Chapter III

Into the critical pond presided over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic values were in deliquescence, and he was greeted with cheers when he began to revise his former estimates and with eulogies when he died untimely. Much may be said for the three critics I have taken as big frogs in this puddle: do not forget the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the historical consciousness and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable scavenger-work of Mr. Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no fertility in the viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the failure of Mr. Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic ideas, the failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image of themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look at their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s masters.

Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably showing that it is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising great central ideas than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr. Lewis Mumford, who is a pleasing writer on architecture, a literary critic who seizes on the romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and repeats with spirit what his predecessor has said, a thinker whose general terms are vague, and who is impractical because of his credulity as to what modern letters can actually effect in modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr. Brooks’s, is a certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here! Without a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding stress on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff. And the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an æsthetic school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra Pound and the T. S. Eliot who wrote _The Sacred Wood_. For after all Mr. Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.

We have, it would seem, come to the end of a decade and a half of exuberance. Enter mournfully Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch to confess the disillusioned after-thoughts of the modern romanticist. It is a supine admission he makes, without blushes be it added, when he says in beginning his account of the modern temper or mood: “I have been compelled to make references to many facts or supposed facts in biology, psychology, and anthropology. Obviously no person is qualified to assert them all with authority and obviously I am much less qualified than many others, but when I state them I do so not as facts, but simply as commonplaces which we have been taught to believe. My subject is not any series of objective facts, but a state of mind, and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which I and my contemporaries have been led to hold ... if the tenets of Freudianism or the hypotheses of the Darwinian theory are false, they have at least been so accepted as to influence the modern temper quite as unmistakably as if they were true ... these supposed facts have an emotional significance. That is as far as it is necessary to go if they are to be used as I use them, only in the effort to account for a mood.”[69]

Shades of the heroes of the mind! Here is a critic who can entertain the possibility that much of our contemporary “knowledge” is untrue, and then merely wring his hands elegantly in the melancholy produced by _assuming_ that it is true. In _The Modern Temper_ (1929) romantic criticism in America culminates in weak despair.

As we should expect, there have been departures lately. There is Mr. Walter Lippmann,[70] as able a cartographer of the Kingdom of Whirl as Mr. Krutch. He sees clearly that the bell-tent of civilisation is in collapse because society has no common human aim, no hold, that is, on a center-pole capable of raising the whole structure. “The effect of modernity, then,” he says in _A Preface to Morals_ (1929), “is to specialise and to intensify our separated activities. Once all things were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the family, the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the rules of morality, the themes of art, and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applying the laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In the modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of separate interests each sovereign within its own realm.”[71] And the remedy he proposes, who can quarrel with it? The “good life,” he says, is an _acquired_ disposition,--surely an advance over the implication of the other critics we have mentioned that somehow the “good life” would _naturally_ come to pass, if one could only eliminate puritanic inhibitions and flow with one’s desires. No, says Mr. Lippmann, we must develop “detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” We must enter into a new asceticism--who would have anticipated five years ago such a phrase from our new critics?--defined as “an effort to overcome immaturity.”

This is excellent in that it perceives the problem and the goal of the clear-insighted modern man, but does not Mr. Lippmann underestimate the enormous psychological difficulties that block the passage from unregenerate to regenerate man? One has the feeling that his is a paper solution, and one is appalled to read of his hopes for psycho-analysis as a technique for achieving the re-education of desire. The aim of psycho-analysis is adjustment to reality, and Mr. Lippmann adopts the dangerous phrase. It is dangerous: for what does “adjustment” in practice mean but taking the position of maximum comfort, the following of the path of least resistance? Continual adjustments by beings to an environment progressively unfavourable mean the progressive deterioration of a species: ultimately adjustment means extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs can give us a lesson in the fallacy of adjustment. It is farcical for this critic to patronise Pythagoras, for instance, who “could not have known any tested method either of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything besides a crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline,” as long as we can contrast the ancient perception of the human necessity of surmounting the environment with the contemporary belief in the value of adjusting (merely reacting) to it.

Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others has articulated what will probably be the fundamental position of American criticism in the next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking and acting chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can “learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant but eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution of the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave of Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within the grave of a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned to the all-important question of a method of realising Wholeness in fact as well as in concept. You will find his method outlined at the close of _The Re-discovery of America_ (1929). It is, I fear, hastily constructed, and more than smacks of amateurishness and of the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in where sages fear to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a method for the development of human potentialities into open discussion.[72]

The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer us “a way out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper to repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of the formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus far, the new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up against them. In passing, I may say that I have before this dipped my freelance pen to the humanists in salutations of great respect mingled with a few misgivings, and I have not the least hesitation in volunteering to defend them against the oblique attack of Mr. T. S. Eliot.

This painstaking critic owes much to Professor Babbitt, far more than does Mr. Lippmann. There is in fact much overlapping between his views and modern humanism. Yet there is an issue between the new humanists and Mr. T. S. Eliot: it resolves itself into the question of Authority. Let us trace out the evolution of Mr. Eliot’s ideas and we shall see the latent weakness of his position, and those who wish may compare it with the new humanists’ position. In _The Sacred Wood_ (1921) he began as an acute æsthetic critic, basing the exercise of criticism upon sensibility and intellect. He professed to be a classicist. Opposed to romantic excesses he was, in spite of an admiration for certain decadent poets, but was he a classicist? If so, what about the essay on _Tradition and the Individual Talent_, in which the idea of “creative imitation” is pushed to an extreme that makes one suspicious? Matters became explicit a few years later when he debated with Mr. J. Middleton Murry. In this debate Mr. Eliot admitted that such were the instabilities and insufficiencies of private judgment and private experience that a man should discipline himself in allegiance to some outside Authority, and for the literary critic this meant loyalty to the classical literary tradition. Something was here given away: the strict corroboration by personal experiment of classical wisdom was left out. Mr. Eliot was revealed as by disposition a neo-classicist (with some romantic elements) thoroughly dependent upon literary authority.

The next step for him, as a man too intelligent and too serious to evade the problems of social and moral chaos, was to acknowledge that criticism in our age could not be so limited as it was conceived to be in _The Sacred Wood_. On the contrary, the critic he saw must become philosophic: he must be a creator of values. But here again he was neo-classical, for he searched for external Authority in politics and in religion. In the former he is Royalist, in the latter Anglo-Catholic.

Turn to his essays on style and order entitled _For Lancelot Andrewes_. They are the work of a fine judicial temperament, but not, not at all, the work of a general in the warfare of the mind. The distinction is worth making much of. I have elsewhere[73] analysed the structure and procedures of Mr. Eliot’s prose to show its thoroughly judicial characteristics: its calmness and gravity, its balance and discriminatory powers among precedents, its fulfilment in a final elucidation arrived at by comparisons and analyses. It is not a full-bodied prose, the weight of the whole man concentrated on the pen, but the prose of a judge conscious of the weight of authority _behind_, not in, him. Now observe that in _For Lancelot Andrewes_ Mr. Eliot, like a learned judge and with an air of profundity, is continually pointing to the tradition of a Church, set up as an authority external to himself. He is at his best when he presents comparatively narrow ideas, ideas about literary style for the most part, as in his exposition of the relevant intensity of Andrewes’ prose. At his most disappointing, he ventures upon a safe common-place generality, as when he remarks, “The greatest tragedies are occupied with great and permanent moral conflicts.” The last is true enough, but Mr. Eliot never talks very much or directly about this occupation, about the stuff itself of moral conflicts.

Likewise Mr. Eliot, apologist for religion, does not write about religion: he points to _a_ Church and the intellectual riches of its history. “For us,” he declares, “religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of a Church.” And again, “And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life”--but we need both the letter and the spirit! Stress on the letter gives us legalism in religious thinking, and on the spirit gives us what Mr. Eliot calls “_Ersatz_-religion”: the two, spirit and letter, must correspond. There we are! the last critical “leader” in this examination turns out to be merely sitting on a judge’s bench and therefore necessarily inactive: he points out where Authority may be found, but one may doubt from the evidence of his writing whether Authority resides in him.