of its own his-
torical, social, or philosophical contexts. His German-Jew-
ish ancestry and an unhappy marriage had, or he felt they
had, made him the victim of American prejudices and re-
pressive laws. He frequently allowed his sufferings to be
magnified until the American society tended to seem merely
a part of his autobiography. Had he been less driven by
a need to personalize criticism in this fashion, Lewisohn
might have become one of our best critics. Even so, he
played a significant role among the liberal critics associated
with The Nation.

Mark Van Doren and Joseph Wood Krutch were also

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA 89

capable of writing astute criticism. Van Doren's criticism
at its best, as in John Dry den (1920) or Shakespeare (1939),
yields great profit on close reading. There appears to be
on his part, however, a determined avoidance of technical
terms or even generalizations which one might apply in
other contexts. In this fact there may be a clue to Van
Doren's failure to become a more influential critic. T. S.
Eliot's "Dryden," a review of Van Doren's book, does pro-
vide such generalizations, as, for instance, that Milton is
"our greatest master of the artificial style," Dryden of the
"natural," and Dryden's merit consists in his "ability to
make the 'small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic,
the trivial into the magnificent." One can read Van Doren's
study for the well-chosen extracts, the fine explications, the
appreciations. Similiarly with his excellent study of the
plays of Shakespeare. Perhaps the point is simply that highly
memorable criticism is read not only for the illumination
it brings to a given work but for the general principles it
provides.

Such comments are less applicable to Krutch because he
is more given to generalizations, as in his milieu study
Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration (1924) and
The Modern Temper (1929), as well as in his Samuel John-
son (1944) and Henry David Thoreau (1949). Krutch's re-
views for The Nation of books as well as plays are almost
invariably shrewd and to the point. The book for which he
is best known, The Modern Temper, is not his best, but it
will long be an important document.

The Modern Temper was an expression, somewhat simi-
lar to Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship," of a de-
sire to see the world objectively, honestly, without romantic
illusions. It overlooked the fact that any view of the world
will arouse feelings appropriate to it. Krutch's view, which

90 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

he later abandoned, aroused a sentimental pessimism. It was
a view derived from a reductive naturalism, a form of scien-
tism that did not allow subjective elements, that is, such
products of the imagination as love or nobility, a place in
the true nature of things. In brief, according to this doc-
trine, because the universe is not anthropocentric, man is
nothing. One chapter, "Love the Life and Death of a
Value," demonstrates that human love has no divine sanc-
tion; it is a product of the imagination therefore it is not
true, and modern man must believe it a delusion exacted
by his senses. "The Tragic Fallacy," another of Krutch's
much-discussed chapters, acknowledges that tragedy need
not depend upon a belief in God but does depend on a
belief in man. However, tragedy is not possible for us be-
cause we are incapable of conceiving man as noble. Even
though Krutch probably went further in this book than
many of his fellow liberals would have gone, his attitudes
in general were those of the liberal critics of the twenties.
He was one of the few willing to pursue the implications
in these attitudes and relate them to literature.

More willing to take their liberal modernism for granted
were the abler of the journalist-critics like Francis Hackett,
literary editor for The New Republic, and Burton Rascoe,
editor of the Herald Tribune's "Books." They encouraged
the new writers and they were, for the most part, eminently
sensible. But once they had helped create a liberal audience,
much of their criticism, except as it furnished information
for the uninformed, had little further use. 7

The critics associated with the movement called Amer-

7 In his autobiography, Carl Van Doren tells how he encouraged Ray-
mond Weaver to write the first life of Melville. "In 1920 I had roused ques-
tions by writing that nobody knew American literature who did not know
Melville. In 1940, revising the book in which this statement had appeared, I
dropped it as now too obvious."

NEW AWARENESS IN AMERICA Ql

ica's Coming-of-Age served their period by attacking the
genteel tradition, by insisting that literature be allowed to
tell the truth about the everyday world. They helped to
create an open-minded audience. Much of their criticism,
however, which was more concerned with attitudes than
with techniques, was assimilated and then forgotten. With
a few notable exceptions, like Beach and Krutch, many of
these critics turned to other subjects, to politics, to social
studies, to history. As a group, the critics associated with
the movement tended to equate life and reality with litera-
ture and to be singularly indifferent to the way in which
life and reality got into literature.

THE NEW HUMANISM

URING the postwar years reductive nat-
uralism had made debunking biographies, drab fiction, and
behaviorist drama seem inevitable. Irving Babbitt, Paul
Elmer More, and their followers were among those who
most firmly resisted the tenets of reductive naturalism and
the kinds of literature to which it gave rise. 1 The New
Humanists were looked upon variously as defenders of the

1 More had edited The Independent and The Nation before retiring to
Princeton in 1914. Between 1904 and 1933 he published fourteen volumes
of his Shelburne Essays, devoted to short essays as well as to full-length
studies of single writers, and Nietzsche (1912), Platonism (1917), The Reli-
gion of Plato (1921), Hellenistic Philosophies (1923), The Christ of the New
Testament (1924), Christ the Word (1927), and The Catholic Faith (1931).
Babbitt taught at Harvard from 1894 and published Literature and the
American College (1908), The New Laokoon (1910), The Masters of Modern
French Criticism (1912), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Democracy and
Leadership (1924), French Literature (1928), and On Being Creative and
Other Essays (1932).

THE NEW HUMANISM 93

genteel tradition, as reactionaries, as enemies of democracy,
or as defenders of traditional values, upholders of the moral
order, and so forth.

The war waged by and against the New Humanists, with
its lulls, its forays, and the final tremendous battle in 1929-
30, involved almost every critic and scholar. One of the first
attacks from the left, as early as 1910, came from Marion
Reedy in Reedy' s Mirror. He found The New Laokoon the
most important book since the turn of the century, but he
prophesied that Babbitt's promised book on Rousseau, de-
spite the abilities of the "brilliant aristocrat," would fail.
"The revolt will go on. Anarchism is a great constructive
force." H. L. Mencken, on his side, carried on an attack that
was mostly slapstick against Babbitt and More. In revising
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mencken found
More's study of Nietzsche (one of the essays in The Drift
of Romanticism [1913]) "very ingenious." Later Mencken
lumped, and attacked as a part of his war on respectability,
all the New Humanists with "the prim virgins, male and
female, of the Dial, the Nation, the New York Times," and
with the "honorary pall-bearers of letters bogus Oxford
dons, jitney Matthew Arnolds," and so on. Randolph
Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks were in greater earnest. They
saw in the New Humanists not only the enemies of the new
literature but the archenemies of socialism.

Bourne, in 1912, found More's study of Nietzsche aca-
demic and without the requisite fervor. Several years later,
with the publication of More's Aristocracy and Justice
(1915), the battle lines were drawn. Bourne was one of the
young generals in the assault on tradition in education,
morality, economics, government, and literature. More had
raised the flag of the traditionalists and the reactionaries.
Bourne, with his fervent humanitarianism and individual-

94 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

ism, saw perversity and cruelty in More's statements that
those in government should never "relax the rigour of law"
out of "pity for the degree of injustice inherent in earthly
life/' nor cease to believe that "in the light of the larger
good of society" the "rights of property are more important
than the right to life." Babbitt, as early as Literature and
the American College, was equally adamant in his opposi-
tion to the humanitarians. Bourne saw in the older critics
and in their younger followers like Stuart P. Sherman a
petulant and, ultimately, a vain protesting against the new
values. Brooks in Letters and Leadership (1918) held that
More could not feel "human values finely because to have
done so would have been to upset his whole faith in a so-
ciety based not upon the creative but upon the acquisitive
instincts of men. . . ."

During most of the igso's there were few serious attacks
on the New Humanists. The young men seemed to have
won the war, and the occasional gibes must have seemed
gratuitous. Most of the literary journals were avowedly lib-
eral. Lewis Mumford found Democracy and Leadership
"lucid and temperate" and Babbitt "a valuable critic of de-
mocracy." Writing in November 1927 in the Herald Trib-
une he said it was unfortunate that Babbitt and More had
been attacked indiscriminately in the all-out war against
gentility. Mumford deplored the Tory prejudices of both
men, but he added that in reading More at this time he dis-
covered "a man of extraordinary tact and good judgement
in every matter pertaining to literature," and that after
reading Babbitt he could admit that "had the weaker mem-
bers of our generation known him better they might not
perhaps have made so many knock-kneed compromises."

The following year, however, activities were renewed all
along the front when Howard Mumford Jones in The New

THE NEW HUMANISM 95

Republic replied to a series of articles on humanism in The
Forum, Mary Colum reviewed Gorham Munson's Desti-
nations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900, and
Horace Kallen reviewed Norman Foerster's American Criti-
cism for the Saturday Review of Literature. Mr. Jones and
Mrs. Colum were concerned with berating Babbitt's Rous-
seau and Romanticism and Mr. Kallen with dismissing
Foerster's book and humanism as "the last gasp of secular-
ized Calvinism" and "the frayed latter end of the genteel
tradition." During 1929 the fighting continued. Robert
Shafer replied to an article by Allen Tate entitled "The
Fallacy of Humanism," and their debate was carried fur-
ther in The Bookman, the editor of which, Seward Collins,
was championing the New Humanists. The book editors
and reviewers, Henry Hazlitt, Harry Hansen, Henry Seidel
Canby, Edmund Wilson, William S. Knickerbocker, and
others got into the fray. Each side had another, though
hardly a final, word to say when Foerster published the
symposium Humanism and America (1930), with fifteen
articles, and in reply Hartley Gratton edited A Critique
of Humanism (1930), with thirteen articles.

Democracy, romanticism, humanitarianism, restraint in
discussing sex, respect for traditional beliefs and attitudes,
and so on, were hotly debated by the New Humanists and
their various opponents, but the underlying and basic issue
was naturalism, in its rationalistic-utilitarian line on the
one side and its sentimental-romantic line on the other.
Norman Foerster said the New Humanists held that "a
complete culture necessitates a sharp contrast between what
Emerson termed the law for man and the law for thing, the
human realm of value and quality and the purely quantita-
tive realm of nature." The New Humanists held that the
law for man is clearly evident, not merely in the durable

96 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

parts of the Greek and Christian tradition, but in the tra-
ditions of India and China as well.

In the first of his Shelburne Essays, More had insisted that
the critical faculty should serve the "law of measure/' The
duty of the critic is to "transform and interpret and mold
the sum of experience from man to man and generation to
generation/' Twenty-four years later in The Demon of the
Absolute he said that men who are morally and intellectu-
ally indolent cannot perceive that the voice of the higher
discipline is available through tradition. In their conceit
the indolent fall into an "absolute relativism" in moral as
well as critical values. "That is the present guise of the
Demon as he stalks abroad, instilling his venom into the
innocent critics of the press."

Babbitt also insisted on this distinction of the lower life
which man shares with nature and the higher which man
has alone, whether merely as a human or as a supernatu-
ral being. The higher faculties of man are reason, moral
will, and moral imagination (as opposed to "recreative" and
"idyllic imagination"). These higher faculties impose an
"inner check" which, critical and moral at once, prevents
self-indulgence, sentimental humanitarian acts, and vaga-
ries of romantic expression and forms. Babbitt furnished
the clearest exposition of his position in "Humanism: An
Essay at Definition" (1930).

In it he stated that the "law of measure" is the center,
historically and psychologically, in all humanistic move-
ments. Modernism is a move away from the law of measure,
but there always have been humanists, men who have recog-
nized intuitively or believed in a "universal norm," "laws
unwritten in the heavens," or believed that human nature
demands a "sense of order and decorum and measure in
deeds and words." The scientific-utilitarian side of natu-

THE NEW HUMANISM 97

ralism (typified by Bacon) offends against balance and de-
corum by glorying in the specialist who sacrifices a rounded
development in order to contribute his bit to progress and
by pursuing "material instead of spiritual 'comfort/ " The
romantic-sentimental side of naturalism (typified by Rous-
seau) offends against balance and decorum by promoting
"free temperamental expansion" and "the humanitarian
hope for brotherhood among men based on emotional over-
flow." The humanists work against excesses of individ-
ualism and "intellectual anarchy" by restraining their ap-
petites.

As Ndrman Foerster would later point out, the excite-
ment over the New Humanism was lessened by the great
depression and a new interest in regional writing. Even
so, the influence of humanism was considerable, largely be-
cause it caused critics to question their basic assumptions.

n

One would have thought, George Santayana said, inves-
tigating the implications in the position of the New Hu-
manists in The Genteel Tradition at Bay, that the genteel
tradition had all but disappeared, was little more than a
remembered atmosphere. But no, the spirit that once moti-
vated it is not dead. Furthermore, its proponents protest
"that it is not genteel or antiquated at all, but orthodox
and immortal. Its principles, it declares, are classical, and
its true name is Humanism." Santayana attempted to dem-
onstrate that the new movement was really a protest against
the consequences of the older humanism. Renaissance hu-
manists, he said, were opposed to austerity, were willing to
wink at amiable vices, and through a spirit of tolerance

98 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

hoped to neutralize the rigors of conflicting dogmas. Eventu-
ally, a tolerant humanist was able to give a place in his
sympathies to religions of the East, to primitive art, to the
virtues of societies quite foreign to his own. "Thus human-
ism ended at last in a pensive agnosticism and a charmed
culture, as in the person of Matthew Arnold." The New
Humanists felt the lameness in this conclusion, and in one
way Santayana agreed with them. "If the humanist could
really live up to his ancient maxim, humani nil a me
alienum puto, he would sink into moral anarchy and artis-
tic impotence the very thing from which our liberal, ro-
mantic world is so greatly suffering." Because an orderly
existence demands insistence on certain patterns, one can-
not accept everything that is new or strange. By and large,
the humanist movement has emancipated the passions, at-
tempted to turn nature to practical purposes to surrender
the spirit to the flesh.

We are the heirs of what Santayana calls the three R's of
the Renaissance: Reformation, Revolution, and Romance.
The Reformation has appealed to lay interests: many a
writer has demonstrated the superiority of Protestantism
by pointing to its social achievements, more commerce, sci-
entific advancement, neater towns, and so forth. "I think
we might say of Protestantism something like what Goethe
said of Hamlet. Nature had carelessly dropped an acorn
into the ancient vase of religion, and the young oak, grow-
ing within, shattered the precious vessel." Santayana, of
course, is denying that Protestantism is half so concerned
with spiritual as with material well-being. Revolution has
increased individual liberty, elevated the average man, and
given him more comfort. Romance is unlike Reformation
and Revolution in that it is not for the most part in rebel-
lion. Whatever may be the points in history where it mani-

THE NEW HUMANISM 99

fests itself clearly, its origins may simply be human. "It
involves a certain sense of homelessness in a chaotic world,
and at the same time a sense of meaning and beauty there."
Santayana finds a humbleness, a sense of human imperfec-
tions, a kind of prerequisite to enlightened action in the
spirit of Romance. As the heir of these three R's, modern
man has come to believe that his physical life is not a life
of sin.

One of the New Humanists said: "The accepted vision
of a good life is to make a lot of money by fair means; to
spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die
with one's boots on." Santayana was willing to accept this
sturdy ideal as the natural outgrowth of industrialism in
America. (And he could add, with a touch of malice, that in
the margins of American life there is room for the cultiva-
tion of an intellectual life, that democracy loves splendidly
endowed libraries and museums, and that "the adaptable
spirit of Protestantism may be relied upon to lend a pious
and philosophical sanction to any instinct that may deeply
move the national mind.") The protests of the New Hu-
manists are not the protests which the Renaissance human-
ists would have made. The New Humanists were pointing
not at a humanism but at a theocracy:

Theocracy is what all the enemies of the three R's . . . must
endeavour to restore, if they understand their own position.
Wealth, learning, sport and beneficence, even on a grand scale,
must leave them cold, or positively alarm them, if these fine
things are not tightly controlled and meted out according to
some revealed absolute standard. . . . Let us have honest bold
dogmas supported by definite arguments: let us re-establish our
moral sentiments on foundations more solid than tradition or
gentility. ... If our edifice is to be safe, we must lay the founda-
tions in eternity.

100 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

The quarrel between the modernists or liberals and the
New Humanists was a major battle to decide whether natu-
ralism was to be intellectually dominant, but it was not
quite the same as the battle waged between Bishop Wilber-
force and Huxley. Babbitt denied that humanism was of
value only in subordination to orthodox Christianity. In
"Humanism: An Essay at Definition" he insisted that a "sur-
vey of the past" does not confirm the view that humanism
is parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the
humanistic spirit that the world has seen, that in ancient
Greece and that in Confucian China, did not have the sup-
port of Christianity or any other form of revealed "religion.
Babbitt placed himself "unhesitatingly on the side of the
supernaturalists," but his "revealed religion" included the
religion of Sophocles, Confucius, and Christ. Most Chris-
tians would see Babbitt's supernaturalism as something
other than Christianity.

tit

It is important, as Santayana said, to know from what
basic laws, dogmas, or assumptions Babbitt draws his strong
convictions. Insofar as one can tell from his own statements
he was not an orthodox Christian. Yet he did not hesitate
to speak with the assurance of a presbyter. In Babbitt's
mind, for example, renunciation had as its corollary an in-
dividualism that was contemptuous of any humanitarian
gestures or movements. It may be true, as Babbitt held, that
"the will to power" is usually much stronger than "the will
to service." But it would seem to follow that an act of re-
nunciation would frequently be an act of charity. His dis-
like of romantics and liberals, who as humanitarians like to
insist on the myth of natural goodness, hardly seems reason

THE NEW HUMANISM 1O1

enough for the constant ridicule of humanitarian acts. Sym-
pathy and kindness played little part in Babbitt's criticism,
and he apparently enjoyed his own belligerent and raucous
manner in controversy.

More, on the other hand, seems to have had the agonized
conscience of the early Calvinist. His startlingly reaction-
ary statements seem, if taken by themselves, cruel in a way
that Babbitt's are not, especially because More was a more
sensitive critic than Babbitt. But More was writing under
the aegis of an angry God. Responsibility was the terrible
burden of the individual, not of society. To blame society
as a whole for evil laws, he wrote in Aristocracy and Tradi-
tion (1917), was to weaken "the responsibility of the in-
dividual soul to its maker and judge." The forces of order
had to be upheld. If the romantics made a myth of natural
goodness, then More may be said to have served the older
myth of man as naturally depraved. In his Platonism he
could make Plato a Presbyterian:

To the true Platonist the divine spirit, though it may be called,
and is, the hidden source of beauty and order and joy, yet al-
ways, when it speaks directly in the human breast, makes itself
heard as an inhibition; like the Guide of Socrates, it never in
its own person commands to do, but only to refrain. Whereas to
the pseudo-Platonist it appears as a positive inspiration, saying
yes to his desires and emotions.

Most readers probably feel that the Dialogues are attempts
to isolate, modify, and explain and then either to justify
or condemn certain of our desires or designs, but More finds
that each ends with a "Thou shalt notl" In More, despite
his delicacy and learning, there is a latter-day Calvinism, a
genteel masochism.

Norman Foerster's interpretation of the humanist posi-

1O2 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

tion in respect to supernaturalism is found in his American
Criticism (1928):

This centre to which humanism refers everything, this centrip-
etal energy which counteracts the multifarious centrifugal im-
pulses, this magnetic will which draws the flux of our sensations
toward it while itself remaining at rest, is the reality which gives
rise to religion. Pure humanism is content to describe it thus in
physical terms, as an observed fact of experience; it hesitates to
pass beyond its experimental knowledge to the dogmatic affir-
mations of any of the great religions.

T. S. Eliot, in "Second Thoughts on Humanism," pub-
lished in Hound and Horn, objected to this passage, saying
it typified the ambiguous attitude of the humanists toward
religion, identifying themselves with it at one moment and
dissociating themselves the next. Their attacks against the
forms of naturalism would seem to make it clear that the
humanists do not look upon themselves as naturalists. Yet
on the other hand they (Babbitt and Foerster, at least) would
not be thought supernaturalists. According to believers in
the supernatural, morals come from God and are justified
thereby. According to the naturalists they come from biol-
ogy, social adjustment, and so forth. There is, as Eliot puts
it, no way out of the dilemma: "you must be either a natu-
ralist or a supernaturalist." Foerster said, "the essential re-
ality of experience is ethical." He was saying, in effect, that
an ethical reality lives in a hiatus between the natural and
the supernatural. But, as Eliot objected, if the word "super-
natural" is suppressed, the "dualism of man and nature
collapses at once." The point is crucial. The term "human"
long depended on connotations derived from supernatural-
ism. If one is not a supernaturalist he must reconcile him-
self to giving up, at least eventually, these associations and

THE NEW HUMANISM 1O3

accepting those that arise from considering man as natural.
This the humanists seemed unwilling to do.

Foerster has been an apologist for the New Humanism
rather than a literary critic. He called American Criticism
"a work of historical-critical exegesis in the field of scholar-
ship." In The American Scholar (1929) he said his fellow
scholars had "fallen victims to the mechanistic tendencies
of the age; and in their pseudo-scientific wanderings into
the fields of literary history, general history, and psychol-
ogy, have lost nearly all perspective and ability to evaluate
the writings either of their own age or of the past." In To-
wards Standards; A Study of the Present Critical Movement
in American Letters (1930) he had surveyed impressionist
criticism, finding, of course, that to emphasize the unique-
ness of a work at the expense of traditional values is to dis-
pense with standards. He had surveyed, too, journalistic
criticism like that of Henry Seidel Canby, finding it based
on "historical relativity or indifferentism"; the Bourne-
Brooks-Mumford school which argued the need for a hu-
manistic reconstruction but offered no tangible method for
it; and, lastly, the humanists who would find in tradition
the values that are permanent in human existence and con-
sonant with a "richly diversified, a finely shaped, and an
exalted life." In 1941, Foerster contributed "The Esthetic
Judgement and the Ethical Judgement" to The Intent of
the Critic. Here he acknowledges that the aesthetic critics
may be right in saying that delight is the primary criterion
in art, but the humanist will "add at once that the delight
comes from the wisdom expressed as well as from the ex-
pression of wisdom." But there appears to be a contradiction
in his adding that "Tintern Abbey" is great aesthetically
but is ethically unsound. Like Babbitt and More, Foerster
has fought courageously against a self-indulgent material-

104 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

ism; his interests have been ethical first and aesthetic only
incidentally.

w

Foerster, in American Critical Essays and elsewhere, lists
Prosser Hall Frye as a humanist who arrived at his position
largely independently. A reading of Literary Reviews and
Criticism (1908), Romance and Tragedy (1922), and Vi-
sions and Chimeras (1929) makes perfectly clear that he
and Babbitt especially had much in common. Frye speaks
of life and literature being "vindicated against naturalism/'
of Zola lacking "moral sense," and of "these modern scien-
tific self-complacent humanitarianisms." Frye's manner is
usually academic, disinterested, and assured, but when he
undertakes to examine the characteristics of romantic lit-
erature he can rise to satiric barbs worthy of Babbitt. Ger-
man romanticism is a work of "degeneration, deformation,
and disease," and "it bears on its front the stigmata of its
infirmitiesabsurdity, folly, inanity, and confusion." When
Frye was not giving rein to his prejudices, he could write
with acuteness, moderation, and clarity. "The Idea of Greek
Tragedy," in Romance and Tragedy, furnishes an excel-
lent account of the general differences between Elizabethan
and Greek tragedy and the development from Aeschylus to
Euripides.

Yvor Winters, commonly identified with the new criti-
cism, also has strong affinities with Babbitt, whose influ-
ence he has acknowledged. Among his later contemporaries,
only F. R. Leavis, the British critic, writes with the same
forthrightness about moral issues in literature. Primitivism
and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry
(1937), Winters's first book, is an attempt to relate the mo-

THE NEW HUMANISM 105

tive behind a poem to the feelings aroused by connotation,
sound, and rhythms. (By "primitive," Winters means writ-
ers who "utilize all the means necessary to the most vigorous
form, but whose range of material is limited," and by "de-
cadent," he means writers who "display a fine sensitivity to
language and who may have a very wide range" but whose
work is weakened by a "vice of feeling.") The exact center
of the book is not clear, but many of the incidental analyses
and statements of principle are explicitly made and valu-
able. Winters's essential position is most clearly stated in
The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943):

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 understanding, 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 under-
standing. The artistic result differs from the crude experience
mainly in its refinement of judgement: the difference in really
good art is enormous, but the difference is of degree rather than
kind.

Much of Winters's theory, which is expressed and ex-
patiated upon in an authoritative manner, is fallacious.
Obviously, there is something to his thesis that the tone
engendered by the connotations, sound, and rhythms evalu-
ates or is appropriate to the motive of the poem. But motive
does not exist as some Platonic essence, or even as a clear-cut
little body of ideas, prior to and separate from its concrete
embodiment in a poem; in a very real sense, motive does
not exist until the poem is at least partially written, and
much of what the poet says is accidental and unwitting on
his part. Winters's thesis, to change the figure, suggests a

106 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

skeletonized idea, apparently highly complex to begin with,
on which the poet is able to grow muscle, tissue, flesh, and
appropriate contours. Winters also assumes a poem that is
static, constant in its meanings and rhythms, as though the
poem in the course of time did not undergo developments
in connotations and meanings of words and in the stresses
with which they are pronounced. Winters's scansions, fre-
quently done with great precision, do not allow for the pos-
sibility of variant readings. Another objection to Winters's
system is that it assumes capacity to intellectualize our ex-
perience of color, sound, rhythm, weight, texture, size, and
so forth that is far beyond human capacity or inclination.
Winters, as one might expect, tends to rate most highly
the poets who employ an abstract diction, whose work least
resists explicit commentary and paraphrase. He also likes
writers restrained in their enthusiasm, strong-minded, and
certain about their moral principles. The source of Win-
ters's assurance about moral issues is never made clear. He
says he is not a Christian. Some of Winters's judgments are
notorious that Edith Wharton is greatly superior to James,
that T. Sturge Moore has written "more great poetry than
any of his contemporaries," that Elizabeth Daryush "is the
finest British poet since T. Sturge Moore," and so forth.
Winters deserves much of the ridicule his ex cathedra man-
ner and excessive statements invite. Even so, Winters is at
times a very perceptive critic. In Maule's Curse: Seven
Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938)
there are excellent studies of several American writers, one
of the best being his examination of "gratuitous emotion-
alizing" in Poe. His little book on Edwin Arlington Robin-
son, with whom he feels strong sympathies, is probably the
best of the critical studies of Robinson. His literal-minded-
ness in criticizing Henry Adams, Stevens, Eliot, John Crowe

THE NEW HUMANISM 107

Ransom, and Frost vitiates his studies of these figures. If
one can manage, however, to separate some of the basic
points Winters makes from the exaggerated judgments to
which they lead him, even these studies can be useful.

Yet another critic who had strong affinities with the hu-
manists was Gorham Munson. He had written several vol-
umes of aesthetic criticism, including Robert Frost (1927),
Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900
(1928), and Style and Form in American Prose (1929), be-
fore developing his enthusiasm for the New Humanism.
Then in 1930, the year he published The Dilemma of the
Liberated, he contributed "Our Critical Spokesmen" to
Foerster's symposium Humanism and America. Munson
declined, however, to be thought an orthodox humanist.
He objected to the humanist emphasis on "moderation/'
"the law of measure, Nothing Too Much," but he also saw
in humanism a valuable critique of the naturalism that
seemed to be ending in the romantic disillusionment of
Krutch's The Modern Temper. Of post-Renaissance history
he said:

The signs are plentiful of another transition: we have gone from
the dominance of religious values to the dominance of intel-
lectual ones, and then to the primacy of emotional values. The
last stage barbarism will occur with the complete triumph of
practical and instinctive values. Then Atlas will indeed be but
an economic creature, cleverly producing what he needs by the
least effort, and spending his increased leisure in the pursuit of
cheap distractions from thought and serious emotion. He will
truly have diminished to the ninth part of a human being.

In the final chapter of The Dilemma of the Liberated, Mun-
son says that scientific-utilitarianism and sentimental-ro-
manticism have, after all, held us at the end of a rather short

108 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

tether. "Our progress must consist in finding out the length
of our tether, and for that Humanism is one of the most
available means/'

Later generations are likely to say that although the nine-
teenth century made too much of moral questions the critics
in the first half of the twentieth century, except for the hu-
manists, made too little of them. It is true that a number
of critics have said that poetic value was not dependent
upon the acceptability of the ethical, philosophical, or sci-
entific statement in a poem. Eliot, for example, said that
James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it, and
he said that because there is a difference between ' 'philo-
sophical belief and poetic assent" we must distinguish be-
tween what Dante said as a poet and what he said as a man.
Ransom, attempting to explain modernity in poetry, said
that the modern poet is intensely concerned with the pos-
sibility of creating aesthetic effects apart from moral or
social considerations: "He cares nothing, professionally,
about morals, or God, or native land. He has performed a
work of dissociation and purified his art." Eliot and Ran-
som were extravagant in such statements. They can be ex-
cused, however, if one recognizes that their attempts to
make poetry pure was a part of the revolt against the didac-
tic heresy, the message-hunting of the Victorians. Poetic
value, as Eliot and Ransom knew, is not to be identified
with its philosophical or ethical value. On the other hand,
they did not come to terms with the fact that perverse or
silly ideas can weaken or preclude poetic value. Somewhat
younger critics have been able to accept both emphases.
Thus Cleanth Brooks requires that a poem or story be able
to withstand "ironic contemplation"; Robert Penn Warren
wants an idea to "prove itself" in its context; and Lionel
Trilling insists on quality, complexity, and maturity of per-

THE NEW HUMANISM 1OQ

ception, which he calls "moral realism." The direct in-
debtedness of these critics to the New Humanism is prob-
ably slight, but like their contemporaries they have been
aware 2 of voices raising serious objections to the spirit of
the age, objecting to romantic individualism and humani-
tarianism, and insisting on raising moral issues in relation
to literature in a period when liberalism and reductive
naturalism were dominating intellectual inquiries. But the
humanists were essentially negative as critics. They were
unsympathetic to almost every writer after Racine. Their
doctrine of discipline, proportion, and moderation was pri-
marily ethical. If it had been more than that, they could
have employed it in analyzing modern literature. The hu-
manists did not bring to criticism any developed awareness
of what R. P. Blackmur has called "symbolic techniques."
They were either unable or unwilling to enter imagina-
tively into a study of symbolic techniques in order to dis-
cover the way in which raw life, unconscious and residual
forces, traditions, and new insights were transformed into
art.

2 For one of the most recent statements of a humanist criticism (although
the kinship with the New Humanism is not made explicit), see Douglas
Bush, "The Humanist Critic," Kenyan Review, XIII (Winter 1951), 81-91.

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM

IG business and the middle-class mores
it was felt to be sponsoring were, of course, subjected to at-
tack in the early years of the century. From the muckraking
movement came John Curtis Underwood's Literature and
Insurgency (1914). The main point of the book would seem
to be that slick writing, such as the work of Elinor Glyn or
of Robert Chambers, was the product of a machine culture,
similar to conventionalized clothes and standardized amuse-
ments. Presumably the muckraking magazines and those
novelists with similar reformist zeal would help restore in-
dividuality, realism, and honesty by revealing the forces
behind the phenomenon. Underwood's book is hard to fol-
low because its thesis is never explicitly developed, if de-
veloped at all. Obviously Underwood thought Howells too
genteel, Twain a great democrat, and N orris and David

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 111

Graham Phillips our greatest writers. The real hero of the
book seems to be Phillips, who revealed, among other
things, "the pretenses and the posturings of the 'good'
women of America." James was the victim of something
called "culture for culture's sake." Precisely how the revo-
lutionary temper of the insurgents enabled them to write
an improved brand of American literature is never made
clear.

Upton Sinclair was a little more candid about distin-
guishing between literary value and a writer's political or
social views. In pamphlets and in Mammonart (1924) he
stated a case for literature as class propaganda. "All art is
propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda:
sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propa-
ganda." Sinclair propagandizes for a socialist literature and
tends to see virtues in writers who, however rawly or crudely
they write, are on the side of socialism, against rigid mores
and against economic exploitation; but he is more moderate
than most of the political critics of the late twenties and
thirties. Sinclair could see virtues in Henry James and be
somewhat critical of Phillips and of Jack London. Toward
the end of Mammonart he says he does not want to praise
writers who do not have intellect and imagination, and in
another place he says, "Great art is produced when propa-
ganda of vitality and importance is put across with technical
competence." But, like Underwood, Sinclair never explains
what is involved in technical competence.

Underwood and Sinclair were writing in the tradition of
social criticism to which Howells, London, Garland, Norris,
H. B. Fuller, and others belonged. With some exceptions,
they assumed a one-to-one relationship between social and
economic problems as subject matter and honest, realistic,
and therefore good fiction. The theory of economic determi-

112 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

nism invited more explicit attempts to relate discussions of
technique and form to social considerations. Oddly enough,
Brander Matthews, one of the last of the genteel critics, was
the first to raise the question. He wrote "The Economic
Interpretation of Literary History," Gateways to Literature
(1912) in order to suggest ways in which Professor Selig-
man's economic interpretation of history could be applied
to the study of literature.

Matthews acknowledges at the start that the "Hero and
Hero- Worship" approach of Carlyle that great men domi-
nate their epoch seems much more relevant to literature
than to history. "It may be that the American Revolution
would have run its course successfully even if Washington
had never been born, and that the Civil War would have
ended as it did even if Lincoln had died at its beginning;
but English literature would be very different if there had
been no Shakspere, and French literature would be very
different if there had been no Molire." There are, none-
theless, ways in which a writer is affected by the economic
situation in which he finds himself. In every age, for ex-
ample, most writers devote themselves to the literary form
that is most popular and therefore most profitable. "This
is what accounts for the richness of drama in England under
Queen Elizabeth, for the vogue of the essay under Queen
Anne, and for the immense expansion of the novel under
Queen Victoria." Matthews says there are four motives
which inspire literature accomplishment of an immediate
end, self-expression, fame, and money. Sometimes all four
combine, but the most insistent is the need for money.
Whatever one thinks about this hierarchy of motives for
writing, it is clear that the desire for money is more relevant
to the sociology of the writer than to literature as an art.
It has almost nothing to do with the inspiration behind a

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 113

literary work. The problem can be seen more explicitly in
the following examples quoted by Matthews:

A distinguisht British art critic has asserted that the luxuriance
of Tudor architecture is due directly to the introduction of
root-crops into England. That is to say, the turnip enabled the
sheep-farmers to carry their cattle thru the winter; and as the
climate of the British Isles favors sheep raising, the creation of
a winter food-supply immediately made possible the expansion
of the wool trade, whereby large fortunes were soon accumu-
lated, the men thus enricht expending the surplus promptly in
stately and sumptuous residences.

Matthews admits that the economic factor here is not a
direct cause of the architecture. He should have said that
it is not a cause of the architecture as architecture in any
sense at all. Taine's formula of race, moment, and milieu,
on the other hand, would be relevant because the climate
and ideals of a people would help to inspire the design. But
most important of all is the presence of an artist capable
of creating a design that catches the multiple significances
suggested by the spirit of the place and the people.

Despite frequent statements to the contrary, economics
is relevant to literary criticism only where one can show
that the nature and forms of a work have been designed
to satisfy a particular audience (coterie, court, or popular),
that its character is what it is partly because of the audience
the author had in mind in creating it. In Literature and
Revolution, translated in 1925, Leon Trotsky wrote: "A
work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own
law, that is, the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain
why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a
given period in history; who it was who made a demand for
such an artistic form and not for another, and why. . . ."

114 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Such a statement as this latter one has a plausible air to it.
It begins to seem less and less plausible, however, when one
reaches out for good illustrations. Certainly it would be
most unlikely that any critic could explain in economic
terms why Virginia Woolf chose to write lyric in lieu of
strict plot stories, why the sonnet is rarely written as suc-
cessfully in the twentieth as in the seventeenth century, or
why most modern poetry is much more highly stylized than
nineteenth-century poetry. Similarly, it would be most un-
likely that a critic could explain solely in economic and class
terms why Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night were
written when they were written, for what particular audi-
ence, and why the audience demanded those particular
forms. Form is an ambiguous term, but even if we limit it
to mean the creation of a character like the ambitious Mal-
volio, forced to recognize his place in order to satisfy the
aristocratic audience, we have no assurance that the ground-
lings did not see him as the aggressive, humorless opponent
of easy living, a type as offensive in the ranks of ironmongers
or journeymen as in the households of the wealthy. The
influence of economics on form means even less if by form
we mean the qualities of suspense and the techniques em-
ployed to create suspense, metrical patterns, the degree of
imagination evident in the imagery of various eras, the pace
of the action, or the tone. Trotsky is saying, on the one
hand, that art has its own laws; but, on the other hand, he
denies that it does by insisting that economic forces dictate
the origins or beginnings of a form. To insist that class or
audience dictates the form is also to imply that a literary
genius is merely a highly complex and delicate mechanism
responding to the economic weather of his age. Sainte-
Beuve's insistence, in criticizing Taine, that a writer oper-
ates as a free agent inside the forces presented to him by his

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 115

milieu is even more applicable as a criticism of economic
determinism, a single aspect of milieu.

Few critics, not even such a stalwart as Emma Goldman,
got down to cases in relating economic forces to literary
form, despite the frequency with which they appealed to
the reality of the economic interpretation of history. 1 Only
late in the career of political criticism, in the thirties, when
the results of equating literary worth with the writer's ad-
vocacy of social and economic reform were all too evident,
was there a general awareness that Marx had not at all times
insisted on a strict linking of economics and literature. In
fact, he had said: "Certain periods of highest development
of art stand in no direct connection with the general de-
velopment of society, nor with the material basis and the
skeleton structure of its organization." (But Lenin had said:
"Down with supermen-litterateurs. . . . Literature must be-
come a component part of the organized, planned, unified
Socialist party work.")

Joel Spingarn, in one of his unpublished New School lec-
tures, said that since 1848, when Marx and Engels stated
their materialistic conception of history, "all historical study
has been dominated by the idea of economic causes." Spin-
garn offered this criticism of the conception:

The trouble with American art and literature is that America
is too much absorbed in business. This is a commercial country.
Therefore we have no art or very poor art and literature. Very
good. . . . But let us turn to medieval Italy and the bourgeois
commercial cities of Italy, absorbed with business far more pas-
sionately than we, produced Dante. In one case business was

1 Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg), a British Marxist
critic, applied himself to the problem in Illusion and Reality (1937). The
reader can decide for himself whether Caudwell's interpretations are con-
vincing.

Il6 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

the cause of no art; in the other case business was the cause of
the greatest art.

Moral and religious forces, Spingarn says, are the real gen-
erative forces in history, and he illustrates the point by re-
calling that Mohammed preached a narrow and powerful
doctrine to the Arabs, "a small petty tribe in a desert sur-
rounded by desert," who were so moved by it that they
spread the religion of Islam from the whole of North Africa
to the center of Asia "and except for a mischance would
have conquered Europe/' Marx and Lenin became new
Mohammeds. Why, Spingarn asks ironically, did "some ex-
ternal cause make them into Mohammeds when the causes
that were at work in Russia for centuries and under a dif-
ferent religion and a different philosophy had produced
nothing?" (Bliss Perry to a similar end had quoted Fisher
Ames on the climate-environment theory in relation to
Greek literature: "The figs are as fine as ever, but where
are the Pindars?") That Spingarn was not saying that the
external conditions had no relation to the generating forces
of morality and religion, is implied in his concluding state-
ment: "All life is a process of the inner urge of men acting
on the external conditions. And history is the unity of the
condition and the urge. It is not the condition, it is not the
urge; it is the unity of the condition and the urge." 2

Marxist criticism in the twenties had few practitioners
and was uninfluential. It may be that most critics, even

2 Harry Slochower came to a similar conclusion in Three Ways of Modern
Man (1937): "Matter and ideas, economics and art, are not identical. Nor is
the relationship between them such that the one is thoioughly subsumed
by the other. . . . Man acts not alone from physical necessity. He is driven
by an inner impulse toward spiritual freedom."

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 117

socialists, did not believe that political theory and litera-
ture were inextricably interrelated. The isolation-of-art the-
ories of the nineteenth century had not encouraged such
a feeling. Max Eastman as an editor of The Masses could
write about poetry without reference to politics. In fact, his
later works, Artists in Uniform (1934) and Art and the Life
of Action (1934), were protests against a state-controlled
literature. Eastman's thesis in The Literary Mind: Its Place
in an Age of Science (1931) was that, not being knowledge,
literature could not compete with science, that is, with "the
inexorable advance of a more disciplined study of man."
Therefore 'he was not prepared to take literature as seriously
as the communists were taking it. His fellow editor Floyd
Dell seemed more interested in psychoanalysis than in poli-
tics. Except for occasional reviews and articles in The Lib-
erator, it was not until Michael Gold began to edit New
Masses in 1928 that there was a criticism explicitly Marxist.
Gold wrote, often quite movingly, about the New York
poor. He was concerned merely with promoting commu-
nism, and although he knew very little about aesthetic the-
ory he knew a great deal about arousing sympathy for the
working classes. Joseph Freeman, on the other hand, in
Voices of October (1930) and as an editor of Proletarian
Literature in the United States (1935), tried to make Marx-
ist criticism acceptable intellectually. He acknowledged that
much of the proletarian art was pretty bad, even admitting
that the writer did not have to belong, as Edwin Seaver had
claimed, to the Party. It was necessary, however, for the
writer to identify himself with the proletariat; having done
this, he could "grow in insight and power with the growth
of the American working class world now beginning to
tread its historic path toward the new world/* The extent
to which the war of the classes dictated the value a critic

Il8 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

could put on a writer is suggested by this passage on Stephen
Spender as a radical, written by Edwin Berry Burgum for
Proletarian Literature:

The poet seeks to escape pessimism by discovering the old
aristocratic virtues in the lower classes, and especially, it should
be noted, in their leaders. The great men in one of his most
characteristic poems, like his old time aristocrats, Spender de-
scribes as born of the sun, traveling a short while toward the
sun, and leaving the vivid air signed with their honor. Now in
all likelihood, honor can be translated into a Communistic vir-
tue, though it will remain a term of dangerous connotations. . . .

William Phillips and Philip Rahv, 8 editors of Partisan
Review, in their contributions to the same volume uttered
a warning that was not widely accepted: "In criticism the
'leftist' substitutes gush on the one hand, and invective on
the other, for analysis; and it is not difficult to see that to
some of these critics Marxism is not a science but a senti-
ment/'

But leftism was so much a part of the intellectual atmos-
phere that many critics, in and out of the Party, admired or
disapproved of writers almost exclusively on the grounds of
their political sentiments. Four of the most influential of
these were V. F. Calverton, Vernon Louis Parrington, Gran-
ville Hicks, and Bernard Smith. In Calverton's Modern
Quarterly (later Modern Monthly), Marxist principles dic-
tated aesthetic principles. The language experiments of
Joyce, Eliot, or E. E. Cummings were held to be misguided
because language should be employed for "social communi-
cation/' and literature, to be of any value, must "attain a
social beauty commensurate with radical vision and aspira-

3 See also Philip Rahv, "Proletarian Literature: An Autopsy," Southern
Review, Vol. IV (Winter 1939).

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 11Q

tion." His The Newer Spirit (1925) is a plea for literature
that serves a social function. Calverton's thesis in The Lib-
eration of American Literature (1932) is that the decay of
the middle class is behind the pessimism and the confused
values of modern literature. Equal suffrage, equal oppor-
tunity, and freedom of thought are myths. "Middle class
culture driven to a deception in its economic defense, justi-
fying exploitation as a virtue and competition as a sign of
progress, translated the contradiction of its economic life
into every form of human endeavor." The literature of such
a society has inevitably reflected its deceptions. Only today,
with the breakdown of the middle class, when no one can
believe any longer in its idealism, "are we able to appreciate
the catastrophic extent to which human thought and im-
pulse were sold out to the burgher." The future belongs
not to the "bourgeois individualist" but to the "proletarian
collectivism" Calverton then cites a group of novelists and
critics who recognize the need for an alliance not with the
acquisitive capitalist but with the intellectual and imagina-
tive proletariat. The premise is that all cultural expressions
have their source in an economic order, but even if one
could accept the rigors and simplicity of such a theory it
would seem unnecessary to attribute virtue exclusively to
the proletariat and vice to the middle class.

Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American
Thought, appearing in 1927 and 1930, treated American
literature almost entirely in political and economic terms.
E. H. Eby, writing the Introduction to the third volume
after Parrington's death, said that three principles explain
the method of the study: Taine's theory, economic determi-
nism, and the equating of American thought with Ameri-
can literature. "When he envisaged American literature as
American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was

120 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

broken and he was free to reevaluate American writers.
. . . The economic forces imprint their mark upon political,
social, and religious institutions; literature expresses the
result in its thought content/' These principles gave Par-
rington a method whereby he could be "true to the facts/'
and his liberalism gave him the position and point of view
in terms of which the facts could be evaluated.

In the Introduction to the first volume Parrington had
written: "The point of view from which I have endeavored
to evaluate the materials is liberal rather than conservative,
Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic; and very likely in my
search I have found what I went forth to find, as others have
discovered what they were searching for/' The sacred books
were: J. Allen Smith's The Spirit of American Government
(1907) and Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation
of the Constitution (1913). It was unnecessary to go to Karl
Marx because the doctrine had "shaped the conclusions
of Madison and Hamilton and John Adams, and it reap-
peared in the arguments of Webster and Calhoun." The
equalitarian doctrines of the French are "treacherous ro-
manticism," but economic determinism is "sober reality/'
Americans have confused the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, forgetting that one is a "classical
statement of French humanitarian democracy, the other an
organic law designed to safeguard the minority under re-
publican rule." Parrington did not explain how economic
determinism is consistent with "the liberal's faith" in the
rise of the proletariat, his own Jeffersonian democracy, but
he said that, beginning with Wilson's Administration, this
faith had proved justified. Nor did he explain in specific in-
stances just how a given literary work was the product of
economic forces. The truth would seem to be that Parring-
ton's system, social and economic determinism, was another

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 121

form of scientism and that he himself was a romantic of the
type he claimed to deplore. 4

Granville Hicks, during his term as a communist, was a
spokesman for party-line literature. In "The Crisis in Criti-
cism" (1933), an article in the New Masses, he laid down the
rules for the "perfect Marxian novel." It must "directly or
indirectly show the effects of the class struggle," "make the
reader feel he is participating in the lives described," and
through its point of view make clear that the author belongs
to "the vanguard of the proletariat." Like Parrington, Hicks
had to equate the valuable parts of the American literary
tradition with an acceptable political and social view. The
Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature
Since the Civil War (1933) ends with this summary:

What stirs us in Emerson is his confidence in the common man,
his courageous appeal for action, his faith in the future. He and
Thoreau were rebels against the shams and oppressions of their
day. They used the language of their times, the language of in-
dividualism, but they spoke for all the oppressed, and some of
their words remain a call to arms. Whitman felt deeply his kin-
ship with the workers and farmers and caught a glimpse of the
collective society. Howells, James, and Mark Twain shrank in
their various ways from the cupidity of the gilded age, and
Howells, teaching himself to think in terms of a new social
order, tried, however feebly, to create, in imagination and fact,
a better world. Garland and Norris denounced oppression; Her-
rick and Phillips worked for reform; Sinclair and London called
themselves socialists.

4 Parrington's style frequently exhibits a floridity and aspiring quality
that contradicts his stated concern with "hard fact" and "sober reality." The
following is a sentence singled out by Yvor Winters, one of his harshest
critics: "The golden dreams ot transcendental faith, that buoyed up Emer-
son and gave hope to Thoreau, turned to ashes in his mouth; the white
gleams of mysticism that now and then lighted up his path died out and
left him in darkness."

122 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

It is significant that Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson,
Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton appar-
ently do not belong to the great tradition.

Bernard Smith's Forces in American Criticism (1939) was
also in the Parrington tradition but militantly Marxist. In
his chapter on twentieth-century criticism he explains why
Marxist criticism is superior to impressionist and expres-
sionist criticism:

The Marxist thesis may be briefly stated as follows: a work
of literature reflects its author's adjustment to society. To de-
termine the character and value of the work we must therefore,
among other things, understand and have an opinion about the
social forces that produced the ideology it expresses as an atti-
tude toward life. Marxism enables us to understand those forces
by explaining the dialectical relationship of a culture to an
economy and of that culture to the classes which exist in that
economy. At the same time, by revealing the creative role of the
proletariat in establishing a communist society, which alone can
realize universal peace and well-being, Marxism offers a scale of
value. Moral as well as political judgments follow from that
thesis and they include a condemnation of the bourgeois sex-
ual code, of woman's traditional place in the community, and
of the accepted relative prestige of labor and unproductive
leisure. Of immediate significance to the critic is the conception
of reality from which the thesis is evolved and which the thesis
defines.

Smith, too, was caught in the thesis that social significance
is also literary significance. A victim of the doctrinaire na-
ture of most American Marxist criticism, he was forced, as
Morton D. Zabel put it, into a "crudity of sympathy, that
keeps him in petty fear of admitting 'beauty* ... as the
proper concern of any serious artist; of sensibility as a criti-
cal instrument of infinitely greater importance . . . than
popular or political passions/'

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 123

Parrington, Hicks, and Smith employed only economic
and social criteria and ignored, ridiculed, or disallowed the
reputations built on standards of artistry. Thus, Parrington
on Poe: "The problem of Poe, fascinating as it is, lies quite
outside the main current of American thought, and it may
be left with the psychologist and the belletrist with whom it
belongs." On Hawthorne: "He was the extreme and finest
expression of the refined alienation from reality that in the
end palsied the creative mind of New England." On James:
"In his subtle psychological inquiries, he remained shut up
within his own skull-pan." Hicks did not know where to
place Poe 'as a part of the American heritage, but Smith at-
tacked him as a Virginia aristocrat. Hicks was also uneasy
with James, finally criticizing his failure to show the reader
the source of income of his characters. Smith was contemp-
tuous of James, finding him a snob, a Tory, above the hard
social realities of his age. The three critics were harsh with
the writer who did not concern himself directly with the
social, economic, and political problems of his own day.
Melville was alienated from his society and strangely pre-
occupied with evil; Emily Dickinson could not come to
terms with her age; Twain, too, infrequently concerned
himself with the social movements of his time; Mrs. Whar-
ton's looking backward to the iSyo's for her subject was a
retreat. Any writer with traditional values, religious sym-
pathies, or belief was probably a coward or a hypocrite.
Thus, Hicks on Eliot: "We need not ask how so melodra-
matic a skeptic can accept the dogmas of Anglicanism, or
what so intelligent an observer can expect from the King
of England, or why so resolute an experimenter should af-
firm his allegiance to the laws of ancient art." Any form of
conservatism was unquestionably bad. Ellen Glasgow's lik-
ing for good breeding makes her an "apologist," James's

124 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

concern with the morality of good manners is mere snob-
bery, and Hawthorne's preoccupation with evil is the deal-
ing with shadows.

Hi

James T. Farrell's A Note on Literary Criticism (1936),
written by an "amateur Marxist," is a criticism of some of
the oversimplifications of Hicks, Gold, and others. The un-
derlying principle in the essay is that no single emphasis
can serve to exhaust the values and meanings in a literary
work; however important the political may be, it does not
preclude other emphases, the psychological, the moral, the
biographical, or the aesthetic. The emphasis on economic
determinism and the coming victory of the proletariat had
caused Marxist novelists and dramatists to insist on a very
restricted meaning for the word ''real." This is the curtain
speech from Clifford Odets's Paradise Lost:

No! There is more to life than thisl Everything he said is
true, but there is more. That was the past, but there is a future.
Now we know. We dare to understand. Truly, truly, the past
was a dream. But this is real! To know from this that something
must be done. That is real. We searched; we were confused! But
we searched, and now the search is ended. For the truth has
found us. For the first time in our lives for the first time our
house has a real foundation. . . .

To reduce all the cultural problems of the twentieth cen-
tury to an economic base, Farrell said, forces the writer to
divide the world into warring classesthe bourgeoisie who
represent decay and death, the proletariat who represent
life and growth; to avoid bourgeois subject matter as de-
cadent, especially that centering in personal relationships;
to be indifferent to style, structure, and the logic of events

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 125

because of the need to propagandize for the new world or-
der. Literature thus divides neatly into four classifications:
bourgeois, or decadent; proletarian, that is, "with Marxian
insight"; exposure, showing the evils of the present social
order; and revolutionary, teaching strikers and farmers how
to organize.

Certain other critics, although agreeing with Farrell that
in their fervor most of the Marxist writers had been great
simplifiers, insisted that the American writer had to ally
himself with the proletariat. Newton Arvin wrote Whitman
(1938) because "the clearer it becomes that the next inevita-
ble step iri human history is the establishment of a socialist
order, the more interested every man becomes in scanning
the work of writers and artists in the recent past for what-
ever resources there may be in it on which a socialist culture
may draw/' Horace Gregory could point to the absurdity of
C. Day Lewis's line: "Waters of the world unite"; but he
could also add that the poet in the thirties was under an
obligation to instruct "a bitter, faithless, rotting social or-
ganism, a post- War world." Robert Cantwell could write a
highly perceptive essay about the society of Henry James in
order to compare it with the society of the proletarian novel-
ist, concluding with this sentence: "To Make My Bread, in
turn, with its weaknesses, gives a new meaning to the term
'beginning of a tradition,' while the works of Henry James
so richly and fully illustrate what is meant by the end of
one." Malcolm Cowley in Exile's Return (1934) and in
many reviews for The New Republic also insisted on the
writer's primary responsibility to society. Cowley would
not acknowledge with John Dos Passos that the individual
writer, to avoid damnation, had to oppose society or the
world; a new and better society is possible, and if we are
"for the moment a beaten nation, the fight is not over."

126 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

IV

The point of view in Axel's Castle: A Study in the Im-
aginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931), which opened
Edmund Wilson's career as a critic, exhibits a conflict simi-
lar to that of Dos Passos whether a writer should serve his
art or his age. The highly individualized art of symbolism,
in defiance of the authority of science and naturalism, had
given us the art of William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, Eliot,
Marcel Proust, and Joyce, our most impressive writers. But
was this enough? "The question begins to press us again as
to whether it is possible to make a practical success of hu-
man society, and whether, if we continue to fail, a few mas-
terpieces, however profound or noble, will be able to make
life worth living even for the few people in a position to
enjoy them.'* Wilson suggested, therefore, that we need an-
other type of artist, closer to Wells and Shaw than to Yeats
or Proust, presumably writers who would help promote a
better society. Wilson was overlooking what Yeats knew,
that literature is a world of deeply moving and permanently
valuable symbols and insights, not blueprints for social
planning; that a poet's imagination cannot be forced but
responds to and makes luminous whatever quickens it. The
social consequences of literature are likely to be indirect.

Wilson's commentaries on politics and literature tend to
be acts of faith in a Marxist social order or sympathetic ges-
tures about the value to literary criticism in the great in-
sights furnished by Marx and Engels. In " Marxism and
Literature" from The Triple Thinkers (1938) we read that
under Marxism society itself "becomes the work of art." In
"Historical Criticism," a lecture given in 1940, he lists Mi-
chelet, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine as a school which

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 127

had interpreted books in terms of their historical origins,
adding the names of Marx and Engels because they had
shown the importance of economics in the interpretation
of historical phenomena. But, again, Wilson does not dem-
onstrate how economic determinism controls literary phe-
nomena. Wilson has written excellent elucidations of spe-
cific works and brilliant accounts, especially in The Wound
and the Bow (1941), of the psychological hurts of authors
like Kipling and Dickens, but, despite his pieties about the
economic interpretations of literature, he has written noth-
ing in which economics might be said to explain a work of
literature^ Irving Howe has said the most admirable part
of Wilson's career has been his "trying to live up to the
dictum that, whatever else, the criticism of literature should
not be merely a criticism of literature." On the contrary,
this probably has been a source of weakness in Wilson's
criticism. Criticism has its focal point in the literary work
itself. Literature is not life or reality. It is an imaginative
creation which indirectly can enlarge our understanding
and improve the quality of our sensibilities. Wilson is at
his best when he stays close to the given work. When, for
example, he examines the imagery of John Steinbeck's
prose, as he does in The Boys in the Back Room (1941) and
proceeds to relate it to Steinbeck's preoccupation with biol-
ogy he enables us to better understand the values which in-
form Steinbeck's fiction. In reading this latter sort of criti-
cism one has no reason to feel that Wilson's sense of social
urgencies is looming so large that literature threatens to
seem trivial.

Harry Levin's widely read essay " Literature as an Institu-
tion" (1946) also stresses the social at the expense of the
artistic aspects of literature. Levin grants Taine his due but
observes that Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, had added

128 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

a corollary to Taine's method. "Literature is not only the
effect of social causes; it is also the cause of social effects/' 5
Levin also gives attention to Sainte-Beuve's point about the
individual writer being able to move freely, uniquely, in-
side his race, moment, and milieu, but he relates it to an-
other nineteenth-century idea, Ferdinand Brunetire's "ev-
olution of genres," the notion that literary forms evolve,
change, and sometimes die off. "The irreducible element of
individual talent would seem to play the same role in the
evolution of genres" Levin says, "that natural selection
plays in the origin of species." Levin also makes the im-
portant point that conventions, "the necessary differences
between art and life," have to be studied. But he has little
faith in the ability of most critics to use Croce's concept of
"expressive form" or Coleridge's "organic principle" as
means of analyzing and evaluating any but acknowledged
masterpieces. For these forms of criticism he would substi-
tute an "institutional method":

One convenience of the institutional method is that it gives due
credit to the never-ending collaboration between writer and
public. It sees no reason to ignore what is relevant in the psy-
chological prepossessions of the craftsman, and it knows that
he is ultimately to be judged by the technical resources of his
craftsmanship; but it attains its clearest and most comprehen-
sive scope by centering on his craft on his social status and his
historical function as participant in a skilled and a living tra-
dition.

5 Mme de Stael, in A Treatise on Ancient and Modern Literature (1803),
made the same point: "The object of the present work is to examine what
is the influence of Religion, of Manners, and of Laws upon Literature; and
reciprocally how far Literature may affect Laws, Manners, and Religion. On
the art of composition and the principles of taste there are extant, in the
French tongue, treatises the most accurate and complete; but, methinks, suf-
ficient pains have not been taken to analyze the moral and political causes
which modify and mark the character of Literature."

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 129

Levin's emphasis, like Taine's, makes for an extrinsic, a so-
cial, view of literature. In implying that the ultimate opin-
ion about the work of a writer is to be determined only by
time, Levin dismisses judicial criticism.

The framework of Levin's critical procedures is more
complex than Taine's, even when Taine's have been modi-
fied and extended by other critics. Levin's primary focus,
however, is not on the individual work of art but on its
origins and its consequences, its social relationships. With
such an emphasis the work itself tends to be absorbed into
studies of literary conventions and of milieu. Literature is
examined not so much in terms of what it is as in terms of
what it does, where it came from, and what it relates to.
Study carried on inside such a framework moves away from
the criticism of literature toward the sociology of literature.

Unlike most critics strongly concerned with politics, eco-
nomics, and sociology, Levin appears to have no social plat-
form to promote. Lionel Trilling, on the other hand, is,
as a critic, very much concerned with understanding and
strengthening the liberal-democratic tradition. He studies
the characteristics of this tradition as they manifest them-
selves in art forms. In Matthew Arnold (1939), E. M. Forster
(1943), and The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling has,
for example, frequently pointed out stereotypes and preju-
dices that have developed as a part of this tradition. He finds
it unrealistic to believe that character can be reduced to its
social origins; he objects to the pseudo science of the notion
that those claiming to be objective can somehow avoid judg-
ments, preferences, and assumptions; and he believes it dan-
gerous to stress only one side of our tradition to stress the
Enlightenment at the expense of the romantic movement.

Criticizing the influence of Parrington, he writes: "Par-
rington stands at the center of American thought about

AN AGE OF CRITICISM

American culture because, as I say, he expresses the chronic
belief that there exists an opposition between reality and
mind and that one must enlist in the party of reality/'
"Manners, Morals and the Novel," for example, shows how
this tradition influences the way novels are written:

[T]he reality we admire tells us that the observation of man-
ners is trivial and even malicious, that there are things much
more important for the novel to consider. As a consequence our
social sympathies have indeed broadened, but in proportion as
they have done so we have lost something of our power of love,
for our novels can never create characters who truly exist. . . .
The reviewers of Helen Howe's novel f We Happy Few] thought
its satiric first part, an excellent satire on the manners of a small
but significant segment of society, was ill-natured and unsatis-
factory, but they approved the second part, which is the record
of the heroine's self-accusing effort to come into communication
with the great soul of America. Yet it should have been clear
that the satire had its source in a kind of affection, in a real
community of feeling, and told the truth, while the second part,
said to be so "real," was mere abstraction, one more example of
our public idea of ourselves and our national life.

Trilling, in this and other essays, is concerned with the so-
cial aspects of literature, but it would be wrong to infer
that this means a lack of concern with the structure of the
literary work. Trilling, as in his examination of deficiencies
in character drawing in the latter part of Helen Howe's
novel, is showing how social attitudes affect the very struc-
ture of a work.

v

Ours is a political century, and it has probably been in-
evitable that political considerations would frequently mas-
querade as literary considerations. During World War II,

SOCIAL AND ACTIVIST CRITICISM 131

for example, a group of critics decided that modern authors
were too pessimistic. Archibald MacLeish in The Irrespon-
sibles (1940), Van Wyck Brooks in The Opinions of Oliver
Allston (1941), and Bernard De Voto in The Literary Fal-
lacy (1944) attacked Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Hemingway,
Lewis, and others for not being more affirmative about the
virtues of Western democratic life. MacLeish even sug-
gested that such writers had helped make us an easy target
for the totalitarian countries. Allen Tate satirized the il-
logic of such a position in "Ode to the Young Pro Consuls
of the Air":

Sad day at Oahu
When the Jap beetle hit!
Our Proustian retort
Was Kimmel and Short.

The other fallacy in such criticism is in the assumption that
any line, affirmative or otherwise, can be dictated to the au-
thor with the expectation that his imagination will find it
engaging and will thereupon proceed to transmute it into
literature. The important question why in all its complexi-
ties modern literature is what it is seemed not to concern
these critics. It is worthy of comment that this criticism by
Brooks, MacLeish, and De Voto has a conservative tendency
which might suggest that those concerned with maintain-
ing the freedom of the artist to create his vision of the world
have no inevitable allegiance either to the Right or to the
Left. For their own social or political ends, such critics
wished to dictate the kind of literature American authors
should write. They were not willing to allow a literature
collectively to tell the whole, interrelated, and necessarily
complex truth.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH

. SYCHOANALYTIC criticism in the United
States owes its first impulse to the Freudians, who em-
phasized language and the unconscious; its second to the
Jungians, who have concerned themselves primarily with
symbol and myth. There has been only an incidental con-
cern with Gestalt and Adlerian psychologies. Two of our
most perceptive students of psychoanalysis and literature,
Frederick J. Hoffman 1 and Lionel Trilling, 2 have pointed
out that Freud himself was indebted to a Zeitgeist which
included not merely Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and their
concern with passion and desire as prime movers, but poets
and critics of the entire nineteenth century who sought to

1 Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1945).

2 "Freud and Literature," The Liberal Imagination (New York, Viking,
1950).

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 133

probe and understand the powers for wisdom, as well as the
satanism and irrationalism hidden in the unconscious parts
of the mind. Preoccupation with the affective life, with
dreams, with the association of ideas is common to roman-
tic and symbolist literature; and many contemporaries of
Freud who might seem to be were not indebted directly to
him. With critics, the indebtedness is likely to be much
clearer and often explicit. References to Oedipus complex,^
manifest and latent dreams, specific symbols in dreams, dis-
placement, condensation, and the like usually imply a first-
hand acquaintance with Freud's theories. Similarly, critical
awareness of archetypes and mythical patterns is likely to
imply some acquaintance with Jung and other students of
myth.

The Poetic Mind (1922) by Frederick C. Prescott was
the first careful American adaptation of Freudian theory
to literature. It remains among the best of them. (He had
published "Poetry and Dreams'* in Abnormal Psychology
as early as 1912.) Prescott develops the analogy between
dreams and poetry, leaning especially on Freud's observa-
tion, which he called "condensation/' that in dreams sev-
eral characters, words, or objects often telescope or fuse.
The language of poetry, Prescott says, also shows conden-
sation. "Of these various meanings one may be the primary
denotation, the other secondary, suggested, or connoted.
But often the surface meaning will be of less importance
than the latent ones; the idea having true poetic significance
and bearing the emotional emphasis will not be said but
suggested, and the real poetry will be between the lines;
the secondary meaning may be the one of prime impor-
tance/' Prescott also reminds us that condensation is a part
of Freud's theory of wit. One of Prescott's illustrations is
from a speech of Hotspur's against Henry IV:

134 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

We must have bloody noses and crack'd crowns
And pass them current too. God's me, my horse.

"Here the 'crack'd crowns' are first cracked coins, secondly
broken heads, and thirdly royal crowns upset. Note too that
the third meaning is at once farthest from the literal, the
most latent, perhaps the most unconscious (in Hotspur's
mind), and the most far-reaching (involving the whole dra-
matic action)." This passage also illustrates Freud's prin-
ciple of "displacement," a shift in emphasis whereby the
important is made to seem inconsequential. Prescott also
relates other principles of psychology to poetry and to prose
fiction, but with less conspicuous success. Prescott antici-
pated in part the kind of critical analysis associated with
Robert Graves and Laura Riding, I. A. Richards and Wil-
liam Empson. His work deserves more recognition than it
has commonly had. Unfortunately, the critics who leaned
on psychology did not follow up the remarkable beginnings
made by Prescott, especially his attempts to use Freud's the-
ories with precision.

Strangely, the influence of Marx on American criticism
was closely related to the influence of Freud. For the most
part, the two systems are not easily reconciled or made com-
patible. The one tends to emphasize the determining pow-
ers of economic and social factors and to see them as analyza-
ble and subject to change and manipulation; the other tends
to see many of man's problems as inherent, hidden, and
ineradicable. The one emphasizes the group and patterns
of external relationships; the other, the personal and idio-
syncratic. Marx's system tends to view the future as Utopian;
Freud's, to see man's fate as a tragedy to be alleviated wher-
ever possible. But Marx and Freud have been frequently
accepted as twin engines moving to destroy the bourgeois

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 135

economic structure and bourgeois moral conventions. For
example, Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, editors of The
Masses, were among the first popularizers of Freud and psy-
choanalysis. Marx and Freud have been seen as liberators,
helping society to throw off its shackles, or, as the phrase
had it, "to escape from its repressions." These repressions
were at once economic, moral, and sexual, and since the
attack on the middle-class mores was more negative than
constructive, most of the critics who merged Marx and
Freud did not worry unduly about the inconsistencies. A
few of them, of course, insisted that the systems were in-
compatible.

The chief symbol of repression was a composite figure
called "the puritan," apparently the creation of Randolph
Bourne in "The Puritan's Will to Power" in The Seven
Arts (April 1917). Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Menck-
en, and many others, as we have seen, took up the cry.
By December 1920, Charles Beard protested that the term
had become merely a symbolic scapegoat: "By the critics it
is used as a term of opprobrium applicable to anything that
interferes with the new freedom, free verse, psycho-analysis,
or even the double entendre."

The puritansometimes it was the pioneer also sacri-
ficed art, the natural graces, personal freedom, and so forth
to making money. Worst of all, he was complacent. The era
of Coolidge, priding itself on being "a business civiliza-
tion," which could suffer Bruce Barton to write a popular
study of Jesus as a supersalesman, undoubtedly deserved
much of the attack it received. Naturally, too, complacency
about the spirit of business and practicality having the sanc-
tion of Christianity easily became righteousness about the
proprieties and all moral issues. The reaction, by insisting
on the place of sex as a determining force in the writer's

136 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

life and work, frequently was excessive and a little glib. It
was obviously an easy matter to relate the puritan to psy-
choanalysis and especially to Freud, whose Three Contribu-
tions to a Theory of Sex, translated in 1910, stated that
neuroses invariably had a sexual basis.

In England in 1910, Professor Ernest Jones published his
study of the Oedipus complex in Hamlet, finding the cause
of Hamlet's inability to act in his unconscious feeling of
guilty love for his mother. Thus, too, Hamlet's jealousy of
Claudius became an added element in Hamlet's avenging
his father's death. Jones tended to reduce the play to the
Oedipus complex but he, like Prescott, was a sober and re-
sponsible student. Neither Prescott nor Jones allowed his
general acceptance of Freudian theory to warp his judgment
or induce him to use terminology glibly. Albert Mordell,
who wrote The Erotic Motive in Literature (1919) was less
careful. His manner and tone are suggested by this passage:

The influence of the writer's attitude towards his father or
mother appears in his literary work. Stendhal has left us a record
of the intense child love he had for his mother; he hated his
father. One can see the results of these conditions in his life,
work and beliefs.- H^ became an atheist, since people who throw
off the influence oy their fathers often cast aside also their belief
in a universal father. This also explains largely the atheism of
Shelley, whose relations with his father were not cordial.

Far too much is made of the Oedipus complex and what
Mordell calls the brother-and-sister complex. In terms of
the latter, for example, the gentleness, kindliness, and moral
tone in Kenan's writing are explained as "due to [an] at-
tachment to his sister." And the persistence with which
Mordell looks for sexual significance causes him to explain
complex poems in a crudely reductive way, as when he says

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 137

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is essentially a plea for
free love. Mordell succumbed to the excitement of psycho-
analytical criticism in a way described by Maxwell Boden-
heim in 1922 as being all too common: "Art, philosophy,
mysticismall are dismissed as mere sublimations^ of the
sexual impulse and men write ponderous books iji which
they frantically attempt to unearth an erotic motive in every
kind of literature and art."

Bodenheim's criticism applies to the later work of Lud-
wig Lewisohn. In this work, especially Expression in Amer-
ica (1932), Lewisohn was less preoccupied with political and
social questions than he had been during his period with
The Nation. Lewisohn concentrated on problems, one in
particular, that affected the psychological well-being of the
individual and was only slightly concerned with the eco-
nomic, social, and impersonal forces by which, as the Marx-
ist critics would say, the writer is formed. More specifically,
Lewisohn concentrated on the ways in which sexual inhibi-
tions had affected the writing of American literature. There
is no understanding the quality of a man's style, the degree
of his commitment to life, or the intensity of his being,
Lewisohn holds, unless one knows what he is sexually. "Sex,
contrary to the common uninstructed opinion, is not peri-
pheral and localized, but pervasive. It is like one drop of
the most powerful coloring matter in the world dropped
into a great jar of colorless water. It tinges every atom of
the water." The thesis tends to dominate, to be the cen-
tral consideration in his history of American literature, but
Lewisohn is a perceptive critic. His discussions of James
and Sherwood Anderson do not, as is the case with a few
of their other critics, concentrate on the psychology of sex
at the expense of the question of talent.

The biography Margaret Fuller (1920) by Katharine An-

138 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

thony is one of the first to make use of psychoanalytic inter-
pretations. Thus Margaret Fuller's dream of following the
body of her mother to its grave is explained by Miss An-
thony: "She had a primeval murderous wish to attend the
funeral of her beloved mother," and of being trampled by
horses: "The vision of the trampling horses is an erotic
phantasy common among hysterical maidens." Margaret
Fuller's marriage to young Assoli, the indigent Italian no-
bleman, is accounted for in similar terms: "He filled up the
place left vacant in her life by her favorite brother Eugene
and she restored in his the long cherished maternal image."
But the biography, despite its avowed dependence on "mod-
ern psychological analysis," is really an attempt to save the
reputation of an ardent feminist from a legend "created
mainly by unemancipated men."

Van Wyck Brooks wrote perhaps the most influential of
the psychoanalytical biographies in which repression, either
explicitly sexual or as enforced respectability, played a pri-
mary part in the writer's career and in which a significant
event is made a key to the writer's entire career. The Ordeal
of Mark Twain (1920) gives a vivid account, as Twain him-
self had to his biographer, of the deathbed scene of his
father at which his mother had made him promise he would
not break her heart. The experience was crucial, Brooks
said, making it easier for Twain to succumb to the respecta-
bility of his later advisers, his wife and his friend Howells.
Brooks may well have had hold of a significant episode,
but he pushed his thesis too hard by insisting that none of
Twain's books was successful and that, free from such re-
pressive conditions, Twain would hive been a very great
and different kind of writer.

Raymond Weaver's Herman Melville: Mariner and Mys-
tic (1920) and Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville (1929)

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 139

participate in the Brooks tradition of explaining the partial
failure of American writers in terms of the debilitating ef-
fects of the Gilded Age, but they also introduce the sug-
gestion that sex in Melville's novels and poems is always
referred to in a mood of disillusion. In Pierre, for example,
Mumford reads a period of regression for Melville: "Sex
meant marriage; marriage meant a household and a tired
wife and children and debts. No wonder he retreated: no
wonder his fantasy attached him to a mother who could not
surrender, to a half sister who could not bear children."
Some years later F. O. Matthiessen admitted that it was evi-
dent Melville was "tormented by the ambiguity of sexual
relations as they revealed the impossibility of ideal truth,"
but biographies tend to dissolve the literary work into mere-
ly a series of psychoanalytical hunches and guesses. Even a
highly trained psychiatrist could make out only a hypotheti-
cal case.

But the temptation to explain works of art in terms of the
author's sex life was apparently very great. According to
Thomas Beer, the preoccupation of Henry Adams with the
mechanization of America and with the unity of thirteenth-
century Europe is easily explained. Painfully "deprived of
a charming wife," Adams began "to discover the sexlessness
of American literature," and finally he became "the chival-
rous rhapsodist of the medieval Virgin." Beer's The Mauve
Decade (1926), written for a popular audience, suggests the
ease with which the historian or critic could thus account
for a writer's most significant work.

One of the most fascinating of these studies is Joseph
Wood Krutch's Edgar Allan PoeA Study in Genius (1926).
Poe invites psychoanalytical criticism, and it is tempting to
move beyond the evidence of the stories and poems them-
selves to discuss Poe's personal abnormalities. Krutch is

140 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

fairly insistent that he has hit upon the source of the ab-
normalities:

Poe could not love in the normal fashion and the reason lay or
seemed to him to lay [sic] in the death of some woman upon
whom his desire had irrevocably fixed itself. If we knew who
lay behind the doors of that tomb in the ghoul-haunted wood-
land of Weir, we should know the answer to the greatest riddle
of Poe's life.

Even if one is hesitant about accepting Krutch's theory, his
general interpretation sets up the contrast between the ra-
tional themes, commonplace settings, normal motivations,
and the abnormalities of Poe's work.

Houston Peterson in The Melody of Chaos (1931) de-
scribes Conrad Aiken, the center of the study, thus: "An
extreme introvert with a critical turn of mind that is bru-
tally objective, he is well qualified to understand cases of
morbid repression, multiple personality and the whole lit-
erature of spiritual ambiguity." It is assumed, although not
insistently, that Aiken as the favorite child of a beautiful
mother developed an Oedipus complex which "turned his
longings away from Reality to the dark subjective world of
the lyric artist/' Much of the book is in a similar vein. If
one makes allowance, however, for the exuberance or ex-
cesses generated by the period in which it was written, the
book is valuable for its account of the self in modern litera-
ture, a subject of central importance. Also valuable in its
way is Edward Dahlberg's Do These Bones Live? (1941). It
is a strangely impressive yet perverse book, not a little like
the criticism of D. H. Lawrence, 3 in which the critic's own

3 Studies of Lawrence thus far have been more biographical than critical.
Horace Gregory's Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study of D. H.
Lawrence (1933) is critical, but it does little with Lawrence's preoccupation
with sex and nothing with the mother-son relationship. Nor, unlike Maud

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 141

message and style always dominate the occasion. The con-
sequence of the denial of the flesh is the theme. Thus, of
Hawthorne: "There is not a human pollution in any of his
novels. His most evil pages distil an endemic miasma in-
stead of rank protoplasm." Of Poe: "Could Edgar Poe have
spoken out of himself, out of remembered nature, as he does
in the Letters pooled with anguishing tears and loneliness,
he might have uttered a minor faustian tragedy, made a
lovely sensual Margaret, instead of lacquering seraphic and
sepulchral mannikins who have ventriloquistic shudders,
so like the much smaller gothic 'bioloquist' Charles Brock-
den Brown, lo, the 'Father of the American Novel* I" Dahl-
berg never considers that his own prophetic vision might be
darkening the landscape just a little. But, as E. M. Forster
says, it is hard to read a prophet without first suspending
one's sense of humor.

More than any other critic of equal stature, Edmund Wil-
son has employed the psychoanalytical method. Some of his
earlier essays, as those on A. E. Housman and Samuel Butler
from The Triple Thinkers (1938), attempt to relate the life
to the work, but in The Wound and the Bow (1941) the
method is more explicitly psychoanalytical. "Dickens: The
Two Scrooges" and "The Kipling that Nobody Read," espe-
cially the latter, are brilliant studies. The key to Dickens's
fiction is said to be the six months that nine-year-old Dick-
ens spent working in a rat-infested warehouse while his
father was in the Marshalsea for debt. "Dickens' seizures in
his blacking-bottle days were obviously neurotic symptoms;

Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), did Gregory attempt to re-
late Lawrence's symbols to Jung's primordial images. Hoffman's Freudian-
ism and the Literary Mind provides the fullest account of Lawrence's knowl-
edge of and reaction to Freud and Jung and suggests that most likely the
final draft of Sons and Lovers saw a clarification of the mother-son theme
as a result of conversations about Freud which Lawrence had been having.

142 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

and the psychologists have lately been telling us that lasting
depressions and terror may be caused by such cuttings-short
of the natural development of childhood.'* The shame and
humiliation, Dickens himself said, haunted him all his life.
Wilson does a good job of relating many of Dickens's sub-
jects, themes, moods, and characters to this experience. Yet,
about halfway through the essay Wilson explains the ex-
tremes of good and bad, of comic and serious melodrama
with evil characters becoming good and comic characters
becoming serious in terms of Dickens's emotional insta-
bility. A page or so later Dickens is revealed as a "victim of
a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person/'
It is certainly true that sweetness and perversity, beneficence
and maliciousness, along with other dualisms, run through
the novels. But we are not told what the extremes of Dick-
ens's own personality and fictional creations have to do with
his original wound, the traumatic experience of his child-
hoodwhether, that is, there was one wound or two. The
Kipling study, which is more consistent, also depends on a
childhood trauma. Kipling and his sister were mistreated
by an aunt with whom they lived for a number of years;
Kipling was physically weak, had had very bad eyesight, was
abused by his schoolmates, suffered a nervous breakdown
which was accompanied by hallucinations, and so forth. As
a young man he was caught between allegiance to the Eng-
lish and to the Hindus. He solved his conflicts personally
by siding outright with authority, with the strict schoolmas-
ter, and with the imperialist. For all his gifts of imagination
and craftsmanship, Kipling writes a fiction, especially after
his initial successes, that lacks tension, fundamental con-
flict "because Kipling would never face one." Wilson's the-
sis sounds plausible in that it explains not only Kipling's
wound but what was wrong with his bow! The essay on

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 143

Edith Wharton almost falls outside the plan of the book.
Her nervous breakdown early in her marriage is mentioned,
but she is treated merely as the historian of her own world.
She "is a brilliant example of the writer who relieves an
emotional strain by denouncing his generation/' Her rela-
tionship with Walter Berry and her conflicts between love
and marital obligation (this is suggested by her fiction),
which a wound-and-bow theory invites, are not discussed.
Sensitivity to suffering, a kind of masochism, as well as a
general exhilaration with physical well-being, seems to be
the key to Wilson's discussion of Hemingway. There are a
number of shrewd observations in the essay, but the thesis
is not probed and developed with any care. The piece on
Finnegans Wake, ''The Dream of H. C. Earwicker," does
not attempt to psychoanalyze Joyce. It calls attention to the
Freudian themes and furnishes, especially considering that
it appeared shortly after the book, an able general account
of its subject and method.

The final chapter of The Wound and the Bow is an ex-
amination of the Philoctetes myth as a figurative expression
of the theory that the suffering and neurosis of the artist are
the cause and subject matter of his art. Philoctetes's sup-
purating wound makes him offensive and he is exiled, but
he has a bow that never misses its mark. Only Philoctetes
can use the bow. Before there can be art there must be the
suffering artist. Philoctetes, after being accepted by his fel-
lows, is eventually cured. He retains the bow and with it
serves his people.

D. H. Lawrence said that a writer "sheds his sickness" in
his books. Freud, in his early work at least, believed the
artist serves the pleasure principle by creating fantasies.
And Adler was sure that all artists suffer from a sense of
inferiority. There is obviously something to the theory, if

144 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

only that artists, like anyone else, will write about what in-
terests them, and that, being sensitive, they will suffer per-
haps more often or more intensely than their fellows. Yet
not all neurotics are artists, and there must be many artists
who are not especially troubled by their own or the world's
problems.

Even if accepted in its broad outlines, the Philoctetes
myth has certain limitations. For example, the bow (his art)
continues its effectiveness after the wound of Philoctetes is
healed, and he had had the bow before the wound. In the
myth there seems to be no causal connection between the
wound and the bow. And, as implied above, the presence
of a wound does not assure the possession of a bow.

Lionel Trilling's "Art and Neurosis," the fullest and most
intelligent discussion of the entire question, suggests that
the wound-and-bow theory, which implies mental illness,
is misleading. "The reference to the artist's neurosis," he
writes, "tells us something about the material on which the
artist exercises his powers, and even something about his
reasons for bringing his powers into play, but it does not
tell us anything about the source of his power, it makes no
causal connection between them." Then Trilling makes
this significant point: There "is in fact no causal connection
between them. For, still granting that the poet is uniquely
neurotic, what is surely not neurotic, what indeed suggests
nothing but health, is his power of using his neuroticism.
He shapes his fantasies, he gives them social form and refer-
ence." Following Freud, Trilling points out that everyone,
including the non-artist and the half artist, has neurotic
symptoms. Therefore, neurosis "cannot uniquely account
for genius." Finally, he objects to the conception of the neu-
rosis as a wound because it suggests passivity rather than a

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 145

conflict, which leads to control of or coming to terms with
whatever is causing the conflict. 4

Wilson's "The Ambiguity of Henry James" in The Tri-
ple Thinkers has begotten a little library of criticism de-
voted to The Turn of the Screw. 5 Edna Kenton first sug-
gested that it is not the children but the governess who is
haunted by the ghosts, but Wilson much more explicitly
made her "a neurotic case of sex repression," tabulated the
Freudian symbols, and tried to establish that the story can
be read either as a ghost story or as the story of a neu-
rotic governess with hallucinations. Mark Van Doren, Al-
len Tate, land others have disagreed with the Freudian in-
terpretation, and Robert Heilman's "The Turn of the
Screw as Poem" 6 attempts to show that the meanings im-
bedded in the imagery of the narrative establish it as a ghost
story concerned with the conflict of good and evil. Wilson
himself subsequently decided that the Freudian analysis is
at least dubious, but two other critics, Leon Edel, who
edited Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1948), and Matthies-
sen in American Renaissance incline toward the belief that
James was deliberately Wilson thought it unintentionally
ambiguous. Edel points out that James probably knew a
good deal about the psychical researches of J. M. Charcot
and of his own brother William; that all the changes of
phrases in the New York edition are from the governess's

4 A number of articles have been written about this subject, among them
these: W. H. Auden, "Psychology and Art Today," The Arts Today, ed.
Geoffrey Grigson (London, John Lane, 1935); R. G. Davis, "Art and Anx-
iety," Partisan Review, XII (Summer 1945), 310-21; William Barrett, "Writ-
ers and Madness," Partisan Review, XIV (Winter 1947), 5-22.

6 For a list of these articles, see Glenn A. Reed, "Another Turn on
James's 'The Turn of the Screw,' " American Literature, XX (January 1949),
413-23.

6 Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis,
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1948).

146 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

reporting to feeling, not what she observed but what she
felt; and that James published the story with The Aspern
Papers, a story of curiosity that becomes a mania, and The
Liar, about a pathological liar. As evidence of the deliberate
ambiguity Matthiessen quoted this sentence from the Pref-
ace: "Make [the reader] think the evil, make him think it
for himself, and you are released from weak specifications/'
Even though one may not be able to establish the legitimacy
of the psychological interpretation with any conclusiveness,
it teases the reader's mind and enriches the story.

Despite all the general interest in the method, the number
of good psychoanalytical essays is relatively small. Among
these is the excellent "Prince Hal's Conflict" by Ernst Kris, 7
a good piece on Stendhal by William Troy, 8 a highly per-
ceptive study of James, "The Ghost of Henry James," by
Saul Rosenzweig, 9 and a study of the early poems of Yeats,
"A Psychoanalytical Study," by M. I. Seiden. 10 One of the
few books consistently employing a psychoanalytical method
is Roy Basler's Sex, Psychology and Literature (1948).

Basler's book is a little more modest in tone than are most
such studies. He sees Freudian psychology as "a key," not
"the key," to a critical understanding of literature, and
he examines only poems which invite such treatment. He
makes explicit the nature of Christabel's sexual enchant-
ment with Geraldine, gives a fairly detailed account of the
psychosis of the hero of Tennyson's Maud, makes clear that

^ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XVII (October 1948), 489-506.

8 Partisan Review, IX (January-February 1942), 3-22.

9 Partisan Review, XI (Fall 1944), 436-55.
W Accent, VI (Spring 1946), 178-90.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 147

Poe was preoccupied with the idee fixe as a persistent theme,
and does a convincing analysis of Prufrock as a man desirous
of living in his precious dreamworld. The latter is probably
the best of his studies. Nor does Easier attempt to psycho-
analyze the poets. He restricts attention to the literary works
themselves.

The Demon Lover (1949) by Arthur Wormhoudt seems
almost a parody of the psychoanalytical method. The thesis
derives from the "breast complex" theory of Edmund Berg-
ler, who subsequently published The Writer and Psycho-
analysis (1950). Words and milk are said to become identi-
fied by the infant because "oral and gustatory sensations'*
are confused by the gradually developing psyche, and so on.
Eventually we are informed that the Muses are "pregenital
mother symbols/' the mountains breast symbols, and the
springs are milk which issues from the breast. Such un-
checked fancy makes the medieval bestiary writers seem
lacking in ingenuity. The oracular tone of Bergler and the
bland assurance of Wormhoudt that he is serving objective
fact are almost frightening. The kind and degree of their
excesses are undoubtedly rare; but the psychoanalytical crit-
ics appear to be especially susceptible to an egregious self-
assurance.

The study of the anxieties and neuroses as well as the
complex symbolism in Franz Kafka's fiction obviously in-
vites psychoanalytical interpretations. A volume such as
The Kafka Problem (1946), edited by Angel Flores, con-
tains interpretations which account in a convincing way for
what would otherwise remain obscure and difficult. Inevita-
bly, however, certain critics become rigorously orthodox,
working out a one-to-one relationship between Freudian
symbols and each element in a story. Charles Neider in The
Frozen Sea (1948), for example, flatly denies the presence of

148 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

any religious symbolism in Kafka's work and proceeds with
a strictly Freudian interpretation. To take one quotation:

A castle, like village, town, citadel and fortress, is a symbol
of woman and mother. A count is a father symbol, like emperor,
king and president. The count's permission is necessary for K. to
enter the castle; i.e., the father's permission is necessary for the
son to possess his mother incestuously. Land too is a symbol of
woman and mother, as indicated by the expression "mother
earth." A land surveyor is therefore one who measures the
mother the incestuous implication is obvious. . . .

Such a rigorous account assumes, first, that the Freudian
hypotheses are invariably correct and, second, that Kafka,
accepting them entirely, deliberately employed the appro-
priate symbolism down to its last detail. On the other hand,
when the critic is not rigid but capable, as Kenneth Burke
is, of grasping and applying the complexities of Freud's view
of the mind, there is danger of deviousness and of gratuitous
ingenuity. For example, Burke's preoccupation with Cole-
ridge's sense of guilt causes him to see the Pilot's boy in
The Ancient Mariner "as a scapegoat for the poet alone,"
a "vessel for drawing off the most malign aspects of the
curse that afflicts the 'greybeard loon.' " This identification,
Burke continues, enabled him to understand the phrase
"silly buckets," which has been variously interpreted. "The
structure [of the poem] became more apparent: the 'loon'
atic Mariner begins his cure from drought under the aegis
of a moon that causes a silly rain, thence by synecdoche to
silly buckets, and the most malignant features of this prob-
lematic cure are transferred to the Pilot's boy who doth crazy
go." But the phrase can be accounted for easily enough in
its context without worrying the problem in such fashion.

The influence of psychoanalysis on literature has been
very great. In Freud, Jung, and others, writers in the ro-
mantic tradition found a sanction for their concern with the

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 149

hidden elements in the human mind, confused motives,
perversity, and rationalizations. The novel and poetry have
learned how to treat receding consciousness, to investigate
the ways of association, the ambiguities of language, and to
see the work of art as in some ways analogous to the dream.
Certain writers have gone even further and accepted and
used some of the more debatable theoriesthe Oedipus
complex, the search for the father, retreat to childhood and
the womb, or the images and symbols held to be primordial
in the collective unconscious. William York Tindall, for in-
stance, has pointed out the specific indebtednesses of Joyce
to Freud and also suggested that D. H. Lawrence employed
the primitive myths and symbols of Quetzalcoatl in The
Plumed Serpent after reading Jung. Even when writers are
not consciously indebted to specific works in psychoanalysis
they are likely to have a secondhand or cultural indebted-
ness for the obvious reason that such concepts and terms as
compulsion, neuroticism, complex, repression, and libido
have become current and have won general acceptance.

Gestalt psychology has, for the most part, been a periph-
eral concern. One of the few critics who have referred
to it is Herbert J. Muller, who has called it a "congenial
psychology" for students of literature. In Modern Fiction
0937) h e related it to impressionists like Lawrence and
Virginia Woolf, pointing out that in Mrs. Dalloway, for ex-
ample, the latter "stressed all the disorderly particulars, the
discontinuous 'quanta' of experience, that had been blurred
by the generalizations of the realist" school. Gestalt psy-
chology, Muller says in his fuller account in Science and
Criticism (1943), helps to restore the prestige of concrete,
immediate sense experience. The phenomena with which
the artist deals correspond with the "kind of reality con-
ceived by scientists today." If this psychology, however, en-
courages us to grasp the work as a whole in its "spread and

150 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

pervasion of meaning" it should also warn us against ab-
stracting properties the didactic, the grotesque, or the ro-
manticand insisting on them as invariables. Muller also
says that an unsympathetic view of the wholeness of a writ-
er's work can "raise havoc with excessive writers like Dos-
toyevsky, Lawrence, Proust." Their excesses are often in-
separable from their peculiar strength.

Susanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
pointed out that Gestalt psychology explains the why of art
expression and thereby makes untenable the assumption
that a poem or piece of fiction has philosophical significance
only when adequately paraphrased. Import is implicit in
the particular form, "the way the assertion is made, and this
involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of
the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth
or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sud-
dent arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by
sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sus-
tained ambiguity resolved by a long-awaited key word, and
the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm."

Jung's concern with a "collective unconscious" bearing
within it recurrent images (for example, devils, heroes, and
gods), and archetypal patterns (guilt and expiation) has
helped to furnish literary criticism with an even larger
framework of psychoanalytical theory. Maud Bodkin in
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry explained that while she ac-
cepts most of Freud's theories she feels that "the concen-
tration of Freudian writers upon the physical relation of
parent and child cuts off [an] equally valid viewpoint,"
namely, the tremendous influence upon the child or indi-
vidual of "the community and the stored achievement." In
other words Miss Bodkin would study mythical patterns in
literature. Earlier, of course, there had been Jessie Weston's

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 151

influential From Ritual to Romance (1920), a work in-
debted to English anthropological studies. American criti-
cism has been much slower and much more tentative about
such borrowings.

William Troy and Francis Fergusson were among the
first to perceive that valuable critical insights might lie in
a study of ritual and myth. Troy's articles and reviews have
not been collected in book form, and therefore it is difficult
to see clearly what the essentials of his position are. "The
Lawrence Myth" 11 treats the phenomenon of the Lawrence
cult: "the persecutions and humiliations, the journeys by
water, the agonies in the wilderness, the betrayals and final
apotheosis at the hands of his disciples/* Troy is concerned
with the view Lawrence took of himself as the "reincarna-
tion of the dying god," of Dionysius, and of the effect it had
upon his art; Lawrence would not bring his emotions and
his beliefs to rest in aesthetic form because: "As soon as I
have finished a mental conception, a full idea even of my-
self, then dynamically I am dead." "Lawrence spent his en-
tire career combatting what he believed was a undue stress
[on scientific rationalism] at the expense of the animal na-
ture in man." And the resulting myth has objective value.
"Thomas Mann: Myth and Reason" 12 gives a detailed and
convincing reading of Death in Venice as initiation rit-
ual and the Joseph novels as a complex social myth. "To
Mann," Troy says, "must be credited the abundantly fer-
tile suggestion that only in the myth do we get the dialecti-
cal process working itself out on the whole ground of human
reality. In the myth the interplay is between the construc-
tions of the mind and the immediate presentation of experi-
ence at any given moment of history, between the principle

11 Partisan Review, IV (January 1938), 3-13.

12 Partisan Review, V (June 1938), 24-32.

152 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

of form and the principle of life." Troy has written in some-
what similar terms about the fiction of James, Joyce, and
Fitzgerald.

Francis Fergusson in The Idea of the Theater (1949),
which may well be the best volume of drama criticism pub-
lished in its generation, has studied Oedipus the King as
ritual drama and has commented on ritualistic elements in
Hamlet and other plays. Ritual and myth as parts of the
meaningful structure of a drama are considered throughout
the volume but probably nowhere more effectively than in
the chapter on Hamlet, where an account of the rituals helps
to demonstrate the nature of the play's unity and to avoid
the various reductive theories which lead to the conclusion
that the play is a failure structurally.

Philip Wheelwright and Mark Schorer have also written
instructive essays on myth. Wheelwright's "Poetry, Myth
and Reality" in The Language of Poetry (1942) regards the
loss of myth as the "most devastating loss humanity can
suffer." Myth consciousness, he argues, "is the bond that
unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed
Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without refer-
ence to which the radical significance of things goes to pot."
Schorer's essay, a chapter in William Blake (1946), makes
clear the dependence of the poet on myth: "The myths of
one age are better than those of another; that is, some myths
include more of the total experience of a culture than
others, and in the great ages, ages of amplitude and spacious-
ness, they include everything. Then poetry attains its full
stature: its vitality is not lessened by shifts of sensibility,
because it has achieved density, strata of various meaning."
Cleanth Brooks had treated this subject, in a somewhat nar-
rower focus, in his chapter on Yeats in Modern Poetry and
the Tradition (1939). These essays clarify the problem of

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 153

belief in relation to poetry as well as telling us a good deal
about the general character of English poetry in its vari-
ous periods. There are also many suggestive comments and
insights about myth during the Enlightenment in Louise
Bogan's "The Secular Hell," printed in Chimera (Spring
1946), the issue in which Troy, Jacques Barzun, Joseph
Campbell, and others discussed myth. Campbell's essay dis-
cusses Finnegans Wake, relating it to Freud and Jung, as
"symbolic archetypes of mythology and metaphysics, famil-
iar to mankind for milleniums and throughout the world."
One's sense of the nature of myth and the comic grandeur
of Joyce's imagination are greatly enlarged by the essay.

Richard Chase in articles, a book on Melville, and espe-
cially in Quest for Myth (1949) holds that "myth is only
art," a certain kind of literature, and is therefore incompe-
tent to perform the duties of science and philosophy. He
does not believe there ever was a "mythopoeic age," and he
deplores the attempt to make myth autonomous, a "religion
without calling it a religion." Myth cannot enable us to
perceive reality as the rational objectivity of the mind per-
ceives it. Myth does not belong with the intellectual, the
scientific disciplines of history, anthropology, psychoanaly-
sis, and philosophy. Chase seems to be saying that myth is an
imaginative statement which evokes a sense of the uncanny
and portentous in "the crises of birth, infancy, initiation,
marriage, death and so on." The marriage of Charles and
Emma Bovary is not mythical, but Edmund Spenser's Pro-
thalamion and John Donne's Epithalamion are. "And they
are mythical because they contain epiphanies of the Un-
canny." Chase, quite understandably, does not want the
hard-won methods of the objective disciplines to be relaxed.
But he does not face the issue that the "uncanny" element
is partly the result of coming to terms with the "crisis," con-

154 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

trolling mysterious forces by imagining) asserting, and ac-
cepting a way of belief or action. Spenser and Donne, with
the strength of a complex body of Christian tradition be-
hind them, assert the beauty, loveliness, and sanctity of mar-
riage. The symbols, the rhythms, and the drama of the two
poems give the assertion its luminous quality, its "epiph-
anies of the Uncanny. " The rational disciplines can be em-
ployed to criticize the weight of the assertion, to modify it.
They cannot, unless we are to have a science of the imagina-
tion and perhaps not even then, supersede the myth itself.

Valuable as these various studies of myth have been, they
rarely give the reader a sense of completed, rounded knowl-
edge. Even those works written by the anthropologists and
professional students of myth seem in part elusive and tenu-
ous. Perhaps the difficulty, as Joyce said of his own fiction, is
not in the author's thought but is inherent in the subject.
This seems to be true of psychological theory generally.
Despite the relevance of psychological theory to literature,
literary criticism with a psychological or psychoanalytical
emphasis has not been conspicuously successful. 13

Quite possibly one of the reasons for the paucity of good
studies is that few critics ever get beyond the amateur
stage in their knowledge of psychoanalysis. 14 Psychoanalysts-
turned-critic, on the other hand, are too often insensitive to

13 This is as true of English as it is of American criticism. I. A. Richards
once attempted to treat the poem as though it were a complicated mecha-
nism with the function of arousing psychological states and bringing them
to rest. Even with the presence of diagrams and the scientific air of the
discussion, little or nothing came from this part of his criticism. Herbert
Read wrote a fairly interesting account of the dream element in one of his
own poems, and William Empson interpreted Alice's trip into Wonderland
as a Freudian dream. It may be that his knowledge of Freudian theory had
earlier helped Empson, as well as Robert Graves and Laura Riding before
him, to hit upon the phenomenon of ambiguity.

14 Three recent critical biographies depend on the psychoanalytical meth-
od. They are: John Berryman's Stephen Crane, Newton Arvin's Herman
Melville, and Irving Howe's Sherwood Anderson.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MYTH 155

aesthetic and literary values and are inclined to treat imagi-
native characters, who "live" only in relation to the theme,
plot, and other characters, as though they were actual case
studies. There is also a tendency in psychoanalytical criti-
cism to make the writer a passive agent, to overemphasize
the part played by his unconscious. Too often a novelist's
characters are seen as swarming in a ready-made fantasy, or
the poet's lines are seen as coming to him almost as auto-
matic writing. We have already observed the tendency of
psychoanalytical biographers to equate a literary work with
the psychological hurt (or wound) of the author as well as to
state its meaning solely in psychological terms. Frederick
J. Hoffman in "Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism" 15
warns that the critic "certainly ought not to think of art
in terms of neurosis; in so doing he is confusing genesis with
the work itself, or considering the work as justified only in
terms of the circumstances in which it was produced."

Modern literature is intimately related, directly and in-
directly, to modern psychological movements. Freud, as
Trilling has pointed out, "has not merely naturalized
poetry; he has discovered its status as a pioneer settler and
he sees it as a method of thought." Freud's principles are
broad, "clearly in the line of ... classic tragic realism."
Again, Gestalt psychology has helped us to see that litera-
ture has its own mode of discourse. Lastly, Jung and other
students of myth have told us a good deal about the nature
of "meaning" in literature. When the critic respects his own
task, literary criticism, he is free to draw upon this impres-
sive body of knowledge and theory.

15 American Quarterly, II (Summer 1950), 144-54.

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM

W.

ILLIAM MORTON PAYNE, as we have
seen, believing that the concept of evolution would make
for a new critical method, had spoken about a new criti-
cism around the turn of the century; Joel Spingarn, finding
Croce's doctrine of expressive form equally promising, had
written "The New Criticism" in 1910. But the term "new
criticism" as used more recently derives from John Crowe
Ransom's The New Criticism (1941), a volume in which he
discusses I. A. Richards, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Yvor
Winters, and a few other critics. The characteristic com-
mon to all these latter critics is intensive analysis of the
literary work. A designation more useful than "new criti-
cism" would be "analytical criticism." 1

1 No relatively brief discussion of this criticism can take into account the
many and divergent lines of inquiry which one or another of its practitioners
has investigated. Because the bulk of contemporary criticism is so great.

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 157

In William Elton's A Glossary of the New Criticism
(1948) there is a lineal table of contemporary criticism list-
ing Pound, Eliot, and the Southern Regionalists in direct
descent from Coleridge; and Richards, Burke, and Empson
in direct descent from Jeremy Bentham. There are also
collateral influences, with the British critics Richards (who
is also indebted to Coleridge) and Empson influencing
Brooks and Warren, and Yvor Winters being at once in
the debt of Burke and Eliot. But if one remembers that
John Stuart Mill called Coleridge and Bentham the two
seminal minds of the nineteenth century, the table, al-
though interesting, merely implies that contemporary criti-
cism is involved in the philosophical, sociological, psycho-
logical, and aesthetic currents of its time.

The interests of T. E. Hulme, who is commonly held
to have influenced Pound, 2 Eliot, and others in the years
immediately prior to World War I, may be taken as rep-
resentative. In his Speculations, published posthumously,
there are dicta, sometimes worked out, sometimes not, about
scientism, romanticism, the structure of poetry, and the
need for a system of religious values. Hulme discussed the
breakup of religious belief and the awful burden thereby
th/own on the individual poet to establish not only his own
scale of values but the vehicles for giving them literary ex-
pression. He attempted to define the contemporary sensi-
bility and to help "make conscious the 'standards' " in it.
Like many another critic, Hulme was concerned with the

there are many works which must be left out of the present discussion, which
is concerned to point out merely the dominant lines and influential texts. It
is also necessary to introduce such British critics as Hulme, Richards, and
Empson. The bibliographies appended to M. D. Zabel's Literary Opinion in
America and to Robert Stallman's Critiques, anthologies of contemporary
criticism, list hundreds of articles and books.

2 For Hulme's influence on Pound, see the la tier's Pavannes and Divisions.

158 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

way cultural developments are manifest in language and
literary forms.

I. A. Richards, whose Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924) was equally influential with Eliot's The Sacred Wood
(1920), has been greatly concerned with the role of litera-
ture in a scientific-minded world. In Science and Poetry
(1926) he discussed as pseudo statements those statements
which are not verifiable in scientific terms but which satisfy
our emotional needs. Poetic statements were useful but not
true. The later Richards of Coleridge on the Imagination
(1935) and Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) got away from
the notion that poetry although valuable in ordering our
minds is irrelevant to the real world. In the volume on Cole-
ridge he says, (< Poetry is the completest mode of utterance."
He places poetic language in the realm of myth, with no
such pejorative connotations as those clinging to the term
"pseudo." Myths, he adds, "are those hard realities in pro-
jection, their symbolic recognition, coordination and ac-
ceptance. . . . Without his mythologies man is only a cruel
animal without a soul ... a congeries of possibilities with-
out order or aim/'

it

Eliot too, of course, has been preoccupied with literature
in relation to its own generation and the generations pre-
ceding it. His first book, The Sacred Wood, ended for many,
particularly for younger readers, the era of Victorian liter-
ary standards. He became a symbol of an intellectual criti-
cism that drew on the scholarship of various fields as well as
a knowledge of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French.
For many years he was the leader of the younger genera-
tion, ignored by those whose tastes had been formed before

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 159,

World War I and occasionally attacked by those who mis-
understood the pessimism of The Waste Land, as well as
by those who disapproved of his growing religious interests,
his politics, or his unsettling of Victorian literary standards.
Recently the controversies have been less heated, but his.
work continues to be studied and to be influential.

Writing the Preface in 1928 for a new edition of The
Sacred Wood, Eliot stated that the volume had as its center
"the integrity of poetry" and that he was much indebted
to Rmy de Gourmont. In the volume appear "Tradition
and the Individual Talent" (which epitomizes many of the
themes that run through his work), pieces on the art of
criticism, as well as brief studies of Dante, Marlowe, Shake-
speare, Jonson, Massinger, Blake, Swinburne, and others.
Many of the subjects which recur in his later work are here:
the objective correlative, the impersonal nature of art, the
need for a sense of history, a pointing to the most usable
parts of the literature of the past, and the meaning of tra-
dition. 3

Homage to John Dry den (1924), which included essays*
on Marvell, the metaphysical poets, and Dryden, established
even more clearly Eliot's belief that the most usable part
of the English literary tradition was the literature of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Subsequently it has be-
come evident that Eliot's criticism was not entirely, in Ar-
nold's sense, disinterested. His discovery of certain poets
and his comments about them were grisit for himself as a
working poet. There are immediately evident connections
between statements in "The Metaphysical Poets" and his
own practice in The Waste Land. There are connections

8 For these and other terms and questions discussed by Eliot, see Robert
W. Stallman's The Critic's Notebook (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press,.

l6o AN AGE OF CRITICISM

between "Song for Simeon/' "Journey of the Magi," as well
as "Gerontion" and the title essay in For Lancelot Andrewes
(1928). And there are connections between Dante (1929)
and Ash Wednesday. In his Milton lecture, delivered sev-
eral times in the United States in 1947 and published in
Sewanee Review, Eliot explained his earlier playing-up of
the metaphysicals and playing-down of Milton. In the 1920*5
one of the principles stressed by Pound and Eliot was that
poetry should have the virtues of prose, that "the subject-
matter and the imagery of poetry should be extended to
objects related to the life of a modern man or woman." In
neither respect would the study of Milton have helped their
contemporaries. Eliot concluded the lecture by saying, "it
now seems to me that poets are sufficiently removed from
Milton, and sufficiently liberated from his reputation, to
approach the study of his work without danger, and with
profit to their poetry and to the English language." In "The
Function of Criticism" in The Sacred Wood, Eliot stated
that "the poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create
poetry." In other words, Eliot's earlier criticism records the
growth of his own mind and the development of his sensi-
b\lity at the same time that it records the direction of one
of the most significant lines of development in modern
poetry and criticism.

The method of his criticism is less easy to characterize.
First and foremost, he requires the co-operation of his
reader. He analyzes and compares. Quite often Eliot's own
comments, in a restricted and transparent style, simply pre-
pare the reader for a long quotation. The reader is obliged
to engage himself with the passage in order to relate it to
what Eliot has said. That this is his intention seems to be
indicated in another sentence from "The Function of Criti-
cism": "In matters of great importance the critic must not

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM l6l

coerce and he must not make judgements of worse and of
better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the
correct judgement for himself/* The occasionally cryptic
expressions, according to his own statement in Homage to
John Dryden, are intentional. Certain notions presented as
cryptograms would, if expressed directly, "be destined to
immediate obloquy, followed by perpetual oblivion." He
generally uses a historical method, not in the sense of estab-
lishing the milieu of a given work but by drawing upon
poems of various periods in order to distinguish the char-
acter as well as the level of excellence of the given work. In
his later criticism, as in The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933) and After Strange Gods (1934), he is likely
to be closer to the method of Arnold than to an aesthetic
emphasis or an analytical method.

Arnold, of course, was preoccupied with the culture of
Victorian England and tended to see literary works as they
related to it. He was able to perceive many of the qualities
that differentiated one writer from another, but he rarely
discussed these differences in other than moral, social, or
cultural terms. Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, was
much more likely to focus attention not only on moral earn-
estness but also on metaphor, diction, metrics, and so forth
in other words, on form. But it is probably Samuel Taylor
Coleridge who furnishes the most characteristic example
of the method and considerations which recur in the new
criticism, especially in the study of "Venus and Adonis" in
Biographia Literaria. He treats of imagination as it relates
to versification and the ability to reduce a multitude of

l62 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

feelir/gs to their proper proportion in relation to the total
unitf of the work; dissociation of the literary work from its
origins in the writer's own life, so that the work, as Eliot
has demanded, lives impersonally and with its own kind of
wholeness; dramatization, or as James would say, rendering
not reporting; 4 union of "creative power and intellectual
energy, " or as we say more commonly now, the union of
thought and feeling; complexity in the sense that one per-
ceives "the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest
thoughts" and in the sense that imagery, versification, tone,
and other things contribute in the most minute ways to the
dominant feeling and thematic lines unifying th work.

Richards and Hulme are both indebted to Coleridge. So
too are later critics like Herbert Read and Kenneth Burke.
In fact, Coleridge is so much a part of the preconceptions in
contemporary criticism that there is probably no critic who
is not greatly in his debt. In this sense, then, the new criti-
cism is not new it is a continuation of nineteenth-century
English criticism. It is undoubtedly more intensive than
Coleridge p. And it is undoubtedly new in that it borrows
from contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and psychol-
ogyjust as Coleridge borrowed from German philosophy.
However, it is hardly just to consider contemporary crit-
ics members of a literary guild. One might think of T. S.
Eliot (at least in his earlier work), William Empson, R. P.
Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and John
Crowe Ransom as being in agreement about most of their
critical standards. Undoubtedly there is a considerable body
of agreement among them, but anyone reading through
Ransom's The New Criticism will also be struck by the
extent of their disagreements. Ransom's theory, most neatly

4 In praising "Venus and Adonis," Coleridge said, "You seem to be told
nothing but to see and hear everything."

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM

expressed in "Criticism as Pure Speculation/' 5 that much of
the concrete detail of the poem is to be looked upon as in-
teresting and pleasant in its own right but irrelevant to the
logical or prose meaning of the poem, is not evident in the
work of these other critics; some of them are explicitly in
disagreement with it. The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943) of-
fers abundant evidence that Yvor Winters is in very consid-
erable disagreement not merely with Ransom's theory but
with that of most of their contemporaries.

A simple way of demonstrating the diversity in method
among contemporary critics is to compare the work of R. P.
Blackmur and Kenneth Burke. Blackmur's criticism is ec-
lectic, indebted to Eliot, Richards, Empson, Burke, and
others and is perhaps impossible to label easily. Like James,
whose prefaces he has edited, he has insisted on the high
value of art. And, as witness his work in The Double Agent
(1935) and The Expense of Greatness (1940), he has insisted
on arduous labor in criticism. He wants the critic * 'con-
stantly to be confronted with examples of poetry" for the
practical purpose of helping readers to understand its mean-
ing and value. In explicating a poem by Wallace Stevens or
Hart Crane he explores all possible meanings in a word in
terms of its content. Ransom opens his account of The New
Criticism by presenting Blackmur's analysis of a poem by
Emily Dickinson as a distinguished example of the illumi-
nation possible as the result of close and imaginative read-
ing. Blackmur's readings are usually detailed and subtle,
but too often his prose is unnecessarily contorted and diffi-
cult. In staying close to the specific work of literature or to
the work of a specific writer, Blackmur typifies the practice
of many contemporary critics. Burke, on the other hand, is

5 The Intent of the Critic, ed. Donald Stauffer (Princeton, N. J., Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 1941).

164 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

more characteristic of the movement in its liking for critical
terminology.

In his later books like A Grammar of Motives (1945) and
A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Burke is a theoretician of a
kind almost unique among literary critics. Aside from what-
ever values Burke's "dramatism," as he calls his generating
principle, may have in settling or precluding the quarrels
between the positivist-minded and their critics over the
claims of poetry or the other arts to be called "knowledge,"
his critical observations are usually shrewd and sometimes
transferable to other contexts. In "Musicality in Verse"
from Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), for instance,
he says there is a "concealed alliteration" in Coleridge's
"bathed by the mist" because b and b are "close phonetic
relatives" of m. " 'B-b-the-b-' would be blunt. But in de-
flecting the third member from a b to an m, the poet retains
the same phonetic theme, while giving us a variation upon
the theme." In "Caldwell: Maker of Grotesques," from the
same volume, Burke furnishes clues that plausibly explain
some of the effects Caldwell frequently manages. Caldwell's
characters, Burke says, are to real people as deracinated
frogs are to whole frogs. What they lack in humanity the
reader supplies. "When the starved grandmother in To-
bacco Road lies dying, with her face on the ground into
the soil, and no one shows even an onlooker's interest in
her wretchedness, we are prodded to anguish. When these
automata show some bare inkling of sociality, it may seem
like a flash of ultimate wisdom." With this as a beginning,
one could read much of Caldwell with an increased critical
awareness. Burke is hard reading for the most part, however,
because he is working out, as he says, a "theory of the criti-
cism of books (a theory that should be applicable, mutatis

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 165

mutandis, to any specific cases)." When he has completed
his work, much that now appears scattered and piecemeal
will probably be more coherent and readily useful.

Such differences in belief and method could be docu-
mented at length. On the other hand, it should be noted
that most contemporary critics do attempt to analyze the
literary work carefully and in detail. Despite the varying
approaches implied by a critic's emphasis on texture, ten-
sion, ambiguity, expressive form, pseudo reference, para-
dox, irony, or other such terms, 6 each critic is attempting
to establish a body of definable criteria. Each is concerned
with developing useful terms and techniques so that the
reader may be able to explore the complex parts of the liter-
ary work and to make some attempt to evaluate its worth.

There has been a good deal of attention paid in recent
years to what W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, in a
widely read article, called "the intentional fallacy." The
general point is that critical inquiries about the meaning of
a poem are not to be settled by consulting the intention of
the author. (The British critic C. S. Lewis in The Personal
Heresy disagreed with E. M. W. Tillyard's contention in
Milton that Paradise Lost is about the state of Milton's mind
when the poem was written. Lewis says it is about Satan, the
angels, and so forth. And he adds: "Every work of art that
lasts long in the world is continually taking on ... colors
which the artist neither foresaw nor intended.") In the final
section of his essay on The Ancient Mariner, "A Poem of
Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading" (1946),
Robert Penn Warren has made a neat summary of most of
the issues relevant to the problem of intention. The pri-

6 See William Elton, A Glossary of the New Criticism (Modern Poetry
Assoc., 1948).

l66 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

mary consideration, he concludes, is the criterion of "in-
ternal consistency." 7

/

Because of the concern of critics with literature as litera-
ture, it was inevitable that there would be protests against
centering the critical process in the antecedents or origins
(the intentional fallacy) of the work as well as against cen-
tering it in the psychological reactions or responses to it
(the affective fallacy). Wimsatt and Beardsley define the af-
fective fallacy as "a confusion between the poem and its
results (what it is and what it does). ... It begins by trying
to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological
effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and rela-
tivism." As a result, "the poem itself, as an object of spe-
cifically critical judgement, tends to disappear." Examples
of affective criticism are Emily Dickinson's remark that in
reading genuine poetry she had the sensation that the top
of her head was taken off and A. E. Housman's comment
about feeling a shiver run down his spine when he recalled
a good line of poetry. References to one's feelings in the
presence of a literary work will indicate approval or dis-
approval of some kind, but they are likely to be vague and
untranslatable into cognitive terms.

7 The problem of internal consistency is often raised in conjunction with
the problem of multiple interpretations. For instance, in his analysis of The
Tempest, Mark Van Doren makes these comments: " The Tempest does bind
up in final form a host of themes with which the author has been concerned.
. , . One interpretation of The Tempest does not agree with another. And
there is a deeper trouble in the truth that any interpretation, even the
wildest, is more or less plausible. . . . Any set of symbols, moved close to the
play, lights up as in an electric field. Its meaning, in other words, is pre-
cisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.
But what the world is cannot be said in a sentence. . . ." Obviously, not every
play or poem is as rich in multiple meanings as The Tempest. Although it
seems likely that a play or poem rich in meanings is likely to last a longer
time, it does not seem necessary to add that the presence of multiple mean-
ings, which could be fatuous and confused, is not an indisputable test of
literary value. In other words, multiple meaning of itself is no test of great-
ness.

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 167

IV

Many contemporary critics also object to the old dichot-
omy of content and form. Like the earlier proponents of
organic form and expressive form they believe that if the
writer alters his expression he has probably affected not
merely the appropriateness of his manner or style but the
actual meaning of what he has said.

The dichotomy of content and form is seen as a Cartesian
and Kantian inheritance. Meaning was commonly held to
have a mind-body relationship; rhetorical figures were a
dress put upon meaning, like the glove put on the hand.
(The attempted divorce of meaning from matter, which
was a part of the effort to achieve mathematical unfeeling
or objectivity, is discussed in the new criticism usually as
a part of the phenomenon labeled by T. S. Eliot the "dis-
sociation of sensibility.") The concern with structure in the
new criticism implies some degree of recognition that ab-
straction emerges from matter. Walter J. Ong in "The
Meaning of the 'New Criticism' " (1943) writes: "The un-
derstanding is defective if it does not observe that, however
they may be handled in mathematics and minor logic, the
most abstract abstractions always come to us in ways which
reflect their origins out of material existents. . . . Abstrac-
tions cannot be preserved and packaged, but are known and
used only as they are being drawn in some way or another
out of matter." Form or structure is understood not as an
envelope or even as a vehicle of the total meaning or total
abstraction the writer has made available. As Yeats wrote
in "Among School Children":

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

l68 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

I. A. Richards was the first of the contemporary critics to
address himself to the problem of "total meaning."

In Practical Criticism (1929), Richards considers meter,
diction, metaphor, and methods of organizing the poem
not as ornaments but as parts of the total meaning. The
poet's attitude toward his subject matter is, or should be,
implicit in his meter (the use of the spondee, for example,
to slow the metrical movement) and in his diction (the "Mis-
ter Death" phrase in Cummings's poem on Buffalo Bill, for
example, suggests the poet's attitude toward death in this
particular context). The meter and the diction are among
the factors that produce the tone. The method of organiz-
ing the elements in the poem the incidental ironies, the
juxtaposing of unlike elements, the bringing together of
homogeneous elements, the use of alliteration, of internal
rhyme, and so forth also contribute to its meaning. The
employment of assonance, for example, can enable a poet to
echo and stress a word he does not want to repeat explicitly.
The interest in total meaning is related to the belief that,
ideally, in literature there can be no true separation of
form and content. 8

Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) extended
Richards's work by demonstrating that language tends to be
highly connotative, or, in Wheelwright's term, "phAi-sig-
nificant." The older preconception was that cognitive lan-
guage implies simple denotation. But Empson took words
like "rooky" from Macbeth and demonstrated that all of the
meanings listed by the Arden editors were plausible. If they
seemed plausible to the various editors they would have
seemed plausible to the first-night audience and would have

8 Tate in "Longinus" (Lectures in Criticism, 1949), however, writes: "The
fusion of art and nature, of technique and subject, can never exceed the
approximate; the margin of imperfection is always there-nature intractable
to art, art unequal to nature."

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM l6g

"seemed plausible to Shakespeare himself, since he was no
less sensitive to words than they." (Ong quotes Hugh Blair,
a late neoclassic rhetorician whose Lectures on Rhetoric
was widely studied in the nineteenth century: "Simple ex-
pression just makes our ideas known to others; but figura-
tive language, over and above, bestows a particular dress
upon that idea; a dress, which both makes it to be remarked
and adorns it.'*) Empsoft, by showing that the new mean-
ing (tenor) and metaphor (vehicle) interact, thereby sug-
gesting a considerable number of meanings (abstractions),
is showing that meanings have their origins in matter, in
the concrete. Meaning is involved with structure or form
down to the slightest connotation or suggestion. 9

After Richards and Empson, criticism became much more
conscious of the details which carry the meaning of a poem.
In "Hardy's Philosophic Metaphors" (Reason in Madness,
1941), for example, Tate criticizes "Nature's Questioning"
on the ground that its structure, the metaphors, contradicts
the working content Hardy's belief in a deistic unknow-
able God. Hardy conceives a God who in one place is an
automaton, in another an imbecile, but in still another a
schoolmaster. "Even in the magnificent image of the 'God-
head dying downwards' we get a certain degree of contra-
diction between tenor and vehicle: in order to say that God
has left the universe to chance after setting it in motion,
Hardy can merely present us with the theistic God as blind
and imbecile." To this Tate adds: "So generally of Hardy

9 Critics like Ransom and Tate have stressed particularity or the concrete
and insist on its value as a contribution to our knowledge. In myth and
archetypal images, in our affective responses to color and image, and in the
way our sensibilities are aroused by what Ransom has called "the world's
body," they want to find evidence of the ways in which literature gives us a
kind of knowledge with which science and philosophy are not concerned.
See especially Ransom's "Criticism as Pure Speculation," The Intent of the
Critic, and "The Literary Criticism of Aristotle," Lectures in Criticism, ed.
Elliot Coleman (New York, Pantheon, 1949).

17O AN AGE OF CRITICISM

it may perhaps be said that his 'philosophy' tends to be a
little beyond the range of his feeling: his abstractions are
thus somewhat irresponsible, since/ he rarely shows us the
experience that ought to justify them, that would give them
substance, visibility, meaning/' Similarly, Tate's analyses of
verses by Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Thomson, and
John Donne in ''Tension in Poetry" are examinations into
patterns of coherent relationships between denotative and
connotative meanings in poetry.

The reader of The Well Wrought Urn (1947) will be
able to observe that Cleanth Brooks also thinks of the poem
as a structure or form in the sense indicated above. He justi-
fies his use of "paradox" and "irony" as the most available
terms to suggest the kinds or indirection and the kinds of
qualification he has observed to be characteristic of the
total statement (or structure) that composes the poem. To
substitute a paraphrase, a simplified meaning, is to destroy
a part of the ^micture and therefore a part of the meaning.

Structure or form is also a key concept in the criticism of
the novel. A novelist succeeds or fails in terms of his struc-
ture. Mark Schorer in "Technique as Discovery" 10 says:
"What we need in fiction is a devoted fidelity to every tech-
nique which will help us discover and evaluate our subject
matter, and more than that, to discover the amplifications
of meaning of which our subject matter is capable." To
take a specific instance, Robert Penn Warren's Introduc-
tion to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has as its center
the concept of an appropriate structure. He explains first
what he calls the "characteristic Hemingway 'point* ": this
includes comments on the initiates in Hemingway's God-
abandoned world, the hard-bitten, disciplined men and

10 Forms of Modern Fiction, cd. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis,
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1948).

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM

women who savor not only drinking and sex but who have
a sharp awareness of the physical world and of light and
darkness. Drinking and sex are dramatized as forces that
dull the sense of nada (death and the meaninglessness of
the physical world), except that with love a margin of hu-
man significance or meaning is achieved, and so forth. The
successful Hemingway stories occur, Warren says, when "the
essential limitations of his premises" have been accepted.
The "failures occur when we feel that Hemingway has not
respected the limitations of his premises." In the failures
not merely the moral significance or judgment, which we
expect ta be implied in the action, becomes blurred, but the
characteristic irony and the simplified style sound empty
and pretentious. Warren's focus, in other words, is on the
structure of the stories. Joseph Warren Beach, R. P. Black-
mur, M. D. Zabel, and comparable critics, we may assume,
look to James and to Conrad, because in them they find
artists who have learned how to inform/a given subject mat-
ter with maximum resonance, meaning, and significance.

v

An argument sometimes directed against such criticism
is that by emphasizing form it fails to emphasize moral val-
ues and other extra-aesthetic values (content). This argu-
ment, again, is dependent upon the old assumption that
form and content are readily separable. The analytical crit-
ics might, in reply, point to their concern with synthesis,
tension, irony, complexity, and inclusiveness, as opposed to
the sentimental, the arbitrary, the merely asserted, and so
forth. The maturity, as Henry James insisted, with which
a moral or political view emerges\from the aesthetic form
is dependent in part on how well, tiow impressively, and

172 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

how vividly the view has been investigated and refracted
through the aesthetic medium. The nature of literary form,
demanding as it does stylization, that is, selection of detail,
understatement, parody, or the manipulation of characters
within a given concrete situation, precludes the possibility
of its offering easy rules of thumb for moral, political, or
social action. (It may develop that critical studies in the
immediate future will furnish further studies of literary
conventions and, more particularly, what is implied by the
term "stylization.") In the final analysis, statements about
the moral or philosophical elements in a literary work are
made inside an aesthetic framework, in terms of the struc-
ture that makes these elements available for discussion.

Another argument directed against this criticism is that
it is antihistorical and antibiographical. The argument
probably oversimplifies the attitudes of most of the analyti-
cal critics since they, as well as other students of literature,
understand with Mine de Stael that there are reciprocal re-
lationships between literature and a society's laws, man-
ners, and religion, just as they understand the general sig-
nificance of Taine's oversimplified statements about a work
of art being the product of "race, milieu, and moment," or
just as they understand, with Arnold and Sainte-Beuve, that
a writer's work can often be better interpreted in the light
of his personal life. Yet most of them would insist that his-
torical studies can be, and frequently have been, carried on
in such a fashion that they become almost divorced from
any significant concern with the values of literature as lit-
erature. They would also insist that scholarship divorced
from an aesthetic criticism will fall into the genetic fallacy,
will attempt to explain a piece of literature not in terms of
what it is but in terms of its social or biographical origins.

In their Theory of Literature (1949), Ren Wellek and

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 173

Austin Warren have mediated these arguments by treating
the poem, or literary work, as a thing in itself, as unique
but also with characteristics common to its genre, and as
having persistent as well as shifting meanings depending
upon the audience and historical context in which it is
read. "A poem, we have to conclude, is not an individual
experience or a sum of experiences, but only a potential
cause of experiences. . . . Thus the real poem must be con-
ceived as a structure of norms, realized only partially in the
actual experience of its many readers." They discuss the
division of the literary work into such factors as sound,
meaning; character, setting, and point of view, each factor
having its subordinate considerations and each interrelated
with the other factors. It is true, they admit, that each work
of art has unique aspects, but to overstress uniqueness in-
vites complete critical relativism and an indifference to the
similarities and common elements that would make it pos-
sible to discuss not merely genre but literature in general.
"The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge
sui generis. . . ." Wellek and Warren admit that the Iliad
as understood by the Greeks is not identical with the Iliad
we are capable of understanding. Nonetheless, there must
be a "substantial identity of 'structure' which has remained
the same throughout the ages." Again, not all the view-
points in terms of which the "structure" is seen will be
equally capable of grasping it most meaningfully. There-
fore, some "hierarchy of viewpoints," a criticism of the grasp
of norms, is implied in the concept of the "adequacy of in-
terpretation." This dependence on a "system of norms"
more or less completely realized by various generations of
readers (as well as by individuals) would avoid the extremes
of absolutism and relativism. It would seem to follow also
that one might, after all, by knowing a good deal about the

174 AN AGE OF CRITICISM

potentialities of literary form or structure be able to say
that particular generations of poets or novelists or drama-
tists held viewpoints that enabled them to make excellent
or relatively poor use of their medium.

The job of the critic is to help us perceive the nature and
worth of the literary work. It is not his function to offer us
coherent systems of philosophy, coherent theories of the
nature of language, or even ideological systems that include
accounts of poetry as a substitute for religion and the rela-
tion of the poet to the economic order. He can use all the
information he can get, but he can employ his knowledge,
as a critic, only insofar as it is relevant to the particular work
or works he is discussing and attempting to make more avail-
able to the reader. Occasionally someone offers to subsume
the study of literature under sociology which would mean
the end of the study of literature as an art. It would be ironic
if a few zealots in criticism managed to raise a complex edi-
fice composed of interrelated lines of knowledge of philos-
ophy, anthropology, and linguistics that was so massive that
.the literary work beneath it became merely an excuse for
cbe superstructure. Almost everyone in the twentieth cen-
tury is looking for a kind of knowledge that will be as a
Second Coming. It is too much to hope that such knowledge
will arise from critical analyses, that it is resting like a genie
in the bottle labeled the "new criticism/' In "The Function
of Criticism," Eliot refers to a criticism that is self-serving
as autotelic. Tate, in a more homely phrase, has compared
such criticism to the picture^pologizing to the frame.

Probably it is true, as some of its practitioners claim, that
no body of criticism in the history of English and American

ANALYTICAL CRITICISM 175

literature is comparable in bulk, variety, or intensity to the
criticism produced in our half century. Since this accom-
plishment is likely to invite a considerable degree of smug-
ness among those who sympathize with the movement, it
may be well to close this survey with a little fable devised by
Robert Penn Warren:

Critics are rarely faithful to their labels and their special strat-
egies. Usually the critic will confess that no one strategy the
psychological, the moralistic, the formalistic, the historical or
combination of strategies, will quite work the defeat of the
poem. For the poem is like the monstrous Orillo in Boiardo's
Orlando fnnamorato. When the sword lops off any member of
the monster, that member is immediately rejoined to the body,
and the monster is as formidable as ever. But the poem is even
more formidable than the monster, for Orillo's adversary finally
gained a victory by an astonishing feat of dexterity: he slashed
off both the monster's arms and quick as a wink seized them and
flung them into the river. The critic who vaingloriously trusts
his method to account for the poem, to exhaust the poem, is try-
ing to emulate this dexterity; he thinks that he, too, can win by
throwing the lopped off arms into the river. But he is doomed
to failure. Neither fire nor water will suffice to prevent the re-
joining of the mutilated members to the monstrous torso. There
is only one way to conquer the monster: you must eat it, bones,
blood, skin, pelt, and gristle. And even then the monster is not
dead, for it lives in you, is assimilated into you, and you are dif-
ferent, and somewhat monstrous yourself, for having eaten it.
So the monster will always win, and the critic knows this. He
does not want to win. He knows that he must always play stooge
to the monster. All he wants to do is to give the monster a chance
to exhibit again his miraculous powers.

A Selected Bibliography

Extensive lists of books, articles, and reviews can be found
in the following:

Aldridge, John W. Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction^

1920-1951. New York. Ronald Press Company, 1952.
Leary, Lewis. Articles on American Literature Appearing

in Current Periodicals, 1920-1945. Durham, N. C., Duke

University Press, 1947.
Millett, F. B. Contemporary American Authors. New York,

Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943.
Spiller, Robert E., et al., (eds.). Literary History of the

United States. Bibliography. New York, The Macmiilan

Company, 1948.
Stallman, Robert W. Critiques and Essays in Criticism^

1920-1948. New York, Ronald Press Company, 1949.
. The Critic's Notebook. Minneapolis, University of

Minnesota Press, 1950.
Taylor, Walter F. A History of American Letters (with

bibliographies by Harry Hartwick). New York, Ameri-
can Book Company, 1936.
Zabel, Morton D. Literary Opinion in America. New York,

Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1951.

INDEX

Aiken, Conrad, 35
America in Literature, 13
American Criticism, 102-3
American Humor, 82
American Jungle, The, 84
"American Literary Criticism and the

Doctrine of Evolution," 51-52
American Mercury, 29
American Mind, The, 12
American Prose Masters, 13
American Renaissance, 57-58
America's Coming of Age, 73, 79-81
Anatomy of Negation, The, 22
Anatomy of Nonsense, The, 105, 163
Anthony, Katharine, 137-38
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, 150-

5i

Aristocracy and Justice, 93

Armed Vision, The, 83

Arnold, Matthew, 13, 162, 172

"Art and Neurosis," 144-45

Art for art's sake. 57

"Art, Form and Expression," 70-71

"Art of Fiction, The," 55, 61

Art of the Novel, The, 62-63

Arvin, Newton, 125, 154

Atlantic Monthly, The, 6

Babbitt, Irving, 15, 50, 92 ff
Barzun, Jacques, 153
Basler, Roy, 146-47
Beach, Joseph Warren, 28, 74, 91, 171
Beardsley, M.C., 165-66
Beer, Thomas, 139
Bell, Clive, 69-70
Bergler, Edmund, 147
Berryman, John, 154
Bcsant, Walter, 61
Beyond Life, 33
Biographia Literaria. 161
Blackmur, R. P., 62, 82, 109, 163-64,
171

Bodkin, Maud, 150-51

Bogan, Louise, 35, 153

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicholas, 51, 68

Book About Myself, A, 54

Book of Prefaces, A, 29

Bookman, The, 43

Bourne, Randolph, 64, 75-77, 93-94

Boyesen, Hjalmar, 53-55

Boyd, Ernest, 86

Boys in the Back Room, The f 127

Brooks, Cleanth, 108, 157, 170

Brooks, Van Wyck, 73-75, 77-83, 131,

135

Brown Decades, The, 83
Brownell, William Crary, 9, 13-151

5 -5i.73

Bruneticre, Ferdinand, 51-54
Burke, Kenneth, 71-72, 148, 157
Bush, Douglas, 109

Cabell, James Branch, 29, 33-34

Calverton, V. F., 118-19

Canby, Henry Seidel, 74, 103

Cantwell, Robert, 125

Caudwell, Christopher (Christopher

St. John Sprigg), 115
Chapman, John Jay, 15-17
Charvat, William, 8-9
Chase, Richard, 153-54
Clark, J . Scott, 49
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 57, 64, 128,

161-62

Coleridge on the Imagination, 158
Collins, Seward, 76
Comte, Auguste, 20
Concept of Realism in the School of

Howells, The, 6
Confident Years, The, Hi
Contemporary American Criticism t

69

Contemporary American Novelists,
74

178

AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Counter-Statement, 71

Cowley, Malcolm, 135

Crane, Stephen, 3

Creative Criticism, 63-68

Criticism, 14, 50-51

Criticism and Fiction, 5, 38

"Criticism as Pure Speculation," 162-

63
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism,

3

Critique of Humanism, A, 95
Croce, Benedetto, 63-68, 70, 128

Dahlberg, Edward, 140-41

Dante, 108

Dell, Floyd, 117

Democratic Distinction in America,

H

Demon of the Absolute, The, 96
Demon Lover, The, 147
De Voto, Bernard, 131
Dial, The, 35
" 'Difference' of Literature, The," 69-

70

Dilemma of the Liberated, The, 107
"Document and Work of Art," 69
Do These Bones Live?, 140-41
Double Agent, The, 163-64
Dreiser, Theodore, 54
Drift of Romanticism, The, 93
Dulce, 56-58

Eastman, Max, 87, 117

"Economic Interpretation of History,

The," 112-13
Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius,

139-40

Edwin Arlington Robinson, 106
Eliot, T. S., 67-68, 102-3, Io6 lo8
Elton, William, 157
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 14, 57-58
Emerson and Other Papers, 16
"Emile Zola," 42-43
Empson, William, 134, 154, 156, 168-

69

Erotic Motive in Literature, The,

Erskine, John, 74
Essays on German Literature, 53
Excavations, 32
Exile's Return, 125
Expense of Greatness, The, 163-64
"Ezra Pound and Contemporary
Criticism," 69

Farrell, James T., 124-25

Fergusson, Francis, 151-52

Flowering of New England, The, Si

Foerster, Norman, 101-4

"Footnote on Criticism," 30

Forbis, Dorothy M., 6

For Lancelot Andrewes, 160

Forces in American Criticism, 122-24

France, Anatole, 20

Frank, Waldo, 84-85

French Art, 13

French Portraits, 22

French Traits, 13

Freud, Sigmund, 132 ff

Freudianism and the Literary Mind,

132

Friends of Mine, 31
Frozen Sea, The, 147-48
Frye, Prosser Hall, 104

Garland, Hamlin, 46

Gates, Lewis E., 20, 48

Gateways to Literature, 112

Gayley, C. M., 46

Genius of Style, The, 14, 70

"Genteel Tradition and American

Philosophy, The," 10-12
Genteel Tradition at Bay, The, 97-

100
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The,

57

Gestalt psychology, 149-50
Gilder, Richard Watson, 8-9
Gilman, Lawrence, 28
Glossary of the New Criticism, A,

57

Gold, Michael, 117
Golden Day, The, 83
Gourmont, Remy de, 26, 67-68, 71-7*

INDEX

179

Grammar of Motives, ^,164
Grattan, Hartley, 95
Graves, Robert, 134, 154
Great Tradition, The, 121-24
Gregory, Horace, 125

Hansen, Harry, 74, 95

Herald Tribune, The, 75, 87, 90

Hicks, Granville, 121-24

History of American Literature,
1607-1865, 8

History of English Literature, 46-49

Hoffman, Frederick J., 132, 155

Homage to John Dry den, 159-60, 161

Hound and Horn, 35

Howe, Irving, 127, 154

Howells, WHliam Dean, 3, 5-6, 37-39

Hulme, T. E., 157-58

"Humanism: An Essay at Defini-
tion," 96-97

Humanism in America, 107

Huneker, James Gibbons, 20, 25-28,

30
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 83

Iconoclasts, 26

Idea of the Theater, The, 151-52

44 Impression ism and Appreciation,"

23-24

Inquiries and Opinions, 15
Intent of the Critic, The, 103
International Monthly, 51-52
Introduction to the Methods and

Materials of Criticism, An, 46
Irresponstbles, The, 131

James, Henry, 37, 47-48, 55, 58-63,

64, 65, 66, 82-83
Jones, Ernest. 136
Jones, Llewellyn. 69-71
Josephson, Matthew, 81
Jung, Carl, 132-33, 148-54

Kazin, Alfred, 82

Krutch, Joseph Wood, 88-90, 139-40

La vie litte"raire, 20

Langer, Susanne, 150

Le roman experimental, 40-41

Letters and Leadership, 80-81, 94

Levin, Harry, 127-29

Lewis, Sinclair, 3, 4, 6-7

Lewisohn, Ludwig, 15, 67-68, 87, 137

Liberal Imagination, The, 129-30

Liberation of American Literature,

The, 119
Life of the Spirit in Modern English

Poets, The, 45
Literary Fallacy, The, 131
Literary History of America, A, 8
Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of

Science, The, 117
Literature and Insurgency, 110-11
Literature and Revolution, 113-14
Little Leaders, 46
Love and Lore, 22
Lowell, Amy, 74
Lowell, James Russell, 8

Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 8, 48
MacLeish, Archibald, 131
Macy, John, 73
M'lle New York, 23
Main Currents in American Litera-
ture, 119-24

Malady of the Ideal, The, 78
Mammonart, 111-12
Manuel de I'histoire de la litterature,

52

Margaret Fuller, 137-38

"Marxism and Literature," 126

Marxist criticism, 7, iioff

Masks and Minstrels of New Ger-
many, 25

Masses, The, 117

Masters of Modern French Criticism,
The, 50, 92

Matthews, Brander, 8, 15-16, 44-45,
112-13

Matthiessen, F. O.. 57-58, 139

Maule's Curse, 106

Mauve Decade, The, 139

Melody of Chaos, The, 140

Memories and Milestones, 16

i8o

AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Men Seen, 34

Mencken, H. L., 28-31

Merry -Go-Round, The, 32

Method of Henry James, The, 74

Midwest Portraits, 74

Modern Book of Criticism, A, 67-68,

88

Modern Temper, The, 89-90, 107
"Morality in Fiction," 22
Mordcll, Albert, 136-37
More, Paul Elmer, 71, 92 if
Muller, Herbert J., 149
Mumford, Lewis, 83-84, 138-39
Munson, Gorham, 95, 107-8

Nathan, George Jean, 28-29

Nation, The, 88, 137

Nature and Elements of Poetry, The,

5

Neider, Charles, 1 17-48
New American Credo, The, 31
"New Criticism, The," 63
New Criticism, The, 156
New England, 8-12, 16-17
New England: Indian Summer, 81
New Humanists, 14-15. 76-77, 92 If
New Laocoon, The, 92-93
New Masses, The, 121
New Republic, The, 90, 125
Norris, Frank, 41-42, 48
Norton, Charles Eliot, 8
Note on Literary Criticism, A, 124-25

On Being Human, 71

On Contemporary Literature, 85

"On Creating a Usable Past," 81

Ong, Walter J., 167-69

Opinions of Oliver Allston, The, 131

Ordeal of Mark Twain, The, 81, 138

Origins of American Critical

Thought, 1810-1835, The, 9
Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression,

22
Our America, 84

Parrington, Vernon Louis, 119-24
Pater, Walter, 20-22

Pattee, Fred Lewis, 8, 49

Pavannes and Divisions, 68

Payne, William Morton, 5, 46-47, 51-

53

Peck, Harry Thurston, 42-44

Perry, Bliss, 12,49-50, 116

Peiry, Thomas Sargent, 6

Personal Heresy, The, 165

Peterson, Houston, i.jo

Phillips, William, 118

Philosophy in a New Key, 150

Philosophy of Disenchantment, The,
22

Philosophy of Fried rich Nietzsche,
The, 29

Philosophy of Literary Form, 164

Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1.58

Pilgrimage of Henry James, The, 81

Platonism, 92

Poetic Mind, The, 133-34

Poetry 1 Magazine, 35

Polkud, James Pcrnval, 25

Port of New York, 3 \

Portrait of the Artist as American, 81

Pound, E/ru, 67-69, 157

Present t. Frederick C., 133-34

Pnmitwism and Decadence, 104

Principles of Criticism, 158

Proletarian Literature in the United
States, 117-18

"Ps\choanal)sis and Literary Criti-
cism," 155

"Puritanism as a Literary Force," 29

"Puritan's Will to Power, The," 135

Quest for Myth, 153-54

Rahv, Philip, 118

Ransom, John Crowe, 106, 108, 162-

63

Rascoc, Burton, 90
Realism, 5, 37-39, 61-62
Reason in Madness, 169-70
Re-Discovery of America, The, 84
Rcedy's Mirror, 93
Responsibilities of the Novelist, The,
42

INDEX

Rhetoric of Motives, ^,164
Richards, I. A., 134, 154, 156-58, 168-

69

Riding, Laura, 134, 154
Romance and Tragedy, 104
Rosenfcld, Paul, 28, 34, 82
Rourke, Constance, 82-83
Rousseau and Romanticism, 92, 95

Sacred Wood, The, 68, 158-59
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 14,

48, i? 2

Sakus, Edgar, 21-22, 32
Santayana, George, 3, 9-12, 57, 97-100
Saturday 'Review of Literature, The,

87

Scepticisms^ 35
Schorer, Mark, 170-71
Schwartz, Delmore, 82
Scott, F. N., 46
Scudder, Vida, 45
"Second Thoughts on Humanism,"

102-3

Sense of Beauty, The, 57
Seven Arts, The, 135
Seven Types of Ambiguity, 168
Sex, Psychology and Literature, 146-

47

Shapiro, Karl, 82
Shelburne Essays, 92
Sherman, Belle, 41
Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 85-87
Short Studies in Literature, 48
Sinclair, Upton, 111-12
Slochower, Harry, 116
Smart Set, 28
Smith, Bernard, 122-24
Significant form, 69-70
Speculations, 157-58
Spencer, Herbert, 41 , 54-55
Spingarn, Joel, 13,63-68, 115-16
Spirit of American Literature, The,

73

Standards, 14-15
Stael, Mme de, 128, 172
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 5
Stoddard, Richard, 8

Straws and Prayerbooks, 33
Studies in Appreciation, 23-24
Studies in the History of the Renais-
sance, 21

Studies in Several Literatures, 43
Symonds, John Addington, 78
Symposium, The, 35

Taine, Hippolyte, 46-51, 119, 126,
128, 172

Tate, Allen, 95, 169-170, 174

Taylor, Bayard, 8

Tendencies in Modern American
Poetry, 74

"Tension in Poetry," 170

Theory of Literature, 173-74

Thompson, Vance, 22-23

Thoreau, Henry David, 57-58

Times of Melville and Whitman,
The,8i

Tindall, William York, 149

Torch, The, 13

Towards Standards, 102

Town Topics, 25

"Tradition and the Individual Tal-
ent," 68, 159

Trent. William Peterfield, 8

Trilling, Lionel, 108, 129-30, 132,

14-1*15

Triple Thinkers, The, 126, 141, 145
Trotsky, Leon, 113-14
Tro\, William, 151-52
Turgeiuev, Ivan, 6
Tu'o Phases of Criticism, 16

Undcnvood, John Curtis, no-u
Usable past, 83
Ut.le, 56-58

Van Doren, Carl, 68, 74-75. 87
Van Doren, Mark, 74-75, 88-89, l66
\an D>ke. Henry, 6-7
Van Vechten, Carl, 19, 31
"Visit to Walt Whitman, A," 27

Walt Whitman, 12
Warren, Austin, 172-74

i8*

AN AGE OF CRITICISM

Warren, Robert Penn, 108, 157, 165-

66, 170-71, 175
Weaver, Raymond, 138-39
Well Wrought Urn, The, 170
Wellek, Rene, 172-74
Wendell, Barrett, 8
West, Ray, 69
Wharton, Edith, 62
Wheelwright, Philip, 152
Whistler, James McNeill, 57
Wilde, Oscar, 22, 25
Wilson, Edmund, 73, 95, 126-27, 141-

45

Wimsatt, W. K., 165-66
Winds of Doctrine, 10
Wine of the Puritans, 78
Winter, William, 8

Winters, Yvor, 104-6, 121, 156

Wood berry, George, 8, 13

World in False face, The, 31

World of H. G. Wells, The, 78

World of Washington Irving, The, Si

Wormhoudt, Arthur, 147

Wound and the Bow, The, 127, 141-

44

Wright, Willard Huntington, 28
Writer and Psychoanalysis, The, 147
Writing of Fiction, The, 62

Young, Stark, 71

Zabel, Morton D., 122, 171
Zola, Emile, 3, 4 1- 44 53