Chapter I

There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy of American literary criticism.

The leading critics of our nation have not been villains--that is, amazing men of initiative, strength, and will bent on destruction--but rather they make us think of well-intentioned bookish gentlemen gyrating in the fields of certain hidden sociological magnets and vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic attractions. On behalf of a potential human greatness, there are perhaps great errors in the present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but there are with us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other words, our critics are not germinative but derivative.

I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains, for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully. Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P. Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the world of professional criticism.

Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an American Type_: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.

I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman, a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection.

In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C. Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society. He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.

Sherman conceived that he was a spokesman for the “average man,” and the point is important in estimating him. It makes it fitting that his style should be passably good but inconspicuous in any pageant of fine styles, fitting that his thinking should constantly deflect from issues that require an unusual severity of discipline for meeting them to issues that are less agitating to the pulse, and most fitting that he should seem not out of joint with his time, like a Forest Philosopher discoursing with men who regard motor-cars as a convincing symbol of progress, but that he should seem to be a contemporary with a touch of conservatism, crying with other average men for Prohibition and vituperating with them our one-time Teutonic enemies. My reader, are you now chiding me for drawing an unsympathetic portrait? Recall then one of the pieces in _Americans_ (1922) and then say, if you can, that in respect to Sherman’s chief weakness I am wrong. The piece in evidence is _An Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More_, wherein, after paying his respects to Mr. More’s gifts, Sherman complained: “But he has done too little to meet his poor living fellow-countrymen.” In fact, he said, and this is the self-incriminating statement, “Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his substance arrives.”[64] It all depends! The genuine writer does seek to reduce his reader by a species of white magic, he labours to compel him to be his slave. But this is a more virile conception of the writer’s rôle than Sherman’s ingratiator embodies. If one puts the emphasis on ingratiation rather than on the skilful imposition of one’s values, then as is well known something is likely to happen to one’s values. Consider the following sad example: Said Sherman, would that Mr. More had loved the aristocratic Plato less and Socrates more. “If,” he went on, “Socrates were among us to-day, I am convinced that he would be a leader of the Democrats in the House; but Plato, I suspect, would be a member of the Senate from Massachusetts.” Quite apart from the fact, apparently forgotten by Sherman, that Socrates at his trial spoke of his brief experience in politics and explained scathingly why he had thereafter abstained from politics, I say that what has occurred here in Sherman’s illustration is the domestication of two men so uncompromisingly at variance with ourselves, so deeply critical of us that if we really felt their presence to-day, we would be, to put it mildly, thoroughly uncomfortable. But Senators and Congressmen do not abash us, and Plato and Socrates transformed into them take on an undisturbing and familiar air. This, I say, is a vicious technique of ingratiation. But there is more and worse: in the same paper Sherman eulogises the average man and then lets himself go deep in the sin of cant. “If ‘P. E. M.’ had a bit more of that natural sympathy of which he is so distrustful, he would have perceived that what more than anything else to-day keeps the average man from lapsing into Yahooism is the _religion of democracy_, consisting of a little bundle of general principles which make him respect himself and his neighbour; a bundle of principles kindled in crucial times by an intense emotion, in which his self-interest, his petty vices, and his envy are consumed as with fire; etc.”[65]

In the lexicon of contemporary humanism there is a damning phrase, “unselective sympathy.” I think it applies to what Sherman meant when he said “religion of democracy,” else why does he base so much of his message on the statistical average man? He could, like Mr. More, have appealed to the latent common sense of man, which is not a visible property of the average man to-day any more than it characterises his leaders, or he could, like M. Charles Maurras, have tried to conceive clearly of a perfect and normal man and argued for a closer approach to normality in human affairs;[66] but no--there was working in Sherman an element of “unselective sympathy” and it made his grasp relax on enterprises of perfection. It was no divine average man he espoused.

When in 1924 he became literary editor of the New York _Herald Tribune_, Sherman had his opportunity to establish what our milieu sorely lacks, a vigorous _conservative_ literary review. But what he organised was essentially not different from any intelligent liberal review with romantic tendencies: many of his regular reviewers were, for instance, already identified as reviewers for the _Nation_. We have followed Sherman from the academic world to the professional literary world, and it would seem to a superficial glance that Sherman changed remarkably in his transit from one to the other. He had been an assailant of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism: he was to praise _An American Tragedy_. He had sneered, and not very well, at the “moderns”: he was to become their friendly counsellor. He had learned, he said, that it was a certain “vitality,” no matter under what guise, that he wanted in letters, and this platform enabled him to do a great deal of explaining away of his altered views. He became less provincial.

But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of leadership. For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him which he called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a fear of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors who are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they will compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel _defensive_ about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on the defensive in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no marked force in himself, on him the registry of environment would be speedily and plainly made. In an academic environment he had fought the New York critics. He came as an editor to New York and the environment quickly persuaded him to blend with it.[67]

When Sherman died, the professional literary world eulogised fulsomely the _émigré_ from the academy. That already tells us a great deal about this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with which Sherman assimilated.