Toward a New Historicism 9781400870417

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Contents
Part I The American Historicist Tradition
Part II The Rediscovery of Historicism
Notes
A List of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

T O W A R D A N E W HISTORICISM

Toward a New Historicism WESLEY MORRIS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1972

Copyright © 1972 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

LCC: 77-166384 ISBN: 0-691-06155-6

Publication of this book has been aided by the Whitney Darrow Publication Reserve Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotype Granjon Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press

FOR BLAKE AND MICHAEL

With the prayer that this imperfect present will be fulfilled in a better future

Preface The meaning of the term historicism, according to a distin­ guished historian, has become so broad as to make the word useless for the philosophy of history. It does not take long to discover why he reached this conclusion; there is little agree­ ment as to what the term means and less as to its origins. It has been employed so variously that efforts to trace its usages flounder in a welter of contradictions. This would, it seems, make my study of historicism somewhat quixotic. I do not claim, however, to have settled disputes; my concession to the scholar's problem is to outline a variety of traditional historicisms in an effort to synthesize basic concerns from which the foundation for a vital new study of literature may be con­ structed. This will not satisfy the historian who finds himself confused by the evolution of historicist theory, but it will make possible the understanding of some complex problems in modern aesthetics. For the sake of clarity it is necessary to avoid the more general problems faced by the philosopher of history, yet I would sufficiently ground my study in an understanding of historicist doctrine to justify my use of the term. A work that purports to define (and to defend) a new historicism would most naturally fall victim to its own first principles, and it is my sense that the new historicism can be best understood in relation to its own tradition. I propose, then, to build a context in terms of which the most recent develop­ ments in historicism can be analyzed. But this context is not strictly historical, and the distinction is crucial for an explana­ tion of the organization of my study. That is, I do not on the whole involve myself with chronology nor with neat systems of evolutions or influences. Many of the theorists I discuss

PREFACE

would not consider themselves historicists; some would deny that their province is with literary history in any form. It is more accurate to say that the context o£ the new historicism is an essential historicist attitude that pervades a significant por­ tion of twentieth-century American literary theory. In place of an inclusive look at American criticism, however, I focus on types or pure examples. Since I have litde interest in chronology my selections are representative rather than integral. My study is finally narrowly philosophic in nature and not broadly historical. This would, I hope, explain my scant treatment of such major critics as Lionel Trilling and F. 0, Matthiessen. The success of my work hinges on my ability to argue first principles and to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the histori­ cist attitude, and simply stated, it is easier to focus on a pure example than to tackle the existence of basic historicist sym­ pathies in the eclectic methodology of a Trilling. Moreover, the stature of major critics springs in part from their ability to transcend the types and become, as it were, paradigms for the historical whole. That is their genius; that is why their names often appear in this study, but it is also why they must remain peculiarly above it, hovering and touching lightly on the surface from time to time but never landing full force for an intensive treatment. My success, of course, must be measured by the book itself; it is its own justification for being. To the extent that it does succeed I know how much of the credit belongs to those who have been patient with my tangled musings and hasty judg­ ments. There are many debts that will forever go unacknowl­ edged because I cannot recall the precise source of ideas developed in the course of conversations with colleagues over coffee or through debates not directly related to the thesis of this study. These must remain silent though significant con­ tributions. I would like to express my appreciation for financial help received from Rice University in the form of summer research grants and from the Whitney Darrow Publication Reserve Fund of Princeton University Press. I also thank the members of my Ph.D. dissertation committee at the University

PREFACE

of Iowa who willingly read this book in its original form and allowed me, through my own clumsy progress with the prob­ lems of historicism, to confront my own limitations. The arduous task of checking and correcting references was most ably and willingly performed by my graduate assistant Peggy Kendrick. The preparation of the Index would have been im­ possible without the help of Barbara Wilson. Two good friends and colleagues, Bob Patten and Terry Doody5 also willingly gave their time to read the manuscript in order to expose and expunge stylistic and theoretical confusions. In particular I owe to Angelo Bertocci the frightening but most valuable experi­ ence of meeting with penetrating and challenging comments at every turn. I can only hope that I have responded adequate­ ly. I am indebted beyond measure to Murray Krieger without whose encouragement the project could never have been begun, and without whose exemplary guidance it would never have been completed. Lastly, I owe a husband's thanks to my wife, Barbara, who managed miraculously to be at once a typist, critic, mother, and companion through some trying and diffi­ cult days. Houston, Texas January /97/

Contents vii Preface xi Contents CHAPTER I

3

CHAPTER II

14

Toward a Discrimination of Historicisms Literary History and Literary Criticism: Literature's Dual Mode of Existence The American Historicist Tradition

PART I CHAPTER III

35

Vernon Louis Parrington: An Argument for Historicism

CHAPTER IV

52

American Marxian Literary Theory: The Search for Critical Certainty

CHAPTER V

74

The Creative Mind and Literary Prophecy: The Critical Heritage of Van Wyck Brooks The Rediscovery of Historicism

PART II CHAPTER VI

IO5

John Crowe Ransom: Principles for a New Historicism

CHAPTER VII

122

The Meeting of Opposites, ι

CHAPTER VIII

145

Roy Harvey Pearce: The Revitalizing of Historicism

CHAPTER IX

167

The Meeting of Opposites,

CHAPTER X

187

Murray Krieger: The Ambition of a New Historicism

Ii

CONTENTS CHAPTER χι 209 Toward a New Historicism

217 Notes 241 A List of Works Cited 257 Index

TOWARD A NEW HISTORICISM

Chapter I

Toward a Discrimination of Historicisms A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

τ. s. ELIOT, Four Quartets I am tempted to begin this study with an apology, for here is yet another book that proposes to argue what we all already know: that literature has a significant relationship with its cultural-historical milieu. Since the high tide of the New Criticism the profession has been inundated by treatises that would return us to the sanity of historical perspective; it is difficult to conceive how anything can be added. But few of these works propose to offer a systematic philosophic analysis of this "newer" criticism, and as a consequence I fear we are not much nearer understanding the claims we want to make. We have still to develop a viable critical methodology, one that balances consistency with adequacy. What the last decade accomplished was the destruction of the chimaera of absolutes; few critics today would claim that the meanings and values of literary works are either wholly determined by historical con­ text or wholly independent of that context. Most critics range themselves somewhere between radical historical relativism on the one hand and subjectivism on the other.* Unfortunately, * There is considerable confusion in the meaning of the term rela­ tivism; this "coin," as Rene Wellek says, has two sides indicating x) that a particular event (e.g. a work of art) can be understood only in terms of the moment of its creation, that meaning is determined by the author's historical existence; and 2) that a particular event can be understood only in the terms of its interpreter's historical context re­ gardless of the time of its creation. The former, sometimes called

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

this spectrum of critical stances often forces us to make in­ numerable fine distinctions that serve only to magnify differ­ ences and to obscure similarities, yet beneath these distinctions lie surprisingly few crucial aesthetic principles. It is my purpose here to bring these aesthetic questions to the surface that we may better grasp the full implications of our literary judgments. The literary critic who argues that literature has a significant relationship with its historical milieu must explain how mean­ ing and value are a product of that relationship; that is, he must determine the meaning and value of any individual human expression as it exists in the evolving context of other human expressions. This critic must concern himself with epistemological questions of how man perceives and knows the world around him, and even more fundamentally he must assume that there is or can be a meaningful continuity between human activities. Essentially these are the concerns of "historicism," but this term is not so easily defined. There are apparently a variety of historicisms. An article in the American Historical Review lists five types of historicism;1 Carlo Antoni distinguishes at least seven;2 Hayden V. White, Antoni's trans­ lator, argues for two basic types although he makes distinc­ tions between five variations on those basic forms.3 Rene Wellek, concentrating exclusively on the literary implications of historicism, works within a single definition but also calls our attention to important variations.4 Largely because of this general disagreement John Lukacs claims that the term has become "so broad as to be useless";5 but if we can define it in its relation to the philosophic tradition from which it springs and apply it to the study of literature, I think the term may be made very useful indeed. To do this, of course, is merely to recognize that historicism has its origins deeply in aesthetics, dating particularly from the Romantic period* Moreover, if the term is carefully defined it escapes antiquarianism, I will call historical relativism; and the latter, the most relativistic position of all, resulting in critical impressionism and epistemological solipsism, I will designate subjectivism. * George Huppert in an article entitled "The Renaissance Background

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

the vagueness o£ a phrase like "historical-mindedness"; historicism, as I hope to establish, is a more profound and en­ during philosophy than the mere sense of one's time-bound existence. ι To help sort out the confusion it is instructive to look at two extreme definitions. Karl Popper, who sets up a straw man in his effort to justify what he calls the "open society," accuses historicists, specifically Hegel and Marx, of fostering "an ap­ proach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction . . . is attainable by discovering the rhythms' or the 'patterns,' the 'laws' or the*'trends' that underlie the evolution of history."6 According to Popper, historicism establishes a universal historical point of view through which the meaning and value of any particular event is determined; the fixed nature of the historical scheme ultimately makes for an histori­ cal relativism. Diametrically opposed to this, J. Hillis Miller argues that historicism is a development of "subjectivist" philosophy and is characterized by the absence of "any one point of view."7 Obviously both of these definitions reflect the personal convictions of their authors. For Popper it was the "closed" historicist society that was used to justify the twen­ tieth-century atrocities of Communism and Fascism. Miller, a neo-subjectivist himself, sees historicism largely in the context of Husserlian phenomenology. Most historians completely reject these narrow definitions. Hans Meyerhoff contends that Popper's use of the term "is somewhat odd and misleading,"8 while Fritz Stern says that historicism and relativism cannot be equated.9 Rene Wellek argues that any form of subjectivism (he is thinking particu­ larly of certain skeptical existentialist philosophies) contradicts historicism.10 But in fact the definitions of Popper and Miller of Historicism," History and Theory, 5 (1966), pp. 48-59, argues for much earlier origins. I grant him his argument and claim only that the most crucial philosophic assumptions of what I would call his­ toricism are clearly post-Kantian.

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are both defensible, although Miller is closer to the essential philosophic commitments of what I will call the "historicist attitude."* There are, I believe, two prime sources for this attitude. First, historicism is a product of Romanticism;11 as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment it absorbs much from the Romandc belief in individualism, the conditioning of ideals by time and place, and the doctrine of progressus in infinitum.12 Hayden White characterizes the movement by its sense of "dynamics"+ as opposed to the static nature of the neo­ classical world view; its "emphasis [centers] upon the idea of change itself, and everything, including ethics and religion, [is] subjected to analysis on the basis of a logic not of being but of becoming."13 Second, the impact of post-Kantian epistemology seems to restrict man's process of knowing to the contemplation of the activity of his own mind as he confronts the flux of experience. But the historicist, no matter how influenced by subjectivist philosophy, never completely re­ linquishes his desire to discover or construct a meaningful continuity in history. This is a broad principle, but it is fundamental. The awareness of the fleeting nature of things gives a greater sense of urgency to the search for continuity, and historicism expresses itself as a liberating epistemology. No longer able to sustain the rational confidence of the Augustan age, the historicist turns away from neo-classical metaphysics and reaches for principles of meaningful relationships which are the products of man's mind. There are, as a result, conflicting tendencies in the move­ ment. One, supported by Idealistic philosophy, persists in the belief that man can transcend the Heraclitian flux either in­ tuitively or rationally, either by sensing the inexorable laws of history or by discovering them in the evolution of the rational * Miller also uses this phrase, but I think it will be clear from the text that our senses of it differ. + A. O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being, particularly Chapter IX on "The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being," discusses the con­ cept of dynamicism as a crucial "unit idea" in the emergence of Romanticism.

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

Human Mind. Another, not so unlike the first, seeks to find the determining principle of continuity within the social organism, substituting for the transcending Mind some empirically dis­ covered concept of enduring social or economic relationships. Any of these could be rigidified into Popper's "closed society," yet along with the desire for transcendental laws, or, perhaps more accurately stated, for patterns of meaning, there is an everpresent subjectivism. The historicist attitude demands that any meaningful, transcendental continuity be itself ultimately subject to the logic of becoming and, hence, be incomplete. This is admittedly a subjectivist point of view, but its spirit is not necessarily the skeptical Weltanschauung of Hillis Miller. It is the tension between these conflicting tendencies in historicism, between transcendental Idealism and subjectivism, that in the final analysis prevents it from becoming either. Meaning, for an historicist, cannot be determined wholly by relative position in the grand scheme nor resigned wholly to the capricious will of the individual beholder. The historicist resists determinism, what Wellek calls the "dogma of con­ tinuity,"14 by asserting the primacy of his concern for the individual, for the particular which is seen not merely in terms of the whole but in its own particularity—as a generating principle of the whole. This relationship between the histori­ cist, as interpreter, and the particular historical event, as object of interpretation, is most crucial. Following the lead of Goethe, the German historian Friedrich Meinecke says that the historicist's approach is "to enter into the very souls of those who acted, to consider their works and cultural contributions in terms of their own premises and, in the last analysis, through artistic intuition to give new life to life gone by—which can­ not be done without a transfusion of one's own life blood."15 The historicist transcends his own present perspective. A con­ tinuity extends from the present into the past, and in this transcendence the past is known through its meaningful rela­ tionship with the present. History, as Dewey says, "cannot escape its own process. It will, therefore, always be rewritten. As the new present arises, the past is the past of a different

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

present."16 Meinecke, however, does not see this leading to a subjectivist despair, for the act of historical awareness presup­ poses an act of self-awareness and an affirmation of the mind's creative power to wrest meaning from the manifold.* Historicism "consists in nothing more than the corroboration of the infinitely creative power of the spirit, which although it does not guarantee us rectilinear progress, yet promises an eternally new birth of valuable historical individualities within the bounds of nature."17 2

Meinecke here curiously sounds like Hegel; only the dis­ claimer of "guarantees" of "rectilinear progress" separates them. But this is, of course, a vast separation. Meinecke pre­ sents a twentieth-century development of historicism based essentially on Goethean aesthetics. Goethe had resisted the appeals of both transcendental Idealism and a wholly sub­ jectivist view of the world, yet historicists have not always been able to maintain such a balance. Actually, as we move through the nineteenth century into the modern period the emphasis swings from a strong historical relativism affixed in a transcendental scheme to a subjectivist rejection of such schemes and an assertion of the need to construct meaningful patterns in time. Consequently there is an emergence of a "new historicism" but one that has strong ties with the older and more traditional forms. Because of this continuity in historicist theory it seems particularly advantageous to discuss these more traditional manifestations in order to make clear the specific problems that a new historicist must face. In this section, therefore, I will describe four types of traditional historicism as a new historicist might see them. These types will represent neither all of the possibilities nor absolute categories that could not be reshuffled to suit a different point of view. Each of the types reflects the particular historical or philosophic *Wilhelm Dilthey also speaks of history in terms of "the story of the creative struggle of man to come to terms with reality" (Meaning in History, p. 59).

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

interests of its originator. In each, the unifying scheme of history is founded on a specific element in the mass of historicalexperiential data which is molded into the first principle of a meaningful continuity. The historicist, in his search for the dynamic relatedness of all human experience, fixes upon a special category of experiences around which he can organize all of the other and more disparate elements. The broadest and perhaps most traditional form of historicism we may label "metaphysical."* Here the unifying principle is sought in transcendent timelessness which can be known only by means of intuition or rational projection, and the continuity of history is characterized by its drive toward an ultimate telos. Hegel, of course, is the best known exponent of this theory; his concept of dialectical movement in history was a rational construct through which he attempted to interpret the variety of the world. More recently Reinhold Niebuhr has borrowed this dialectical scheme in order to assert his faith in a transcendent, Christian meaning in history. Niebuhr's theory is considerably narrower than Hegel's, but in both the aim is to arrive at an understanding of the final fulfillment of historical progress and thereby to have available the criterion of meaning for every individual moment in history. Such a system does provide for certainty of interpreta­ tion, though it must buy this certainty with what Rene Wellek calls a "crippling [historical] relativism and an anarchy of values."18 Meaning, contrary to radical subjectivism, is ascer­ tainable but always reflects the universal; values, because the individual is bound to one position in the total scheme, are really unimportant. I do not intend by this oversimplification to suggest that Hegel made no attempt to preserve some balance in the relationship between the existential and the universal.19 Rather I suggest that for the metaphysical histori* The terms metaphysical, naturalistic, and aesthetic, I have bor­ rowed from Hayden White though my debt is no more than ter­ minological. I have used them as best fitted to my context, and I apologize to him that my own special interests may have led me to damage his.

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

cist, particularly when he functions as literary critic, the ascendancy of the universal is unavoidable. A second variety of historicism, which frequently sets itself in conscious opposition to the metaphysical interpretation of history, may best be called "naturalistic" although it has been referred to as "positivistic" and "scientific." Its fundamental principles are characteristically borrowed from the sciences or pseudo-sciences; anthropology, biology, psychology, economics, and sociology are the most popular sources. The naturalistic historicist often violently attacks any theory of transcendent order, preferring to locate his meaning-structure in empirically ob­ servable facts. This attitude most immediately reflects the widely known but often narrowly interpreted dictum of Leo­ pold Ranke that the historian must strive to depict history wie es eigentlich gewesen. Hence, the methodology tends to classify all human expressions as mere documents, keys to sociological understanding. The literary work, a new historicist would argue, is wholly transparent; having no substance of its own, it merely reveals the conditions which produced it. To the extent Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Brunetiere were influenced by nineteenth-century Positivism they provided a basis for this theory, but we must not dismiss these men too quickly for their "scientism." Only a few lesser lights, like Henry Thomas Buckle, expressed an undiluted confidence in the scientific methodology, a confidence, we should note, that far outstrips the Augustan's faith in reason. I entertain little doubt that before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regu­ larity of the moral world, as it is now to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material world.20 A more recent development of positivistic historiography has come from analytic philosophy. Karl Popper and C. G. Hampel have offered a rigidly logical methodology of historical expla­ nation,21 and W. B. Gallie has mingled Collingwood and IO

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

analytic philosophy to achieve yet another positivistic ap­ proach.22 Two specific manifestations of the "naturalistic" historicist attitude are the insistence on the historian's "objective" stance and, though less frequently, a glorification of statistical meth­ ods which substitute quantitative measure for true critical analysis. Like the metaphysical historicist, the naturalist tends to lose sight of the particular in his haste to see what lies behind it, but whereas in the former the particular is subordinated to the "idea," in the latter it is frequently subordinated to social or political action. A third type of historicism is best entitled "nationalistic." It stands most directly opposed to Ranke's ideal of Universal History, and draws support from the most disparate sources including Michelet, Goethe, and Comte. In America its purest representation is found in the "frontier" nationalism of Frederick Jackson Turner. Yet essentially it tends to assume two forms: the political as is evidenced in the liberal polemics of George Brandes and the folk-oriented study as was espoused by many nineteenth-century German historians and linguists. Neither, of course, demands that the historian confine himself wholly within the boundaries of a single nation, yet the politi­ cal or racial unit is taken as the key to all larger evolutions. It is the interaction of nationalistic interests which drives history in clearly definable directions. Too often the obvious value of such an approach is clouded by the historian's own nationalistic pride. Meaning can be distorted by convenient black and white distinctions or lost in the vagaries of a "national soul." Again, too hasty a simplification here would unfairly reduce such powerful thinkers as Herder or Brandes to narrow nationalistic propagandists. What I am suggesting in this category, rather, is a complex of attitudes which locates the meaning of historical expressions within the confines of the national interests. It is a concept of particular importance to American literary theory. The definition of the fourth category is slightly more diffi­ cult; although the term is not wholly satisfactory, I will desig-

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

nate it "aesthetic" historicism. Hayden White says that this theory centers its attention "on the creative act of the historian himself."23 R. G. Collingwood, a student of Croce, borrows a page from faculty psychology to describe a peculiar type of "historical imagination" which freely constructs the narrative of history. Essentially, the historical imagination operates identically in historian and novelist, though the latter may be more arbitrary in his dealings with the "truth."24 Collingwood, however, is never quite clear as to how truth really limits the historian and makes his work qualitatively different from the novelist's. If we trace the roots of aesthetic historicism back to Vico, a path both Croce and Collingwood acknowledge, we will find that there is no real difference between the two; both historian and novelist are engaged in the fundamental epistemological activities of life, the construction of meaning wholly in terms of the historian's present perspective. On this basis Carlo Antoni claims that "authentic historiography is always of the present, the contemporary . . . ; it is always conceived in order to clarify our present situation."25 Furthermore, in his emphasis on the value of the creative act the aesthetic historicist promotes "an exaggerated respect for the author himself (if not as a practical personality, yet as a poetic personality)."26 Since the critic is also involved in this imaginative creation of life, the relationship between an individual expression and its historical milieu is mediated by the personalities of both the author and the critic. The literary work, for example, is most important as a key to that imaginative vision which restructures our conception of reality. At the same time, it is just a by­ product, a momentary brilliance that is virtually extinguished by the next creative act. 3

To summarize, the new historicist sees the traditional forms of historicism suffering from a tendency toward either histori­ cal relativism or subjectivism. With the exception of aesthetic historicism, meaning and value are located in the extrinsic historical or cultural process and not in the individual ex-

DISCRIMINATION OF HISTORICISMS

pression or event. Aesthetic historicism, on the other hand, loses the distinction between literary works and observed reality by collapsing both into the creative minds of particu­ larly insightful men. Nevertheless, in its emphasis on the creative imagination and its rejection of metaphysical systems, aesthetic historicism has opened a new path for the theory of historical meaning. It asserts more strongly than any other traditional historicism the "aesthetic sense" which the move­ ment inherited from Romanticism,27 and it is this sense in par­ ticular that makes historicism a vital element in literary theory. The recent revival of interest in historicism, therefore, must be seen in this total context. The dilemma that a new historicist faces consists in explaining the aesthetic relationship between the work and its cultural-historical environment, a relationship that is structural as well as thematic. To do this he must confront the damning circularity of the historicist tautology, the approach to literature that explains the meaning of history in terms of the particular works which comprise it and con­ versely interprets those same works in terms of that historical meaning. The new historicist must argue that the individual work stands free of its historical context while it simultaneously draws its audience toward that context. Logic, of course, ulti­ mately runs afoul of such a paradox, and we may never be able to develop a completely satisfactory explanation of an his­ toricist aesthetics. But the effort seems to be justified by the rewards. The new historicism cannot help but expand our comprehension of literature and the culture of which it is so vital a part. I believe that at the conclusion we will share R. B. Heilman's opinion that the new historicism is truly a step for­ ward; and that "though the old historicism may now be sharing the wealth it is anything but dispossessed; its essential lineaments appear in a new movement that seems destined for a rich flourishing."28

Chapter II

Literary History and Literary Criticism Literature's Dual Mode o£ Existence We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. τ. s. ELIOT, Four Quartets It has been my aim in the Introduction to outline briefly the general philosophic bases for a study of culture known as "historicism." Now I would narrow our attention to a special case of that study: the role of historical perspective in the interpretation and evaluation of literature. Essentially, the problem is to unite the fields of literary history and literary cridcism, to argue that only in such a union can we fully understand and appreciate our finest works of art and, beyond that, our cultural heritage. Unfortunately, the marriage of the literary historian and the literary critic has been uneasy even in the best of times. R. B. Heilman finds the incompatibility so marked and widespread that he is led to conjecture about possible psychological sources for the diversity of opinion. It would appear that only differences in "structures of the mind" could account for such unlike ways of structuring the world. The historian tends to see everything in its relatedness and seeks to make infinite differentiations within these relation­ ships. The critic wants to analyze according to his sense of the organic nature of a particular element, to integrate all the facets of a work into a closed unit. Against [the critic's] analysis that must hope to persuade, the historian offers evidence that undertakes to prove;

LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM

against the dogma of autonomy, he offers the arguments of origin and consonance . . . ; against a view of genius as mystery, he agrees with Taine that it is a product of con­ ditions.1 The aesthetic questions at stake in such a division are pre­ cisely those involved in the historical relativist-subjectivist ten­ sions that mark the historicist tradition. For the literary his­ torian to claim that meaning in literature is determined by historical context, he must be ready to affirm that the individual work is irrevocably embedded in that context. On the other hand, the critic must argue that the individual work stands free of its historical context if he is to avoid the determinism of the literary historian's position. The new historicist, who would make the tautological necessities of his theory meaningful, must combine the two, must see literature both as a part integrally absorbed into the whole and as a part individually rising out of the whole. The extreme polarity of his characterization, Heilman ad­ mits, is for the sake of argument; the disagreement between the historian and the critic is never comfortably absolute. Yet the fervor with which some partisans justify their special province often appears to polarize the issue. The tendency is to construct a dialectic which marks out the proper boundaries of one's own discipline by delimiting those of one's adversary; that is, the critic seems forever to be advising the historian of his proper study while the historian never fails to return his own advice to the critic. In the process each always wants to claim more than the other is willing to concede, and there results an overlap of interests that outlines the fundamental aesthetic problems of the new historicism. The goal is to define the locus of the literary work's meaning and value. To what degree are these a matter of historical perspective? By separating the historical and critical approaches the assumption appears to be that literature has at least two modes of existence; as Rene Wellek says, "that which is historical and still somehow present."2 If this dichotomy is absolute, all hope for uniting the

LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM

historical and the aesthetic approaches to literature must be abandoned. But surely there is some relationship between these two modes of being. In the very nature of literature's depend­ ence upon language, Warner Berthoii urges, each individual artifact is at once a repository of cultural meanings and values and something wrought out of those materials in order to transcend its particular moment in the historical continuum.3 An awareness of this is pressed on us by our own experiences with literature, but it is the specific duty of an historicist aesthetics to explain this relationship and to devise a critical methodology adequate to our awareness. ι We would not have to search far for good examples of the historian-critic debate, but the classic instance, perhaps, occurs in an exchange between F. W. Bateson and F. R. Leavis.* Here we can observe with little difficulty those different "structures of the mind" that make communication almost impossible. Their dialogue spans over thirty years, from the publication of Bateson's English Poetry and the English Language in 1934 to Leavis's edition of A Selection from Scrutiny in 1968. During this time little, if anything, is resolved, and the funda­ mental conceptions of both remain the same. Despite repeated protests (more thoughtful and sincere in the later writings of Bateson) that neither wishes to absolutely separate critical judgments from historical interpretations, the tendency toward polarity never significantly weakens. The dialogue begins with Leavis's review of English Poetry and the English Language. He argues that Bateson's peculiar definition of "literary history" is really a kind of literary criti­ cism, though vaguely presented. Such a history . . . could be accomplished by a writer inter­ ested in, and intelligent about the present. It would, for one * Quentin Skinner in "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3-53, also uses this LeavisBateson debate as an illustration of the division between two essential attitudes toward the study of history.

LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM

thing, be an attempt to establish a perspective, to determine what of English poetry of the past is, or ought to be, alive for us now.4 Bateson responds in an effort to clarify the intent of his original definition, and he does so in terms that startlingly foreshadow Heilman's differentiation of the historical and critical mental structures. Apparently, Bateson would keep the disciplines wholly separate. A critical judgment . . . is the expression of an immediate intuition. In its entirety it is necessarily inexplicable and incommunicable. The historian has simply to present his reader with the evi­ dence upon which he has himself based his conclusion, and if the evidence proves to be trustworthy and adequate his reader can have no alternative except to concur in it.5 Despite the clarity of these distinctions he ends his remarks by claiming to want to "bridge the gulf" between history and criticism. Leavis's rejoinder hits two major points: that there cannot be any real separation as Bateson's discussion sometimes implies and that there is nothing approximating real, hard "evidence" available to the historian, nothing, in any case, that would establish meaning beyond doubt.® After a hiatus of nearly twenty years, Bateson resumes the debate in a long editorial policy statement written for Essays in Criticism. This article, in which the author borrows the tone and title of Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," resembles many "after the New Criticism" statements designed to preserve the virtues of close textual analysis and at the same time to reassert the more traditional historical approach to literature. But again Bateson seeks no more than a "balance of opposites" in this matter. He presents his readers with a critical methodology which he feels will accomplish a limited sort of "harmony" between the critic and the historian. In truth, his article is a corrective for what he calls the "irresponsibility" of modern criticism which has "lost

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the sense of literary context." This "literary context," he warns, must not be confused with "literary background." The former is the "framework of reference within which the work achieves meaning"; it is "intrinsic." The latter is of only limited value because it is "extrinsic" and consists of such matters as the "author's biography, the social history of his age, [and] an account of earlier treatments of his subject matter."7 To illustrate this critical irresponsibility Bateson chooses, not at all by chance, some passages from F. R. Leavis's Revaluation which make stylistic comparisons of lines from Marvell and Pope. He performs a close textual analysis of his own on these lines, but unlike Leavis this leads him to confusion. He then proposes that the critic avail himself of a "wider context" or frame of reference in order to remove the confusion. The proper critical "discipline" should consist of an "order in which . . . contextual checks operate"; that is, it should proceed through an ever-widening series of "progressive corrections." The orderly process commences on the level of "dictionary definitions," proceeds to the second check of "familiar tradition or genre," moves then to the third and still broader context of the history of ideas (the "intellectual" context), and arrives finally at the "ultimate" check, the "social context." "Correct meaning" is attained when the work "assumes its original historical setting" where the "human experience embodied in it begins to be realized and re-enacted by the reader." As for value judgments, they too must be made "in terms of the con­ texts in which [the work] originated."8 Leavis's irritated reply turns the charge of irresponsibility back upon his antagonist: Bateson, he claims, cannot possibly have read the poems he attempts to interpret. His major attack, however, is aimed at the more vulnerable ground of Bateson's contextual checks. Bateson's "discipline," he retorts, "is not merely irrelevant; it isn't and can't be, a discipline at all; it has no determinate enough field or aim." Moreover, he notes that Bateson violates his own dictum that "literary context" must not be confused with "literary background" by the emphasis he places on the "ultimate" check of "social context." Leavis agrees

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that "the study of literature should be associated with extraliterary studies. But to make literary criticism dependent on the extra-literary studies . . . in the way Mr. Bateson proposes is to stultify the former and deprive the latter of the special profit they might have for the literary student." He rejects the historical relativism of Bateson's approach and affirms force­ fully the importance of a perspective of the present in literary criticism. The poem, as I've said, is a determinate thing; it is there; but there is nothing to correspond—nothing answering to Mr. Bateson's "social context" that can be set over against the poem, or induced to re-establish itself round it as a kind of framework or completion, and there never was anything.9 He defends the journal Scrutiny (the debate in part at least centered on opposing claims of excellence for this and Bateson's journal Essays in Criticism) on the ground that it has always professed the goals of improving taste and en­ couraging learning through the development of the critical faculties. This, he argues, is the true function of criticism and the one that makes the critic's task morally and intellectually responsible to the present time. Bateson, rather predictably, answers that Leavis has opened the door to "sheer subjectivism" and at the same time has continued the tradition of critical irresponsibility by his "in­ sistence on reading everything written in English as though it was written yesterday." His main thrust, however, is perhaps more telling; he charges that Leavis ignores the nature of lan­ guage as a reflector of the age of the poet. The meanings of the words, and therefore a fortiori the meaning of the whole poem, are emphatically not there. To discover their meaning we have to ask what they meant to their author and his original readers, and if we are to recover their full meaning, the connotations as well as the denota­ tions, we shall often find ourselves committed to precisely those stylistic, intellectual and social explorations that Dr. Leavis now deplores.10

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Leavis's final reply points out that Bateson relies too heavily on matters of convention. Apparently Bateson feels that because a poet writes within a certain form or tradition, that form is de­ terminative of meaning. Hence Bateson's generic reading of Marvell "clearly must be so." Leavis claims, on the contrary, to have "demonstrated that it is not so, by giving a detailed analysis of what the poem actually does." His parting shots also score a valid point against Bateson's unfaltering confidence in the historically relative nature of language. "Some of the essential meanings that one has to recognize," Leavis argues, "are created by the poet, but this possibility . . . Mr. Bateson cannot permit himself to entertain."11 2

I have devoted so much space to this specific example because I believe it is exemplary and because I want to follow in detail its full implications. It would seem that to satisfy the particular demands of both the critical and historical disciplines the work must be seen to have at least two functions, but the relationship between them is never clear. This is what I have called litera­ ture's dual mode of existence. There is, of course, no argument against the claim that literature can be read in a variety of ways to serve a variety of ends; this is legitimate and useful. What I would question is the overriding effect of such fragmentation on the study of literature itself, of literature as literature and not as social, economic, or biographical document. Further­ more, I would tentatively suggest here (a question that I will more fully investigate in Chapter III) that even the study of literature for such extrinsic aims is in danger of misconception when the peculiar aesthetic nature of the literary art is ignored. Bateson's emphasis on the literary historian's relativistic con­ cerns effectively closes him off from what he considers the critic's interest in the enduring or timeless status of literature. "Whereas literary history," he says, "presupposes a process of change, literary criticism presupposes a static condition, a vir­ tual changelessness in literature." He goes on to argue that

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"to the critic all literature, in so far as it is literature, is funda­ mentally the same." By this he means that for the critic there is only one universal standard, the aesthetic, which describes the organic structure of the work. The critic interests himself only in "similarities."12 Essentially Bateson wants a distinction between the literary historian's special aim of establishing "correct meaning" determined by historical context and the critic's job of discussing what a work means to us today. The critic, on the other hand, seems only too willing to accept this division of labors with, of course, some slight adjustments in the scope and the concept of importance. Leavis emphasizes the present significance of literature at the expense of its historical context. Another spokesman for the critics, R. S. Crane, urges that criticism must not involve itself with questions of history or biography; criticism seeks to establish the aesthetic "best."13 Much like Bateson, he sees the literary historian's task as demonstrating differences, but the critic's far more valuable function, Crane would have us believe, is to reveal the permanent qualities of literature. John Crowe Ran­ som also supports a rigid separation; literary history and literary criticism, he says, are "qualitatively distinct."14 Allen Tate presents a similar argument based on an epistemology that would cut literature free from any cultural-historical con­ text. Agreeing with the Chicago logical positivists Carnap and Morris, he says, "they are quite firm in their belief—with a little backsliding on the part of Morris—that poetry, and per­ haps all imaginative literature is, in Arthur Mizener's phrase, only 'amiable insanity'; it designates but it does not denote anything 'real.' "15 This extreme position of the early New Critics, Ransom and Tate, was eventually modified, but the "qualitative" distinctions presented in these arguments reflect the extent of the theoretical problem which a new historicist must face in bringing the oppositions together. The dual mode of existence of the literary work necessitates a dual conception of literary meaning; that is, a work actually has two meanings: one determined by its historical context and

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a second, and less precise, meaning that derives from the critic's sense of the function of the work in his own, present, social context. The tendency to allow this duality to become absolute has most recently been demonstrated by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. What Hirsch calls "meaning" is the product of the author's determin­ ing will (including all the conscious and unconscious factors of his environment that affect his will). The present impact of literature is designated "significance."18 The former, or "past" meaning, is the responsibility of the "interpreter" of literature and is clearly historical. "Significance," or "present" meaning, belongs to the realm of "criticism" and is highly subjective. Literature's dual mode of existence, therefore, demands a dualistic critical approach, a different discipline for every function of the work. Hirsch's meaning-significance split is simply another side of the divorce between literary history and literary criticism, but the question of the relationship of the two still remains. What purpose is served by the interpreter's task ? What is the importance of "meaning" in a discussion of "significance"? We must assume from the elaborateness of Hirsch's argument, if nothing else, that a work's "meaning" is important to us today and is thereby a part of that work's "significance."

3 At least one result of the division of literary history and literary criticism, or "interpretation" and "criticism," is that it allows for a division between interpretation and evaluation. Hirsch, along with Bateson and many literary historians, eschews all interest in the matter of determining literary value: value judgments are too much the expression of mere personal response; they are too subjective. On the other hand, meaning is not simply a matter of response but is determined by histori­ cal factors which can be known and presented as evidence. Howard Mumford Jones notes that one of the most immediate problems facing the literary historian is "whether literary history is to be encyclopedic or selective."17 To be selective necessitates the justification of choices, a statement of the

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criteria of value on which judgments are made. To be en­ cyclopedic lessens the role played by aesthetic questions and perhaps allows the scholar to come nearer a full understanding by virtue of being all-inclusive. It is obvious that this latter tactic cannot succeed; selections must still be made, and to treat all the works of a particular age as equally vital is a gross distortion of history.18 The desire to be encyclopedic, however, remains fundamental to much of literary history. To cover all of the materials without clouding the presentation with subjective evaluations makes the study more exact, or that seems to be the idea. One cannot help recalling the monumental task that George Saintsbury assigned to the literary historian. He must read, and, as far as possible, read everything—that is the first and great commandment. If he omits one period of literature, even one author of some real, if ever so little, importance in a period, he runs the risk of putting his view of the rest out of focus. . . . Secondly, he must . . . see in what each differs from each, but never in order to dislike one because it is not the other.19 Meaning thus becomes a matter of total context—as Heilman noted, a product of infinite differentiations. Successful inter­ pretation requires that the literary historian be exhaustive; the nearer he comes to covering every possibility, the nearer he will approach Truth. For Saintsbury the ingestion of the total context provides the scholar with the raw material for the workings of his own personal sensibilities. Saintsbury was, of course, ultimately an impressionist. The encyclopedic method, however, is more frequently invoked as a corrective for impressionism. Its prom­ ise of objectivity resembles the impersonal and supposedly more reliable methods of scientific experimentation. Furthermore, the desire for "correct meaning" and the corresponding lack of interest in qualitative distinctions induces the historian to treat the materials of his study as, to use another of Bateson's terms, "evidence." The encyclopedic approach begins to take on the

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color of statistical analysis. The literary historian, realistically confessing that absolute precision is unattainable, concerns himself with probabilities. By assembling all of the available data one may succeed in establishing the most probable mean­ ing with a high degree of objective certainty. It is not sur­ prising, therefore, that this methodology should find its way into Hirsch's recent description of a hermeneutic theory.20 All of the factors of an author's life and work are treated as "evidence" which forms a closed context of possible meanings. The "correct meaning" of an individual work, then, is deter­ mined by that context, and we, as interpreters, can know it by deciding which of all proposed interpretations satisfies the greatest number of determining possibilities. This attitude parallels what I defined as naturalistic or scientific historicism in the preceding chapter. It has had many opponents; in the field of general history G. M. Trevelyan long ago denounced the tendency to reduce the "art of history writing" to the mere "collection of facts and collating of evi­ dence."21 Allen Tate blames the influence of Dewey's education theories and James's pragmatism for the rise of "scientism" in the study of literature. What the literary historians are saying, he argues, "is that the meaning of a work of literature is iden­ tical with the method of studying it."22 It is ironic that the concept of the "scientific world view" with its confidence in an objective method of attaining truth should spread so rapidly throughout non-scientific disciplines at the very time that quantum and relativity theories were making such as­ sumptions impossible in the sciences themselves.23 Physicists early in the twentieth century ceased to promote the image of the wholly detached scientific observer; it had become necessary to consider the experimenter's participation in his own experi­ ment. Similarly, this same fundamental point leads Murray Krieger to reject the objective and value-free approach to literature offered by Hirsch. Krieger finds it impossible to divorce the critic's sense of enduring values from his effort to describe the work's historical perspective.24

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4 For the impressionist without the catholic sensibilities of a Saintsbury the justification of historical perspective leads to other problems. George Edward Woodberry's "Two Phases of Criticism: Historical and Esthetic" conventionally separates literary study into two camps. All art, he claims, has both a "phenomenal" and a "transcendental" mode of existence. The first is the object of a "recreative" criticism which endeavors "to realize the state of mind of a man at a past moment"; this involves, as with Hirsch's more recent and elaborate version of the same thing, recreating the writer's whole social being—a task that both men admit is impossible. The second mode of existence is the object of another kind of recreative criticism that makes "only a passing reference" to what was in the artist's mind. In this phase the meanings and values of the poem are "our own personality and not that of its original creator." Woodberry asserts that "it is not the poet, but the reader, who writes the poem . . works of art are "raw material" out of which we as readers create new poems.25 This radical impressionism is modified in a later work where he seems to prefigure Dewey's concept of "reconstructive doing" by declaring that reading is "a repetition of the act of creation under different circumstances . . it is " a blending of two souls," but, he adds, it is not "seldom that the reader brings the best part." In the long run Woodberry's attempt to justify the value of historical study must give way to his impression­ istic approach. He measures works of art in proportion as they appeal "to more and more of life already realized in the reader himself." No matter what the critic's scholarly training, "if the light is not in him, he cannot see."26 Louis Teeter, capitalizing on such an impressionistic theory, constructs a different historical approach by emphasizing the value of art as a reflector of opinions. He argues that art has no "unchanging values"; it is the "change," the relationship of the present and the past seen through the work, which provides us with the means of determining art's relationship

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with life. The collaboration between the scholar, who guides us to the values of the past, and the critic, who expresses the values of the present, produces a history of taste which reveals the evolution of society.27 Howard Mumford Jones claims, somewhat in support of this idea, "that the history of taste is, among other things, a succession of abandoned absolutes."* Literature is a social act "meant for an audience living in time and space and sharing the social and cultural predilections of that space and time."28 The practical consequences of such a theory are not at all happy. Instead of studying literature one actually studies liter­ ary criticism, and the work itself has no life of its own. It is precisely this idea that is rejected by Rene Wellek. Literature is not merely the passive reflection or copy of the political, social, or even intellectual development of man­ kind. It is, no doubt, in constant interrelation with all the other activities. It is influenced by them profoundly, and (what is frequently forgotten) it influences them. But litera­ ture has its own autonomous development irreducible to any other activity or even to a sum of all these activities.29 This definition, nevertheless, does not really resolve the basic difficulty; how can the work be "profoundly" influenced by these extrinsic activities and still be considered "autonomous" ? In an article published several years after this first statement, Wellek defines six types of literary history: as a i) history of books; as 2) intellectual history; as the 3) history of national civilizations; as 4) sociological method; as 5) historical relativism; and, finally, as an 6) internal history of literary development.30 * It is interesting that both Teeter and Jones acknowledge the in­ fluence of George Boas. Jones says, "the history of literary sensibility in America—that is, the patient study of what Americans have re­ sponded to in art and why they have responded to one expression rather than another—is still to seek. A synthesis like that edited by Professor Boas at Johns Hopkins, Romanticism in America, is almost alone in the field ..." (The Theory of American Literature, p. 180).

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In rejecting the first five he brings us once more to the primary dilemma of a new historicism, for he is intent upon the avoid­ ance of both radical historical relativism and the assertion of the necessity to judge the work only according to its aesthetic values.31 The methodology he proposes would study literature as literature, as an evolving and autonomous structure of mean­ ing; this approach he calls "Perspectivism." "Perspectivism means that we recognize that there is one poetry, one literature, comparable in all ages, developing, changing, full of possibilities." Within this literary system the individual work is seen as having been "created at a certain point in time, and [as being] . . . subject to change and even to complete destruction." But these changes are not merely the record of changing human tastes. The individual literary work has a mode of existence which "is neither an empirical fact, in the sense of being a state of mind of any given indi­ vidual or any group of individuals, nor is it an ideal changeless object such as a triangle." The history of taste, he objects, ignores the "normative" character of the work, denies that there are "correct and incorrect readings."32 In literary study, and here he most clearly adopts an historicist stance, we must somehow succeed in preserving "the individuality of the his­ torical event, while the historical process must not be left as a collection of sequent but unrelated events." Wellek argues that values must be derived from within the evolving literary system itself and that "the historical process will produce ever new forms of value."33 The individuality of each work is measured by its relation to this system of norms. The system of language [that is, the literary system of lan­ guage] is a collection of conventions and norms whose work­ ings and relations we can observe and describe as having a fundamental coherence and identity in spite of very different and imperfect, or incomplete pronouncements of individual speakers.34 He admits that the method is circular; "the historical process has to be judged by values, while the scale of values is itself

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derived from history," yet he does not follow the full implica­ tions of this closed system. First, it is very difficult to see what significant relationship these purely literary values have to any extrinsic or non-literary matters. He suggests that considera­ tion of such "other criteria," those political, social, and in­ tellectual "activities" he mentioned above as "profoundly" in­ fluencing literature, must follow the study of the specifically literary norms, but this simply makes the relationship sequen­ tial.35 More importantly, the exact state of values within this constantly changing system is unclear. In the individual work, he tells us, "there is a substantial identity of 'structure' which has remained the same throughout the ages. This structure, however, is dynamic: it changes throughout the process of history while passing through the minds of its readers, critics and fellow artists." Wellek does not want to admit that the "dynamic" quality he sees in literary history is mere "subjec­ tivism." There are, we remember, right and wrong interpreta­ tions or judgments, and the mere sum of all opinions is not the final value. "The work of art . . . appears as an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status." But if this status is measured by a system of norms that is dynamic and changing, existing in "collective ideology, chang­ ing with it,"36 it certainly has no fixed or timeless existence. A work that is subject to "complete destruction" as it passes through this system would not seem to have an enduring value by means of which we can measure the rightness or wrongness of other judgments. Wellek's closed system not only tends to cut off the study of literature from "other criteria," its fluctuat­ ing norms also preclude any universal value judgments.37 Even the fixity of such structural elements as sound, style, image, and metaphor, perhaps the most permanent of those aspects of the poem which Wellek suggests as strata of changelessness, are subject to the dynamic flux of values which determines the fate of the poem as a whole. Directly acknowledging his debt to Louis Teeter, he returns ultimately to the very history of taste that he so specifically rejected. The "development" of the individual work he describes as a "series of concretizations of

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a given work of art in the course of history which we may, to a certain extent, reconstruct from the reports of critics and readers about their experiences and judgments, and the effect of a given work of art on other works."38

5 Wellek's promotion of an "internal history of literary de­ velopment" is somewhat of a special case. By cutting himself free from extra-literary meanings and values his emphasis is wholly aesthetic, concerned with literary forms and ideas. For the most part, however, literary historians have been very much more concerned with cultural and sociological relationships, at the expense of aesthetics. The literary historian, as Harry Hayden Clark says, is always "in danger of losing sight of the foreground in [the] sweeping contemplation of the back­ ground."39 Such is clearly the case with Bateson's expanding system of "contextual checks" which finally explodes into a broad cultural analysis. This is, I feel compelled to repeat once more, the result of the belief that literature has a dual mode of existence. It is accompanied by an even more awkward dichot­ omy, that between content and form. Bolstered by his rejection of value considerations and intent upon his study of literary background, the literary historian may succumb to the lure of "inferior" literature. Fred Lewis Pattee deliberately chooses works for his History of American Literature Since I8JO that cannot rightly be "called litera­ ture ... ; yet. .. cannot be neglected by one who would study the period."40 Howard Mumford Jones says that "for the purposes of scholarship the work must be looked upon, not as aesthetic experience, but as document";41 and Bliss Perry de­ clares that "our most characteristic American writing . . . is not the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe or a Haw­ thorne. It is civic writing; a citizen literature."42 The shunning of aesthetically successful literature, even by men claiming to write literary histories, results from their overriding interest in content rather than form. It is easier to root out unit ideas from works that make little claim to a peculiar aesthetic quality.

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Structural integrity is simply an obstacle to the otherwise easy access to the background. Marshall Van Deusen claims that early twentieth-century American cultural studies of literature "seem .. . to suggest that 'content' alone is important and that content is to be judged by its accuracy in dealing with the 'facts' of experience."43 We are back once more to a scientistic version of literary history. The method is to search for "key phrases"44 or "themes"45 that best exemplify certain ideas or philosophies. All too often this eventuates in an interest in the lowest common denominator. Bliss Perry begins his study of the "American Mind" by listing several typical American "qualities" each of which becomes the key idea discussed in a succeeding chapter. The list is extrapolated from sermons and political tracts, but the literary works interpreted later are judged solely in terms of their conformity with the "typical." The dilemma that faces the new historicist, as I mentioned at the end of Chapter I, is to dissolve the distinction between aesthetics and historical interpretation. Value as opposed to meaning, "significance" as opposed to "meaning," the formcontent dichotomy, all of these assertions of literature's dual mode of existence spring from a basic misunderstanding of the profound relation of literature to its cultural-historical milieu. Unless we can find a way to integrate these concerns we are condemned always to fragment our literary works, and in the process misunderstand them. Perry's "qualities" of the mind reflect the incredibly limited sense of thematic interest that plagues much of the traditional historical interpretation of literature. It is aesthetically blind. But there is no convincing reason given for why historical perspective and aesthetic re­ sponse should be mutually exclusive. The new historicist sets as his task the resolution of literature's dual mode of existence by introducing aesthetics into history; not so much by aestheticizing history as did Croce, though Croce's ideas influence much of the new historicism, but by insisting that thematics necessarily involves matters of form. Ideas and the structures that inform them, past meanings as well as present signifi­ cances, are all part of the total aesthetic impact of literature.

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Bateson proposes in his debate with Leavis that the historian (or scholar) and the critic work in "harmony," but his con­ ception of the literary work makes this a rather hollow sug­ gestion. In a postscript to the debate he says: the critical gospels that he and I preach are, indeed, comple­ mentary rather than contradictory. As a scholar-critic the literary object that I have tried to see as in itself it really is may seem to overemphasize meaning (stylistic differentia­ tion) at the expense of response (quasi-self-identification), but the difference of critical philosophies is surely only one of degree.46 Nevertheless, they are still separate for him; the "scholar-critic" is a hyphenated creature who straddles two modes of existence to keep them always distinct. Different, and incompatible, structures of the mind insist on preserving literature's duality. The new historicist must give us a new structure of the mind which will recognize that "meaning" implies "aesthetic re­ sponse," or that "aesthetic response" presupposes "meaning," and that will see literature aesthetically embedded in history.

PART I

The American Historicist Tradition

Chapter 111

Vernon Louis Parrington An Argument for Historicism Long before history began, [man's] education was complete, for the rec­ ord could not have been started until he had been taught to record. The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams Warner Berthofi observes that "you cannot write intellectual, or cultural, history without reference to literature; neither can you write it solely on the basis of literature."1 He makes no mention of Vernon Parrington in this passage, but his warning might well be directed toward those who would imitate the methodology of Main Currents in American Thought. In this chapter, however, I do not wish simply to reiterate the charges made against Parrington's failures in aesthetic judgment; he has too often been censured for a lack of aesthetic sensibility without being granted the legitimacy of his particular interests, which in Main Currents were decidedly non-aesthetic. My per­ spective on Parrington is unusual. Through his successes as well as his failures we can see the importance of BerthofFs claim that while neither literature nor culture can be wholly explained in terms of the other, neither can one be wholly explained without the other. I am not implying by this that Parrington thought of himself as a literary historian or, least of all, as an historicist. He cer­ tainly did not. His expressed aims are very much opposed to the

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historicist's effort to unite the historical and aesthetic studies of literature. He consciously divorces himself from any attempt at aesthetic evaluation and concentrates on the interpretation of meaning as relative to a particular time and place; his method­ ology is designed to affirm literature's dual mode of existence. In the process a whole new system of non-aesthetic values emerges, and literature, or perhaps I should say the literary per­ formance, is judged quite rigorously according to these norms. Yet when the non-aesthetic values begin to overlap or merge with aesthetic values, a different set of problems arises. At this point, we might say, Parrington's approach to culture via literature forces him in the direction of historicism. Attacks on Parrington have come from many sides. Literary scholars have frequently, though not so tactfully, repeated Lionel Trilling's objection: that even if one grants the validity of using literature as a source for American thought patterns, "it is not exactly a matter of free choice whether or no a cul­ tural historian shall be a literary critic."2 Cultural historians, on the other hand, have not been quick to embrace Main Currents. John Higham cites the typical charges: He showed slight interest or competence in metaphysics and theology; he scarcely touched scientific thought and develop­ ment, or the rise of the social sciences; he ignored legal thought, intellectual institutions, and the non-literary arts. In fact, the book was basically a study of certain political and economic ideas as revealed in writings which Parrington deemed to be literature.3 Spurned by both sides, Parrington is somewhat of a scholar without a department. The important question is "Just what kind of a study is Main Currents?" In the "Introduction" to Volume I the author claims to be concerned with the whole context of social thought wherein the narrower field of literature must find its place. "I have chosen," he tells us, "to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the

VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON

narrower belletristic." He refines this in the Introduction to the second volume by proposing to study this "social develop­ ment" as it is "expressed in our literature." Finally, in the Foreword to the unfinished third volume he replies to the many "gentle reproofs" that he had received for his failures as a literary historian by saying he never intended to write a "his­ tory of American literature."4 It is not unfair to note, I believe, that Parrington's understanding of his work changed as he progressed; in the early volumes he sought to study, in Higham's words, certain, select "political and economic ideas revealed in writings which [he] deemed to be literature." As he approached the decades covered in the last volume (18601920) his conception of literature as the transmitter of ideas altered; literature, or the literary artist, assumed a more ex­ alted role as the "authentic voice of this great shapeless Amer­ ica."5 This is not a literature that merely "reveals" or "ex­ presses" ideas but a literature that tests and, more importantly, asserts ideas in the midst of ideological confusion. It is still difficult to know whether we should accuse Parrington of being a too ambitious literary historian or a too narrow cultural historian. The evidence is that in those more simplistic ages of American culture Parrington had little diffi­ culty tracing political and economic ideas in American litera­ ture. But as American culture grew more diffuse, literature was called upon to perform other services, to assert itself against America's "shapelessness." Parrington seemed to sense, without explicitly stating, that literature responds to the demands of a culture in ways that make it more than a document of the times; if American culture was becoming more complex so was its literature. His greatest difficulty in Main Currents was to balance his sensibility of literature's power as a cultural force against his earlier mimetic concerns with literature as a cultural reflector. As a result his critical awareness conflicted with his search for neat abstract formulations, and some of his readings were forced while others were perhaps too expansive. His particular blindnesses were in those areas where his misevalua-

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

tion of literary achievement led him to misread the main currents of American thought. What follows below, then, is not so much a correction or condemnation of Main Currents as it is an extension of Parrington's own interests into the field of aesthetics that he so cavalierly abandoned. Parrington was certainly not an historicist, but he insisted on fighting the historicist's battle even while denying himself the use of all the legitimate weapons. χ Parrington accepted from the Hegelians a metaphysical cul­ tural perspective immersed in abstractions, but it was a theory highly incompatible with his interest in culture's "great men." He wanted to found his study of American thought primarily on the contributions of a few truly creative intellects, and he assumed that they worked within a peculiarly American cul­ tural core which was at once fixed and timeless yet also, growing or evolving. What he sought was a "continuity" of American thought. He further limited himself by insisting that such a cultural study could be made via literature, and for the most part the "great men" who occupy the crucial chapters of his work are "literary" men. Unfortunately, there is a constant war between the dialectical cultural history he outlines in the early volumes and the individualistic personalities of the "great men" who are supposed to give sustenance to the metaphysical scheme. The more Parrington paints his heroes as creative thinkers, the more difficult it is to see them as a part of the overall pattern. His interest in the "continuity" of American thought first appears in the form of a justification of his study of colonial literature; their subjects, he argues, are not "old fashioned"; they are "much the same themes with which we are engaged, and with which our children will be engaged after us."6 The unity of colonial America is presented in terms of a dialectic of liberal versus conservative ideals. Tracing the oppositions to their earliest confrontation, Parrington sees the "Connecti­ cut Wits" as a group standing for the conservative viewpoint.

VERNON LOUIS PARTINGTON

They embodied a conception of life and society that had taken form during nearly two hundred years of provincial experience; and they phrased that conception at the moment when vast changes were impending and the traditional New England was on the point of being caught in the grasp of forces that were to destroy what was most native to her life.7 The opposing term was the liberal spirit of the French Revolu­ tion represented in the writing of Phillip Freneau. "It is fitting," he says, "that our first outstanding poet should have been a liberal."8 Not significantly further into his study than this, the dichot­ omy of liberal and conservative apparendy becomes inadequate, and a whole series of not quite synonymous oppositions are developed. In place of liberal versus conservative we also find "idealist" versus "reactionary," or "democrat" versus "federal­ ist," or "Whig" versus "Tory," or, very frequently indeed, "Jeffersonian" versus "Hamiltonian." Moreover, the dialectic is never free from emotional overtones; for instance, conserva­ tism is associated with "dogmatism," "despotism," and seem­ ingly worst of all, "Calvinism." On the other hand, liberalism is marked by energy or dynamism, "vision" and "imagina­ tion." The obvious stumbling block occurs in the second vol­ ume when the dialectic moves from liberal versus conserva­ tive to "romantic" versus "realistic." The shift is never quite clear; it involves a movement from terminology of largely political implications to terms which carry specific literary con­ notations.* The overtones of value are still quite evident, but the term "romantic" seems to slip from the favorable to the unfavorable, from one implication to another, without clear reason.f At one point Parrington partly underlines this am­ biguity himself. * There are, of course, infrequent uses of the political antithesis "Jeffersonian" versus "Jacksonian," but this does not really help make the shift any smoother. f Lionel Trilling also notes this ambiguity in the word "romantic" although he feels that it is generally used as a term of praise (The Liberal Imagination, p. 4).

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

Romanticism comes to different issues in different men and different times: Emerson and Jefferson were unlike enough, as their worlds were unlike; but they were both romantics and their idealism was only a different expression of a com­ mon spirit.9 There is somewhat greater uniformity in the use of the second term of the dialectic, but "realism," even more than "romanticism," belongs to the world of literature, indicating matters of style and technique as well as a philosophy of life.* Parrington is never really explicit as to its broader ideological implications. We have no doubt that he views with nostalgic disfavor "the slow decay of . . . romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds" which was the result of the rise of "critical realism." Yet the muckraking of Upton Sinclair and particularly that realistic derivative, the "new naturalism," receives his heartiest support. Finally, the realism of William Dean Howells is singled out for extensive praise although it would seem largely for its reflection of Howells's national "loyalties."10 In truth, then, we cannot wholly accept Granville Hicks's claim that Parrington's "theory involves the assumption that there have been two opposing tendencies in the whole of American history—the liberal and the conservative."11 Parring­ ton's dialectic is subject to wide variations depending upon the immediate context; it cannot satisfy a Marxist like Hicks, for it depends too much on the shifting limits of intellectual abstractions. Parrington is more like George Brandes in his approach to national history; he is not so much interested in dialectical oppositions as in the evolution of a "progressive * Warner BerthofI argues that "realism" for American writers and critics was never a purely literary concept. I most heartily agree, but I would urge that the use of the term is still ambiguous, and this is, in part, the cause of Parrington's shifting approach. In general, when he uses "realism" to designate the ideological opposite of liberal Jeffersonian idealism (that is, as "Jacksonian"), he implies that it is destructive. When he uses it with more narrowly literary connotations, as a tech­ nique of exposing ills by means of literature, he is treating the term favorably. See the first chapter of Berthoff's The Ferment of Realism.

VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON

spirit" in the national character. If one attempts to follow the dialectic it continually breaks down, for "progressivism" is too vague a concept as Parrington treats it to be fixed in a rigid system of antitheses. The dialectic works best when Parrington is considering what I called in the previous chapter "inferior" literature. I mean by this designation the literary work that strives foremost for an expression of unambiguous thought by de-emphasizing the aesthetic potentiality of language. It is "inferior" as litera­ ture because the author fails to exploit the full potential of his medium. In the chapters of Main Currents dealing with eighteenth-century literary endeavors, a period not distin­ guished by much truly imaginative work, Parrington's dialec­ tical synthesis appears to be successful, but even Parrington does not consider these works very artistic. He declares that he has made selections only insofar as they are useful social documents.12 The prominence of the Connecticut Wits is justi­ fied, even though they "may not deserve the high title of poets," because "their works remain extraordinarily interesting docu­ ments of a . . . period."13 Literature here serves the purposes of the dialectic. But literature produced by "great men" cannot be so easily classified. Parrington must face the full consequences of his own evaluations. Are these men "great" merely because they reflect the liberal side of the dialectic? Are the Connecticut Wits of less cultural significance because they merely "docu­ ment" or "phrase" traditional "concepts"? Or are some men "great" because, unlike the Connecticut Wits, they are formulators of a "progressive spirit," because they are the "shapers" of American culture? Moreover, since Parrington's great men are all literary men their greatness is measured in their literary achievements, and the aesthetic nature of the objects studied complicates the estimation of their cultural value. The dilemma can be phrased in Aristotelian terms: are these great men imi­ tators or makers? I have not forgotten that Parrington es­ chewed aesthetics; I am simply reiterating the inevitability of aesthetic considerations when one proposes to study culture

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via literature. A single-minded interest in "thematics" is pos­ sible when the objects studied are inferior as literature; but if they are the products of truly creative and progressive intellects, the formal achievement in language appears to be intimately involved with the themes expressed. Hence to transfer themes from the work to the world involves an estimation of the formal or structural relation between the work and the world. For Parrington there is a kind of compromise. Writers whose interests are very centrally aesthetic he dismisses as "variations" on the main current of American thought. Here the dialectic has succeeded in narrowing Parrington's cultural perspective. On the other hand, he chooses as his principal hero a poet whose interests are highly thematic and whose works lend themselves to content analysis. That poet is Walt Whit­ man. Superficially, Whitman expounds some rather bland liberalisms; he delights in calling himself a revolutionary in politics, and Parrington quickly seizes these references. Yet Whitman's egoism must somehow be adjusted to his collec­ tivism, his mysticism and prophetic pose to his political naivete, his lyrical ecstasies to his boorish realism. All of this Parrington handles with some facility, and in the process he shatters his glossary of nearly synonymous dialectical terms.14 Parrington accepts too literally Whitman's protestations against "style." "The greatest poet," Whitman proclaims, "has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution."15 Yet I know of no other poet who struggled so consistently to reduce the distance between words and "thoughts and things," to master "style" so that content comes to the reader undiminished. "I seek less to state or display any theme or thought," Whitman proclaims, "and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight."16 A dis­ cussion of Whitman's "themes" apart from a discussion of his style seems impertinent in the light of the poet's "ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary and poetic form [his] ... physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic

VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON

Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America."17 Parrington never mentions style or form in his discussions of Leaves of Grass, but he cannot wholly escape such matters. He does not discuss style; he imitates it, turns it back upon the poet to force the reader to experience through language the "atmosphere" of Whitman's expansive consciousness and democratic egalitarianism which he considers the poet's most important contribution to the progress of American thought. At these moments Parrington is nearer a truly aesthetic evalua­ tion of Whitman than if he were to engage in philosophic speculations. Let me illustrate with a passage from the Whit­ man chapter discussing the influence of Emerson. Parrington's prose is certainly reminiscent of Whitman's, and both are obvious approximations of the famous Whitmanesque lines. I have rearranged Parrington's language to better illustrate my point. There is the same glorification of consciousness and will, The same exaltation of the soul, The same trust in the buried life that men call instinct, The same imperious call to heed the voice of the innate Godhood; And round and about this "perfect and free individual" is a mystical and free universe Wherein the children of men may luxuriate in their divinity. The body is excellent as the soul is excellent; Away, therefore, with all shamefacedness— The mean secretiveness, The putting of fingers to the lips in presence of the naked, The lies in presence of open palpable facts!18 In his poetry Whitman's "aesthetic" self is indistinguishable from his political self, and it is impossible to admire one without accepting the other. For Parrington, Whitman is the most "authentic voice of this great shapeless America" as he

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gives shape to the reality that lies beyond the poem. It is a poetic vision seen in and through "poetic form," one that Parrington ultimately cannot place much faith in, but it embodies a sense of the whole of culture that Parrington himself could not grasp through his political-economic dialectic. Whitman rises above the dialectic, and, quite obviously, by the time Parrington began his discussion of Whitman he too had lost faith in neat antitheses. The metaphysical perspective borrowed from the Hegelians failed him, and he turned more emphati­ cally than ever to the literary expressions of great men. 2

Implicit in the notion that one can study culture as it is manifest in its literary productions is the aesthetic question of the relationship of the written word to the perceived world. All of this is necessarily involved in Parrington's stated aims for Main Currents, and these aims grow out of his desire to find some way to grasp, to know, the world in which he lived. But Parrington limits himself radically by adhering to a rather simplistic thematic interpretation of the works he studied. Essentially he develops a realistic epistemology which tends to drive words apart from the "things" of the world they were supposed to signify. It is a rather hollow view of literature unintentionally promoted by his exaggerated fear of "aes­ thetics." It also partly explains why Parrington can rightly see himself as a companion of the school of Whitman, striving for a sense of order in the midst of doubt and disillusion, while at the same time he misreads the crucial aesthetic mysticism which appears in Whitman's efforts to project form through his verse.* Parrington rejects aesthetic questions partly because he as* David Noble, in Historians Against History, places Parrington in that broad tradition of American historiography ranging from George Bancroft to Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson which sought to define cultural progress within the context of the "new world." The historian was to be a "New Adam" constructing again Man's sense of the world in which he lives.

VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON

sociates such interests with what Santayana called the "genteel tradition." The "genteel" critics produced, he believes, "an exaggerated regard for aesthetic values. Poetasters have shoul­ dered aside vigorous creative thinkers . . . , have sought daintier fare than polemics."19 This expression of a strong masculine sentiment against the effeminate character of "aestheticism" is mingled with an embryonic political tempera­ ment. Longfellow, he argues, was the "most characterisdc product" of the genteel tradition, a man totally oblivious to the "electric currents of the times." Both Longfellow and Lowell, he charges, lacked the originality to assimilate new ideas. Speaking of Poe's place in his cultural milieu, he claims that the "technician concerned with the values of long and short syllables would find few congenial spirits in a world of more substantial things."20 As for Henry James, he sees him as "the last refinement of the genteel tradition, the completest embodiment of its vague cultural aspirations."21 Alongside life's more "substantial things" the role of aesthetics is indeed trivial* Parrington, as I have said, was primarily interested in ideas, themes, or content. James, like Poe, was far too concerned with the "daintier fare" of form and structure and, according to Parrington, far too unconcerned with the "polemical" rever­ berations of his day. He considers James a throwback, a reac­ tionary as well as a "romantic" in the pejorative sense that he sometimes uses the term.22 Yet it can be argued that James, through his aestheticism, expresses one of the most vital "currents" of American thought. Moreover, the growing sense of disillusion in Parrington's work that accompanies the failure of the dialectic to encompass the "shapelessness" of America testifies to Parrington's involvement with the same cultural dilemmas that distressed James. Main Currents is, to borrow a phrase from James, an intense "search for form." A shapeless * It is interesting to note that Parrington attacks Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and James for separating aesthetic and cultural interests—the very tactic that Parrington himself uses. It would seem that the separation is acceptable only when one sides with culture.

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world requires that its "authentic voice" be either shapeless or shaping. Both James and Parrington seek in literature the latter alternative, and both express in this seeking an incipient historicism, a mixture of nationalistic and aesthetic conscious­ nesses. For Parrington this means a literature of polemics, and the giants of the era are the muckrakers and satirists, specifi­ cally Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, who most directly rise to the occasion. For James the solution lies in another direction, as J. A. Ward's recent study of James's formalism, The Search for Form, helps us understand. It is not an answer that Parrington can readily embrace, but it is something more than the "vagrant current" or "casual variation" in the mainstream of American thought that Parrington claimed it was. James expresses his "search for form" primarily in aesthetic terms, and in so doing he places himself in a broad aesthetic tradition that developed out of Kantian epistemology and found its primary American voice in Emerson. He owes spe­ cifically to English and German romantic philosophers his theory of organic form, but "organicism" for James, Ward claims, involves crucial questions of space-time relationships. The organic form of the work results from the spatialization of time, from the tendency to construct according to pictorial rather than chronological principles. James evidences the same distrust of chronology in his novels that is so characteristic of many of his contemporaries, and that began to develop in his immediate predecessors. We only need think of the influence of Bergson on Proust or the Symbolism of Mallarme to recall how directly such interests were reflected in the literature of James's day. Ward's reading of James, as he acknowledges, is supported by Joseph Frank's study of Joyce, Proust, and Djuna Barnes in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." This article, originally published in 1945, draws on a vast philosophic background to explain the tendency of these writers to experiment with tem­ poral organization. The main philosophic inspiration behind Frank's interpretations is that of Wilhelm Worringer who described the development of such a-temporal art forms as the

VERNON LOUIS PARRINGTON

expression of a Zeitgeist—as, that is, a cultural phenomenon. He calls it "non-naturalistic" art and sees it as a retreat from nature because nature appears to be an "incomprehensible chaos, a meaningless or terrifying confusion of occurrences and sensations."23 In the plastic arts this results in a retreat from "perspectivist" techniques into those of non-representational forms, planes, pure lines, and primary colors. The attitude toward time is also severely altered, as Frank points out; mere chronology, cause and effect relations in time, are no longer adequate to the artist's sense of interminable flux and chaos. If the plastic arts, therefore, escape into pure forms, the tem­ poral arts like literature (particularly novels which involve the concept of "plot") attempt to escape into a new sense of time. Frank calls this "spatial form," the denial of chronology through the effort to compose an organic structure of total and momentary impact—outside of time—like the total impact of a painting. It is not difficult to see James as a part of this tradition in the light of Ward's discussion of his theory and practice; it is James's reaction to Parrington's "shapeless" world. For this Parrington accuses him of being an escapist, and we should remember that Worringer defined non-naturalistic art as an escape from the incomprehensible flux of undifferentiated sense experience. Indeed, the upshot of much of the Symbolist tradi­ tion that directly influenced Joyce and Barnes is to fix time in the eternal moment, the epiphany. But Joyce himself struggled against an absolute escape from reality into the timeless, and the emphatic rejection of this tendency in the Symbolists is perhaps best expressed in Valery's extraordinary "Le Cimetiere marin." Also, the thrust of Bergsonian philosophy, it seems to me, opposes this retreat from real experience—from the flow of time. "Unlike several of his contemporaries," Ward suggests, "James was uninterested in the theme of transcience...." Nor does James represent experience as a succession of aes­ thetic moments, like the "epiphanies" of Joyce or the "still

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

points" of Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Perception and the intensity of awareness are of supreme importance in James, but his enlightened vessels of consciousness seldom exult in isolated ecstatic moments.24 There is a kind of lethargic grace to the construction of a Jamesian novel; "intensity" in the Baudelairean or Joycean sense is absent. On the one hand, James reflects more of Howells's realism than Joyce's apocalyptic visions. James's heroes are truly New World innocents if one places them beside the likes of Stephen Dedalus or Buck Mulligan. On the other hand, a novel like The Ambassadors, to pick up on a tentative speculation advanced by Ward,25 projects a hero who illustrates strikingly the self-conscious historicism of Henry Adams* In The Education of Henry Adams New World innocence is up for re-examination; the central concern is not to escape the past but to "make" something meaningful of it, to construct through an aesthetic perception of the self in one's own milieu a total picture of one's existence.! It is faithful to "reality," a discovery, at the same time that it is a fabrication, an object that is whole and complete and beautiful. There is one major instance where Parrington's search for form moves even beyond James's aestheticism, where he de­ parts from the materialistic pose that dominates his reading of Whitman.J In an article entitled "The Incomparable Mr. Cabell" Parrington writes "literary criticism" and not cultural history. The article was included unrevised in the third volume of Main Currents at the discretion of the editor, and it has * F. O. Matthiessen quotes a letter from James to Adams affirming the will to live and to struggle against the "abyss" of the "past" (Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 119). t Marius Bewley, in The Complex Fate, particularly in Chapter I, sees Hawthorne's influence on James as a key to this struggle to discover and create one's cultural existence. ί There is another, and more confusing exception, a reference made to Poe's "finer romanticism" (Main Currents, Vol. II, p. 59) which seems out of temper with his harsh treatment of Poe.

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somewhat puzzled Parrington's readers ever since. Here Parrington is concerned with the aesthetic implications of what he calls Cabell's "cosmic irony." "The Cabellian jest," he says, "uncovers depths of meditation that reveal the philosopher and the poet." He continues by explaining that he has "called Mr. Cabell a poet" because of "his persistent idealization of life in terms of beauty." None of this would be so unusual if it were not for Parrington's lavish praise of Cabell's "romantic" na­ ture, the writer's escape from "reality" that expresses a deep anguish at the plight of man.26 The result is nothing like the activist literature of Lewis and Sinclair. If the Cabell piece was to be a part of Main Currents in Parrington's master plan (the editor assures us that the plan is easily known and followed in the assembling of the final volume), would he not have suffered the fate of James and Poe, those aesthetes who fled from life's "more substantial things"? The question, of course, must remain unanswered, but the spirit of Parrington's analysis of Cabell gives us another, and I venture to add more profound, side of the author of Main Currents. To describe Cabell's romanticism he suggests that we need to turn Prospero's words around—our dreams are such stuff as we are made on. They alone are real and salu­ tary, for amid all their ramblings they seem dimly to suggest some end; amidst their rank egoisms they seem to fore­ shadow a purpose: and may not that end and purpose be the eventual creation of a life for man that shall be worthy of his dreams?27 The inversion of Prospero's words is no real inversion at all, but the meaning of the passage is quite clear. The "function of art in society," he claims, is "to lure men away from the con­ templation of acts which terrify or debase, from all ignoble and depressing realism, to pursue the ideal and entice the imagina­ tion to enter and dwell in a world as it ought to be."28 This is Sidney's "Golden World," an aesthetic construct, and it looks forward with extraordinary clarity to the myth suffused dream

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"Word Order" o£ Northrop Frye.* Moreover, this headlong escape into art from the terrifying natural world must remind us of Worringer's characterization of "non-naturalistic" art, and beyond that of James. In the long run, the most puzzling aspect of this chapter is that the goals of Cabell are so quickly perceived and unashamedly endorsed—even as to their cultural significance—while the far more pervasive and successful ob­ jectives of James are summarily dismissed. Parrington has been frequently enrolled in the school of Taine, and even more frequently seen under the influence of the political economists of his day, particularly his close per­ sonal friend J. Allen Smith. He has been claimed by liberals and dialectical materialists, and even by Utopian idealists. There is truth in all of these characterizations, yet only one aspect remains consistent and undiminished throughout his work and is not contradicted by either dialectical materialism or idealism. That is his continuing fascination with those creative intellects (for the most part literary men) who lead Man toward the world "as it ought to be." David Noble finds no difficulty including Parrington among those American historians who sought to define a new history for the new America, who sought to discover patterns of meaning that belonged only to the American culture. Parrington's literary concerns make him somewhat of a special case in this tradition but they also point up his kinship with Van Wyck Brooksf * Murray Krieger, in "Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism: Ariel and the Spirit of Gravity," Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, explains the Sidneyan spirit which pervades Frye's criticism. Parring­ ton's references to literature's ability to create the sense of wholeness, the sense of an ending, might also be seen as foreshadowing Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending. f F . O . M a t t h i e s s e n i n The American Renaissance, p. xvii, is one of very few American scholars to insist on the viability of such a kinship. That Parrington's ideas on the relation of great men to a social-historical continuity have also interested psychoanalytic historians like Erik Erikson also supports the contention that Parrington belongs in the school of Brooks. In their most decidedly individual ways, Erikson, Matthiessen, Parrington, and Brooks all attempt to define the complex

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and the development of a truly aesthetic historicism. Parrington stands somehow central to the cultural flux of his day; he belongs to no individualized movement. His self-imposed aesthetic limitations prevented him from being an historicist; when he does succumb to the lure of aesthetics in his reading of Cabell he moves beyond historicism into the timeless literary dream world of Frye. Nevertheless, his efforts lead us first to the limitations of his methodology and then beyond, to those questions which are for the historicist. In this way he gives us a profound argument for historicism. relationship that exists between truly creative men and the societies that produce them. See Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, pp. 287, 324.

Chapter I V

American Marxian Literary Theory The Search for Critical Certainty The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily in­ spired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most ef­ fective and attractive combinations MATTHEW ARNOLD , "The Function of Criticism

at the Present Time" Although Vernon Parrington's liberalism cannot be accurately interpreted as Marxian, Parrington's work has very much ap­ pealed to American Marxian critics. Bernard Smith, aware of the dialectical limitations of Main Currents, tries to make Parrington at least a "fellow traveler." "The time was ripe for him," Smith says, "but not for a genuine Marxist."1 A some­ what more discriminating Granville Hicks seems to have en­ tangled himself in the very contradictions of Parrington's elu­ sive terminology. If he was primarily and most of the time a JefTersonian, he was also, on occasion and to a certain extent a Marxist. If that is a paradox, the fault is Mr. Parrington's.2 Hicks, however, knows what principal philosophic assumptions separate Parrington from true Marxism. "When a Marxist looks in Parrington for what seem to him the inevitable corol­ laries, he is disappointed. He ... finds Parrington turning, not

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to the proletariat, but to the literati."8 There is very little proletarianism in Parrington's works; his strong Jefiersonian agrarianism carries with it an equally strong aristocratic bias.* Nevertheless, Smith's treatment of Parrington as a prelude to Marxian criticism is characteristic of the Marxian tendency to view everything as a stage in the inevitable progress of history. What appealed to Smith and Hicks, of course, were the political-economic overtones of Main Currents and the evaluations of authors according to their contributions as "creative intellects" to the progress of American liberal thought. But Parrington lacks an essential confidence in the inevitability of this progress. The growing sense of disillusion, even pessimism, in the course of the three volumes of Main Currentsi contradicts the bold faith in the emergence of the proletariate professed by many Marxists. He does provide a strong justification for literature, or the literary artist, as a vital force in cultural history. Literature for the Marxist is a valuable tool in the study of historical movements and a key to the present state of affairs. It might also serve as a key to the future by participating in the process of historical prophecy,5 but all of this is an elaboration on the fundamental methodology of Parrington. His struggle to keep aesthetics out of his cultural evaluations conflicts with the Marxist's attempt to make cul­ tural and aesthetic values identical. The Marxist would have literature with but a single mode of existence. Any statement about the nature of Marxian aesthetics is complicated by the fact that Marx himself never fully de­ veloped an aesthetic theory. At best we have only his scattered remarks mingled, sometimes indistinguishably, with the petu­ lant judgments of Engels, and unless we want to count the official Party dogma or the recent efforts of a Marxist like Georg Lukacs, there really is no Marxian theory of art. Never­ theless, Marxists have not been unaware of the power and influence of art, and a great body of literary writing has arisen to explain the relation of the art work to the Marxian world * In his "Introduction" to Giants in the Earth by Ο. E. Rolvaag, p. xii, Parrington roundly attacks Jacksonian "levelers."

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view. From this we may establish some general propositions and study the contributions of two very unlike American Marxian theorists, Granville Hicks and Kenneth Burke. ι George Steiner summarizes what he feels are the two basic principles of Marxian aesthetics: i) that "being determines consciousness," and 2) the resulting "materialist axiom that all human understanding mirrors objective reality." What this definition fails to emphasize is the "collective" or unified ele­ ments of the Marxian society. In addition to the Hegelian phenomenology there is also the Hegelian Idealism, the grand scheme of history which provides order for the chaos of im­ mediate personal human perception. Art is an "ideological superstructure subject to the laws of historical necessity."8 Granville Hicks calls the grand scheme an "all-embracing pattern"7 meaning that every element of human experience finds its ultimate meaning in the totality of the unified histor­ ical movement. In an effort to avoid the Idealism of Hegelian philosophy Marx and Engels emphasize the empirical nature of their theory, yet it remains essentially Idealistic* In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.8 For all of its existential focus, its inductive methodology, Marxian historicism remains aware of its basis in a determin­ istic metaphysics. "Many times," Karl Jaspers tells us, "a * Marx and Engels also objected strongly to the use of the material­ istic methodology "as a ready-made pattern in which to tailor his­ torical facts" (Literature and Art, p. 57).

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passionate 'idealism' which strives for substance can be found working in a new 'materialism'."9 In one sense it is the existence of this metaphysical order that is most crucial to Marxian literary criticism; it provides a fixed referent for all critical evaluations and interpretations. "If Karl Marx's law is true,"10 it makes possible the assertion of truth claims in literary criticism.* It also "democratizes" criticism by removing standards from the literary elite and making them available in the public domain. Given this faith in an ultimate truth, the Marxian critic considers himself a scientist employ­ ing the "scientific tools of the Marxian methodology,"11 and this produces what Georg Lukacs terms a "new historicism in art."12 Lukacs's "new" historicism, however, merely joins two older historicist approaches, and the marriage is not compatible. With its foundation in Hegel it is profoundly metaphysical and deterministic, but in its pseudo-scientific materialism it is clearly naturalistic, inductive and skeptical. The former is ra­ tional and focuses on the inevitable; the latter is practical and issues in activism. The conflict has its source in the thinking of Marx himself;18 and although it has been variously explained away by his successors, it remains an important factor in Marxian criticism. On the one hand, Marxism has been at­ tacked for its "unscientific" Idealism. Max Eastman wants to "put in the place of the Hegelian metaphysics, a science of human thought and behavior."14 He is suspicious of the "mystic force" which he sees underlying the Marxian concept of "pur­ posive" or "determinate" history.f On the other hand, the * Georg Lukacs argues that Marxian historicism provides a concrete standard for hermeneutics, thereby removing literary judgments from the realm of mere "taste" (Studies in European Realism, p. 2). t Karl Marx, speaking of the history of the French Revolution, dem­ onstrates the determinancy of his concept of history. That Napoleon, the Corsican, arose to be the hero was an accident, but if it had not been Napoleon, it would have been another like him: "the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary." Selected Wor\s, vol. I, pp. 341-42.

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Marxist seldom claims to know the full implications of "His­ tory." Rather he asserts his faith in the rationality of human historical progress while admitting man's limited vision of the whole very much as the eighteenth-century rationalist asserted his faith in the Great Chain of Being although all the links were not visible to him. In some instances Eastman's greatest fears are realized, and the Marxist succumbs to the lure of mysticism. John Middleton Murry frankly considered Marx a religious visionary. "Only the shallow minds," he tells us, "will be surprised at the notion of an essential congruity between the vision of Marx and the vision of great mystics, great poets, and great philosophers."15 This approach again reflects the sense of urgency that pervades Marxian literary theory. The necessity of Marxian "law" is the necessity of certainty of meaning; it is an expression of what Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish Marxist philosopher, calls man's fundamental "desire to find outside [himself] support for [his] own existence."16 The Marxian law insists that literature, like all human ex­ pressions, is conditioned by cultural-historical forces. There­ fore, the Marxist is left open to one of the "possible dangers of historicism" according to Peter Demetz. "The joy of discover­ ing the matchless radiance of the unique historical figure [is] coupled with the tendency to dissolve the individual into the stream of history."17 Nevertheless, it is out of this tension be­ tween the search for the individual and the faith in an allembracing pattern that a true Marxian historicism emerges. If all human activities comprise a unified historical progress, art is both an individual part of the whole and an integral or for­ ward-looking part of the whole. This is the historicist's tau­ tology described in the first chapter. Because the "Marxist must trace the movement towards the proletarian revolution and socialist ideology through the entire history of world culture"18 (my italics), all that precedes the present moment is "neces­ sary pre-history" and the process of historical criticism is a "necessary anachronism."19 As a result the Marxist sees litera­ ture projecting a kind of "sacramental" time in the very way

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that medieval Corpus Christi drama cycles projected all time from the creation to the apocalypse through the chronology of the sequence. Each individual part is a "figure" for the whole while at the same time it stands uniquely in its own historical context.20 The Marxist, then, combines this historicist tautology with a narrow mimetic doctrine. Art must "mirror objective reality," and Marxists like V. F. Calverton vigorously condemn the "artificial dichotomy between the real world and the art world."2X This union yields a monistic critical methodology, one that makes no distinction between the art work's aesthetic and cultural-historical modes of existence. Moreover, it gives the illusion of having banished the form-content dichotomy because art and life not only share the same themes, they also derive the same structure from those themes, or from the ulti­ mate meaning of history. The Marxian critic is able to transform the existential or thematic aspect of his world view into the formal or aesthetic aspect of art primarily because his philosophy is derived from the highly formalistic Hegelian dialectic.* The essence of Hegelian historicism, as it was grasped by Marx in terms of the economic class struggle, is tension, and tension readily becomes a formal or structural key for literature. Robert Weimann analyzes Shakespeare's history plays according to the manner in which the aesthetic-formal elements in the plays reflect the existential-thematic elements of Shakespeare's society. The playwright could dramatically juxtapose and evaluate the ideals or attitudes of both service and individualism, honour and property, family pride and family feeling, Iasciviousness and chastity, sophistication and simplicity, cyni* This cverpresent formalism explains why Lukacs has finally turned to Aristotle for a theory of art. The Marxian concept of a highly struc­ tured historical sequence, a rational history, inevitably leads to a demand for a highly structured, rational artwork that reflects or imitates his­ tory. Like Aristotle Lukacs sees art as more compact or selective than history, but unlike Aristotle he considers both art and history as logically or causally structured (see Georg Lukacs, Aestheti\, 2 vols.).

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cism and naivety. These attitudes were usable in dramatic composition precisely because the resulting tensions were not slurred over but transformed into tragic conflict or comic incongruity.22 Similarly, Arnold Kettle interprets Hamlet and King Lear according to aesthetic tensions which ultimately reveal to us the Marxian historical conflicts.23 Lukacs sees the tensions of historical dialectics reflected in the heroes of Scott's novels. The "average" or "mediocre" hero serves as the focal point around which the great figures representing the great historical move­ ments revolve.24 One may grasp in the individual expression of the artist a sense of the clash and resolution of historical movements, and the deeper the artist is immersed in the experiental world the better is his representation of the dialectic. As Trotsky says, the poet must "dissolve" into the Revolution.25 Of course, the attempt to turn historical dialectics into an aesthetic-formal principle simply collapses art into life and, ironically, leads back to a form-content dichotomy in art. When Engels calls for "the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances,"26 he has in mind something like the lowest common denominator of social types, the representa­ tion of a character who by virtue of his commonality has something of the whole body politic in him. Lukacs's "average" hero is quite different in that he "represents" history by virtue of his extraordinary capacity to be at once individual and an embodiment of the extremes of social circumstances,* but even *Alfred Kazin in his Introduction to Studies in European Realism discusses the distinction between the "average" or "typical" hero emphasized by Lukacs and the "common-man." Kazin also emphasizes the heavy role that drama plays in Lukacs's aesthetics. The whole concept of historical dialectics as aesthetic-formal principle could be said to be "dramatic" though it is applied to all forms of literature. There are several possible interpretations to this theory, ranging from the mimetic that is typical of much American and British Marxian criticism to the more sophisticated French structuralist approaches founded upon "Gestalt" psychology. Both, however, assume, as Harry

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Lukacs confuses art and life when he claims that in the novel "the proper hero ... is life itself."27 Trotsky ceases to talk about poems on revolutionary topics and begins to speak of the Revolution itself as a poem. He only will be the poet of the Revolution who will learn to grasp it in its entirety, to regard its defeats as steps toward victory.... and who will be able to see in the intense prepa­ ration of forces during the ebb tide of the elements, the underlying pathos and poetry of the Revolution.28 Nothing remains for the "poet of the Revolution" but to encase the "poetry of the Revolution" in an adequate aesthetic form. 2

A most important secondary question grows out of this Marxian theory of art; it involves considerations of the poet's role in the stream of history. A concern for the past is inherent in the historicist attitude, and the Marxist reflects this concern in his dialectical interpretations of the progress of history. But there is a serious conflict between the Marxist's interest in past events, including literary works, and his intense progressivism. How can he be both a traditionalist and a revolutionary; how can he affirm a belief in the unity of all human history and at the same time dedicate himself to the destruction of all past values?29 This dilemma, of course, is simply a variation of the "danger" of historicism stated by Demetz; for our purposes here the question is one of determining the significance of past artistic productions in the present progressive society. Marx himself was aware of the problem. The difficulty is not in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding why they still constitute with Levin says, "that the ethic of the novelist turns into an aesthetic problem of his work" ("Toward a Sociology of the Novel," Journal of the His­ tory of Ideas, 26 [1965], 149).

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us a course of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.30 His answer is really no more than that they have the charm of the past, but such nostalgia is reactionary.31 The revolutionary character of Marxian theory demands that history be forwardlooking; the tradition achieves its full meaning only in its foreshadowing of the proletarian emergence. As a result Marx­ ian critics repeatedly emphasize the here and now,32 and the most frequently heard attacks are against reactionary or "back­ ward looking" writers and critics,* those who would imitate past artistic works, using them as "standards and models." Greatness accords with the degree to which a past work antici­ pates the Revolution.33 And because art is radically mimetic, the most recent works must be the best. Ralph Fox rightly denies that Marx ever intended such a concept; but he can argue this only on the ground that some elements of meaning and value exist outside the determinate scheme of history to counteract radical progressivism,34 and this tactic undermines the very possibility of a critical certainty provided by the allembracing pattern. Radical progressivism, moreover, puts a somewhat different slant on the Marxist's mimetic theory. The emphasis is on neither imitation of the past nor the present, but on imitation of the future, on the presentation of the inevitable rise of the proletarian state. This does not demand a simplistic Utopian literature although it takes that form in works like William Morris's News from Nowhere. Rather it asks that the poet be the prophet of the Revolution by finding in the events of the past and the present the seeds of the future society. Essentially this is a political responsibility, and it results in a paradox between the expression of full faith in the determinism of the Marxian theory and the admission of a pragmatic necessity for political activism.35 The former can lead to an intellectual * B. A. Botkin's attack on the Nashville Agrarians is a case in point. Such regionalism is seen by the Marxist as "anti-historical" ("Regional­ ism and Culture," The Writer in a Changing World, p. 141).

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paralysis, what for the Marxist is a gnostic fatalism arising from his certain knowledge that the future is inevitably formed in the progress of history—is controlled by the course of events of the past, the mart main. The latter leads to the consideration of literature's active role in the construction of a better society. As we have seen, Parrington could allow his dialectical view of history to collapse in the face of the "shapelessness" of American culture. His call, then, for an activist literature is a call for a shaping force, a literature that will infuse meaning into the meaningless flux. The Marxist cannot collapse the dialectic; culture cannot be for him truly shapeless. Meaning is fixed within the opposing terms of the dialectic, and an activist literature cannot actually be said to create shape or meaning. Instead it is a literature that reinforces or conveys meaning. It is didactic and propagandistic by necessity. Marx, of course, argues that activism in politics can "shorten and lessen the birth pangs" of the Revolution,se but this does not really help us understand the confused role of the artist and his work. "The insistence that the man of letters should play a political role," Edmund Wilson tells us, was "originally no part of Marxism."37 Yet the all-embracing nature of the dialectic and the confusion of art and life in the Marxian mimetic doctrine ultimately necessitate the inclusion of the artist in the political arena. Curiously enough, once in the realm of politics the artist becomes the object of the same kind of cult of per­ sonality that characterizes Marxian political philosophy. Ac­ tivism promotes a kind of individualism in art, for while it denies the artist creative freedom, it places extraordinary emphasis on his appeal, at the very least on his rhetorical achievements. Essentially, there are two prevailing attitudes. On the one hand, Bernard Smith sees the artist's role as one indirectly affecting the social development. The artist does not ordinarily create a work with the inten­ tion of stimulating a specific act or a specific line of thought. He seeks to present an experience that will heighten his

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reader's understanding of life. Such understanding is not purposeless; it will influence his conduct—but only in a general direction. To determine the actual point of arrival is the philosopher's problem.38 The artist, for Smith, is passive. As Matthew Arnold argued, the artist's role is not to think but to express; his work may ultimately be effective in a political way, but it is life itself that is purposive and not his writing. If the artist can see life as it really is and can convey this to his reader, he will have exposed the reader to truth and thereby have motivated him to action in accordance with the truth. On the other hand, art can be seen as something more directly affecting the lives of its readers. The most reductive sense of art's pragmatic function is offered by Michael Gold who argues that art must not be the "Boudoir sport of dilet­ tantes"; it must be "heroic" as it "teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory-women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theaters, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is necessary as bread."39 The "aims of art" can also be more militant according to V. F. Calverton: "The proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a great purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and second, toward the creation of a new society."40 Of the two points of view, Smith's appears to be the most resigned to the dictates of Marx's "law," but the same fatalism pervades Calverton as well. Pressing his radical mimesis into a definition of the creative mind, he reveals that the artist's "contribution" as artist to the "creation of a new society" is really a very limited one. While literature is possessed of an imaginative element which makes it assume forms which are more elusive than economic charts and political programmes, the roots of that imagina­ tion lie as close to the culture from which they have arisen as do the less imaginative materials of economics and politics.41

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The only distinction here is one of degree, for the causal "roots" of all of these activities are nourished in the "modes of pro­ duction of material life."42 The artist is bound by the system, on the one side by the sin of reactionarism (the slavish imitation of the past) and on the other by the sin of revisionism (the deviation from the Marxian teleology). There remains for him only the rhetorical task of promoting the dogma, and in this he is indistinguishable from the political leader and the pam­ phleteer. The religious fervor of Marxism makes everyone a witness to the faith, pace Mr. Wilson who would relieve the Marxian artist of political responsibility. Thus, if the Marxian aesthetician must ultimately collapse the work into history, the aesthetic-formal into the thematic-existential, he must likewise confuse the artist and the political leader. The result either way is a form-content dichotomy in art that tends to rob the actual art work of any truly vital participation in its historical milieu. The artist is simply a rhetorician in the most limited sense of the word, a propagandist for the cause, but this is the price the Marxian critic must pay for critical certainty. 3 If I were to argue that there is a particular brand of Ameri­ can Marxism which is unlike any other, a task I cannot—and have not the courage—to undertake here, I would choose Granville Hicks as my most illustrative example. Hicks's career is a paradigm of the American Marxian movement, both as to strengths and weaknesses. His most important work, The Great Tradition, reflects all of the passion of thousands of sim­ ilar Party-line documents, but, more importantly, it is an acknowledged failure. The work reveals the violent twisting of intellect necessary to bring a naturally humanistic critical and social sensibility into line with a narrow doctrine that denies the very freedom of intellect so essential to that sensi­ bility. Like the whole American Marxian experiment, it is fundamentally out of temper with itself. Looking back from the sixties Hicks very candidly, and I think perceptively, evaluates the work he did in the thirties.

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The Great Tradition was successful in many respects, although at the time of composition his aim was for quite different effects. Most importantly, he tries to explain the guiding aesthetic principle that led him to interpret literature from the Marxian point of view. Most of the critics who had been influenced by Marxism had adopted a double standard, a dualistic method: they could denounce a writer's political ideas but praise his esthetic values or technical skills or whatever they chose to call them. I wanted to devise a monistic theory. I argued that the critic should begin by examining a writer's attitude toward the world, and then analyze the form in which he had expressed that attitude. I believed that content determined form, con­ tent being defined not as mere subject matter but as the writer's whole Weltanschauung. So far as form was con­ cerned, the only important question was whether the writer had found the right form for his vision.43 This is, of course, no real monism at all. Hicks here has reduced the importance of form, in effect made it an empty shell into which one pours content. Form should be as inobtrusive as possible. Yet just by asking the question he has put before himself the central aesthetic problem of Marxism: how to unite the aesthetic-formal and the thematic-existential. The adequacy of form is not, for Hicks or any Marxist, merely the felicity of expression. Form is not the property of the materials of art but belongs to the shape of history. Ultimately form is "given" along with content; form is content in the dialectic. "By giving us the key to history," he recalls of his doctrinaire years, "Marxism enabled us to understand science, literature, art, all human activity."44. Typically, mimesis is the fundamental characteristic of art for Hicks, but he does not see this as simply fidelity of "obser­ vation."45 The all-embracing pattern is frequently hidden in the flux of the existential world, and the artist's task is to present this hidden pattern as it is capable of unifying "the widest variety of events."46

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Every writer, whatever his theme, must understand the relation of the particular fragment of experience he chooses to describe to the fundamental and inescapable forces that have been affecting every phase of . . . life.47 This should remind us, though faintly, of Lukacs's idea of the "average" hero, the individual character who embodies within his broadly inclusive personality all of the contradictions of the real world and yet at the same time reveals the hidden patterns behind the apparent flux. Hicks, like Lukacs and many other Marxists, turns to the novel as the art form best suited to the expression of unity in diversity;48 but we should note that the sense of unity comes from the artist's penetration to the patterns that lie behind the phenomena and not from aesthetic struc­ ture; the patterns are real and transcendent. Hicks was never able to articulate a full aesthetic theory on the scale of Lukacs's, and for that reason we must be content with a few unsystematic declarations. In addition, the critical monism that transfers unifying form from the dialectic of his­ tory to the work of art always eluded Hicks, and The Great Tradition abounds in the very dualism that he later claimed he wanted to avoid. In a manner reminiscent of Parrington he separates aesthetics and political ideals. Almost the whole of nineteenth-century American literature is judged as inadequate in terms of its political or social content; but unlike Parrington, Hicks is most willing to give high praise to artistic achieve­ ment. He grants, somewhat begrudgingly, that Henry James was a master of style in the very breath that he ejects James from the "Great Tradition" for his limited vision of the Industrial Revolution.49 In the case of Emily Dickinson his treatment is perceptive beyond the limits of Marxian dogma. His praise is often general, but it is praise of her control of language, her creation of aesthetic effects, unqualified by po­ litical considerations. This is not to say that he accepts her wholly; Marxism eventually asserts itself and she is abruptly dismissed for being too "remote" from the stream of real life,50 but this hardly contradicts his earlier admiration for her

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poems. Nor does his sense that Oscar Wilde was a victim of outmoded Victorian morality fully explain his strong sympathy for the man. Aestheticism in general he sees through Marxian eyes, as a social phenomenon and an expression of hatred for the bourgeoisie.51 Nevertheless, he is more tolerant of its purely artistic achievements than most of his fellow travelers. Hicks's sensibility to art never really bows before the dogma of Marxian politics; only when he ceases to write about litera­ ture altogether, as in the final chapter of the revised edition of The Great Tradition, can he make the typically outrageous claims for art as a proletarian "weapon." Yet even in this chapter a paradox clouds his political commitment. He defines the artistic imagination as "the ability to rearrange the elements of experience into patterns that are new and different and yet true to experience."52 As is clear from the context, being "true to experience," for the doctrinaire Marxist, is being true to Marx's "law," but Marx's law gives the artist the "pattern." There is little room for the production of "new and different" arrangements. Hicks, it would seem, will not renounce "literary talent" in the name of any "set of political principles,"58 and consequently the literary work must be seen paradoxically as both a creation and a discovery. This is a difficult aesthetic principle, one we shall have the opportunity to return to in a later chapter, and Hicks never really seeks to explain it. I think we are justified also in saying that Hicks never found that all-embracing pattern that was to be the unifying element in his study of the "Great Tradition." His later works seem to be still in search of it, and perhaps this too is characteristic of the American Marxian movement. It was not so much the Stalinist alliance with Hitler that drove many of the Americans out of the International Party, as Hicks argues, but the fundamental resistance of American literary men to any such arbitrary controls imposed from the outside. For Hicks the important matter was always a proletarian sympathy, and this issues in an activism that is really beyond the powers of art. Literature can be involved through the im-

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mediacy of experience that it presents, through, that is, the involvement of the author; the lack of such involvement was, he claimed, the failure of Henry James and Emily Dickinson. The true function of literature should be to "rouse a sense of solidarity with the class-conscious workers and a loyalty to their cause" by forcing the reader to "participate" in the ex­ perience of the author.54 This charge is directed more toward the critic than the artist; it is the critic he urges to "take sides."55 In the final analysis Hicks's sympathies lie with the more amorphous move­ ment of American socialism that preceded the Marxian influx. The "all-embracing pattern" is conspicuously absent from this movement, and it is marked primarily by an intense concern for the plight of the worker. Daniel Aaron classifies Hicks as a "grass roots" Marxist,56 and this is most accurate. The entire pre-Marxian American socialist program was directed toward an immediate involvement in the practical aspects of life. There is surrounding it a strong distrust for theorizing, which may account for Hicks's reluctance to develop his aesthetic ideas systematically, and a general anti-intellectual bias. In Hicks's later autobiographical works these are even more noticeable tendencies. In Small Town (1946), he describes his experiences as a crusader for local reforms, as a community worker. He even rejects the idea that literature is a useful class weapon.57 Hicks once accused Kenneth Burke of separating the aes­ thetic from the social;58 this was the doctrinaire Hicks. Yet Hicks himself was never able to accept the narrow and sim­ plistic confusion of art and life that V. F. Calverton defended. Like Parrington, the dialectic failed Hicks, not because he found culture to be "shapeless" but because his "grass roots" concerns demanded something more solid than metaphysical speculation. Hicks is an idealist who frequently employs the language of Marxism, but he is not really a Marxian historicist. His commitment to the dialectic is not firm enough to allow him to unite the aesthetic world and the real world. The

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all-embracing pattern provides meaning only in a loose way, as a guide to some sort of desired end, but it lacks the crucial element of Marxian historicism: critical certainty.

4 Granville Hicks's accusation that Kenneth Burke separates aesthetics and social history is, I believe, wrong; more em­ phatically, I would claim that Burke's philosophy is funda­ mentally an aesthetic reading of culture. This alone would seem to disqualify him from a discussion of Marxian histori­ cism, but Burke's involvement with Marxism makes him a peculiarly instructive example. In truth, Burke's philosophy simply absorbs Marxism as it absorbs most other philosophical, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and epistemological theories. Yet un­ like Hicks and most other American Marxists, Burke is fore­ most an aesthetician who attempts to provide a full statement of a Marxian theory of art. The crucial aspect of Burke's aesthetics is the oft-defined and multifaceted concept of "Symbolic Form." Burke is a sym­ bolist. He takes from the epistemology of Symbolism, perhaps filtered through Eliot, theories of how the mind comes to terms with reality. He is also a structuralist in that the operations of the mind are seen in terms of certain patterns that can be isolated and read into the very structure of society. In many ways, Burke's formalism parallels that of Lukacs, and both are fond of calling on Aristotle for support in their basic con­ ceptions of art's relation to life. Yet there are other sources for Burke's thought, and we shall note many of them. Burke maintains that there is an "element of self-expression in all human activities,"59 but for the poet "self-expression" plays a primary and conscious role in his existence. The poetic act is the "bodying-forth" of experiences lurking in the poet's mind; that is, the poet "translates" his "original mood" into symbols adequate to encompass the original experiences or emotions. From Dilthey, Burke borrows the idea that every human activity is an attempt to project the real self outward, into the world at large. Moreover, he defines the symbol, in

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terms reminiscent of Eliot's "objective correlative," as "a for­ mula . . . a word invented by the artist to specify a particular grouping or pattern or emphasizing of experience."60 It is important to remember, however, that Burke sees Man, and not simply the artist, as a "symbol-using" animal. One value of art is that which concerns the poet alone. There is, according to Burke, a kind of catharsis that results from the poet's unburdening of his emotions. "Poetry is produced for the purposes of comfort," he argues; this is poetry's medicinal function, as "therapeutic or prophylactic."61 He also describes it as a "purgation rite," a drama of "self-quest" or "rebirth."62 A poem is a "ritual of redemption, a kind of 'private mass' (made public in so far as others can participate in it)."63 But there is, I believe, no real contradiction between the concepts of art as "therapeutic" and as "ritual" or "rebirth." My quotations here merely mix Burke's borrowings from both Freudian and Myth-Archetype theories, and these approaches have always leaned heavily upon one another. Burke is talking about es­ sentially the same activity whatever the terminology; the "purgative" function of art, couched in Freudian language, treats the poem as "dream." Freud's "charting" of dream ele­ ments and their associations in the patient's mind is precisely the methodology employed by Burke in the analysis of litera­ ture. He classifies both neurtoic acts and poetic acts as "sym­ bolic,"64 and the literary critic can arrive at the crux of "sym­ bolic action" by "Indexing" all of the poet's imagery and the recurring associations of that imagery (a version of free as­ sociation). As Freud analyzed dreams to determine the pa­ tient's inner conflicts, Burke would analyze the poem to deter­ mine the poet's inner conflicts. This Burke calls "statistical" criticism, a totally objective approach to literature. The critic is able to "work out a psychology by objective citation—by scissor work."65 The Freudian dream analysis approach is primarily designed to arrive at the poet's personal psychological experience; this Burke calls "extrinsic" criticism. There is also an "intrinsic" criticism, that which considers the work or symbol in itself, as

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independent of the author's psyche.68 The union of these two approaches is rather awkwardly presented. Apparently the originating emotion sets off the symbolic activity that develops according to its own laws of consistency. The work, then, must be somehow both a reflection of the author's inner conflicts and also independent of them. More importantly, however, Burke discusses another kind of "extrinsic" criticism, one that concerns him in the bulk of his writing. This approach analyzes the effect of the work on its audience. Poetry, I would hasten to add, never fully loses its "personal" aspect for Burke; he even defines its broader effects by first discussing the relation of the poet to his age. The creative act is rooted in the poet's experience; that is, the "Symbol" is equal to the poet's self at the moment of conception.67 The poet, in turn, is rooted in his milieu, and the creative act becomes an expression not merely of the poet but also of his age. William Reuckert very properly calls this an imitation theory.es In the light of Burke's definition of the "Symbol" as merely an ade­ quate form for the poet's experience, the poem becomes a device for conveying the poet's sense of his own relation to the world around him, and is, therefore, necessarily conditioned by its place in the historical spectrum. This incipient historicist atti­ tude, however, is not without some confusing twists. One essential problem is that of sharability. What enables the poet to communicate with his audience? In part, Burke explains this in terms of a "margin of overlap between artists' and readers' experiences,"69 but such overlap is possible in several ways. One is decidedly metahistorical, the result of in­ nate or deeply cultural "forms of the mind" to which the author may always appeal.70 He also explains it as the result of historical conditioning, a matter of a "general agreement" in society as to norms and standards. This may occur, however, only in a "great age" (one of unified beliefs and ideologies) wherein the writer can be wholly objective. In an age of weak ideology the artist is forced to draw on his personal experience and produces "subjective art."71 Much of this sounds again like Matthew Arnold's claim that only in an era of strong

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beliefs can a truly great poetry be produced. Objective strength in art depends upon the acceptance of the current ideology; and all ideologies, Burke seems to say, eventually crumble. In particular, the modern age is without a unified body of beliefs, and it is the duty of the modern artist to provide his own uni­ fying structure for his work. Such a position, it would seem, excludes Burke from any truly Marxian point of view. The essence of Marxian historicism is the strength of its ideology, and Burke apparently feels no such faith in the transcending dialectic. The Marxist would have a highly "objective" art precisely in Burke's sense of the word. So would Burke; he finds much danger in "subjective" art, yet he finds no objective criterion in the modern day. Actually Burke wants to use Marxism for his own particular purposes. In Attitudes Toward History he describes history as a "curve" developing in rather Hegelian stages (with an obvious Marxian economic emphasis) toward an ultimate goal. Henry Bamford Parkes claims that for Burke this progression is utterly out of the control of man,72 and if this were so, his concept of art would be very narrowly Marxian, a matter of slavish and doctrinaire expositions. But Burke's real position in this early work is that through art man can contribute to the collapse of decadent societies. It is the "forensic" function of art, the power of rhetoric that he wants to turn to Marxian uses, not just to popularize the dogma but to make known the inevitable. In the modern age of weak ideologies, it is the duty of art to create a strong belief, and the belief Burke wants widely accepted conforms with the general principles of the Marxian economic realignment of society. Burke's Marxism, therefore, is enormously measured and compromising. In an address given before the First American Writers' Congress he spoke of the role of "Revolutionary Sym­ bolism in America," arguing, in the language of mythological criticism, that "a myth is the social tool for welding the sense of interrelationship by which the carpenter and the mechanic, though differently occupied, can work together for common social ends."73 Art is a "weapon," but only because Burke sees

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it involved in the fundamental activities by means of which we come to know and understand our positions in the world around us. Where life appears chaotic and hostile, art can provide the bases for beliefs that diminish the chaos. As might be expected Burke's address was attacked as a "sell out" during the discussion sessions of the Congress.74 He sold out the dialectic. But Burke is a moralist, much like Granville Hicks; he accepts the Marxian dogma on moral grounds rather than as a metaphysical certainty. Unlike Hicks, Burke enlists art in the cause of his moral beliefs. Rather than having separated art and life as Hicks claimed, Burke sees art as a fundamental expression of life. He is no realist in his epistemology, and that makes him unable to accept the mi­ metic theory of Marxian aesthetics. He can claim, nevertheless, that art must aid in the establishment of a just society. In this way art's rhetorical function for Burke is far broader than it is for many Marxists; art must not only convince, it must also create a body of beliefs to propagandize. Afterward, Burke might argue, the ideology having been established, an age of objective art will arise. Then the artist need no longer create his world view; he will only need to rhapsodize about it. At this stage Burke's theory would be more in conformity with Marxian doctrine. Again unlike Hicks, and even Parrington, Burke apparently never had a strong faith in the dialectic, at least not as a determining force that drives history inevitably toward the socialist society. On the other hand, he has a stronger faith than either of those men in the power of art to give shape to a "shapeless" society. His emphasis is on action, on symbolic action, the structuring of the mind—which for Burke is the same as the structuring of the real world. Yet this leads to the greatest fault of Burke's theory, the expansiveness of his con­ ceptions. He sees literature as a broad spectrum of linguistic potentialities ranging from the narrowly contextual creation of "pure" poems to the openly rhetorical efforts to persuade to a certain belief. Along the way the one begins to fade into the other, and, as R. P. Blackmur claims, this makes his theory of

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

literature so broad as to include without clear distinction an ode by Keats and Hitler's Mein KampfJs The Communist Manifesto is treated just in this manner. It is a kind of persuasive "poem" that creates a new ideology. Burke has been convinced, but his conviction is founded upon the power of language and the order of "myth." It is hardly the conviction of a true Marxian materialist. Attitudes toward history are, then, man-made attitudes. The power of the crea­ tive intellect is the center of Burke's attention, and this makes him suspect in the eyes of the Marxian theorist. Ultimately, Burke's Marxism is very much like that of Edmund Wilson; it is a matter of choice, a moral decision. So it seems to be with most American Marxists; faith in the dialectic is tenuous, founded upon deep moral convictions that see necessity in broad ethical terms rather than as a fatalism. Perhaps in the long run Burke belongs with the historicists we will discuss in the next chapter, those who assert man's powers to truly make a brave new world.

Chapter V

The Creative Mind and Literary Prophecy The Critical Heritage of Van Wyck Brooks He stops upon this threshold, As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized. WALLACE STEVENS , "To

An Old Philosopher in Rome"

The placement of this chapter violates whatever hint of chro­ nology might have been evoked by Chapters III and IV, but a chronological study of historicism has never really been my aim. Thus I would note that both Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks influenced some of the critics who have so far occupied our attentions, particularly Vernon Parrington; yet they, along with Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford, form a continuing tradition of aesthetic theory that extends into the present day. They may serve, then, as foils for understanding many of the theories discussed in Part I and also as figures who anticipate much of the "new historicism" to be analyzed in Part II. Their placement here is a matter of theoretical and not historical necessity. I must add, however, that my empha­ sis on theory conflicts with a tendency on the part of Bourne, Brooks, and Wilson to withdraw from abstract philosophizing. The man of letters for Brooks is an artist rather than a philo­ sophic system-builder. Imagination and not reason is the pri­ mary faculty of mind, and culture is seen as an aesthetic con­ struct. Moreover, the Brooksian approach reflects an intense moral consciousness and often a passionate nationalism. This moral consciousness and nationalism are neither dog­ matic nor jingoistic. They are, broadly speaking, part of the temper of the twenties and thirties, an expression of the quest for a cultural heritage amidst the chaos of the "melting pot."

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

Of course this search is older than either Bourne or Brooks, but it was unusually acute in those decades preceding the "Great Depression" which gave birth to their aesthetic con­ jectures. The question of the shape of the national heritage is essentially moral; it necessitates a consideration of universal value systems. This was Parrington's greatest over-simplifica­ tion: to read the complexities of a national morality wholly in politico-economic terms. For the Marxists the shape of the nation was identical with the outline of moral law; to know the Truth was also to know Goodness and Beauty. This too, I hope we have seen, tends to be reductive. There was, however, no dearth of attempts to define these moral and cultural laws from different ideological convictions. They range in style and interest from William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, a loose collection of lyrical essays, to Constance Rourke's "The Roots of American Culture," a study of American folk­ ways. In addition, the list might well reach back to the auto­ biographical writings of the historian Henry Adams. It would be foolish not to see the graceful hand of Emerson and the vigorous gestures of Whitman behind this tradition, but no one seems more symptomatic of the American cultural crisis at the fin de siecle than Henry Adams. This is not to say that Adams's interests were narrowly nationalistic. Speaking of himself in the third person in The Education he describes his approach to history in terms of his theory of "relations": Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity." With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better.1 It is the attitude expressed that is important to us in this study. The theory of "relations" derives from his "Dynamic Theory of History"; it is founded on a skeptical epistemology that

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depicts the historian as the primary focal point of historical explanation, for knowledge arises from a complex interrela­ tionship between man and his natural surroundings. From the beginning of organic existence his [Man's] con­ sciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness; and . . . the rise of his faculties from a lower power to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the function of assimilating and storing out­ side force or forces.

. . . but as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until he succumbs to their excess.2 This is the same devastating sense of movement from "Unity" to "Multiplicity," from the compactness of organized sensibility to the expansiveness of chaotic sensibility, that lay behind James's and Parrington's "search for form." It is a matter of moral rather than political necessity, or, at the least, we can say that the moral questions precede the political. Adams speaks of the "education of the new American" as an epistemological struggle to come to terms with the new multi­ plicity, to expand one's sensibilities to encompass the contradic­ tions.3 The alternative, and Adams's sense of his own fate, is to be swallowed in the "abyss of ignorance." All of this expresses the challenge of the "new American," and it was reflected in many phases of American culture. Above all it was a task for the creative mind, the symbol-making mind that Adams himself spoke of.# It was in this spirit, and per­ haps directly supported by James Harvey Robinson's call for a "new American history," that Van Wyck Brooks proposed his * Adams refers to the mind's symbol-making powers throughout, but the full philosophic sense of the historian's struggle to unify the multi­ plicity is outlined in Chapter 31 of The Education, pp. 449-61.

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

theory of the "usable past." The goal of cultural-historical studies, Brooks argued, should be to "bring about, for the first time, that sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspiration which is the best promise of a national culture."4 It is history as a "continuous present," considered as a guide for the future with lines extending "forward and backward" as in Adams's historical methodology. Thus as Norman Foerster points out: Historical criticism becomes long distance prophecy in the writing of such men as Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Mumford, who even when dealing with the past and the present, are never historians in the ordinary sense, but idealists viewing past and present in the light of a fairer future.5 We should pause here to distinguish between the prophetic tendencies of the Bourne-Brooks tradition and those of the Marxian critics. The Marxist claims to "know" the future be­ cause he can determine the rational dialectic of human culture; Brooks asserts the need of a revised or reconstructed tradition in order to build out a new culture. The former is passive as a theory, but is frequently accompanied by pragmatic activism; the latter is active as theory but given to a kind of Ivory Tower passivism. Vernon Parrington, oddly enough, occupies a me­ diating position between the two. Insofar as he sought to discover a dialectic in the progress of American thought, a dialectic that seemed to be superior to the creative force of individual men, he was very much like the Marxists. Yet there is that other side to Parrington, and it is the more significant. His emphasis on the "creative intellect," an idea most as­ suredly reflecting the influence of Van Wyck Brooks, saw the man of letters as a vital force in the making of culture. Recently, Henry Steele Commager, contrasting American and European traditions of nationalism, remarked that "the sentiment of American nationalism was, to an extraordinary degree, a literary creation, and that the national memory was a literary and, in a sense, a contrived memory."6 There is no doubt that for Bourne and Brooks cultural history was very

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

closely associated with literature, but literature as an aesthetic object rather than Parrington's socio-economic document. Bernard De Voto attacked Brooks for this idea, calling it the "literary fallacy" and claiming it assumes "that a culture may be understood and judged solely by means of its literature."7 This is, however, a far more fit judgment of Parrington than Brooks, for De Voto misses a really crucial distinction. Par­ rington's approach is the narrower; the "creative intellect" all too often is caught up in Parrington's simplistic thematicism and is little more than the voice of "progressive" ideas. For Brooks the artist's role was religious and not simply intellec­ tual. He believed, as Sherman Paul tells us, "in the 'visionary leader'; artists were the pathfinders of society, and by means of literature they would meet the social and religious problems which he felt were at the heart of the civilized modern world."8 Parrington found that aesthetic values got in the way of his interest in ideas, but Brooks conceived of aesthetic creation as perhaps the most vital force in human society. It is most likely Parrington's hard-headed singleness of purpose that enabled him, as Richard Ruland claims, to succeed "in doing what Van Wyck Brooks never could," to provide "a coherent usable past for the liberals."9 The programmatic nature of Main Currents made it immediately more appealing to Marxian theorists than Brooks's socio-religious enthusiasm. Brooks's ar­ gument is an embellishment on the plea for a creative cultural force issued by Matthew Arnold; man's last, best hope rests in the united effort of criticism and poetry. The same attitude, interestingly enough, pervaded the New Criticism and most especially the philosophic writings of John Crowe Ransom, whose response to what he saw as the decaying modern world was a turn toward art and the creative life. Van Wyck Brooks, then, presents us with a kind of aesthetic historicism which anticipates the revival of a "new" historicism in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Essentially it sees art as creative of life, which is just the reverse of the Marxian historicism that collapses art into life. The latter is necessarily mimetic and propagandistic; the Marxian identity of the aesthetic-formal and the thematic-

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

existential leaves only history with any truly creative powers. Brooks's sense of the creative life is completely free of mimesis. Like Croce, Brooks succeeds in aestheticizing history. ι The philosophic background of the creative prophet notion is broad and difficult to trace. Most certainly Croce's aesthetic historicism offers a parallel development of essentially the same idea, and behind all of this stands the whole tradition of German romantic epistemology. In America the philosophy of George Santayana may have provided a general foundation, some moods or tones that were later adopted by Bourne and Brooks. Santayana makes himself very clear on the subject of art's powers to alter our lives. "The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature," he says, "lies in what they can help us to become."10 The directness of this statement, however, does not imply a simple version of moral instruction; it is founded on a fully developed epistemology. The great function of poetry . . . is . . . to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensa­ tion and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of the soul.11 The poet's goal is to bring about perfect "harmony between our nature and our experience." "Beauty is the pledge of the pos­ sible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."12 This is no transcendental escape, no mystical vision, but a dynamic act of the imagination that creates a sense of organic unity between the inner and outer worlds. The value of art is "intrinsic" to the act of creation itself. It is a measure of "happiness and civilization" in that it is con­ stitutive of our sense of oneness with the outer world. "Beauty and Tightness," Santayana tells us, "are relative to our judg­ ment and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

over her." Our experience of beauty, therefore, is not directly useful on the level of every day actions, and our judgment of beauty, our taste, is necessarily relative since it is a product of an individual act of imagination. Otherwise, the sameness of the mode of all creative acts would reduce everything to iden­ tity. This act of imagination he calls "spontaneous play" to distinguish it from the world of practical activities or "work."13 But it is "play" in Schiller's sense (or in the sense of psycho­ analysts like Erikson) and ultimately has a value that reaches beyond the "intrinsic," though a value one would not want to call pragmatic. Santayana always considered himself a classicist in the belief that "one must temper the fervor of youth with the discipline of age, one must make oneself by means of calculated choice."14 Such is the burden of his essay "Tradition and Practice" in which he discusses the merits of discipline and order.15 Since art can make no truth claims in the sense of reproducing life with minute fidelity or in the sense of revealing universal, transcendent meanings, the poet as harmonizer, as creator, becomes a kind of "prophet." "The experience imagined should be conceived as a destiny, governed by principles, and issuing in the discipline and enlightenment of the will."16 Hence, through a version of the Kantian categorical impera­ tive, an "as if" commitment, imaginative constructs become "disciplines" for man's volitional activity. It is on this basis that Santayana makes his famous identification of poetry and religion. Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with re­ ligion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive.17 He sees that poetry and religion are not true to life nor true to any transcendent meaning, but he asserts that both are neces­ sary constructs in that they can both "discipline" and "en­ lighten" the will. They are "beneficial" to man not just in the

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

imaginative act which is individual and solitary but also in the broader social realm of interrelated human actions. The emphasis is on dynamics, growth, creativity, and is in line with the objections voiced in what is probably his best known lecture, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philos­ ophy." There he condemns the tendency of American thought to adhere to the status quo, to be static and, therefore, dead. James Ballowe notes that this "denunciation of the genteel tradition in 1911 ... anticipated such dissident commentaries as that of Van Wyck Brooks in 'America's Coming of Age' (1915) and Randolph Bourne in 'Youth and Life' (1913) and 'The History of a Literary Radical' (1920)."18 Most certainly the rejection of the nineteenth-century dictatorship of "taste" is significant, but Santayana's more profound philosophic as­ sumptions about the nature of the creative imagination and the identity of poetry and religion also lie behind these essays of Bourne and Brooks. Brooks asks, "if we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?"19 The most significant thrust is toward "invention" and not mere discovery. It is a version of historical impressionism that makes everything in the past relative to the present, not by distorting "facts" but by creating a spiritual harmony between the human soul and its environ­ ment through a disciplined act of the creative imagination. There is nationalism blended with aesthetic historicism in this theory; the ultimate goal is to provide for the individual a sense of participation in his national past, a spiritual union with his fellow men. 2 Because the focus is on individual creative vision it frequently results in extravagant praise heaped upon the artist as "person." It is, after all, the artist's powerful creative imagination which leads us out of darkness. It is the beautiful world of the creative genius that prophesies our deliverance and enables the poet to stand nearest the deity. For those who saw in art a moral, instructive force the extension is all too easy. Perhaps the best

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

case in point is Randolph Bourne, in his theory and his legend. Whereas Santayana carefully differentiated the aesthetic faculty from other powers of the mind, that of social action for in­ stance, before he considered the broader and less direct social effects of the creative act, Bourne began by uniting aesthetic and social activity. Creative literature, he argued, must be put "in its proper place, making all 'culture' [artistic activity] serve its apprenticeship . . . as interpretation of things larger than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tide of society."20 This is the germ of aesthetic historicism: history is the product of artistic awareness. Bourne believed, as Sherman Paul says, that the "literary radical possesses an imagination at once aesthetic and sociological." Furthermore, by his own admission he never managed to equalize the balance that dipped heavily toward the social.21 Yet he does echo Santayana's "classicism." "If the classic means power with restraint, vitality with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out into the classic."22 Intensely moral in his revolutionary zeal, Bourne was never­ theless distrustful of sentimental, or what he called "selfconscious," moralizing. By this he meant the outmoded moral sentiments and ex cathedra pronouncements of the "genteel tradition." Again in a manner reminiscent of Santayana, he saw the creative personality as morally aware only when in im­ mediate contact or union with the world around him. He praised Dreiser because "as he reveals himself, it is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul."23 This is another, more vital, kind of self-consciousness. In Bourne's mind the creative genius's role in society makes him a social critic as artist. It is this critic-artist who saves us from our "cultural humil­ ity" by means of his controlled or "classic" creative passion. "The new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build out the future."24 The act of constructing a moral and social transcend-

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

ent continuity springs from the critic-artist's projection in his work of a sense of organic unity. What we read in his writings, therefore, is essentially an autobiography* The creative man as self-critic, Bourne argues, is at the same time a critic of society. These ideas were Bourne's most significant bequest to his im­ mediate posterity which Sherman Paul summarizes as: Autobiography was the mode he cherished, the staple thread of all his work, his way of being true to himself and his cir­ cumstances and of bearing witness, which makes his true inheritors not so much those who took over his topics as those who discovered for themselves the necessity and re­ sources of an autobiographical method.25

3 To be sure his "inheritors" did more than take over his "autobiographical method"; they extended to its fullest Bourne's concept of the critic as self-conscious artist, or in Paul's better term, the critic as "witness." Brooks's concept of the "creative life" enunciated in "America's Coming-of-Age"26 meant commitment of the whole man, through the creative imagination, to the task of revitalizing the spiritual life of America. The idea derives most directly from Walt Whitman, from what he had called "Personalism." The essence of this doctrine is the "development of well-rounded, healthy person­ alities in order that a more perfect democracy might be possible."27 Gorham Munson claims that the young critics of the nineteen-twenties who owed much to Randolph Bourne conceived of "criticism as an intellectual strategy," as the "manipulation of leading ideas in a definite campaign to achieve culture's larger objectives." They constantly reiterated "the great need for at least a handful of American writers [Bourne's critic-artists] to conceive of a higher perfection in * Ernst Cassirer in An Essay on Man, p. 52, describes this as essen­ tially a Goethean tradition. "Poetry is one of the forms in which a man may give the verdict on himself and his life. It is self-knowledge and self-criticism." In the hands of a sociological critic the "selfcriticism" is easily expanded into criticism of society itself.

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

life and in literature, far higher than any current standard, and to dedicate themselves to a quest of this higher perfection."28 But the tendency is to focus attention entirely on the creative personality. The critic-artist writes autobiography, offering himself as "witness" for a purer life. Lewis Mumford (who, by the way, did not know Bourne personally) claims that "Randolph Bourne was precious to us because of what he was, rather than because of what he had actually written."29 Largely as a result of the mistaken notion that he was per­ secuted for his anti-war sentiment, Bourne became a martyr in the eyes of many of his contemporaries and the historians who followed them. An article published in 1932 by Dorothy Teall assesses the factors that led to Bourne's rapid canonization. Her conclusion that, to paraphrase Van Wyck Brooks, the im­ mediate circle of Bourne's friends felt compelled to construct "a usable Randolph Bourne" seems quite accurate.30 For Brooks, Waldo Frank, and even Mumford, among others, Bourne was a kind of prophet who foretold the coming of social and political disaster. Mumford's awareness of his own myth-hunting is clearly articulated when he says, "one wants someone to seize the proper magnitude of Randolph Bourne, and to give him, as a living image and symbol some more durable means of existence."31 Bourne's legendary status made him public property, a free-floating symbol to be attached to a variety of causes. Yet we must wonder how far one may depart from the biographical facts as they are known. Samuel Sillen, writing in Masses and Mainstream sees (perhaps I should say seizes) Bourne as a martyred Marxist revolutionary.32 But Lillian SchlisseI and Edward Dahlberg both argue convinc­ ingly that Bourne's opposition "to the fetish of politics and what he called the 'new orthodoxies of propaganda'" made him unlikely material for radical Marxism.83 Ultimately, we do not need to spend much time asking whether the legend accurately reflects Bourne's literary or critical production; it does not, but that is largely irrelevant. What is significant is the fact that Bourne's own theories of the role of the creative personality, amplified by Brooks's idea of the "creative life," seem to justify

CREATIVE M I N D A N D LITERARY P R O P H E C Y

the myth-making. It is, they might argue, what a few men have made of Randolph Bourne that is his greatest value.* 4 Van Wyck Brooks's essay, "America's Coming-of-Age" (1915), serves as a key to the aesthetic-social tradition of which he and Bourne were members. On the one hand, Brooks admonishes poets of the school of Longfellow for moralizing in tag-end lines because such is not the truly immediate ex­ pression of creative emotion or "personality."34 In equal meas­ ure he rejects the dogmatic moralism of Professors More and Babbitt because it lacks a dynamic relationship with the cul­ tural moment.85 On the other hand, Edgar Allan Poe's mere expression of his individual personality is equally condemned. For Brooks, and later for Vernon Parrington, Poe was an "aesthete" whose failure in social consciousness was a serious moral deficiency; he argues that "the mind can work healthily only when it is essentially in touch with the society of its own age. No matter what unknown region it presses, it must have a point of relativity in the common reason of its time and place." Brooks sees the works of Poe and Hawthorne as romantic, even neurotic, retreats from a society hostile to their ideals.f "They neither enriched society nor were enriched by it. They were driven to create and inhabit worlds of their own— diaphanous private worlds of mist and twilight."36 * Erik Erikson argues that the growth of legends is in itself crucial for an understanding of any individual in society. Concerning some of the legends of Martin Luther's youth he says, "If some of it is legend, so be it; the making of legend is as much part of the scholarly rewriting of history as it is part of the original facts used in the work of scholars. We are thus obliged to accept half-legend as half-history, provided only that a reported episode does not contradict other well-established facts; persists in having the ring of truth; and yields a meaning consistent with psychological theory" (Young Man Luther, p. 37). fMany of Brooks's more radical statements about Poe and Haw­ thorne were later modified if not wholly repudiated—often under severe attack from other critics. Brooks's tendency to generalize hastily leads him to overstate his case, but our interest here is in a developing critical attitude which largely remains consistent even when mellowed by age.

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

Although Brooks frequently sounds like Parrington, to in­ terpret his approach to society in this way would be to miss the main thrust. Parrington, with the notable exception of his treatment of Cabell, rejected the aesthetic dream world of romantics like Poe and Hawthorne. Brooks wanted to find a position between the dream and reality. He called for the creative genius to construct a "personal programme" which would "correspond on the plane of ideas to style on the plane of letters." This "personal programme" is actually "a point of view in criticism . . . a working-plan, a definition of issues, which at once renders it impossible to make one's peace with the world."37 Brooks never attempted, unfortunately, to give this program the doctrinal status it would have gained in the hands of a Marxist, or even a Parrington. Frederick J. Hoffman argues that like many of the critics of his day, Brooks was gen­ erally skeptical of systems. "The twenties," Hoffman says, was "an age of individualists, who pieced together fragments of books, scraps of conversation and new recipes, without regard for logical consistency."38 In this, Van Wyck Brooks was per­ haps most representative. Rene Wellek, in a fine analytical article on Brooks's critical methodology, attempts very sym­ pathetically to find a consistent theoretical thread in the Brooks canon; but finally he succeeds only in demonstrating that there is very little "system" to Brooks's aesthetics, and what system exists is full of contradictions. The presence of such contradictions and critical limitations, however, should not bar us from seeing the general consistency in the broader implications of Brooks's critical thought. If Wellek proves that Brooks was not a sophisticated philosopher, he also reveals to us the central aim of Brooks's writing. "He seems to me rather a romantic nationalist, with all the liberal associations of nineteenth-century nationalism, who would like to restore literature to its former glories as a national voice and critics to the role of national awakeners."39 There is no question that Brooks echoes the Arnoldian and Santayanan sense of philosophic and religious needs answered

CREATIVE M I N D A N D LITERARY PROPHECY

through art. The conspicuous heroes in his writing are Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, and he explicitly takes up the staff of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," turning it against Max Eastman's The Literary Mind by asserting the vital role that the artist plays in the cultural revolution.40 What Wellek does not sufficiently emphasize is the fu­ sion of artistic and critical activities in Brooks's attempt to restore unity to the national culture. Brooks argues that "poets and novelists and critics are the pathfinders of society; to them belongs the vision without which the people perish."41 He be­ lieves that "the mind is a flower that has an organic connection with the soil it springs from."42 The archetypal figure in this struggle, as I have said, is Walt Whitman* who, we are told, "for the first time, gave us the sense of something organic in American life." Whitman both artistically and personally molded the disparate elements of American culture into a unity, giving it "a certain focal centre in the consciousness of its own character." For Brooks America is a vast, "unformed, flimsy, tangled" thing, "everywhere unchecked, uncharted, un­ organized . . . chaos. It is a welter of life which has not been worked into an organism."43 This "welter of life" is the raw material for the critic-artist's act of unification, and such a view of life leaves little doubt as to the true creativity of the critic-artist's organizing powers.f The critic-artist is also a reformer,44 and as a reformer he is not likely to be openly received by society. Lacking the suf* Brooks seems to be undecided about the full merit of Whitman. In "Letters and Leadership," only three years after "America's Coming-ofAge," he says of Whitman that "having embraced life, he was unable really to make anything of it" {Sketches in Criticism, p. 178). f Quoting from Whitman's Democratic Vistas he notes the power of art to "penetrate" and "shape," to "construct, sustain," or "demolish." All of these terms carry with them a strong hint of "aggregation" or a power somewhat short of pure creativity, yet it is difficult to tell how literally we can take Brooks's language. In the long run the tone seems to indicate a clear opposition to purely mechanical forms of artistic activity (see Sketches in Criticism, p. 179).

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

ficient will and visionary determination, the poet can be sub­ dued by culture. This strong sense of the critic-artist's duty in the early Brooks produced his famous Ordeal of Mar\ Twain and the less noted but similar Pilgrimage of Henry James, both of which discuss at length the stultifying effect of American culture on the creative mind. In the long run, of course, more condemnation falls on the critic-artist for not facing his respon­ sibility than on the resistance of culture. For Brooks, the true creative genius is by definition one who stands against the status quo. "It is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation."45 The critic-artist, through his imaginative act, becomes the "cause" of a "regener­ ation" of society.46 In this self-expressive or autobiographical theory there is an essential historicism. Every human expression allows us to discover in it the creative personality that produced it, and this personality is firmly and uniquely embedded in history. But historical understanding is incomplete until the interplay be­ tween the present interpreter and the expressive personality of the past is established. This interplay is a union of two minds, separate in time, and individual, yet joined in a common bond within the struggle to know the meaning of human existence. Brooks would agree that the critic striving to build a "usable past" experiences what Dilthey calls "rediscovery." Understanding is the rediscovery of the I in the Thou; the mind rediscovers itself at ever higher levels of connected­ ness; this sameness of the mind in the I and the Thou and in every subject of a community, in every system of culture and, finally, in the totality of mind and universal history, makes the working together of the different processes in the human studies possible.47 This "infinitely creative power of the spirit," as Meinecke calls it, provides the necessary transcendental principle for an his­ torical continuity by binding together man's struggles toward

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

a meaningful existence. It asserts that history will always be rewritten, but it rejects any subjectivist despair by further asserting the possibility of a meaningful interplay of historical perspectives. Once more adopting the role of antagonist, Bernard De Voto accuses Brooks of being "circular" in his practical criticism— of claiming that "there are no great American writers because American society is not great, and the proof that American society is not great is that it has produced no great writers."48 Brooks should reply, "That is just it!" The theory is deliber­ ately open in that it allows the critic as artist to be the judge of the artist as critic. It is only by knowing the men of a society that we can know that society. Rene Wellek judges the method harshly; the first volume of the Ma\ers and Finders series is, he says, nothing more than "patching together quotations, draw­ ing little miniatures, retelling anecdotes and describing cos­ tumes and faces."49 Wellek is disturbed by the lack of what he calls a "critical spirit," but he and Brooks speak a wholly dif­ ferent language on this point. Brooks has no intention of criticizing in the manner of making historical or aesthetic judgments; rather, as Edmund Wilson aptly puts it, he has "attempted to convey the precise qualities of the literary per­ sonalities of his New Englanders by compounding a kind of paste out of their writings."50 It is a version of Crocean historicism very similar to that propounded by R. G. Collingwood; its central methodology consists in the attempt to rethink the thoughts of earlier generations.51 Wilson, in reviewing the second volume of Makers and Finders, is not fully in agree­ ment with Brooks's approach; he finds the apparent lack of interest in matters of style (he suggests that Brooks was not a good judge of the technical aspects of poetry) a serious limita­ tion. He admits, nevertheless, that it is one of the most striking proofs of Mr. Brooks's posses­ sion of the historical imagination that he is able to see the events of the past, not merely in retrospect, that he does not merely estimate facts, sum up tendencies, compose obitu-

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

aries, but that he can show us movements and books as they loomed upon the people to whom they were new.

[New England: Indian Summer] is one of the key books of our period, which places us in time and space and tells us what to think of ourselves.52 Wilson has far better understood Brooks's design. The "his­ torical imagination" grasps the whole of a culture, organically "weaving a tapestry of the literary life."53 The results are in passages like the following. This was the summer world, bright and fresh, brimming with life, where Mark Twain had hunted wild turkeys and squirrels as a boy, where the locust-trees, as he recalled them, had always been in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Thoreau was living in his hut at Walden and Cooper was writing The Deerslayer in the days that Mark Twain brought back in Huc\ Finn. 54 Beyond the "patching" of quotations lies the vision of the cul­ tural whole brought into the present. It is the artistic quality of the act of historical criticism that matters, and this is justifica­ tion of Sherman Paul's claim that Makers and Finders is Brooks's finest work of art and his "largest contribution to the usable past by the creation of which he hoped, finally, to re­ deem our culture."55 Brooks's criticism goes beyond the mere analysis of style; such matters are submerged in an aesthetics of historical awareness that asserts the historical relativism of individual conceptualizations while it also exalts the transcend­ ing process of the historical imagination.

5 It is Edmund Wilson who provides the most mature, meas­ ured, and finally most consistent version of the Brooksian ap­ proach. Wilson's career has been a long one marked by many moods, but his personal commitment to the elucidation of literature's socio-historical meanings and values assures us of a

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

continuity in his critical theory. He is that most admirable, if elusive, critic who continues to grow while remaining faithful to his first principles. We find him eclectically drawing on Marx, Freud, Parrington, and Brooks to explain his conviction that literature participates in some essential way in the forming of culture. Yet Wilson, like Brooks and Bourne, eschews sys­ tematic critical methodologies; he makes use of the systems constructed by others in an unsystematic way. For this reason he frequently appears to be shallow; his theoretical statements approach but rarely seem to penetrate into the real mysteries of human creativity. It is a task, I am certain, that he willingly leaves to others, and in some ways Edmund Wilson is most impressive in the manner he anticipates the many diverse and exciting developments of the last two decades in fields like anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. With Wilson, as with other critics, I am rejecting the "developmental" ap­ proach in search of some "essential" attitudes which make him appropriate to this study. This particular instance is made somewhat more comfortable by Sherman Paul's study of Wilson's full career, which I will have occasion to call on despite some minor differences in our approaches. To be sure, the best overview of Wilson comes from those who have consciously followed him, or through him, the Brooksian approach. Sherman Paul is certainly preeminent among these, a more academic and scholarly Wilson, perhaps, but nonetheless a defender of the faith. For him, Wilson and Brooks belong to a strong Emersonian tradition: "individual­ istic and self-reliant, tough and resilient, without any de­ pendence on religion,"56 or, I would add, without dependence on any deterministic or transcendental system of cosmic mean­ ings and values. For Alfred Kazin, who dedicates his Brooksian volume of literary vignettes, Contemporaries, to Wilson, "Wilson is not a reporter but a literary artist driven by histor­ ical imagination—like Henry Adams and Carlyle." That is, he is an Adams or a Carlyle not in point of view but in man­ ner; his "sense of historical contrast is documented entirely from his own life and that of his family in relation to Amer-

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

ica."57 Most assuredly this resembles the autobiographical history of Henry Adams, and it partakes of a moral con­ sciousness which makes Wilson another example of the critic as "witness." Nor is Wilson untouched by the tradition of Vernon Parrington. The dedication of Axel's Castle to Christian Gauss, Wilson's teacher and life-long friend, attributes to Gauss the "idea of what literary criticism ought to be—a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them."58 In a somewhat later essay, "The Histor­ ical Interpretation of Literature," Wilson announces: "I want to talk about the historical interpretation of literature in its social, economic and political aspects."59 Still later, in Patriotic Gore, we sense that the criticism of literature itself has been left behind; rather, Wilson is seeking to study cultural ideas, focused on contemporary problems, via literature. It must be granted that in these three works, so widely dispersed through­ out Wilson's career, the author clearly sets forth differing aims, yet they are tied together by those fundamental assumptions that make up the "essential" Edmund Wilson. In Patriotic Gore, where he is most like Parrington, he relies mainly on diaries and other forms of autobiographical literature as sources for cultural ideas. He avoids all major figures, and he is fre­ quently guilty of what Charles Frank defines as an overriding interest in literature's depiction of "real people,"60 what I would call a rather simplistic mimetic theory. Following Parrington even further, he has seen fit on some occasions to deny that he ever intended to be a literary critic or literary historian.61 It is not surprising, therefore, that although Wilson belongs in the American Marxian tradition of the thirties, he never escapes the influence of the more romantic Parrington, and of Bourne and Brooks. Wilson was never committed to the pro­ grammatic doctrines of the Communist Party. In To the Fin­ land Station he undertakes a study of evolving historical atti­ tudes from Michelet to Lenin, and there is in this study a noticeable trace of Marxian dialectical determinism. The book is designed to convince its readers dramatically, if not philo-

CREATIVE M I N D A N D LITERARY P R O P H E C Y

sophically, that Lenin's triumph was an inevitable, and hence justified, historical occurrence. Yet it is quite clear that history's movements, though powerful and transcendent, are structured by human exploits. The Marxian dialectic, Wilson claims, is valuable as "myth," as a "semi-materialistic system" tainted by an "element of mysticism." The triad of the Dialectic has thus had its real validity as a symbol for the recurring insurgence of the young and grow­ ing forces of life against the old and the sterile, for coopera­ tive instincts of society against the barbarous and the anarchic.62 Throughout his career Wilson has remained a spokesman for youth, representing progress and moral awareness, and against age, representing repression and stasis, but this hardly achieves the proportions of Hegelian dialectics. Much like Granville Hicks, Wilson makes the belletristic profession serve political ends. The literary critic is always a critic of society (or ought to be), and he is concerned with the condition of man. Yet there is a bifurcation of interests here that renders Wilson temperamentally unsuited for Marxism. He adamantly refuses to allow imaginative literature to serve propagandistic ends.63 Marxism, as a political philosophy, he argues, cannot tell us anything about art nor can art effectively promote Marxism.64 Essentially, Wilson sees Marxism itself as an imaginative historical creation, concerned with life as is literature. They are, then, complementary human endeavors, both challenging society to correct its ills. As a consequence of this separation of art and philosophy he attacks the Marxian critics' mindless hero-worship of writers like Dos Passos despite his own praise of Dos Passos as an artist. This in part explains Wilson's rejection of the Marxian myth of Providential His­ tory, the all-encompassing dialectic, for it limits creative action and distorts the art work's status as art.65 In this respect the Marxist is guilty of a reductive criticism much like that of the "new humanists" More and Babbitt. Their critical meth­ odology leads to a gnostic arrogance which seems to make the

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

critic, safely harbored within his closed world, arbiter of all human productions. Christian and Marxian eschatology are both stifling. This is not to say that Wilson banishes moral considerations from the criticism of literature. Quite the con­ trary; he simply avoids systematizing his moral standards. They remain generally consistent, however, for Wilson is an untiring advocate of political and economic equality, imagina­ tive confrontation with life, and intellectual questioning. It is his intellectualism, his interest in the rational and creative powers of the mind, that opens Wilson to the most severe attacks from writers who consider themselves politically more committed. Norman Podhoretz, whom we might label a non-academic son of Van Wyck Brooks, accuses Wilson of ivory-towerism.66 Admittedly, the same charge can be put to the entire Bourne-Brooks-Wilson-Mumford tradition, for it is, after all, the creative man of letters and not the politician or the revolutionary whom these men propose as the savior of society. Wilson, following Brooks, wants to hold the line somewhere between the imaginative life and the activist life, between dream and reality. Each is a valid commitment, al­ though the former tends to dominate the latter. Bringing the two together is the central philosophic and aesthetic problem of Wilson's version of historicism. He cannot accept the ex­ tremes—neither Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam's Axel in his selfisolation nor Rimbaud's retreat from art into stark reality. Nor will he accept the aesthetic solution of Granville Hicks where art is absorbed into the dialectic. His dualism is evident from the very beginning; in Axel's Castle he defends the achievement of symbolism, but he bor­ rows a page from Marxian historicism to explain (and explain away) this artistic phenomenon. Symbolism, Wilson argues, was a reaction to the industrialized and pragmatic world of the latter nineteenth century; thus it is a manifestation of the Zeitgeist. More significantly, he claims that the Symbolist "escape" from the real world is merely a passing phase; their day is over. Continuing his historical explanation, Wilson proposes that the Symbolist movement should be followed by

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

what sounds like an Hegelian synthesis of thesis and antithesis, a union of "Symbolism and Naturalism," which would bring about a new phase of literary and social history.67 In this he anticipates by several decades the similar theory of Harry Levin, and both men find Joyce's Ulysses to be the first great work of the new era. If we express the synthesis of Symbolism and Naturalism in terms of the union of the ideal and the material then Wilson is rather firmly in the Marxian world. The real difference is that Wilson is aware of his idealistic leanings whereas most Marxists (including Marx himself) forever deny them. Yet the real hero of Wilson's historicism is Michelet and not Hegel or Marx. Michelet represents historiography as a "work of the imagination"; in the tradition of Vico (which includes Croce) the writing of history is seen as akin to the writing of a novel. The historian, Wilson abstracts from Michelet, is confronted by two major problems: i) "the nerve-trying task . . . of fusing disparate materials, of indicating the interrelations between diverse forms of human activity"; and 2) the necessity of re­ capturing "the peculiar shape and color of history as it must have seemed to the men who lived it." The goal of the his­ torian, to use Wilson's own Romantic terminology, is to picture the continuous and "organic character of society." Of Michelet, Wilson says, "he was the man who, above all others, had sup­ plied the French of his time with a past."68 There is no trace of dialectical materialism in this version of aesthetic histori­ cism, and Wilson has clearly repeated Brooks's call for the construction of a "usable past." He even goes so far as to imply that Michelet is the "novelist" of French history in the same manner as Proust is the "historian" of his own personal past. Wilson's aesthetic historicism, complexly derived from so many sources, is never easy to categorize. The fundamental dualism that underlies his approach is subject to startling metamorphoses under the stress of various influences; and, therefore, the pairs Symbolism and Naturalism, idealism and materialism, dream and reality are accurate but less than synon­ ymous expressions of the "essential" Edmund Wilson. More-

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

over, Wilson frequently pushes beyond his masters into some­ what uncharted ground thereby making a study of influences only partially effective. In Patriotic Gore he undertakes to de­ scribe the relationship between literary style, as a structured lin­ guistic expression, and the social attitudes which produced it. The result is a study of individual writing styles in terms of a national life-style. The objective roughly parallels the historicism of Roy Harvey Pearce, but tends to be more linguistic in its orientation. Wilson attributes the disapearance of more ornate prose forms to the influence of the Civil War and industrialization.69 The new post-war society puts its emphasis on expediency, clarity, and simplicity; and only those writers like Henry Adams and Henry James, who were fundamentally out of tune with their place in history, resisted the trends. The discussion lacks depth; we cannot help but wish that Wilson had bolstered his arguments with theoretical projections similar to those offered by men like Noam Chomsky and Claude LeviStrauss. But Wilson again avoids high-level philosophizing; his immediate problem is to see the creative man in his social context, and this does not require a structural analysis of society and its linguistic forms. Nevertheless, Wilson's interests here point to another, and perhaps finally more central, expression of his own dualism, the psycho-social dichotomy of the inner and the outer worlds. A thin but continuous thread of psychoanalytic theory, most clearly derived from Freud, has persistently run through all of Wilson's criticism* This has given him the advantage over men like Parrington, for he can improve upon Parrington's instinctive reaction to Whitman's prosody by directly studying the author's style as a reflection of the structure of his world * A somewhat unsympathetic treatment of Wilson's debt to Freud is given in Louis Fraiberg's Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criti­ cism. Fraiberg is intent on demonstrating how far critics like Burke, Brooks, Wilson, and Trilling depart from the master, and he is un­ concerned with the socio-historical nature of these critics. A somewhat milder treatment of Brooks's Freudianism can be found in Claudia C. Morrison's Freud and the Critic.

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

vision. He transforms Brooks's heavy use of quotations to re­ veal past attitudes into a more personal (we should remember Brooks's call for a "personal programme") and imaginadve re-creation of the past. He has learned from Parrington and Brooks the limits of his critical activity, and he has perceived better than they the potential for studying society via literature. Others have developed this approach with more philosophic skill. Lionel Trilling couples Freud and Vico to effectively explore the cultural meanings and values of literature. Simi­ larly, critics like Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Leon Edel have developed their own variations of this approach. Wilson aims toward what might be called a "total act of creative interpretation"; it involves the historian, psychoanalyst, political commentator, and aesthetician in a cooperative enterprise, or, ideally, is accomplished by one critic capable of all these approaches. The project is certainly am­ bitious, and it suffers from its own undisciplined nature. At its most irritating it eventuates in a literary elitism, wholly justi­ fying Podhoretz's charge.70 Yet this psycho-socio-historical criticism (if I may be pardoned for using so clumsy a term) springs from a truly significant insight. Wilson sees culture and its traditions as products of a psychodrama wherein man is caught between the inner and outer worlds. To this extent he anticipates the more profound theory of Erik Erikson on the drama of individual ego development. For Erikson, as for Wilson, the search for individual (ego) identity takes place within a closed social context; man in every human expression, in every human act, is conditioned by his social tradition and works to free himself from that tradition.71 Each individual artistic expression is a profound kind of "play" (in Schiller's and Erikson's usage) wherein man struggles to order his existence, to balance the demands of inner and outer worlds. The construction of a "usable past" reflects man's need for a tradition, but it is a tradition that is composed in a free creative act expressing a personal vision and satisfying the ego's need to "master" the data of experience. Ultimately, Wilson's concern for the artist is a social concern;

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

the true artist is one who stands in and opposed to his own world. It is this opposition which makes possible the creative struggle. The critic enters this world of mutual love and oppo­ sition in an effort to understand it; but he brings with him his own social milieu, and this provides the ground for his critical act. He must join the two worlds without denying each its own particular existence, and in repeated acts of this nature the critic provides for his readers an historical context dense and vibrant in its creative potential. The critic and artist become joint partners in what Sherman Paul tags "the literary voca­ tion." This is Wilson's ideal, characterized by Alfred Kazin as "cultural reminiscences,"72 but we must understand that such reminiscences push beyond the limits of memory. The critic, like Henry Adams, projects himself backward and for­ ward through time to "weave a tapestry" of historical meaning. In so doing the critic-artist writes autobiography in order to build a "usable past." Moreover, the "uses" of such a past go beyond mere ego satisfaction; the truly "useful" past provides a guide for future action, functions as a categorical imperative for moral behavior, as Santayana claimed. Admittedly, Wilson is not compulsively oriented toward "literary prophecy" as were Bourne, Brooks, and especially Mumford. Nevertheless, it is clear that the man possessing the creative imagination of Michelet inevitably becomes the best "witness" to what Dilthey called "the possibilities of the future."73 6 The "prophetic" aspect of the Brooksian approach rests on the Santayanan idea that the historical imagination can con­ struct a tradition that will be the foundation of a future social "harmony." It is neither the kind of futurism implicit in the Marxist's certainty of a dialectical system nor a kind of mystical fortunetelling: in the long run it is literary and in a peculiar way pragmatic, founded on the keen awareness of moral-social necessity. The prophet is, in the religious sense, a witness in his creative life of a better way. The technique is autobiograph­ ical in the broadest meaning of the term, not simply in the

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

recounting of past activities (though it is that too), but in the more difficult sense of expressing the author's whole soul in the creative acts of his imagination. Sherman Paul feels that Brooks was quite successful at fulfilling the dictates of his own theory, at least in the early years of his career. "During the years from 1909-25, he was very much the 'American scholar,' or, since he himself had not yet recognized his place in the Emersonian tradition, a 'great personality' such as he admired, one who dominated his age and transformed its character."74 Lewis Mumford takes Brooks's concepts to their extremes. This makes Mumford at once more systematic and more fran­ tic; his sense of imminent decay and destruction results in an intense emphasis upon the artist's moral obligations. "The future of our civilization," he tells us, "depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured."75 The zeal of his mission is often evangelic; the tone of The Conduct of Life, like the tone of much of his writing, has about it the shrill urgency of the pulpit. "To understand the nature of this situa­ tion," he says in the first chapter, "to extend the knowledge and to recreate the values necessary for our survival and our salvation, is in fact the main purpose of the present book."78 It would not be difficult to argue that such was the "main purpose" of most of Lewis Mumford's writings. Howard Par­ sons reads The Conduct of Life as above all a religious book, as "apocalyptic."77 Mumford conceives the creative act to be most centrally a vision of an attainable social end. Moreover, the vision must produce "a pervasive teleology or finalism, uniting the cosmic and human, . . . [which] becomes our operational postulate and living faith."78 The artist answers Shelley's call to be the "legislator" of mankind, and Mumford, like Shelley, sees artistic truth as essentially higher than that of science. It is constitutive of a social order that "appears" to be ideological and that oilers us "operational" principles for the conduct of our daily lives. The emphasis upon individual creativity led Bourne and

A M E R I C A N HISTORICIST TRADITION

Brooks into the cult of personality; nor does Mumford com­ pletely escape this lure. He is a full partner in the discipleship of Emerson, and he writes with fervor about men of genius like Wren, Sullivan, Richardson, Whitman, Melville, and, of course, Randolph Bourne. Yet his concept of a totally inclusive organic creation, which goes far beyond Wilson's idea of a total act of creative interpretation, denies such individuality. This fate he shares with those Marxists whose dialectical pro­ gression is swallowed up in the final synthesis.79 To be sure, Mumford even calls his theory of creativity the "philosophy of open synthesis"—"open" because it is all-inclusive. He ex­ presses his own Brooksian desire to stand between the dream and reality, but the "real" loses all distinction as the "alternating rhythm" of creation achieves its final unity. The mission of creative thought is to gather into it all the living sources of its day, all that is vital in the practical life, all that is intelligible in science, all that is relevant in the social heritage and, recasting these things into new forms and symbols, to react upon the blind drift of convention and habit and routine. Life flourishes only in this alternating rhythm of dream and deed: when one appears without the other, we can look forward to a shrinkage, a lapse, a devitali­ zation. Idealism is a bad name for this mission; it is just as correct to call it realism; since it is part of the natural history of the human mind. What is valid in idealism is the belief in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence.80 Mumford must finally pay the price of consistency by blur­ ring all distinctions in an organic identity. Santayana carefully sought to preserve individuality in his aesthetics by holding firmly to the total relativity of values. The only way the creative imagination's sense of oneness with the world could be pro­ jected into society was by means of a categorical imperative, an "as if" commitment to moral values created in the imaginative act. Aesthetic value remained throughout his theory a matter of individual taste as measured by greater or lesser aesthetic IOO

CREATIVE MIND AND LITERARY PROPHECY

capacity. Any projection of the creative act was the result solely of a sense of unity and harmony that such an act expresses, and from this "sense" of harmony arose the ordered conduct of the moral life. For Mumford, however, the organic synthesis tends to lose the distinctions of aesthetic and moral—indeed to deny all distinctions in its eloquent but somewhat frightening totality. It has the transcendental status which asserts order and harmony to be the greatest moral values in social history, but its inclusiveness makes any individual creative act infinitely short of perfection. Nothing less than a god-like creativity summing and exceeding all particular creative acts could pro­ duce such a final union. If Santayana's dogged relativism ren­ ders critical judgments of art totally impressionistic and denies us the right to talk about trans-personal aesthetic values, Mumford's Utopian organicism is destructive of all aesthetic values in the monstrous absorption of identity.

7 It is, of course, the loss of the individual into the organic whole, the triumph of dream over reality, that prompted the New Critics to defend the integrity of the individual work. Furthermore, this is the primary aesthetic problem of all the varieties of historicism that we have discussed in Part I, and it remains the problem for the emerging new historicisms that we have yet to analyze. The effect of the New Criticism on historicism is finally a matter of degree, refocusing attentions on the immediate artistic object rather than the background from which that object emerged. There is no necessary "either/ or" in this, although the theories offered often present, uncon­ sciously, such absolute choices. As I have repeatedly argued, the true historicist by definition is interested in both, and in the aesthetic implications of art's dual mode of existence. If we must say that Mumford's extension of Brooks's con­ cepts ultimately leads to the total dissolution of the individual in the organic whole, we must also note that Bourne, Brooks, Wilson, and Mumford have called our attention to the creative act and its necessary social implications. This often results in a IOI

AMERICAN HISTORICIST TRADITION

cult of personality, but it also emphasizes the artist's role as a man of his times. To make these claims it was necessary for these men to reject the programmatic theories of Parrington and the Marxists; for a sense of "critical certainty," the literary prophets substituted the categorical imperative. Yet they also paid the price for their un-philosophic approach by blurring distinctions between works. "Creativity" is too frequently merely an honorific word; beyond the vague sense of moral right there is very little that we can use to make evaluations. This is not to claim that Brooks or Bourne or Wilson or Mumford did not make critical judgments; it is simply to argue that their philosophic principles, such as we may extract them, do not provide us with any specific criteria. But these are the objections of a post-new critical world, and for the Brooksian the enemies of his approach are clear: the genteel tradition, the dogmatic moralizing of the Puritans, the reduction of life's complexity by system-mongers, or in general any aspect of static society.

PART II

The Rediscovery of Historicism

Chapter V1

John Crowe Ransom Principles for a New Historicism Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child— I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after-image of the inner eye. THEODORE ROETHKE , "The Dying Man" Van Wyck Brooks's ideal, to stand between dream and reality, is no more than a restatement of the historicist's concept of literature's dual mode of existence. Dream becomes the aes­ thetic vision of a perfectly ordered world seen in the poem, and reality is the recognizable world of society seen through the poem. The dilemma has been and remains to join the two without vitiating the significance of either, and I believe that a schematic sense of the theoretical positions discussed in Part I will help clarify this dilemma. DREAM or THE AESTHETIC VISION

t

Mumford

t

.

χ

Parrington (Cabell article)

t

Brooks

t

Ransom

4 Burke Parrington (Whitman chapter of Main Currents)

4

Hicks I REALITY Or THE SOCIAL-HISTORICAL VISION

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The crucial addition, of course, is the name of John Crowe Ransom, and the chart is designed to emphasize the tensions that exist in Ransom's poetic theory. I confess that the symmetry of this chart is somewhat mis­ leading. The balancing positions of the "two" Parringtons is in part a justification of my treatment of him, and the greater proportion of Parrington's writings, admittedly, would place him in the lower rather than the higher station. Nevertheless, it is the theoretical balance that I would depict and not simply trends and tendencies. Parrington's reading of Cabell sees the poet dangerously near a pure aesthetic vision of life; the poet is saved from Mumford's total "synthesis" only by his "cosmic irony," his double view of life "as it is" denied and romanti­ cized by his view of life "as it ought to be." Parrington's view of the Whitmanesque poet at the other extreme falls short of Hicks's poet as social activist because Parrington finds in Whitman's verse an organizing principle for society "as it might be" that springs from the poet's own poetic genius and not from the eternal law of historical dialectics. The Brooks-Ransom-Burke triumvirate is somewhat more resistent to easy distinctions. The appeal of Brooks is more toward the integrity of the individual poetic vision, toward the "intrinsic" value of the creative act. The thrust of Burke's aesthetics is toward the shaping forces of society on and in the poet's symbol-making mind, toward the "extrinsic" meaning of the creative act. In so saying, however, I have had to fall back on those "trends and tendencies" that I rejected above. Burke most clearly claims that the "extrinsic" approach to art takes two forms, a psychological study of the poet and a socio-historical study of the poet's environment. The two inter­ act for him in a way that parallels Brooks's conception of the interplay of critic-artist and society. For both men it is only by rooting the artist in his social milieu that a true historical inter­ pretation of art can be achieved. For both, the historical mean­ ing of any particular work rests wholly on the belief that a poet is irrevocably a man of his times. On the other hand, neither would accept a rigid historical

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

relativism. Brooks avoids it by calling for the rewriting of history to create a "usable past"; Burke, in an already over­ complicated epistemology, simply adds another dimension to his sense of a poem's meaning. The "Symbol" belongs not only to the mind of the poet and to the poet's social context; it also has its own independent status. There is for Burke an "in­ trinsic" as well as an "extrinsic" approach to poetry. After the act of its composition by a poet who had acted in a particular temporal scene, [the "Symbol"] survives as an objective structure, capable of being examined in itself, in temporal scenes quite different from the scene of its compo­ sition, and by agents quite different from the agent who originally enacted it.1 Here the "Symbol" assumes an autonomy that as a mere ex­ pression of the author's psyche it could not have; Burke even speaks of the power of the "Symbol" to "generate," on its own, new and different symbols in the minds of its perceivers.2 The "intrinsic" approach considers the work as a unique aesthetic construct, whereas the "extrinsic" approaches see the work grounded in society or the artist's mind. These two modes of existence represent Burke's confronta­ tion with the historicist's dilemma, but Burke is really no historicist. He makes no attempt to explain the relationship between these different functions of poetry. Unlike Parrington, Brooks, or Hicks, he does not conceive of literature as having one essential goal; his approach is pluralistic, for he acknowl­ edges several, only slightly overlapping sets of meanings and values. His program is multitelic and his definition of literature is enormously inclusive. It is interesting that John Crowe Ransom's poetic theory seemingly shares in Burke's intrinsic-extrinsic dualism. Com­ menting on Burke's theories, Ransom notes that there are several philosophic bases working simultaneously in Burke's aesthetics (specifically Marxism, Freudianism, and anthro­ pology); yet he reduces Burke's approach to essentially two fundamental positions, the social and the aesthetic. There are,

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Ransom claims, really only two "kinds" of poetry for Burke. "The one he honors is the dialectical or critical kind, and the one he neglects is the lyrical or radical kind." Ransom explicitly states that such a preference runs counter to his own, and in so doing he collapses the two kinds of poetry into one poem with a dual purpose. "The social aspect of the poem," he tells us, "seems to me inflated under Burke's treatment." To extend the Kantian terms a little, I think the trouble with Burke's readings is that his imagination plays too near the rational surface of the poem, and the reason it does not go deeper is that he is no lover of nature.3 Poetry for Ransom exists on two levels: the first is the "rational surface" which can be explicitly social in meaning; the other, undefined in this essay on Burke, should be immediately recog­ nizable to any student of Ransom's aesthetics. The "deeper" level is "irrational," in Ransom's use of the term, the realm of sensibility where the poet embraces the particularity of the world rather than its social abstractions. It is primarily this "deeper" meaning that, in full retreat from social norms, pro­ vided the basis for the New Criticism; yet finally it must be seen as a step toward the dream world of aesthetic vision— toward the Brooksian world "as it ought to be." Ransom is a transitional figure for us in this study much as he has been for the general history of American critical theory. He is difficult to place not because he changes or shifts his aesthetic principles (they are, as we shall see, marvelously consistent), but because he adheres to a critical doctrine that is neither here nor there in the common canons of American aesthetic thought. For him, as for all the critics discussed so far, literary theory is grounded in epistemology. Ransom finds himself confronting the ancient question of poetry and knowl­ edge, and the ultimate criterion of value is necessarily bound up with the determination of the meaning of the poem. Francis Roellinger, Jr., speaking of Allen Tate as well as Ransom, sums up the critical problem.

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

Mr. Tate and Mr. Ransom remind us of Plato in their as­ sumption that, if poetry has any value at all, it must be knowledge. Unlike Plato, they conclude that it has value. They are Aristotelian in their assumption of a rational in­ tellect and in their insistence upon the intellectual aspect of poetry. And they are confronted with Aristotle's problem: to answer the charge that poetry is not knowledge.4 Ransom's solution to this problem springs from his assump­ tion that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge, each with a rightful place in poetry. These are the terms of his dualism— terms of opposition which will hold our attention for most of this chapter. Despite somewhat shifting emphasis on the value of one or the other from time to time, and irrespective of at least one serious effort to achieve a synthesis, Ransom remains rigidly consistent in his basic position. As John M. Bradbury says: Temperamentally and philosophically, Ransom cannot for­ sake his oppositions, for the human condition is to him an ironical opposition between man's desires and his potentiali­ ties, between his moral propensities and the world's indiffer­ ence. No science and no religion can, in Ransom's book, resolve these oppositions.5 ι In many ways the most crucial work in Ransom's production was a rather early one, God Without Thunder (1930). He is never very far from it although he repeatedly refines his ter­ minology. Here he makes the first lengthy announcement and exposition of the essential dualism in his theory; "Life" is con­ ceived in Arnoldian fashion as the dichotomy of science and religion; in sociological terms as the dichotomy of city and country; in something like Marxian terms, Industrial and Pastoral; and in metaphorical terms, "Penseroso" and "Al­ legro."6 Later in his career he added a psychological dimen­ sion by adopting the Freudian oppositions between "ego" and

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

"id."7 All of these, including the aesthetic dualism which most interests us here, arise from Ransom's Kantian epistemology.8 The essential dualism which forms the core of God Without Thunder is that of the faculties of reason and aesthetic sensi­ bility. Ransom claims that each gives us a particular kind of knowledge. The reason deals in abstractions and belongs to the rational world of science and general laws based on operational postulates. The aesthetic sensibility concerns itself with the particularities of existence, the objects of perception in all their minute uniqueness and infinite quantity. The former is practical and utilitarian; the latter is fundamentally hedo­ nistic* At least in one place Ransom conceives of these two powers of mind as different kinds of imagination. "We may be sure now that the scientific imagination and the poetic imagination are not of the same kind, and that the kinds of knowledge which they intend are not the same."9 But for the most part his language is closer to that of Kantian faculty psychology. I should say that imagination is an organ of knowledge whose technique is images. It presents to the reflective mind the particularity of nature; whereas there is quite another organ, working by a technique of universals, which gives us science.10 His preference for the former partly results from his an­ tipathy to Hegel. Man's reason, Ransom says, always "tries to define the intention of the universe, and man's proper portion within this universe"; but this often eventuates in science (he is borrowing from Bergson here) which "is an abstract way of knowledge. With its abstract types and patterns [it has always] disposed too brutally and quickly of the particulars which it en­ countered."11 Hegel, he charges, saw the particular only "as being in the process of pointing up and helping out the univer* I am not suggesting here that Yvor Winters (In Defense of Reason, was correct in his general charge of hedonism leveled PPagainst Ransom. Winters failed to take note that this was only one term of a very insistent dualism. IIO

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

sality."12 For the Marxist such an all-embracing pattern is a release from uncertainty, a provision of meaning for the seem­ ingly incomprehensible flux of life. For Ransom it is a falsifi­ cation of the particularities of life, a rational imposition upon life's fundamental irrationality. Yet Ransom unfairly treats this Hegelian system as static, fixed, and it is perhaps more accurate to call his position anti-Platonic* He uses this ter­ minology himself in an article entitled "Poetry: A Note in Ontology" (1934). We are led to believe that nature is rational and that by force of reasoning we shall possess it. We love to view the world under universal or scientific ideas to which we give the name truth; and this is because the ideas seem to make not for righteousness but for mastery. The Platonic Idea becomes the Logos which science wor­ ships, which is the Occidental God, whose minions we are, and whose children, claiming a large share in His powers for patrimony.13 Where the Marxist seeks a rational, metaphysical explana­ tion for all phenomena, Ransom relegates such systems to the realm of practical or utilitarian knowledge. Pure Platonic poetry, he claims, subsumes the particular image to the general Idea. Yet Ransom does not cast out rational knowledge or generalization in order to have only the particular. Whereas "Platonic Poetry is too idealistic ... Physical Poetry [that which deals with particulars] is too realistic," and this would be "tedious" and fail to "maintain interest."14 The best poem would seemingly contain some of both (though obviously more of the "Physical"), yet not merely in order to be more in­ teresting. The objection to science's mechanization of the particular is * One difficulty in Ransom's theory is keeping track of the synonymns he conceives for his dualism. In "Poetry: II, The Cause," Platonic, rational, or scientific knowledge is also called tivism" and "naturalism"; in "Classical and Romantic" it is "classicism."

Ill

many Final "posi­ called

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

a clear echo of Bergson. Furthermore, Ransom assigns the poet a prodigious Bergsonian task—to "perpetuate in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crum­ bling beneath his touch."15 Reality for Ransom is a matter of "flux and blur."18 There is also some evidence that Santayana entered into Ransom's thinking; the significant coupling of religion and poetry in God Without Thunder has a decidedly Santayanan twist in the insistence that both are fictions which seek to grasp the meaning of the world.17 Ransom sees, how­ ever, a dichotomy in Santayana between the "realm of es­ sences" and the "realm of matter," and he finds too much emphasis on the former.18 In his own similar dualism he would seek to tilt the balance toward the latter. 2

On the basis of this dualistic epistemology Ransom invests poetry with a dualistic goal. By way of definition he proclaims: A system of constants, and an infinite aggregate of con­ tingency enveloping and of course imperilling these con­ stants,—that is the real world, and that is necessarily its competent representation by the arts.19 The concept embodies the idea that the "constants" or uni­ versal must always add up to less than the particular in such a way as to be found in the particulars. The infinite meanings and values represented by the particularity of the work cannot be exhausted by finite generalities or abstractions, but the indi­ vidual work must have both, else "it would fail in realism."20 The oppositions of "constant" and "contingency" or "univer­ sal" and "particular" are far better known in Ransom's terms "structure" and "texture." These elements of the poem's total being have been fully and clearly discussed before21 and need not be reiterated here beyond noting that "structure" is equiva­ lent to a prose paraphrase (an idea or prose core) while "texture" is conceived as "irrelevant" in contradistinction to prose which is logical and rational. The doctrine is a crucial one for the New Criticism, for it is founded upon the prose-

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

poetry distinction so central to new critical aesthetics. Yet while the later New Critics fight to keep prose out of poems, Ransom insists that it be included. A poem consists of two kinds of knowledge, the one which presents "the denser and more re­ fractory original world"22 and that which deals in concepts and universale, man's utilitarian reductions of reality. Actually, both are "realities" and thus are significant elements in poetic activity, but they are sufficiently dissimilar as realities to require two distinct modes of presentation. I suggest that the differentia of poetry as discourse is an ontological one. It treats an order of existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be treated in scientific [prose] discourse.23 The prose-poetry distinction is made, therefore, on the epistemological grounds of the kinds of reality presented. This insistent separation derives from a series of supporting oppositions which define more fully the work's dualistic struc­ ture. On the one hand, the objects of poetic discourse are the particularities of "the body and solid substance of the world."24 They are the "precious objects" which are loved in and for themselves,25 in something like Martin Buber's I-Thou rela­ tionship.* In romantic art we revel in the particularity of things, and feel joy of restoration after an estrangement from nature. The experience is vain and aimless for practical purposes. But it * In an article written twenty-one years later Ransom pursued this idea further by seeking support for his position in a theory of Words­ worth's rebellion against the "Great Chain of Being," which he inter­ prets as parallel to his own rejection of abstract or universal reductions of reality. But in the process, I fear, he overlooks the complex theoretical struggle in Wordsworth's Prefaces between Hartley's mechanistic psychology of creativity and Coleridge's organicism. Wordsworth was never able to escape the passive mind theories of Locke and thereby proposed a kind of "natural piety" that lacks much of the dynamism Ransom would wish it to have ("Wordsworth: Notes Toward an Understanding of Poetry," Kenyon Review, 12 [1950], 498-519).

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

answers to a deep need within us. It exercises that impulse of natural piety which requires of us that our life should be in loving rapport with the environment.28 On the other hand, the "truths" of prose or scientific discourse are "abstracted" from the particularities. They are neater, more logical, and spring from what Kant called our sense of "purposiveness" in nature. They are the result, Ransom says, of "our natural propensities as knowers."27 For all of the sexual implications of his "World's Body" metaphor, however, love of natural objects must be kept free from passion. Frequently throughout his career Ransom re­ peated a phrase from Schopenhauer to describe the artist's relations with nature: "To have knowledge without desire."28 Poetic discourse, he tells us, "is more cool than hot, and a moral fervor is as disastrous to it as a burst of passion itself."29 Consequently he sees poetic activity as reflective of "the purest esthetic experience"; it eschews all interest in utility. Prose, with its focus on scientific knowledge, "is no more than the knowl­ edge of the uses of nature; it does not credit nature with having any life of its own."30 As a result poetic discourse must avoid any temptations toward social or political activism. The true poetry has no great interest in improving or ideal­ izing the world, which does well enough. It only wants to realize the world, to see it better. Poetry is the kind of knowledge by which we must know what we have arranged that we shall not know otherwise.31 Ransom's attitude that art ought not to participate in social movements also pervades the New Criticism and stands directly opposed to that of most of the critical theorists I have dis­ cussed so far.* Ransom relegates political activism to the * In a somewhat loosely constructed speech for the dedication of a new Phi Beta Kappa Hall at William and Mary, later reprinted in Kenyon Review, 21 (1959), 121-40 as a reply to Roy Harvey Pearce's Historicism Once More, Ransom proposes what he calls an "anthro­ pological" study of literature which would unite the past and the present in socio-historical interests. There is more than a touch of II4

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

speculation of prose discourse, and in its pure form sees poetry as "always something magnificently chimerical, and irrespon­ sible if it would really commit us to an action."32 His dualistic theory demands that in the realm of poetic discourse the artist must never assert his own personality; he must remain as "nearly anonymous" as possible.33 Following Kant again he demands that a purely aesthetic experience be morally and ethically "disinterested,"34 yet, as for the prose element in the poem, Ransom seemingly assumes that it will contain expres­ sions of the poet's beliefs. Ideas can be abstracted from the poem,35 and in studying some ancient authors it is deemed a necessary step in the total critical act.38 Taking issue with Eliot, he claims that a poet's beliefs are in this degree fair game for critical evaluation; for instance, Shelley's are ad­ judged "foolish."37

3 There are a host of difficulties inherent in Ransom's dualism. There is a clear sense of mimesis in his aesthetics, particularly in his insistence on the "representation" of natural objects. He would banish the sentiment of the artist specifically to preserve a strong sense of "realism." Yet total detachment and photo­ graphic representation are not what he wants; "they indicate no attitude necessarily, no love."38 In addition, the extent of "reality" is never very clear. For the most part Ransom seems to mean by "the real" only the particularities of nature, yet more than once he proclaims that the poem must contain both particularities and universals to be truly realistic. I have until now simply avoided this problem by interpreting it as an indi­ cation of two kinds of reality; but this is certainly inadequate, for Ransom's emphasis upon the "World's Body" asserts that particularity yields a radically more "real" reality than does universality. There are, to be sure, even more crucial problems arising from the dualism of poetry and prose. A great emphasis in political activism in the address, but in this the mood appears to be atypical.

REDISCOVERY O F H I S T O R I C I S M

Ransom's theorizing is on making an absolute distinction be­ tween the two forms of discourse, yet they must also be seen as working somehow harmoniously within the individual poem * "A poetic discourse embodies within itself, and intends not to lose or vitiate, a prose discourse. No prose argument, no poem."39 The unavoidable result of such a position is a formcontent dichotomy consisting of "the prose core to which [the critic] can violently reduce the total object, and the differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire."40 In addition, Ransom's clear preference for "texture" or poetic discourse seems to be discounted by his statement that "if Shelley's [prose] argument is foolish, it makes his poetry fool­ ish."41 The exact balance of prose and poetry within the single poem is never clearly stated. Moreover, Ransom's concept of the poem as a whole or an "entirety" results in at least one signifi­ cant effort to completely dissolve the dualism in the creative act. Murray Krieger quite accurately points out those passages of The New Criticism where Ransom, in terms very reminis­ cent of his friend Allen Tate, sets the oppositions of structure and texture (here called "Determinant Meaning" and "Deter­ minant Sound") into a relation of "tension" (to borrow Tate's term) which yields a poem having its own status in being.42 Such an idea, of course, forms the center of Ransom's theory of ontological criticism and is perhaps the single most influen­ tial aspect of his theory on the New Criticism and Contextualism. It is, as Krieger notes, Ransom's approach to Coleridge's organic poem which must somehow fuse into a unity the disparate elements of Imagination and Fancy.43 But it also runs counter to Ransom's abiding concern with "realism." The poem as an organic unit having its own unique status in being would seemingly be just one more particularity in nature's infinite supply. It would not, by anything other than mere chance, give us knowledge of our environment. * Perhaps "poem" must be interpreted as a third term and not as synonymous with "poetry." Yet Ransom seems to want to find the prose core within the poetic irrelevancy, not merely coexistent with it.

xx6

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

In his poetic ontology Ransom sees the poem-reality relation as something less than a traditionally imitative one. In the final analysis, rather than a fusion of structure and texture, he must argue that texture alone is the essence of the poem. Poetry is "like" reality simply because of its irrelevant texture which approximates the irrational or contingent aspects of nature. The art form best able to accomplish this task is music; with its "prodigious display of texture, [it] seems the better informed about the nature of the world, the more realistic, the less naive."44 Such an idea could lead to irrelevancy run wild in an effort to approximate nature's infinite possibilities, and Krieger rightly points out that Ransom wants no part of this.45 Ransom objects to the tendency toward total irrationality in the theory of Cleanth Brooks and finds dangerous echoes of it in William Empson's concept of "ambiguity."* My belief is that opposites can never be said to be resolved or reconciled merely because they have been got into the same poem . . . ; that if there is a resolution at all it must be a logical resolution; that when there is no resolution we have a poem without structural unity.48 Here, however, Ransom has not only reaffirmed the necessity of "logical structure"; he has indicated that "texture," because of its irrelevancy, must bow to structure.

4 Ultimately, the ontological theory proves to be far too radical for the Ransom who set down his philosophic beliefs in God Without Thunder, and he has never been seriously near * In The New Criticism, pp. 314-16, Ransom attempted to put a check on irrelevancy with a concept of "positive" and "negative" irrelevancy. The entire thrust of his dualistic theory also seems to be in this direc­ tion. "A poem cannot and need not list all the details of the 'manifold,' only enough, and in variety enough, to make a fair sampling." ("The Concrete Universal," Poems and Essays, p. 172). Such restrictions, how­ ever, are too vague to be of any real limiting value. And they reflect a kind of desperation that must turn to purely subjective standards, a defeating retreat for a philosophic objectivist like Ransom.

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repudiating those beliefs. It is without doubt a significant shift, for it formulates the basis of the New Criticism and provides Murray Krieger with some fundamental concepts for his own Contextualist position. But Ransom's desire to preserve poetry's direct knowledge-giving functions makes the concept of the poem's unique status too limiting. Interest in the poem's body, Krieger's "incarnate metaphor," is barred by Ransom's primary interest in what poetry tells us about the world's body; and as long as he sees knowledge in its dual forms, the organic fusion of "structure" and "texture" is impossible. The more "intrinsic" or less public meanings of "texture" act as mere "stuffing" for a logical prose paraphrase which has wide public appeal.47 The need for a prose paraphrase is purely functional; it facilitates communication in the poem. The need for a "texture" of im­ mediate experience of particularities is more difficult to explain. At least in one sense it serves as reconstitutive action to save us from the stultifying effects of scientific abstractions; this is the more Bergsonian idea that we have already noted. On another occasion he argues that it answers a need arising from a natural "impulse" toward nature,48 but both of these ideas have con­ siderably more significant philosophic foundations. The primary reason for Ransom's claim that poetry gives us knowledge is found in his religious orthodoxy. The dualism he expounded in God Without Thunder exists also as a dichotomy of innocence and experience. The former state is characterized by man's living in nature, the second by man's attempt to gain complete mastery over it—to reduce it to logical systems where­ by he might be its god. The first is truely poetic or Edenic while the second is prosaic 48 Poetry offers us a chance to regain something of that primal state if it will only "watch closely after its own innocence; that is, be careful not to pervert by positive [prosaic] misrepresentation this world's data."50 It is this emphasis on the prelapsarian world of pure aesthetic vision that pulls Ransom's theory toward Van Wyck Brooks's "dream."* Not long after the publication of The New Criticism * It might be argued that Ransom differs from Brooks in that Ran­ som's "dream world" is backward looking, and essentially conservative,

J O H N CROWE R A N S O M

in 1941 Ransom turns away from his ontological theory to a theory once again based on Christian myth. Adam, he tells us, was given by God both power over nature as well as the human impulse to love it in all its particularity. Sin resulted from Adam's violation of the restrictions imposed by God on the "tree of knowledge." When Adam ate the fruit he acquired the kind of abstract, scientific knowledge which subverted his love for particulars.51 The fall from Eden was a disruption of the prose-poetry or structure-texture balance. The myth affirms the dualism of Ransom's philosophy by giving it clear moral value, a moral value that must be trans­ ferred to poetry.52 This morality, of course, is of a different nature than that easy, conceptualized morality he condemns in the theory of Yvor Winters53 or in the reductive theology of Christianity itself. In God Without Thunder Ransom argues for a return to an Old Testament orthodoxy, to the kind of myth which by preserving man's sense of irrationality and mystery would not lead to cold abstractions about existence but would rather demand that he turn again toward a state of natural innocence. Ransom's religious commitment pushes him beyond the particularity of the world's body; not only is the idea of poetry's ontic status undercut, but poetry's balance of structure and texture is justified finally by the vision of a timeless Eden that it gives us. It is the dream of a world re­ turned to its proper proportions.

5 In part, the somewhat exaggerated emphasis given in this chapter to the non-formalist interests of Ransom reflects my belief that this side of his theory has been least systematically explored. More importantly, we are limited by the specific focus of this study as a whole; and though this is no license for random distortion, it does demand that our attention rest while Brooks's "dream world" is forward looking, and essentially liberal. These distinctions, while very real, do not affect the aesthetic problems discussed here, for the two dream worlds are both finally identical since the eschatological vision unites the beginning and end in timelessness.

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primarily on the problem of poetry's relation to the world. I spoke of Ransom as a transitional figure in the beginning of this chapter, and it is to this idea that I return now. In Chapters III-V, I concentrated on the theory of critics whose conformity with a rather traditional historicism I sought to demonstrate. Most of these theorists would perhaps best be called, to borrow from Carlo Antoni, sociologically oriented historicists. Ransom represents a philosophic departure from these positions. He establishes himself in the foreground of a new movement. Yet we may not see him making as complete a break from these traditions as a study of his new critical formalism alone might suggest. When at the conclusion of God Without Thunder he proposes a "program" to turn man away from modernism and progressivism, away from a world reduced to abstractions and back toward the fullness of existence lost in Adam's fall,54 Ransom is proposing to revolutionize man's mode of existence in a manner not at all dissimilar to that of Van Wyck Brooks. It is not merely nostalgia for the "good old days"; it is a pro­ gram of moral salvation. Ransom was as much a social re­ former as a literary reformer, but the distinction is blurred by the fact that for him literature and life, in the tradition of Arnold, were always closely related. His Southern Agrarianism, for all of its fatally narrow vision of actual rural life, was justified in arguments that parallel the more traditional historicist beliefs. For Ransom the solution to the crumbling away of orderly society lay in an aesthetic approach to life;55 his emphasis on poetry's ability to revitalize experience was part of his program to recapture some small portion of man's state of innocence. Frederick A. Pottle, writing generally of the New Critics and most assuredly including Ransom in his analysis, claims that the new critical aesthetics effectively destroyed "historicism, the doctrine that in reading a poem we must try to limit the meaning strictly to what would have been possible for readers of the time in which the poem was composed."56 We may agree with Pottle concerning so limited and relativistic a theory. Ransom generally treats pure historical scholarship as merely

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

an "aid" to total critical evaluation, but he asserts that the critic must know "the precise beliefs and ways of thought" that were extant in the day of the poem's composition.57 Such knowledge is only half the critic's approach; it represents only one term of the dualism—that of the poet's beliefs or a prose content. The remainder, and admittedly the most significant for Ransom, is the element of texture which by capturing the immediate sense of objectivity in the particularity of nature preserves that par­ ticularity, rescuing it from the crumbling flux and blur of natural contingency. Yet this allows poetry to be both above time and immersed in time, and it forms the basis for a pro­ foundly new kind of historicism which proposes to find permanence in the very particularity that is subject to change. Ransom's epistemological difficulties, his attempts to get within the individual poem both the world's infinite particu­ larity and man's rational abstractions of that particularity, re­ peat the historicist's problem with literature's dual mode of existence. He strives to bring the historically relative prose core into some balanced, even organic, relationship with the irrelevant poetic texture, but always his belief that poetry gives us direct knowledge of the "world's body" leads him into trouble. It is never quite clear just how "structure" and "tex­ ture," prose and poetry, or rational abstractions and "world's body" can be synonymous pairs in his dualistic theory. Most significantly, Ransom's aesthetics lacks a fully developed de­ scription of the role that language plays in the knowledgegiving process. Only by a consideration of the medium of poetic creation can a full understanding of the historicist's dualism be attained. Yet by conjecturing that poetry achieves some sort of ontic status, Ransom moves nearer than any of the critics discussed in Part I to a synthesis which does not merely collapse one term of the dualism into the other. In consequence, historicism for those who followed Ransom could never again relapse into one of the easy traditional forms described in the Introduction.

Chapter VII

The Meeting of Opposites, ι John Crowe Ransom's contribution to the emergence of a new historicism, and his contribution to poetic theory in general, lies in his effort to define a peculiarly aesthetic existence for poetry that assumes its cultural-historical origins. He leaves many questions unanswered, but he does not deny poetry's dual mode of existence in order to simplify or make orderly his critical approach. If the new historicism, as I suggested in Chapter II, is largely an effort to find the common aesthetic interest of both literary history and literary criticism, Ransom is the first American theorist who offers a perspective from which such a common interest may be described without sacrificing one side to the other. Kenneth Burke, who seeks a system which accounts for all modes of human understanding, includes in this system both "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" ap­ proaches to literature, but Burke offers only a pluralistic theory. He does not succeed in bringing the oppositions of "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" together; he merely makes them copartners in man's never-ending quest for knowledge. Ransom's Edenic vision, on the other hand, was an effort to balance those elements of a poem's composition assignable to both the prose content or historically relative prose paraphrase and the poetic texture which gives the poem a unique status or timeless existence. His ontological theory, though it may finally be unsuccessful, attempts to provide a sense of how the poem preserves its dualistic nature while it simultaneously triumphs over it. In a sense, the "separatists" who argued for either "intrinsic" or "extrinsic" meanings and values but never both may have done their job too well. They created not only a theory or set of

THE MEETING OF OPPOSITES, I

opposing theories but also a whole dictionary of critical ter­ minology with specific connotations that make communication between literary critics and literary historians virtually im­ possible. Obviously if a formalist critic insists literally on a work's "autonomy," he cannot at the same time claim that that work "reflects" its moment of creation; that is, he cannot claim that a work's literally "unique" meanings and values are the same as its social-historical meanings and values. But the difficulties of post-new critical theorists are more than merely terminological; the oppositions between formalists and histori­ ans spring from very fundamental differences in their con­ ceptions of the creative act and of the nature of the object produced by that act. More specifically, the disagreement re­ flects what are possibly irreconcilable philosophic beliefs, or as R. B. Heilman argues, innately different "structures of the mind."1 Yet the energy expended on resolving the differences betokens some recognition on both sides that the process of exclusion has barred each from attaining the fullness of under­ standing desired. With that recognition begins the task of expanding and altering the basic premises, but also with that recognition comes the necessity of creating new terms or re­ defining old ones. The course of redefinition is fraught with dangers; nevertheless, it is the most frequently chosen. The remaining chapters of this study contain analyses of several significant attempts to affect a union of the formalist and historical approaches into a new historicism. Chapters VII and VIII concentrate primarily on critics whose essential loyal­ ties rest with traditional forms of historicism, but who wish also to enrich their theories by encompassing within them some of the elements of formalism. Chapters IX and X follow just the opposite path by focusing on a group of critics and aestheticians whose primary biases are formalist, but who will not deny the literary work a more direct and vital role in human culture. Everywhere a crucial problem will be to de­ termine the precise meanings of the critical terms employed, and in several instances we will find that a particular critic fails to be persuasive because of his careless use of language.

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At the same time we too must proceed with great caution. Often what seem to be acceptably synonymous terms carry with them deceptively different connotations. There is no glossary that can deliver us from such errors, only our sense of the critic's intentions. ι Among the more frequent sets of opposed theoretical po­ sitions, the debate between the critics who see the author as "maker" and those who claim he imitates his social milieu has perhaps the longest and most distinguished tradition (with sources at least as far back as Plato). Thus when Marius Bewley says of Hawthorne and James that "both men are seen to be working in a tradition (as well as making it)," he is confronting the old critical dichotomy of creation versus dis­ covery.2 But "creation" cannot mean for him what it has come to mean in the new critical canon, for he derives the major theme of his study, The Complex Fate, from a socially oriented point of view very reminiscent of the early works of Van Wyck Brooks. His is a nationalistic historicist position; he is con­ cerned with the effects of the "thinness" of American culture on the works of America's major writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The problem of the American artist, he says, was to find himself, to achieve a balance in his awareness of "the nature of his separateness and the nature of his connection with European, and particularly with English, culture."3 Bewley, like Van Wyck Brooks, sees "creativity" in its spe­ cific social application as the "making" of a cultural tradition. The Scarlet Letter is, then, "not an allegory on the woman taken in adultery but a subtle exploration of moral isolation in America."4 Its value, and therefore Hawthorne's, is in its con­ tribution to the formulation of a coherent American culture. In the long run the artist's traditionalism and not his creativity is the measure of his success. Hawthorne and James were truly American artists, according to Bewley, because they were able to criticize their own culture without removing themselves

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from an American sensibility, but T. S. Eliot was too vociferous in his attacks. Unfortunately, this idea forces the critic to reduce American culture to a simple series of properly American themes, the presence or absence of which in the works of par­ ticular artists is used to determine the extent of that artist's Americanism. Such an approach would seem to undercut even the Brooksian sense of creativity, but Bewley anticipates this charge and explains it away by claiming that it is all a matter of degree. I do not mean that the American poet might not be as critical on the surface as the English poet, but he is too much a part of the fabric to question too radically unless he should also be willing to remove himself from the scene for good.5 There is, I fear, a destructive blindness in a nationalism that would label The Four Quartets "English" simply because it was uncompromisingly critical of American culture. 2

In The Complex Fate Marius Bewley is very much concerned with the close analysis of specific texts, but he does not seriously consider the text as an autonomous unit created by the artist out of, but not imitative of, his native environment. The artist who creates a work that is clearly apart from the American tradition is simply banished from the fold. We have no real sense that Bewley is struggling to accommodate a formalist methodology to his traditional historicist attitude. For R.W.B. Lewis, however, the case is somewhat different. In The Amer­ ican Adam his critical point of view is also that of the national­ istic historicist; his interest, he tells us, is "in the history of ideas," particularly American ideas. Yet he raises these ideas to the status of a national "myth"* which is constructed of "whole clusters of ideas."8 The myth is that of the "new Adam," the prelapsarian man who finds himself in a totally virgin land prior to experience and emancipated from history. * We should recall Kenneth Burke's method of using "image clusters" to measure a historical epoch.

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The idea is very reminiscent of some assertions made by Ransom especially as it takes on an "existentialist" tone. The "American Adam," according to Lewis, does not see himself actually in a state of innocence, but he longs for it. What some novelists were to discover was that the story implicit in American experience had to do with an Adamic person, springing from nowhere, outside time, at home only in the presence of nature and God, who is thrust by circum­ stances into an actual world and an actual age.7 The upshot of this "American experience" is to lend Amer­ ican literature a thematic unity. Very much like Marius Bewley, Lewis sees the American artist caught in the struggle to hold on to his past, the traditions of the old culture, and at the same time to cut himself off, to begin anew. Unlike Bewley, however, this struggle is the American theme or theme-myth made manifest. The tension between the lure of the state of innocence and the fact of the state of experience produces "irony," an attitude with religious parallels in the doctrine of felix culpa.* Moreover, Lewis uses "irony" in very much the sense that a New Critic might, as the key to the structure of an individual work.8 His focus is primarily on the central characters of American novels and stories, but these characters are "problematic" in their reflection of the American myth. In the novels of Hawthorne and Melville he finds "the isolated hero 'alone in a hostile, or at best neutral, universe.'" Yet Lewis goes beyond character analysis to the explication of plot ten­ sions and natural imagery all of which reflect the struggle between the forest of innocence and the city of experience.8 In a subsequent work, The Picaresque Saint, Lewis affirms even more strongly the theme-myth of innocence versus ex­ perience. Abandoning here the nationalism of The American Adam, he discusses a series of modern writers who have been "forced to find ... grounds for living in life itself,"10 and in so * Professor Lewis's interest in the relation between religion and literature is put forth more clearly in "Hold on Hard to the Huckleberry Bushes," Trials of the Word, pp. 97-111.

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doing he accentuates even more the existentialist tone of his critical point of view. The focus is still on central characters. The figure I am calling the picaresque saint tries to hold in balance ..., by the very contradictions of his character, both the observed truths of contemporary experience and the vital aspiration to transcend them.11 This hero is paradoxical, precisely like Lukacs's "type," because he lives in a paradoxical age, and the dilemma of balanced oppositions is "one of the great and most meaningful creative struggles of our time."12 Once again we have come near the new critical concept of "irony" which represents structurally the artist's attempts to achieve a Active balance of discordant or paradoxical human experience. The issue is whether in the achieving of the "balance" the artist has been literally creative of new meanings and values. In a more recent book, The Trials of the Word (1965), Lewis would seem to argue that he does. He implies that one does not "scrutinize" a work "for its univocal formulations of particular historical doctrines." Rather he suggests that the reader "submits for a while to the actual ingredients and the inner movement and growth of a work to see what attitude and insight, including religious attitude and insight, the work itself brings into being."13 There are some serious reservations that might be raised concerning the substance of the Adamic theme-myth itself. One wonders if it does not tend to lead us into hasty interpre­ tations; Cooper's Deerslayer is not, I would argue, as evil-free a vision of the natural world as Lewis might have us believe. Our more immediate concerns, however, are with methodology rather than substance, and in this there is also much to be questioned. By making paradox or irony the sole principle of both social and novelistic structure, Lewis has risked the same vague work-world relationship that trapped some of the New Critics. To say that life and art are both paradoxical is not to say very much. Yet that is essentially the assertion; for Lewis Bread and Wine is, in its focus on a problematic (or paradoxi­ cal) hero, "the most representative novel of Silone's [also

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paradoxical] day."14 On the other hand, to say that the work "grows" into its own meaning (presumably by balancing the paradox) would deny even this structural relationship between the work and the world by resolving the irony in the work. This latter concept forces the work even farther away from a participation in the cultural myth, and Lewis would certainly reject any such idea. His position is that of an historicist, and he preserves in his idea of the theme-myth a full sense of historical movement—and its accompanying relativism * He is quite serious about the description of Bread and Wine as most "representative" of its day, and he argues for an interpretation of art as realization of culture that keeps him, finally, very close to the methodology of Marius Bewley. 3 The real distinction between Bewley's critical approach in The Complex Fate and Lewis's in The American Adam and The Picaresque Saint is measured partly in each man's respon­ siveness to contemporary literary theory. Bewley never really adopts a formalist or new critical attitude when he discusses and analyzes particular texts; "creativity" can never mean for him what it might mean for Cleanth Brooks. Lewis, on the other hand, tends to use very specific new critical terminology, but only with a partial awareness of the full new critical impli­ cations of the terms. When he speaks of the artist's struggle to balance the oppositions of human experience in order to create a work whose structural principle is irony, or when he speaks of the "inner movement and growth of a work" which yields "insight," he had adopted the language of a formalist describ­ ing an autonomous work of art. Such an idea, however, runs * In the final essay of Trials of the Word Professor Lewis drops the theme-myth of irony or paradox and traces the development of apoca­ lyptic themes in contemporary American literature from Hart Crane to Saul Bellow. His position here is more traditionally historicist for the apocalyptic theme does not easily claim to be a structural principle as did irony, yet it provides for him a clear sense of historical movement that is reflected in the attitudes of the writers he discusses.

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directly counter to his efforts to see literature as a strictly cul­ tural phenomenon deriving its most significant meaning and value from the social environment in which it exists. However we might wish it to be otherwise, there is a milieu of attitudes surrounding some of our critical terminology that forces the critic to be especially aware of the full implications of the language he uses. I would not argue that an awareness of critical traditions alone makes for good criticism. There are still the substantive elements behind the methodology which are not merely a reflection of that methodology. They involve the critic's ex­ perience, sensitivity, beliefs, and taste, which are marshalled by the fundamental principles of his critical methods into a com­ prehensive critical approach. In this way F. O. Matthiessen is sensitive to both theory and literary genius. His AmericanRenaissance, which appeared in 1941, approaches directly the dilemma that Rene Wellek claimed every literary historian must face: Matthiessen says in the prefatory "Method and Scope" section of his monumental work that his aim is "to place these works [Representative Men, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick^, Pierre, Walien, and heaves of Grass] both in their age and ours."15 As a nationalistic historicist, he concerns himself with the full analysis of the American tradition which was continuous before and after the five year period (1850-55) which saw the publi­ cation of all these works, but he warns that one "does not live by trends alone; [one] reads books, whether of the present or past, because they have an immediate life of their own." He even speaks of "organic" symbols "with a life of their own,"18 but he does not express this dual interest unaware of the full implications of his claims: the historicist's dilemma which re­ quires a work whose existence must be both in and beyond time. F. O. Matthiessen's career spanned the great debate between the literary historians and literary critics which resulted, in some circles, in a separation of historical and critical meanings and values. He rejects this separation, and he argues as a true

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historicist that such a division of energies is destructive of a full understanding of literature. In a review of Norman Foerster's American Criticism in 1929 he clearly outlines the duties of what he calls the "new historian of literature." He must follow the impressive lead of historians like Turner, Andrews, Adams, and Beard, who have given us a new vision of the forces dominant in our political and social past. But he must not lose himself in his background, or forget that he is dealing primarily with literature. He must re­ member that his real quarry is aesthetic values, and that perhaps one does not have to master the importance of Jacksonian democracy to read intelligently "Rapaccini's Daughter."17 The influence of T. S. Eliot's "comparative criticism" leads Matthiessen to make broad associations between the meta­ physical poetry and prose of the English Renaissance and American fiction and prose of the 1850's. In one sense this borrowing from Eliot tends to negate any sense of history by internationalizing and universalizing the main concepts to be discussed. To be sure, Matthiessen's great learning leads him to make use of works, images, styles, and themes that span the entire history of Western culture. Yet the comparative ap­ proach is a means and not an end in his theory. When, again under Eliot's influence, he parallels the English Renaissance artist's struggle against the "dissociation of sensibility" with what he argues is an "American Renaissance," the method is primarily a device to facilitate a very close textual analysis of the works in question. There are, of course, very legitimate dis­ cussions of influence, for example Melville's stylistic debt to Sir Thomas Browne,18 but these are only preliminary steps toward that fuller understanding of American literature which Matthiessen seeks. He does not attempt to cut American culture free from its participation in European, and particularly English, traditions, but in discovering bases for comparison he can also investigate what is unique in the American adaptation of these traditions. The concept of the "dissociation of sensi-

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bility," therefore, is given a peculiarly American tone when it is interpreted in terms of what he calls the break-up of the "puritan synthesis."19 The Puritan synthesis, best exemplified in the religious philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, was founded upon the fusion of logic and emotion. After the power of Edwards's oratory had been dissipated, a split developed in theological circles between the adherents of a logical (Uni­ tarian) point of view and a more mystical (emotional) religious fervor, and this split profoundly affected the sensibilities of nineteenth-century American writers. From Emerson through Whitman the essential struggle was to bring the two together, and this struggle was reflected in the very style of their writing. In its unself-conscious combination of textual and cultural interests American Renaissance is a marvelous example of the possibilities of uniting scholarship with critical awareness. Matthiessen was consciously the student of Van Wyck Brooks, and he also understood well the value of the New Criticism. He did not, however, actually manage to fuse the two theories.20 In the "Preface" to his Henry James: The Major Phase he argues that "aesthetic criticism, if carried far enough, inevitably becomes social criticism, since the act of perception extends through the work of art to its milieu."21 A work spans time (from the moment of its creation to the moment we read it many years later) only in the sense that it reflects a "com­ mon humanity" in which we of the present America partici­ pate. For Matthiessen these "common" elements in the Amer­ ican tradition achieve what he calls "mythological or universal significance."22 The result is a kind of aesthetic historicism raised to metaphysical status. Perhaps Parrington is ultimately the true intellectual grandfather of American Renaissance, for the insistence that one can read through the work into the artist's milieu is a kind of intellectual history via literature. But Matthiessen's awareness of style and form, of language in general as a generative force in the creative process, is far more sophisticated than that of Parrington. In a real sense Matthies­ sen's practical criticism is a far better testimonial to his new historicist sensibilities than his theorizing. In his elaborate

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explications the shift from close textual analysis to cultural history is frequently imperceptible. There are lapses, of course; his work on Dreiser, for obvious reasons, bypasses style in order to get at the broad social significance of thematic content. There are, therefore, inconsistencies in practice as well as theory, but there are significant beginnings of a new historicism in Matthiessen's contribution to literary scholarship.*

4 A more recent attempt to work within the theoretical tra­ ditions in order to bring formalist and historical criticism together is developed in Paul Goodman's The Structure of Literature. Goodman, whose interest in cultural history is well known from his numerous other publications, sets out to define a purely structural approach to literature. "Our experience" of poetry, he says, "is the immediate presentation, the aesthetic surface," and this demands that the critic focus his attentions on "the internal structure of the presented work."23 Yet for Good­ man, structural investigation is only a first step in the process of critical analysis. Ultimately one is led beyond the "immediate" object, and it is here, extrinsic to the structure itself, that one finds the locus of the work's meanings and values. This is not to say that he does not see the artist "creating" in some mean­ ingful way; the art work, he claims, is a necessary working out of neuroses, not merely by expressing the traumas but by making for them an environment in which they can exist outside of the author's psyche. That environment forms the structure of the novel or poem. Analysis of the work, like Freudian dream analysis, is a kind of structural study, but it has goals beyond the mere understanding of the work itself. * I am in partial agreement with Roy Harvey Pearce, "Literature, History and Humanism: An Americanist's Dilemma," College English, 24 (1963), 364-72, where he argues that Matthiessen managed to give us a "new" focus in American literary criticism. Yet this revolution has been slow in developing, and its theoretical evolution seems only recently to have caught fire.

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Goodman warns that we must keep in mind "always that a literary gesture is a motion of the soul in the world."24 This idea, of course, is very similar to the Freudian literary analysis employed by Kenneth Burke, and it is open to the same problem of explaining how the reader shares meaning­ fully in the psychic drama of the author without merely re­ ducing the work to the status of a conveyor of mental attitudes. Art for Goodman is a working out of the artist's neuroses, but it is not merely an imitation or reflection of them. The work, he argues, has an existence independent of both author and reader, an existence in time and in culture. The logical status of the formal structure of a work of art is a peculiar one in that through it an individual actual ex­ perience seems to be knowable and namable. Thus again we see the peculiar genius of art, for the artist makes a particular work, and this particular work is at the same time a communicable term for the intellect. By analogy we could say that we know our friend in a psychoanalytical case history of him; but the analogy collapses into an identity, for the case history become persuasive by becoming a novel.25 One essential assumption would seem to be that we know our world only by means of the workings out of our psychic re­ sponses to it, and these responses apparently have a structural integrity of their own. On the basis of this assumption Good­ man returns, as did Kenneth Burke, to a concept of art as psychic ritual wherein "society learns and relearns its con­ ventions from the rites." Literature is truly "creative" in the sense that it is a way of knowing like all other ways of know­ ing, as psychic-structural "gestures" which create "conven­ tions." It has been argued that we cannot possibly understand the past, because those men had their own "pattern of culture"; so they did. But through their art, if we stubbornly insist that

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their experience had some formal structure or other, we do understand the pattern.26 Goodman, therefore, has offered us another form of "aes­ thetic historicism"; in the final analysis there is no distinction made between art and culture, though presumably there is some sort of unorganized buzz of experience which exists beyond culture (or below it). The "patterns" of society are wholly artistic patterns. He is very much here in the tradition of Van Wyck Brooks, but his concept of art as a psychic working out leaves him with a few new problems that Brooks did not confront. How does one differentiate between psychic responses that are works of art and those that are not? Is it merely a matter of verbalizing psychic structure? In deter­ mining the "patterns" of the past, which works are selected and what are the criteria for their selection?* Of course Good­ man does not wish to bind the work so closely to the psyche of its individual author; in the concluding chapter of The Struc­ ture of Literature he discusses "how a structural defect in a play leads us to important considerations outside the play, in our social existence." In Corneille's Horace, what he calls a "fault" in the play is seen as having been caused by a fault in "society." We are confronted with the question how such a work by such an author can contain such a lapse. And in answering this we find a discrepancy in our social existence. Corneille fails because we fail. Our society, as at present, will not bear a better play than this on this theme.27 The "lapse" he speaks of here is Corneille's refusal to contra­ dict the monarchical authority of his day; but we might argue that if we are to speak "historically" of Corneille's society, there is no reason to call the playwright's conformity with the politi­ cal beliefs of his day a "fault." It is, rather, Goodman's value •These questions clearly result from Goodman's struggle with the circularity of historicism and I do not want to condemn him for merely running into this dilemma. I do believe, however, that he fails to con­ front the full implications of this not-so-vicious circle.

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system that is in operation here, and the structural "fault" in Corneille's play is determined solely on the basis of Goodman's liberal, socialist politics. Moreover, he has abandoned his con­ cern for structure in order to deliver an indictment against society (note, not just against Corneille's society but "our society"). I do not mean to imply that polidcs cannot enter into a historicist's literary theory; it quite frequently is central to it. I would argue, however, that Goodman's pontifical moral­ izing in this final chapter does not clarify the concept of art's unique yet related status that he discussed earlier in the book. The idea that society can be said to have "faults" presupposes some norm for evaluation, but to judge the past in terms of the present sounds too much like the approach of an Hegelian or Marxian critic. For Goodman there exists an ideal structure that provides the ultimate criterion of value for all literary works, and this structure is patently political and, like the Marxian dialectic, unhistorical. Hence the artist's "working out" of his neurosis by creating literary art is severely limited by the existence of a value system to which he must conform if he is to write faultless literature. The choice seems to be be­ tween seeing the work in its value-free function as case history or as a reflection of the political failings of "our society."

5 Despite Goodman's specific attempt to confront the dilemma of the work's structural integrity as opposed to its socialhistorical relativity, he evidences no real interest in formalism as such. His concern is always with how structural analysis prepares us for further, and we presume more important, steps in the critical processes; his real difficulty lies in perhaps mak­ ing too bold a claim for the artist's powers to mold his psychic responses into an object that has a meaningful and valuable existence of its own. Frederick J. Hoffman, it seems to me, makes equally ambitious claims along these lines, but attempts to define more carefully the extent of his formalist interests. In his major works on the early decades of twentieth-century American culture, his position is quite traditionally that of an

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historical relativist; yet he gives an indication, which is not yet fully realized in theory or in practice, of wanting some­ thing more. In the "Preface" to The Twenties he tells us: literature is not valuable simply because it "uses" the matter of the time ... ; the form is the matter, the matter is in the form, and the reality which is thus formally given is a moral and aesthetic anecdote of one or another aspect of the time.28 The language is somewhat confusing, although his desires are clear. Hofiman is struggling to avoid a form-content dichot­ omy, but he cannot really escape a double standard. The works he selects to discuss in this volume are the ones that "come nearest to being the best of their kind and at the same time the most representative of the preoccupations and attitudes" of the historical era in which they were written.29 One wonders if Hoffman is not trapped in Ransom's dilemma of the little boy whose mother sent him to buy a dozen of the "biggest reddest apples." More importantly, however, the general or­ ganization of the study reflects the methodology of relativism. The plan of each chapter is to discuss in depth a specific cul­ tural attitude of the twenties and then to use one text, analyzed at length, to illustrate how these attitudes are embodied in the work. Hoffman later makes more explicit theoretical attempts to develop his theory. In a paper delivered at Michigan State University in 1961, he defines a literary work as that structure wherein what he calls "Form" and "Milieu" exist in a state of "tension" yielding an "imagined" form of reality. Form and Milieu are interdependent; they interact and qualitatively affect their result which is the aesthetic version of "reality," as distinguished from a reality produced by any other kind of discourse or intellectual habit.30 The idea has quite definite new critical overtones, particularly when he declares that this "aesthetic reality" "becomes an elaborate metaphoric consequence of formal, social, and psy­ chological circumstances existing in tension, struggling for

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balance."81 He does not mean quite what R.W.B. Lewis meant by the work achieving "balance." The artist, Hoiiman tells us in an article published in 1958, does not merely balance opposite forms of human experience, rather his act is truly creative in that it is a "shaping of chaos." The artist's task ap­ parently is to force the matter of human experience into an artistic form, and the resulting tensions between matter and form give us an "aesthetic reality" which is only one of many realities—all "hypothetical."32 The "formal peculiarities" of the poem are in effect rather traditional aspects of prosody consisting of such elements as "richness of language," "point of view," "texture," "structure," "image," "metaphor," and many others. But "Milieu" is not quite so easily defined. It is something more than the mere "matter" of human experience; it is an "intellectual and psycho­ logical circumstance" or the "artist's disposition toward real­ ity."33 It is the artist's "rebellion" against the world or culture, against its theoretical, social, and moral forms, its conventions. "Milieu," with all of its traditional meanings of "present," "ambiance," and "moment" (all of which Hoffman acknowl­ edges), becomes here a state of mind which the artist informs in such a way as to create a new or aesthetic reality. The im­ portant aspect is that "Form" and "Milieu" have a dual exist­ ence; they "can be viewed either as within the text or external to it."34 The critic, Hoffman tells us, is concerned with what he calls "Thematics" or the "study of both stylistics [the formal peculiarities noted above] and the psychological consequences of forms of philosophical commitment (or the absence of such commitment)." The examples he gives of such studies are his own The Mortal No, Murray Krieger's The Tragic Vision, and, in general, the work of Northrop Frye; these are all, he says, investigations "of the levels of popular culture" or "the cultural image" or "cultural tensions" as reflected in literature.39 The diversity within this list of critics, however, does not really clarify what he means by "Thematics." His own methodology in The Mortal No is, according to Bernard Duffey, a "Kultur-

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geschichte . . . , c u l t u r e i d e n t i f i e d w i t h l i t e r a t u r e a n d l i t e r a t u r e selected at will." Dufiey argues further that Hoffman reads his authors "for what they reflect of the world Mr. Hoffman defines. They are classified rather than analyzed."38 This analysis of The Mortal No appears to be justified; in a chapter on Ernst Junger, Hoffman measures the success of modern war literature by its author's ability to represent the violence and horror of war death. Junger succeeds, he claims, because he manages to adapt his language to the situation in his diaryform novel, The Storm of Steel, but John Hersey fails in Hiroshima. Hoffman argues that Junger "forced" his language to "adjust" to the fact of violence; Junger demonstrates, then, that "literature may only present [reality] and make some effort to see the individual in it." Hersey is rejected, it would seem, because he dared to "disturb" the facts.37 The thrust of his methodology here affirms his belief that literature is a "rep­ resentative anecdote" of culture; for the historical fact remains inviolable, and "tensions" cannot result in a "qualitative" change in either Milieu or Form without risking an aesthetic reality which is too far removed from the "facts" outside the work. Hoffman does not fully come to terms with formalist aesthetics. 6 There is implied in Hoffman's concept of the artist's rebel­ lion against convention a dialectical relationship that results in a literary or artistic version of historical movement. The idea remains undeveloped and is ultimately negated by the insistence that the artist not "disturb" the facts, but the same idea is crucial to the rather elaborate recent literary theory of Harry Levin. We might best begin, however, by discussing Levin's earlier aesthetic concepts in The Power of Blackness. His approach here is significantly different from the dialectical theory he develops in later works, but it provides us with at least a partial basis for evaluating that later theory. In his Preface Levin takes as his masters Vernon Parrington, Moses Coit Tyler, and particularly F. O. Matthiessen, and he declares

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his intention to follow the latter critic's efforts "to assimilate the relevant findings of scholarly research and esthetic criti­ cism." Levin sees his book as fundamentally a demonstration of his methodology. My central concern is with the workings of the imaginative faculty, particularly in what might be called tabulation: man's habit of telling stories as a means of summarizing his activities and crystallizing his attitudes.38 Yet this is not merely a study of "ideology"; rather it is a discussion of the extent to which tabulations* have been "regu­ lated by the conditions to which they have owed their exist­ ence." Levin espouses a nationalistic historicism; one which will allow him to respect "the integrity" of individual symbols and at the same time to see those symbols in the context of an "American dream," which, like Matthiessen's "common hu­ manity," we all share.39 In The Gates of Horn he describes the methodology of The Power of Blackness as essentially a metaphysical historicism. This was primarily a study in literary iconology, in the adaptation of archetypal themes to given circumstances close at hand. It emphasized the obverse side of the story-telling faculty, its deep immersion in myth as opposed to its sharp confrontation with actuality.40 Now he wants to turn his attentions to a more dynamic process of cultural and literary movement, a process that he calls "realism." In a dynamic society, where the situation is always changing, symbols quickly lose their meaning, and artists are thrown * In part the idea of "fabulation" has been taken up by Robert Scholes, in The Fabulators·, it has obvious relationships with what Bergson called the "fabulatory function" of mind and what Frank Kermode characterized as man's "fictional sense of an ending." Ernst Curtius also discusses the idea of homo faber (see European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 9), and parallels must also be seen in a line leading from Vico (man as the "naming" intelligence) to Schiller (in the "play instinct").

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back on literal details. In a static society, where artistic con­ vention is stabilized by social convention, art tends to be symbolic rather than realistic.41 The subject of The Gates of Horn is still the "relation between literature and life," but it is both a new relation that is being described and a different attitude toward life. In one sense symbolism and realism are the two dominant modes of literary endeavor according to Levin. "Generally speaking," he argues, "art seems to oscillate between two poles, the symbolistic and the realistic."42 In his early book on James Joyce he claimed that the crowning achievement of Ulysses is its ability to com­ bine the two;43 but while his idea of symbolism was then essentially the same as that discussed above, his definition of "realism" (or as he more frequently calls it, "naturalism") was largely a technique for depicting the specific details of daily life.* Levin's approach to realism in The Gates of Horn has far broader, even political overtones.f He proposes as an axiom that realistic fiction has been a characteristic expression of bour­ geois society. The character of our culture is so perversely middle class, and our novels are so thoroughly immersed in our social problems that the correlation seems obvious.44 The idea is not simply that literature reflects life but that it is "an integral part of life." Literature is not only the effect of social causes; it is also the cause of social effects. The critic may investigate its causes, as Taine tried to do; or he may, like Brandes and others, be more interested in its effects.45 * This idea apparently comes from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, pp. 475-83, but the full scope of Auerbach's realistic dialectic had not yet impressed itself on Levin. It must also remind us of Edmund Wilson's similar argument presented in Axel's Castle. fFor parallel ideas on the development of the novel see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel and Margaret Schlauch, Antecedents of the English Novel. 14Ο

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For Levin, as it was for Erich Auerbach whose Mimesis he highly praises, "realism" is vastly more than a mere literary tradition; the integral relation he claims between literature and life allows him to talk about one in terms of the other. Thus he describes a progression in fiction which is dialectical, is founded upon a series of what might be called modal ironies. Novels "imitate" other novels, but they imitate "critically." Fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art but by exposing artifice. The novelist finds it harder to introduce fresh observations than to adopt the conventions of other novelists, easier to imitate literature than to imitate life. But a true novel imitates critically, not conventionally; hence it becomes a parody of other novels, an exception to prove the rule that fiction is untrue.46 That is to say, the rise of the novel, the rise of each individual novel, is the expression of a realistic attitude. Realism is pro­ gressive "disillusionment"; the realist exposes artifice by ex­ ploding conventions, by continually puncturing our easy dreams. The twin terms of the dialectic are in one sense "realism" and "romance" (or the mythic gates of horn and ivory), but realism is also "a synthesis: the imposition of reality upon romance, the transposition of reality into ro­ mance."* Don Quixote is the "ur-form" for the novelistic tra­ dition and also for the tradition of human awareness that is manifest in literature. The great novelists are those who change the "context of literature" by readjusting it "to the vicissitudes of life."47 To explain the relationship between the novel and society Levin speaks of literature as an "Institution." Realism debunks outmoded conventions as they were expressed in the literature of preceding generations. Thus the history of culture becomes a succession of un­ masked ideologies and lost illusions, obsolete fables and * He credits Lukacs with giving him the idea that realism is a "rejec­ tion of romance" ("Toward a Sociology of the Novel," Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 [1965], 152).

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corrected hypotheses, of which literature comprises the record and commentary. The novel, viewed against its institutional setting, becomes a satire as well as a parody. It penetrates beyond literary convention to social convention, as Don Quixote penetrated beyond romance to chivalry itself. In criticizing literature it criticizes life. It rebounds from fan­ tasy into knowledge.48 Such a belief allows him to reinject a subdued but clearly activist stance into his theory, for the truly great realists ("the greatest writers of all time") must be "committed to a search­ ing and scrupulous critique of life as they know it."49 His theory lacks a Marxian sense of progress toward Utopia,* but it shares very centrally in the concept of the artist's role in affecting social change through his literature. Levin's specific goal in his literary theory is to resolve the "apparent polarity of sociological and formal criticism."50 To see realistic literature as a dialectical movement in time having both a significance as parody (formal) and as satire (sociologi­ cal) is an ingenious and impressive attempt. But from his early statement that literature "oscillates" between the sym­ bolistic and the realistic, and from his dialectic of realism and romance, we might assume that realistic literature is only one of several kinds; that when he speaks of realism, he is not speaking of literature in general. Yet in his analysis of Ulysses where he saw the novel as both symbolistic and realistic, and in his association of realism with dynamic social movement, real­ ism begins to assert itself as the central principle of a general aesthetics. Levin quotes Robbe-Grillet claiming that "each emergent school displaces its predecessors in the name of realism;"51 and although he is speaking primarily of the novel here, his habit is not to confine his generalizations to specific genres but to elaborate them into a broader theory of literature. This confusion, though it is unfortunately an aggravating * He is fully aware that "a perfect society . . . has no use for a selfcritical literature" (Contexts of Criticism, p. 188). But, he adds, no society is perfect!

THE MEETING OF OPPOSITES, I

procedure for a theorist, is relatively unimportant to our par­ ticular study. What Levin offers us is another version of aes­ thetic historicism. His approach is quite similar to that of Van Wyck Brooks in the concept of the creative intellect's necessary modernity.* Each epoch projects a new vision of its world in its dialectical relationship with its tradition, and this is nothing more than the call for a continuous present. Levin first argued that this relativism does not result in Rene Wellek's charge of an "anarchy of values";52 but insofar as realism is a measure of a work's modernity the value of being realistic is a purely relative value. "The realism of any novel," he later admits, "has a purely relative meaning, dependent not only upon its apprehenders but upon its context both social and literary."53 "Realism" becomes such a broad term for Levin that ulti­ mately it has no meaning at all. All too often it seems to mean simply "modern" or the "latest" production in the same sense that Van Wyck Brooks saw each creative act as necessarily recreating the past in terms of the present. Moreover, like Brooks, Levin loses the distinction between literature and life. The realistic tradition seen in wholly literary terms is basically a process of each new work parodying its predecessors; but the parody is also a satire, for the literary conventions parodied and the social attitudes satirized are the same.54 A "critique of society," he tells us, "often begins as a parody of literature."55 Both Brooks and Levin, therefore, have collapsed life into art, which is, admittedly, exactly what they set out to do. With Levin, however, there are still some nagging questions about symbolistic and romantic literature. "Realism" does not always mean for him "modernity" in which case it would simply en­ compass symbolism and even romance. We cannot forget that he sets these terms in opposition, giving each a basis in a par* It also parallels that aspect of Edmund Wilson's historicism which sees the artist involved in a struggle with his own culture. Wilson's pre-Erikson sense of the individual developing in his social tradition yet asserting his own individuality is a crucial concept for Levin's evolving "realism."

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ticular manner of perceiving the world. It is clear from its social relationships that "realism," for Levin, is a value term to measure social progress, but in its purely literary context it seems to be only descriptive. Realism as social movement tends to become a universal historical principle; realism as literary movement is a matter of technique. If we are to take seriously Levin's argument that realism's literary and social meanings are identical, his denial of the literary work's dual mode of existence, we must see that he resolves the conflict between formal and socio-historical criti­ cism by also making them identical. The claim is that literature is the most profound manifestation of the very attitudes towards life's conventionality that make for change. It is as much to say that life is literary; its forms are indistinguishable from those of literature. It is a strong justification for literature; but it gives everything away to socio-historical meaning and value, for change becomes a matter of society's repeated awakenings to its reactionary nature.

Chapter VIII

Roy Harvey Pearce The Revitalizing of Historicism It is commonplace to state that whatever one may come to consider a truly American trait can be shown to have its equally characteristic oppo­ site. This, one suspects, is true of all "national characters," or (as I would prefer to call them) national identi­ ties—so true, in fact that one may begin rather than end with the propo­ sition that a nation's identity is de­ rived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counterpointed cer­ tain opposite potentialities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction. ERIK ERIKSON, Childhood and Society

There are few critics today who are more aware of their place in their own critical tradition than Roy Harvey Pearce. Among those I have already discussed are many whom he cites re­ peatedly and whose works he acknowledges as having been influential. Pearce's theoretical endeavors, nevertheless, repre­ sent a very serious attempt to push beyond those who have preceded him in the task of overhauling historicist theory; he struggles consciously and comprehensively with that historical relativism and anarchy of values that Rene Wellek claims are the "true" characteristics of historicism. As a traditional histori­ cist himself he attempts to broaden the traditional definitions in order to infuse the work, seen as fundamentally culturally

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oriented, with some meaning and value of its own. We should by now be all too familiar with the problems of such an ap­ proach, but Pearce has managed better than most not only to ask the proper questions but also to couch them in a lan­ guage that unequivocally offers us all of the alternatives. Two major influences on Pearce's literary theory I have not yet had an opportunity to discuss. The first, the work of Erich Auerbach, is very indirect but enormously significant. Auerbach represents for Pearce, and for this study as well, perhaps the most sophisticated of all the versions of traditional historicist aesthetics which have gained wide acceptance in this country. He is in one sense beyond the limits of American criticism. Yet I do not hesitate to bring him in here because he has been a major figure in the American critical tradition. The other influence is quite direct, the study of the history of ideas as developed by A. O. Lovejoy. Lovejoy's philosophic ap­ proach, which is not totally antithetical to the historicism of Auerbach, provides Pearce with the fundamental critical as­ sumptions that he later modifies into his own particular critical methodology. ι Erich Auerbach, as I have already mentioned, also had a significant influence on the theory of Harry Levin. In particu­ lar, both men attempt to define a broad concept of "realism" based on the idea of historical dynamics, and for both "real­ ism" is far more than a strictly literary tradition. In his Mimesis Auerbach sees the development of realism as essentially a postHellenic phenomenon. A truly realistic style springs from the sense of "a historically active dynamism," the "unfolding of historical forces."1 For the Greek writer the cyclic, and there­ fore fixed or static, concept of history denied the sense of change inherent in realism. Thus Auerbach sees the Hellenic separation of styles (the high and the low) and the absolute division between tragedy and comedy as reflections of an age which acknowledged eternally fixed relations between gods and mortals, heroes and mere men. In the Hebraic world,

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however, with its essentially eschatological vision of history as linear time, change is the fundamental principle of life. Fur­ thermore, a most significant addition to this Hebraic vision was the Messiah concept of the God-man, the perfect paradox which denies the basic Hellenic separations of mortal and divine. Realism, according to Auerbach, is the product of this Judeo-Christian tradition which is "totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles."2 My analysis here is far too neatly schematic to be adequate to Auerbach's theory. In truth, he distinguishes between dif­ ferent kinds of realism (one of which he finds in Homer), and he sees the realistic tradition existing long before the coming of Christ (particularly in the Old Testament). But it is not unfair to say that the "true" realism which lies at the heart of Mimesis belongs exclusively to a Judeo-Christian tradition although it may have had many pre-Christian anticipations. One of these early forms appears in the story of Abraham and Isaac which serves as a paradigm for a very crucial aspect of Auerbach's theory. The story of Abraham's choice embodies in it the full sense of the "problematic" nature of human existence; this, in turn, is reflected in the very language em­ ployed to tell it. The style is characterized by "certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, sug­ gestive influence of the unexpressed, 'background' quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, uni­ versal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problem­ atic."3 The Abraham story is more realistic than Homer's epics because "the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible."4 The paradox of the God-man Christ which is the theoretical ground of the problematic view of life "engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base."5 This idea has, obviously, far more than purely aesthetic implications. In I 47

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discussing the liturgical plays of the Middle Ages Auerbach claims that these works capture the essence of the whole Christian drama of history. In it all the heights and depths of human conduct and all the heights and depths of stylistic expression find their morally or aesthetically established right to exist; and hence there is no basis for a separation of the sublime from the low and everyday, for they are indissolubly connected in Christ's very life and suffering.8 It is important to notice that in the use of the conjunction "or" no distinction is made between the "moral" and the "aesthetic," and both are collapsed into Christian eschatology. The "problematic" quality of human existence gave rise in the Middle Ages to the "figural" method of Biblical exegesis. As Auerbach defines it: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within tem­ porality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life.7 Figural interpretation is a response to the seeming incompre­ hensibility of life's vicissitudes, an effort to give meaning to existence. The horror of Abraham's choice makes such a methodology necessary, for the figural relationship ultimately seeks a justification in "Divine Providence." The tentativeness of events in the figural interpretation is fundamentally different from the tentativeness of events in the modern view of historical development. In the modern view, the provisional event is treated as a step in an unbroken horizontal process; in the figural system the interpretation is always sought from above.8

ROY HARVEY PEARCE

That is to say, it is Platonic and not Hegelian. The historical events, Auerbach tells us, are not temporally or causally linked; they are bound together in eternity, "in the eyes of God." The great danger of such a concept, he argues, is the tendency for the "sensory occurrence" (the historical event) to be lost in "the power of the figural meaning."9 Thus the truly "problem­ atic" quality of realism would be destroyed, for the earthly would be totally overpowered by the sublime, the man-Christ subsumed in the God-Christ. True figural realism, on the other hand, preserves the sense of the immediate historical event while not relinquishing the claim for more eternal meanings. This was the mark of Dante's genius; for Auerbach the "ele­ vated style" of the Inferno "consists precisely in integrating what is characteristically individual and at times horrible, ugly, grotesque, and vulgar with the dignity of God's judgment."10 What we must see in all of this is the important relationship between style and history. The key function of the Abraham story in Auerbach's theory lies not merely in its dramatization of an existential dilemma. Rather it is significant as an example of the stylistic embodiment of man's agonizing struggle to understand the paradoxical nature of his existence at a particu­ lar moment in history. Auerbach defines history as a series of realisms because each epoch renders this basic struggle, what Rene Wellek calls "man's conscious and unconscious epistemology,"11 according to the specific details of the immediate historical events obtaining in that epoch. What is "problem­ atic" about realism is the attempt to balance the particularity of earthly events against some form of transcendent meaning (or, in more recent forms of realism, against some form of social stability or order), but each epoch manifests itself ac­ cording to its own sets of particularities and its own transcend­ ent or social order. There is no question that Auerbach's sense of the "problematic" is an existentialist life vision, but his peculiar use of this concept forces us to see it not as a general law but as a continuous series of epistemological struggles

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

reflected in realistic styles. The continuity of this series, more­ over, is the fundamental principle of Auerbach's historicism, but it is not strictly Hegelian, and it does not, as Rene Wellek claims, result in a theoretical contradiction* The repeated stylistic embodiments of man's existential struggles are the measure of historical dynamics; it is existentialism embedded in historical relativism which forms the structure of Auer­ bach's historicism. He advises the critic to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; . . . to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations . . . , because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique.12 Yet here too, as with all traditional historicisms, meaning and value reside wholly in the historical moment and not in the work. As Murray Krieger has pointed out, realistic litera­ ture for Auerbach seems to be only one of many possible mani­ festations of the epoch; it must take its place beside not only other literary forms but also contemporary hair styles and fads.13 Auerbach has denied to literature any meaningfully unique function in history; he has allowed it to have but a single mode of existence as a type of cultural manifestation that claims to employ a linguistic medium. Literature may only body forth in an appropriate style what meanings and values the age presents. The final effect of the theory on critical methodology is all too evident in Auerbach's own sum­ mary of his approach. * Apparently Wellek feels that Auerbach's "existentialism" is essen­ tially Kierkegaardian and carries with it Kierkegaard's rejection of Hegel. I will not quarrel with the contention that Kierkegaardian existentialism conflicts with Hegelian historicism, but I do argue that too easy a reduction of Auerbach's methodology to either Kierkegaard or Hegel is ultimately distorting. See Wellek's Concepts of Criticism, pp. 236-37.

ROY HARVEY PEARCE

I see the possibility of success and profit in a method which consists in letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose, and in trying them out on a series of texts which have be­ come familiar and vital to me in the course of my philologi­ cal activity; for I am convinced that these basic motifs in the history of the representation of reality—provided I have seen them correctly—must be demonstrable in any random realistic text.14 2

There is some general validity to the claim that Vernon Parrington's critical methods foreshadowed the more sophisti­ cated approach of A. O. Lovejoy, but Parrington's "environ­ mental" study of the history of American ideas differs from Lovejoy's philosophic study of cultural ideas in many specific details. The authors of a recent article on Parrington reluctantly admit that he was not always consistent; he tended "to regard ideas to which he was sympathetic as constituting 'thinking' independent of the social and economic environment" and ideas he opposed as its "victims." Furthermore, it is the "clear and unequivocal philosophy of social action"—which the au­ thors praise highly15—that is responsible for his worst incon­ sistencies; it was, as I argued in Chapter III, Parrington's approach to cultural history and literature with a point of view to be demonstrated that led to his most unjust evalua­ tions. Nothing could be further from the method of rigorous and objective philosophic analysis proposed by A. O. Lovejoy. The historian of ideas, Lovejoy claims, is concerned with the tracing of a "unit idea" through all "of the provinces of history in which it figures in any important degree, whether those provinces are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion, or politics."16 Leo Spitzer objects to the "scientific" pose of this approach which assumes that "an abstract idea . . . survives in history from generation to generation; a separate idea, always identifiable to the eye of the historian, in whatever period,"17 but Spitzer has extended Lovejoy's methodology too far. It is r5i

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the actual changes in the unit idea that most concerns the historian of ideas. Spitzer is right, nevertheless, to point out that the idea of "tracing" an abstraction through history im­ plies that that abstraction maintains some recognizable ele­ ment of its original form. This much Lovejoy must admit in order to defend his assertion that the movement of unit ideas from epoch to epoch (no matter how they synthesize with other unit ideas) constitutes an essential continuity in cultural history. The unit idea has its basis, according to Lovejoy, in the "implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation."" They are not simply determined by "social groups" and are not purely rational;19 the causes and movements of unit ideas can be traced ultimately to psychological responses to environment, the feelings or atti­ tudes aroused by milieu, or what he calls "metaphysical pathos."20 The fundamental method of approach involves "a study of the sacred words and phrases of a period or a moment, with a view to a clearing up of their ambiguities." Thus the ultimate goal of such a study is to "give a needed unifying background to many now unconnected and, consequently, poorly understood facts." Literary works he defines as "growths from seed scattered by great philosophic systems which them­ selves, perhaps, have ceased to be";21 but even though unit ideas transform themselves as they evolve from generation to generation, the idea in the work remains distinct. The meta­ phor of organic growth cannot, therefore, be taken literally. The fundamental identity of the idea, and of the logic of the reasonings to which it gave rise, is not annulled by the dissimilarity of the concomitant ideas with which it was associated, nor by the differing preoccupations and tempera­ mental biases of the writers into whose thinking it entered.22 We might agree with Spitzer that this insistence on the in­ violability of the unit idea would, in a lesser man than Lovej oy,

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lead us to miss subtle variations in the texture of individual works. Spitzer also argues that there is an inherent tendency in this method to categorize, and that the history of ideas approach seems to work best in the more "intellectual ages" like the eighteenth century.23 Miss Margaret Starkey's defense of Lovejoy's methodology quite accurately points out that these particular faults are not properties of the system but lapses in the ability of its users.24 Yet I must also argue that the concept of the primacy of the unit idea in each work of literature results in serious aesthetic limitations. In the lead article of the first issue of The Journal of the History of Ideas Lovejoy claims that art possesses its own peculiar "aesthetic values," but he does not elaborate on this point. Instead he turns to a discussion of the aesthetic experience. [A] work of art may be said to be differentiated from other visible or audible artificial objects by its capacity to produce in the perceiver a distinctive something called an "aesthetic enjoyment," or at least an "aesthetic experience," which . . . is at all events not simply identical either with cognitive experience or with a recognition of a possible ulterior utility which the object may serve.25 Lovejoy expresses here a primary interest in the work-reader relationship which may be contrasted with Ransom's, and most traditional historicists', primary interest in the workworld relationship. The justification for the study of the history of ideas is to enhance the aesthetic response and thereby aesthetic value. The external stimulus giving rise to the experience consists, it is true, in the actual words of the poem; but the capacity, even of the separate words, to suggest imagery or to arouse emotion, not to say convey ideas, is due to the associations which they already possess in the reader's mind, and these may be, and often are, the products of other reading.26

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He does not mean by this a variation of "contextualism." "The very notion," he tells us, "of a work of art as a self-contained kind of thing is a psychological absurdity."27 On the other hand, Lovejoy does not shove the aesthetic response into mere subjectivism; not just any response will do. There are correct responses, right interpretations, and these are controlled very much by the immersion of the work's lan­ guage in the ideas of its day. The value of scholarship is to inform the reader of the possibilities of word meanings, of the possibilities that confronted the author. How meager would be the aesthetic content of the Divine Comedy as a whole, or most of its parts, to a modern reader— especially a non-Catholic reader—wholly ignorant of medie­ val ideas and feelings and pieties.28 We must conclude from this that the proper aesthetic response to the work depends on our knowledge of the author's genera­ tion. Lovejoy's critical methodology, then, is a prelude to E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s more recent hermenuetics; but for Lovejoy the work's aesthetic value is bound simply to its "content" which, we may assume, refers to the presence in the work of the unit idea. The approach is finally wholly relativistic; the reader's aesthetic experience is determined by the meanings and values of the milieu in which the work was created. Furthermore, to know the author's environment appears to be more than merely knowing what the author knew. John Livingston Lowe's approach to Coleridge, though Lovejoy praises it highly, is, in terms of the history of ideas methodology, only partially the answer. More accurately, the duty of the historian of ideas re­ sembles that charged to literary scholars by George Saintsbury: know everything or risk omitting the most crucial element. The task set before the historian of ideas by Lovejoy has something of a statistical ring to it; he must "discriminate" and "list exhaustively" in order to find the "ruling idea."29 The primary target of Leo Spitzer's attack on the history of ideas is what Lovejoy calls the "analytic" methodology. Spitzer argues:

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In opposition to such an histoire des idees, with its bias for naturalistic and atomistic methods applied to the history of the human mind, I propose a Geistesgeschichte, in which Geist represents nothing ominously mystical or mythological, but simply the totality of the features of a given period or movement which the historian sees as a unity.30 In the place of "analysis" he would offer "synthesis." It is not necessary here to detail Lovejoy's astute reply, but the debate between the two men reflects a fundamental division in their philosophies. Spitzer seemingly argues for the organic whole­ ness of cultural epochs; he objects to the process of breaking them down into unit ideas. On the other hand. Lovejoy does not deny that there is some sort of unity within individual epochs, but he maintains that it is not a literally organic unity which defies analysis. Spitzer, somewhat in contradiction of his concept of the organic cultural moment, also claims that the unit idea as it appears in the thought of individual writers is totally absorbed in the organic wholeness of the complete thought. Lovejoy replies, of course, that such a radical organic theory not only makes analytic methods absurd but also denies the possibility for human communication since, as Spitzer maintains, no two wholes are ever alike. Again Lovejoy refuses to accept the literal implications of organicism; he believes that ideas, thoughts, and literary works are sharable, and he insists that the unit idea retains some measure of independence even while it exists totally within the whole.31 3 This is, I repeat once more, a rephrasing of the historicist's dilemma: the work seen as of its own time and of all times, the work with a dual mode of existence. It is, furthermore, the particular problem to which Roy Harvey Pearce directs him­ self, and his solution is to seek a "synthetic" approach that, in contrast with Spitzer, will not deny its basis in the study of the history of ideas. He calls this merely a shift in emphasis from "the idea and its relationship to other ideas" to the "idea-

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informed context . . . and its relationship to other contexts." "Once made available by analysis, the idea is put back into this social context by a species of synthesis." The approach assumes that "the nature of society [is] relatively homogeneous." Essentially, Pearce nationalizes Lovejoy's international interests. He takes as his context a particular society at a particular time. This would yield, he tells us, studies like "the impact of the idea of the Great Chain of Being in Augustan England."32 In part such limitations of scope are necessary for the historian of ideas whose capacities are something less than Lovejoy's, but for Pearce national interests are part of his theory. In an article written nine years after the urging of this synthetic method, he emphasizes that American studies "must reflect our sense of the wholeness of our civilization," our American civiliza­ tion.33 It is in literature, Pearce claims, that the cultural synthesis finds its best illustration; that is, the literary work speaks meaningfully to its contemporary readers and those who come to it many years later, for it is not merely reflective of its moment but of the homogeneity of its cultural history as well. Presumably, as we share in that culture, the works which spring from it will be open to us. Yet this very tradi­ tional historicism, which apparently borrows F. O. Matthiessen's idea of a "common humanity," also has an opposing side. Pearce struggles to define a work of literature which is "unique and self-sufficient" even though the materials of its construc­ tion are "contingent."* The use to which a writer puts socially embodied ideas, the way in which he orders and thus interprets such ideas, the very texture of his product—judgment of all these is inde­ pendent of purely historical conditions.34 The goal that Pearce sets for himself is to bring the formal­ ism of the New Criticism into a more consistent relationship with the history of ideas. To do this he argues that a study of * See Historicism Once More, pp. 25-26 where he discusses the idea that historicism "entails" both a "radical relativism" and an absolutism.

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culturally determined ideas is a "necessary preliminary" to for­ malist analysis. It is necessary because the artist creates in a kind of "closed field" of linguistic and ideological possibili­ ties,* and this limitation, brought on by the fact that the artist "must share language and ideas and main concerns and drives," provides the critic (and the reader who knows the cultural context) with "the approximate . . . nature of the artist's intention." The critic has access, then, to the "total normative aesthetic quality of the work."35 This same assump­ tion has received fuller philosophic treatment in E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Validity in Interpretation where the meaning of any literary work is found within the limits of the author's "de­ terminant will" (including all of the conscious or unconscious environmental influences that make up his "will"). The method of the "synthesis" with its emphasis on national­ ism, continuity, and the closed field has remained central to the whole development of Pearce's theory. Its expressed aim is to enable the critic "to move from a sense of the individual style of a poem . .. to that of its culture." Culture has its own "style" which is "at once the background against which and the ground out of which" the poet works. Thus he claims that "the achievement of American poetry is a good measure of the achievement of American culture as a whole."38 The idea most likely derives from the theories of Americo Castro whom Pearce often cites. "History," Castro claims, "is where are realized, in many ways, man's possibilities for achieving great deeds and works that endure and radiate their values afield, works . . . that can affect the mind, the imagination, or the soul."37 Similarly, Pearce announced some years after his first endeavors to join formalism with the history of ideas his belief, reminiscent of Parrington's, that poetry is "history (our history) via literature."38 Hence in The Continuity of Ameri­ can Poetry he interprets Whitman's Song of Myself, Pound's * A very similar idea is explored by Hugh Kenner in an article entitled "Language as a Closed Field," Learners and Discerners: A Newer Criticism, ed. Robert Scholes, particularly p. 112.

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Cantos, Crane's The Bridge, and Williams's Paterson as "plot­ less epics" projected by "milieu and ambiance" which are poems "centripetal" to their culture.39 The word "centripetal" is characteristic; it clearly indicates his attraction to historical relativism, but Pearce has never been willing to accept that radical relativism which sees the artist as merely a photographic copier of his immediate environment. Rene Wellek dismisses the theoretical efforts of Pearce as "weird mixtures" of incompatible ideas,40 but this judgment is unfair in its refusal to recognize the depth of the problem that Pearce confronts. For Pearce the function of poetry is "to en­ hance, deepen, and enlarge man's vision of his world and him­ self in it,"41 and this vision he says, "ultimately derives from the writer's (and reader's) sense of humanitas." Humanitas he de­ fines as "our awareness of our private and often burdensome existence as men." In this awareness we see ourselves as both unique, individual beings and at the same time "acculturated creatures whose least gesture can always be accounted for in someone's encyclopedic register of the life-style which obtains at our particular moment in history."42 Quoting Lionel Tril­ ling, he argues that literature must "make us aware of the par­ ticularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture."43 The wholeness of the literary work must contain a sense of opposition between the poet's drive to be creatively free and the limitations im­ posed upon him by society. In a more recent statement Pearce enumerates the specific "theses" of his theory. In literature the specifically human is identified as a self whose power for selfhood, centering on the fact of conscious­ ness, enables men to wrest meaning from the flux of exist­ ence. [We are] guided by the very "formalism" of the manifesta­ tion, the work of art. The self is the author's, as a man speaking to men. The selves which make up his speakers and casts of characters are

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functions of his self and, through his art, can become func­ tions of ours.44 The conflict that confronts the artist is the conflict between extremes, between the "unique" expression and the "encyclo­ pedic register," between freedom and social convention. The idea perhaps owes something to Auerbach's vision of the "prob­ lematic" nature of Western society, and the inevitable result of the artist's opposition to society is a stand-off. The poet can never escape from the closed field in which he works. His work is the manifestation of an existential commitment, and tension, paradox, and ambiguity become the "formal resolu­ tions or the containment, or both, of those existential contrarities which, as it is endowed with humanitas, the literary work manifests."45 The author creates through an "as-if" assertion a world as it "might be" within the historically conditioned context of "possibilities." It is the polarity between the artist and his environment or between, to use appropriate Sartrean terms, the "self" and "other" that produces art. There is no Hegelian or Marxian transcendental progression that marshals this struggle into metaphysical patterns. As with Auerbach, continuity in history is a matter of the interrelations of these struggles as they are manifest in literature (though as we saw Auerbach also emphasizes non-literary manifestations). On this basis, Pearce sees the continuity of American poetry culminate in Wallace Stevens whose enduring quest was to find the relationship between "imagination" and "reality."46 Stevens comes nearer writing the "ultimate poem" because he refuses to yield to the demands of culture as did Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Timrod, and Lanier. Upon the writer's sense of the "opposing self" rests the possibility for literary crcation. At the same time, Pearce would claim, the possibilities for greatness in literature reflect the possibilities for greatness in culture, for the aesthetic "ought to be," reflected by the poet's sense of his individual freedom opposed to con­ cepts of his culture, achieves its self-sufEcient form only through the tension of humanitas. The focus here, it should be noted, J59

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is on the potentialities for greatness in culture and not in the creative ability of the artist; Pearce would presumably agree that the greater the society, the less radical will be the artist's opposition. Pearce holds firmly throughout his career to the concept of the individual artist working within the closed context of his society. This is essential to the methodological "synthesis" he wants to perform on the history of ideas approach, and it pervades his study of frontier American attitudes toward the Indian in The Savages of America." The Lovejovian heritage of this book is clear, yet it goes beyond Lovejoy to draw lines of relation between the cultural "unit idea" of the "savage" and the historical fact of the Indian. What emerges is an anthro­ pological point of view that describes for the reader an im­ portant aspect of American cultural history, an aspect that, significantly, extends beyond the frontier era. Pearce, in the tradition of Van Wyck Brooks, creates a "past" for modern American society, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Pearce discovers the limits of a portion of the closed American cultural context. In so doing he reveals his debt to Erik Erikson, for Erikson had only shortly before fully formulated his idea that every person and every group has a limited inventory of historically determined spatial-temporal concepts, which de­ termine the world image, the evil and ideal prototypes, and the unconscious life plan. These concepts dominate a nation's strivings and can lead to high distinction; but they also narrow a people's imagination and thus invite disaster.*8 The possibility of cultural "disaster," we should remember, led Brooks to condemn the "narrowing" of the imagination in Mark Twain and Henry James; the creative mind must (ac­ cording to Brooks, Erikson, and Pearce) stand over against society, although it can never escape society. In a study of psychoanalytic approaches to Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" Pearce very precisely characterizes the exis-

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tential implications of the artist-society relationship as "free­ dom in, not from, history."49 This existential dilemma of the artist is broader, and perhaps more elusive, than the existentialism of the new critical formal­ ists; it is more than the anguished confrontation of the ma­ terials of creation by an artist confused by the "flux and blur" of history. Presumably the artist, as defined by Pearce, struggles against a too restrictive society rather than a society rendered chaotic by ambiguous and paradoxical value systems. In this fundamental way Pearce stands diametrically opposed to the New Criticism and Contextualism. He emphasizes the "prog­ ress" arising from the conflict between individual and society, and the act of interpretation involves the critic in a study of both the artist's psycho-social crisis and his historical milieu. This critical approach he calls "existential historicism," and the writer is the "symbolist as historian." For Pearce, Hawthorne is a most adequate example of such an artist; Hawthorne's "sense of the past" involves the "use of history both as object and subject."50 A Hawthorne novel or tale embodies in it the historicity of the author's life, his psychic and social being or humanitas, but, more important, it also draws the reader into that historicity. "The factuality of past life," for Hawthorne, "had to be transformed into the symbolism of present art and thereby be made part of the factuality of his readers' lives as they might live them."51 Speaking of those works by Haw­ thorne that most clearly achieve this historical perspectivism, of The House of the Seven Gables and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" in particular, Pearce claims, they treat history as a continuum joining author, actor, and reader. Therefore, as they focus upon the quality of life as it exists at any given point on the continuum, they focus on the mutual involvement of the three parties in the con­ tinuum. The problem of composition . . . entails at once portraying an historical episode, making the protagonist in the work come to see his relationship to the episode, and also making the reader aware of his relationship to the episode.52

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There appears to be an almost unbroken tradition of ideas in American historicist theory concerning the artist's dialectical relation with his culture. We have noted variations on the theme in Parrington's progressive Jefiersonianism, Van Wyck Brooks's moral idealism, Marxian revolutionary economics, Marius Bewley's "complex fate," Harry Levin's "scrupulous critique," and now in Roy Harvey Pearce's concept of humanitas. These theories, of course, illustrate widely different "types" of approach; the idea of the artist-society opposition is couched in "metaphysical," "nationalistic," and "aesthetic" historicisms. The artist has in this tradition been given a burdensome and vital role in the general life of his society and has been fre­ quently criticized for not readily or adequately answering the call. There is in this a deep-seated sense of art's peculiar abili­ ties to formulate an escape from the limitations of social exist­ ence. Even where the "problematic" theory of art exists as a copartner with a faith in an ultimate metaphysical order (as with some Hegelians) this existential anguish remains, and in more recent aesthetic theories it is heightened to become a prominent aspect of the critical approach. Behind it all is the essentially epistemological foundation of historicist literary theory. Art is a way of knowing, either by forming some aesthetic unit out of disparate human experience or by reveal­ ing the order inherent in that experience. For many traditional historicists the emphasis is on the latter, on knowledge gained "through" the individual work as that work functions primarily as a window to culture. But this implies a radical mimesis and historical relativism, and for the most part even traditional historicists want to occupy a position somewhere further along the continuum toward a theory which would claim for art at least some power as a maker of meanings—perhaps of particu­ lar, "artistic" meanings. It is along this continuum that we have been moving in this study, approaching nearer and nearer to the point where we are no longer justified in calling a par­ ticular theory "traditional historicism." It is a matter of balanc­ ing fundamental philosophic commitments against what are too often overly ambitious desires; essentially, when we reach a

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point where the critic grounds his theory primarily in an assertion of art's uniquely embodied meanings and values, that is to say in the artist's truly creative function, then we must begin to discuss a really new historicism. Of course, the actual dividing line between historical relativism and pure formalism is impossible to locate; a perfect balance between the two extremes perhaps can never exist. We do not, however, have to let that bar us from the recognition of significant efforts which have been made to achieve that balance. Roy Harvey Pearce, I believe, has made the most sustained effort of any American critic to approach the ideal middle from the traditional historicist side. It is the writer's "primal intuition," he claims, his sense of the self in culture or humanitas which provides the "formal elements—for holding the work together." These formal elements are inseparably teamed with a second component, the "historical data," which supplies the matter for the poem in order to produce the aesthetically "whole" work. This form-content relationship serves as a basis for Pearce's version of the "concrete universal—universal as regards its tendency, derived from its vital center of humanitas, toward the ideally possible whole; concrete as regards its necessarily historically conditioned expressive form."53 The idea springs from his basic assumption "that literature—any literature—is at once in history and above it."54 The organicity or wholeness which formalist criteria will help us remark are such because as the poem first happened, it still happens. As it still happens, it brings, inseparably, the life of its culture with it. If we accept the form, we accept the life. If we accept the life, we accept the culture. This is his­ torical understanding and historical knowledge.55 Criticism, therefore, must be a historical study—"perhaps the purest of historicisms"—because only by studying the culture which produced the work of art can we accept that work as a "true" manifestation of its culture.58 Yet despite the clear desire for an "organic" work that has its own particular existence outside of time, Pearce's language

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turns him along a different path. The union of form and matter is never complete; it merely tends "toward the ideally possible whole." Furthermore, the study of literature is really the study of a "manifestation" of culture, and the aim of criticism is finally to attain "historical knowledge." Pearce wants to go beyond Auerbach's concept of the "author as carrier not agent." He wants to see the work as a product of the "author's own creative activity" as well as "the creative potential of his cul­ ture,"57 but he is unwilling to make the commitments to for­ malism that might realize an organic work of art. He explicitly denies that poetic language has any unique status.* Poems are examples of a special, concentrated use of what some modern linguistic scholars call "non-casual utterances" and are therefore still within the purview of language as we use it day to day.58 In this particular point Pearce has not advanced beyond the theory of F. W. Bateson whose concept of language as cul­ turally determined saw the individual work as merely another manifestation of the manner in which language adapts to social and intellectual revolutions. It is a denial of the potentiality of uniqueness to the very medium of literature. Pearce claims that in "studying language, we study history," and the relationship between the two is integral and complete. The poem really has no existence apart from its historical perspective, and because of this it is difficult to see where Pearce has significantly gone beyond Auerbach. We cannot take the word "creative" literally when the "individual style" of the object made is structured wholly by its social environment. The critic, he tells us, always looks "back toward the basic stylef * He does, however, describe the poetic process as might an organicist: "As many poets have testified, the words themselves, as they become increasingly implicated in a poetic structure, often dictate where they should go and what other words are needed to go with them so as to complete the structure and bring it to life" (Historicism Once More, p. 26). But he will not follow the full logical consequences of a truly organicist aesthetic. f Pearce's idea of "basic styles" may have been derived from

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from the unique styles of the poems in which he can see it [the basic style] in all its determining immanence."59 To speak of the work's "unique" or "individual style" as determined by a basic "life-style" in culture is a contradiction in terms. To be sure, he goes on in this passage to take some of the edge off of the idea of "determining immanence." For in part at least it is determinative . . . it prescribes a direction in which the poet's imagination may move; it de­ limits the areas of experience on which his sensibility may be operative; and it supplies his mind with a "content"—a substance of motifs, conceptions, and the like; in the largest sense, topoi.e° This is, in effect, a return to his earlier idea of a "closed field," a limit on the number of creative possibilities within each indi­ vidual epoch. It is a formal and substantive control that makes the language of poetry the product of its day. The artist's sense of humanitas leads him to project an ideal world and word order in his poem, but it apparently can never be realized, even in the purely Active structure of that poem.

4 When I spoke of Pearce's efforts to advance along the path toward the balancing of historical relativist and formalist principles, I should have emphasized that anything short of attaining that ideal balance is really infinitely short of it. Work­ ing so carefully within existing critical traditions he is very much aware of the inherent contradictions that spring from the terminology he employs. Pearce's most significant theo­ retical contribution, and it is a momentous one, lies in this very awareness of the possibilities of critical understanding. He cannot abandon his commitment to view literature as history, as culturally determined history which has its ultimate value in the conveying of knowledge about the cultural tradition in Americo Castro's "functional structure," which for Castro was a con­ trolling element in historical dynamics (see The Structure of Spanish History, pp. 37#).

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which we (as native readers) live. At the same time, I think we must see in his efforts a far greater awareness of the artist's powers, of the vitality of art in general, than in the approaches of Parrington or Hicks or Lewis. The concept of humanitas with all of its implications of existential commit­ ment and duty is not an inconsiderable, nor indemonstrable, claim for literature. Pearce teaches us, ultimately, that our critical language by traditional implication tends toward the establishing of abso­ lutes. To speak of the work as unique and timeless yet also as relative and determined is to pose the dilemma that all historicists face; but few, as I have repeatedly tried to demonstrate, seek such total oppositions. In our enthusiasm for the peculiar life and impact that we feel in our experience with literature we want to proclaim its uniqueness. In our awareness that, as Auerbach urges, the artist is a man writing at a particular time in a particular medium we cannot escape the conclusion that the work he produces is a meaningful expression of his vision of his world. Again, we have a work of art with a dual mode of existence. This dual status, however, is more correctly a product of our critical methods and terms than an ontological truth. Although we speak of literature's unique yet relative meanings and values, the object that seems to espouse this dualism is a single object. Moreover, it is not really possible to make this dilemma simply a matter of degree; to speak of more or less uniqueness is meaningless. To say that a work is partly unique and partly determined is to assert either a form-content dichotomy or a more complex poetry-prose dualism like that of John Crowe Ransom. Neither is, seemingly, fully adequate to our experience of literature, an experience wherein the interac­ tion between the reader and the work seems to be complete and unified.

Chapter IX

The Meeting of Opposites, n The aesthetic historicism of Harry Levin which sees the artist as "maker" of his culture in the very act of making his art contrasts directly with the mimetic-nationalistic historicism of Roy Harvey Pearce. For Levin the concept of "realism" is founded upon the claim that the artist is truly creative as artist, though he simultaneously contributes to the historical advance­ ment of his culture as does Van Wyck Brooks's creative man of letters. For Pearce, as he was influenced by the mimetic theory of Erich Auerbach, the claim that the artist literally creates is vitiated by his insistence that the poem's "unique" style is traceable to a "basic style" in culture. Seemingly Pearce cannot free himself from the necessity of seeing "reality" as a solid, resistant, and formed entity extrinsic to the structure of the work itself. As a result, his concept of humanitas, which super­ ficially resembles Levin's theory of the artist opposed to the conventions of his day, mixes rather imperfectly with these mimetic leanings and necessitates a dualistic aesthetics not unlike that of John Crowe Ransom. In a broader sense, how­ ever, Levin and Pearce are very much alike; they are essentially traditional historicists. If Levin's aesthetic historicism collapses history into art, Pearce's mimetic historicism collapses art into history. Neither, of course, would be satisfied with this simple reduction of his theory, but at the very least we can say that these are aesthetic problems that still want a satisfactory explanation. In this chapter I will direct my attention to a group of literary theorists who come to historicism primarily from an organicist aesthetics. Insofar as their fundamental assumption is

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that the artist literally creates a unique work of art, they reject traditional mimetic theories. Furthermore, their insistence on the work's self-sufficiency, its individual status in being, makes them diametrically opposed to any confusion of art and history. Nevertheless, this branch of organicism is in no way related to late nineteenth-century "aestheticism," for it asserted itself in direct opposition to "artsakism." Murray Krieger has already ably defended the movement against charges of critical hedon­ ism,1 and we need only reiterate here that the goal of what he calls "Contextualism" was never a "pure" formalism although the zeal of the early New Critics unfortunately made it appear to be so. As for the critics to be discussed in this chapter, it will be no trouble to allay all doubts as to their sincere extraformalist interests. It is this strong interest that makes them key figures in our search for a new historicism, and it is this twin-visioned Contextualism that is, to borrow Krieger's term, "ambitious" in its attempt to recognize for poetry a valuable and unique place in human culture. Ambitious in the best way, not to misrule poetry by cutting it off from man's other concerns, nor to abandon it by turn­ ing it into a disguised form of these other concerns, but to allow it the sovereignty it requires to flower in the way that can preserve its unique human function, that of at once re­ flecting and revealing the human condition through being a total object itself.2 The present chapter will serve to acquaint us with the prob­ lems of such an aesthetics. The critics discussed here evidence an unparalled critical and philosophic awareness in the develop­ ment of their theories, and their successes and failures must be measured against the ambitious tasks they have set for them­ selves. In the following chapter I will analyze in depth the effort of one theorist as he struggles to come to terms with an organicist-historicist aesthetics and to define the limits to which Contextualist critical theory may legitimately go in its quest for a new historicism.

THE MEETING OF OPPOSITES, II I

In Symbolism and American Literature Charles Feidelson, Jr. offers a theory of the poetic process which seeks at once to preserve the unique organicity of the symbol, or poem, while remaining aware of the poet's relation as poet to his milieu. The design of the work is to trace the development of the sym­ bolic process in the development of American literature. The goal is to disclose what is peculiarly American about this de­ velopment. In defining the poetic object or symbol Feidelson is quite explicit in his formalist demands. To consider the literary work as a piece of language is to regard it as a symbol, autonomous in the sense that it is quite distinct both from the personality of its author and from any world of pure objects, and creative in the sense that it brings into existence its own meaning.3 This absolute sense of the poem's individuality is precisely the target most often hit by non-Contextualist critics in rejecting organic theory, for it seems to deny all possible extrinsic mean­ ing and value for the work. In part, however, Feidelson draws these exacting distinctions in order to rescue the poem from what he sees as the dangerous temptation to reduce the poetic object into the purely extrinsic. The enemies of symbolism are clearly identified. For the symbolist, both romanticism and naturalism are uses of language that place the focus of reality outside language— romanticism, as Allen Tate puts it, is "not qualitatively dif­ ferent from the naturalism it attacked, but identical with it, and committed in the arts to the same imperfect inspiration." In both cases, from the symbolistic point of view, the literary process is weighted by an ulterior motive, and the writer's eye has a cast induced by a conflicting habit of mind. Sym­ bolism is neither one nor the other but a new departure, a revision of the literary question.4 Feidelson argues that symbolism, as he defines it, is not an

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extension of romanticism,* for romanticism treats language as a mere "instrument of expression."5 True symbolism is some­ thing distinct from that symbolism we conventionally associate with the European romantic movement; it is not only "a re­ vision of the literary question" but is also based on a profoundly different set of epistemological assumptions. Symbolism, he says, is "problematic" "in the sense that its characteristic subject is its own equivocal method." In order for a work to be a pure symbol it portrays its own process of becoming a symbol which necessitates that it at once affirm and deny its own validity. In order to achieve the perfect balance of these ten­ sions the poet must become a "kind of Manichee"; "his God is the present reality of his work ..., his Devil is the potentiality of illusion and disunity."® All of this would seem to bar Feidelson from any serious historicist interests, but there is also a strong nationalism that affects his theory. The paradigmatic poet in his conception of the development of American symbolism is Walt Whitman. For Whitman, he claims, "instead of describing reality, a poem is a realization."7 That is to say, Whitman's poems do not tell us anything. In fact, they do not literally "describe" even the symbolic or poetic process; they are "dramatistically" the proc­ ess itself.f It is, therefore, not quite accurate to speak of the symbolic process as the "subject" of the poem though we have no better way to express the idea of the poem's symbolic realization of its own act of becoming. On the basis of this definition Feidelson proposes what we might call a new na­ tionalistic historicism. Historical because he sees the maturation of symbolic awareness as a movement from the time of Emer­ son to the time of Melville with further projections into the modern era: "Symbolism is the coloration taken on by the * He is specifically refuting Edmund Wilson's position in Axel's Castle. + This idea should remind us of Kenneth Burke's definition of Symbol which involves both the process of creation as well as the artist's vision of his world. Feidelson, however, cannot be characterized as an Aristotelian promoting an imitation theory whereas such a description is not, as we have seen, unjust for Burke.

THE MEETING OF OPPOSITES, II

American literary mind under the pressure of American in­ tellectual history." Specifically, he finds the roots of American symbolism in the Puritan adherence to Ramist logic as it was influenced by Biblical typology. This philosophic belief, he argues, was the source for the symbolist's idea of the autonomy of language; and when it was combined with a reaction against the tradition of epistemological skepticism initiated by Des­ cartes and brought to a dead end by Hume and Berkeley, the inevitable result was "Symbolism."8 What Feidelson offers here is a history of epistemological sensibilities; that is, a history of the continuing sophistication of a particular kind of poetic activity. This activity can be seen as developing in sophistication, however, only insofar as it remains something less than a truly symbolic act of mind. Feidelson wants to describe a peculiarly American progress in the growth of symbolistic sensibilities, but this is possible only in a pre-symbolic tradition if we are to accept his particular definition of the symbol's organic autonomy. Once the poetic process, the creative act, achieves its goal (the production of a pure symbol the "subject" of which is its own process of be­ coming) the organic perfection of the symbol reflects the per­ fection of the symbolic process. Thereafter one cannot mean­ ingfully speak of a growth in symbolic power, for the power has reached its optimum creative range in the making of the pure symbol. Thus Feidelson does not really combine his organicism with a nationalistic historicism, but he provides us with some sig­ nificant principles that might eventually lead to such an organicist-historicist theory. He warns us not to confuse the symbol with the poet who produces it: "While dramatizing the conscious effort of its author, [the symbol] enjoys an autonomy to which the person of the author is irrelevant."9 Yet he is rejecting here those simplistic theories of poetry which see the poem as identical with the poet's autobiography, and at least that part of the author's "person" which constitutes the act of creation, which is the poem's "subject," must be relevant to its meaning. There is a narrow kind of autobiography in the dra-

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matization of a moment of the artist's consciousness. The apparent difficulty of defining a new "organicist historicism" rests direcdy on this relationship between the poem and the artist as a man writing at a particular time. Seemingly, we cannot absolutely separate the symbol from that specific and in­ dividual act of mind that produced it; and if we are to see the organic symbol as in any way related to an historical tradition, it must be through the symbolic processes which act upon the language of everyday discourse to create a unique vision of a moment in time. Although Feidelson's historicism is ultimately only an historicism of the pre-symbolic powers of mind—of the struggle to achieve a truly symbolic poetry—his definition of the poem's self-conscious nature, of its subject matter as its own process of becoming, leads us nearer to that new histori­ cism we are seeking to describe in these final chapters. 2

There is no single effort in the works of Leo Spitzer to de­ velop a full aesthetic theory even to the extent that Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature presents a completed theory, but throughout his essays are many com­ ments that reveal his ideas on poetry and criticism. Murray Krieger, discussing Spitzer in the context of a new historicist theory, feels that Spitzer espouses several not always com­ patible critical approaches.10 The first involves a rather tradi­ tional historicism; Spitzer asks: since the best document of the soul of a nation is its litera­ ture, and since the latter is nothing but its language as this is written down by elect speakers, can we perhaps not hope to grasp the spirit of a nation in the language of its outstand­ ing works of literature ... P11 Moreover, it is possible, he says, to "compare the whole of a national literature to the whole of a national language."12 This is what Krieger calls an historicism which finds "the locus of the inviolable context . . . in the cultural complex";18 but Spitzer also speaks of the "artistic" work as "characterized

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by its self-sufficiency and organic perfection which allow it to stand out as an independent whole."14 These two arguments clearly place him in the tradition of the new historicism we are discussing in this chapter. Spitzer's organicism is no momentary interlude in his theory. In an essay entitled "Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, March (Lines 61-114)" he chastens the Variorem editors for not analyzing "from within the poetic logic that blends its parts organically together" and condemns their tendency to criticize from "preconceived general ideas about Spenser's mythological poetry."15 Similarly, in an excellent essay on "The Ode on a Grecian Urn" he warns Earl Wasserman to be careful in admitting "extraneous elements" to his criticism of poetic texts. The reader must be led to feel the poem as self-explanatory and self-sufficient (for so it is meant in most cases by the poet) as unfolding itself organically before the reader with­ out any commentator being needed. Help from the outside introduced too early, and as if it were necessary, is apt to destroy the impression of the specific uniqueness and whole­ ness of the work of art.16 Rene Wellek finds three major trends in Spitzer's theory, the "philological circle," "mystical intuition," and "depth psychology."17 Spitzer himself calls attention to his debt to Freud and Jung, but he indicates that whatever help this approach may offer is very limited. In part he admires the technique of studying "emotional clusters" as it was developed by Kenneth Burke, and to this extent he transforms Freudian dream analysis into a critical technique that has an historicist orientation in its search for a "clue to the writer's Weltan­ schauung." Yet the limitations are clear; for he sees the meth­ odology as applicable "only to those poets who do allow their phobias and idiosyncrasies to appear in their writing," and he claims this eliminates vast areas of pre-Romantic literature.18 The psychology of the author does, nevertheless, figure in Spitzer's concept of the "philological circle." He describes this

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crucial aspect of his critical methodology in several places but perhaps most succinctly in his essay on "Explication de Texte Applied to Three Great Middle English Poems." I first draw from one detail (which need not always be linguistic or stylistic, but may also be compositional in na­ ture) of incontrovertible factual evidence, an inference as to the (at this stage still hypothetic) psyche of the author or the period, which hypothesis is then, in a second movement, controlled by a scrutiny of . . . all other striking details . . . which occur in the same author or period.18 This approach apparently makes no distinction between the "psyche" of the author or his historical epoch, and it should remind us of the argument between Spitzer and A. O. Lovejoy discussed in the previous chapter. There Spitzer's organicism seemed to refer ambiguously to both the broad range of culture and the individual act of mind of a poet in that culture. To adhere to the former would be a very traditional historicist position, but it would also deny the sense of the work's in­ dividual autonomy for which he argued in his rejection of the history of ideas. Spitzer describes his own methodology, which he calls "stylistics," as an analysis of individual poems "from the sur­ face" to their "inward life-center." Insofar as this "life-center" is identical with the "psyche" or "soul of the artist"20 (as it might be if the German term Geist were substituted), and insofar as the ultimate goal is "to explain particular stylistic traits by their historical or cultural background," he has es­ poused a general historicist theory.21 Every "stylistic deviation" from the generally accepted "norm" must be representative of an "historical step taken by the writer ... a shift in the soul of the epoch." It is "a shift of which the writer has become con­ scious and which he would translate into a necessarily new linguistic form."22 As a linguistic theory it is very much like that of F. W. Bateson, and both men encounter problems in mixing this idea of language as a direct reflection of social movement with their greater or lesser commitments to the

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idea of free poetic creativity. Bateson cannot seriously be called an organicist, but Spitzer's dilemma is the problematic relation­ ship between the author as a man of his age using the language of that age and the organic poem that he creates. Nevertheless, Spitzer's insight into the poem's stylistic relationship to the mind of the poet and the poet's immersion in his own milieu is a significant advancement beyond Bateson toward a new historicism. He gives expression to the aesthetic problem as has no critic we have considered thus far. Poetry, he says in reply to Karl Shapiro, consists of "words, with their meaning preserved, which, through the magic of the poet... arrive at a sense-beyond-sense." The words in their old, time-bound meanings are literally "transfigured" as they appear in the poetic context, but their old meanings are not thereby de­ stroyed.23 His critical methodology consists of first selecting a detail on the surface of the organic text, then making innumer­ able plunges into hypotheses about the text's inner soul which is at once the poem's, the poet's, and the epoch's. These plunges he calls the scholar's to and fro "voyages" between the depths and the surface. Wellek argues that this is the most tenuous aspect of Spitzer's theory for it relies on a "mystical intuition." He is disturbed by the lack of precision in Spitzer's approach. The success of the methodology depends upon the proper selection of the first detail and consequently on the proper formulation of a hy­ pothesis based on this detail; yet we are never told how this first step is taken. It "cannot be planned," Spitzer admits; it is a mere "impression," the result of "talent" or "experience."24 He further confesses that the entire process is circular, the "explana­ tion of a linguistic fact by an assumed psychological process for which the only evidence is the fact to be explained," and he argues, as a self-conscious historicist must, that the circle is not vicious and that all exegesis is ultimately tautological.25 Never­ theless, Wellek's accusation of "mysticism" is unfair. Although the selection of the first detail is crucial, for the true organicist the selection cannot be arrived at in the process of an objective technique. In the perception of literature as literature the or-

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ganicist methodology is in one sense necessarily "impression­ istic"; the inviolable context of the poem must be perceived directly and privately by the critic, and his resultant critical discussion can only hope to guide others toward that same "impression." Yet this is no mystical vision; it is merely the best that the organicist can do to describe the impact of his experience of the work. Such an approach is fundamentally unacceptable to the traditional scholar-historian like Wellek who would have for criticism a more scientifically adequate critical methodology. In his search for a new historicism the organicist must give up scientific precision in criticism; this despite Spitzer's claim that his method is "rigorously scientific."28 We may be dis­ turbed or disappointed by Spitzer's use of such terms as "magic" to describe the poet's act of creation, or his description of the moment of recognition of the poem's meaning as a "click." We may more strongly object to his claim that the critic is dependent upon a kind of divine guidance, a "light from above" which is the manifestation of the critic's "faith" and his "moral nature."27 But admitting this necessary lack of a scientific certainty in organicist theory, we need not resort to total epistemological skepticism. We may legitimately ask the organicist, particularly when he evidences clear historicist interests, to explain as best he can the limitations and possi­ bilities of his critical methodology. Spitzer's impressionism, therefore, is to be distinguished from the more anarchical version of impressionism that the organicists themselves have so vigorously attacked. Clearly he assumes that there is an a priori norm that controls critical interpretation and evalua­ tion; it is the sense of "rightness" that makes the "light from above" necessary, and for Spitzer, as an organicist, it is the text itself which provides all of the standards and norms. (This, of course, does not make clear how his concept of the critic's "moral nature" enters into the critical process.) More im­ portantly, he steps beyond the self-enclosed organicist definition to propose an historicist dualism in his idea of the words with their old meanings "preserved" as they also espouse a new and

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unique meaning. Again, if such a paradox defies precise scientific explanation, this need not bar us from seeking that fuller explication of the relationship between poem, poet, and epoch which is so fundamental to an organicist's new historicism.

3 Such is the approach of Eliseo Vivas; he argues for the con­ cept of a unique, contextually self-sufficient poetic object pre­ cisely by defining the poetic activity which produces such an object. Deriving much of his aesthetics from the neo-Kantian epistemology of Ernst Cassirer, he sees the fundamental unit of poetic structure as a "constitutive symbol" which he defines in three different ways. It may refer to the elementary means we use to grasp the world perceptually . . . and which give the world the basic order it has for us. Or it may refer to the more or less sophisticated works of art we find in all cultures. . . . Or it may refer to components of works of art. The first is the "primary act of mind" whereby we give "mean­ ing" or structure to the world. The world is grasped through, or by means of, symbolic forms. Whether or not there is an a priori element in them, or whether some of them are a priori, is fortunately a question we need not answer.28 It would appear from this that the "artistic process," that act of mind which produces an actual work of art, follows* the "primary act of mind" and involves it in constituting the artistic symbol. Since there is no qualitative distinction be­ tween the symbol as a part of a work and the symbol as a whole work, we need not pause over this problem, but the * We must take the time sequence seriously. Vivas plainly states that the primary act of perception is "prior" to the aesthetic process and necessarily so because "the latter presupposes the former" (D. H. Lawrence, p. 279).

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effort to separate the artistic activity from the primary act of perception is crucial. Vivas considers the artistic process literally "creative" of a unique art object. I believe that creation is a genuine phenomenon and not, as the majority of psychologists and philosophers today believe, some sort of complex shuffling of what has already been acquired empirically. I believe that in the act of creation the mind adds something to what was there before the act took place.29 In his practical criticism he eschews any interest in a priori antecedents for the poem partly because Cassirer's neo-Kantian epistemology tends to bar such discussions and partly because as a literary critic he is interested only in the object produced and the process of mind that produced it. A poet's unique power, then, is to work in language in order to infuse into words themselves whatever unique meanings and values are located in the poem. Ordinary men tend to use language merely as "an instrument of practical communication";30 that is, words function only propositionally, or referentially, as "signs" pointing to objects other than themselves. The poetic use of language, on the other hand, asserts "the autonomy and con­ textual self-identity of a literary work of art."31 A poem has its own unique status in being because it encloses its own unique meanings and values wholly within its structure. To say that a poem gives "knowledge" of a "thing" which is "in some sense independent of the formulated knowledge [i.e., the poem itself] and is referred to by the latter" is em­ phatically and repeatedly rejected.32 Literature, he argues, does not offer us philosophic or propositional "truths" about the world because the literary object's unique "status in being" precludes such knowledge. At least this is so when the work is functioning as art33 or during the aesthetic experience of it which he describes as "rapt intransitive attention." This literally means that the work of art exists as art "only in the aesthetic transaction" (during aesthetic experience), for only

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at this moment is it a uniquely meaningful and valuable selfenclosed object having no reference beyond its own structure.34 Vivas apparently wishes to argue that the work of art has at least two modes of existence, one during its participation in the "aesthetic transaction" and another at all other times. The former is exclusive of all cognitive or non-aesthetic activities of mind, but the latter may permit such activities as long as they are not confused with the truly aesthetic. This idea also has its basis in the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer who conceived of the fundamental symbolic processes of mind as issuing in "myth, art, language and science," as separate ways we have of formulating our world.35 Vivas moves beyond Cassirer by putting these "activities of mind" (he calls them "cognitive," "moral," "religious," and "aesthetic") on different planes so that the first three "presuppose and build on the world we come to know by means of art."36 This is vitally important for the development of his critical theory, for it bars the cognitive, moral, and religious functions from any direct participation in the aesthetic experience; they can be only prior to it or follow it. Although the aesthetic object appears in the aesthetic trans­ action as involving uniqueness and as being self-sufficient, its uniqueness and self-sufficiency are not absolute, for the object is dependent on the pre-suppositions that make it possible, and not all of these are purely aesthetic. If, then, the self-sufficiency of a work of literature in the intransitive experience gives it a sort of congressional immunity from moral* and cognitive jurisdiction, it does so only within the transaction. Outside it, it is open to criticism. The work is open to criticism not only in the obvious sense that we must consider the practical effects that it has on us, but also in the sense that we must criticize the presuppositions that make it possible in moral and cognitive terms.37 The function of cognitive (and/or moral and religious) criti­ cism is to deal with the whole range of factors—moral, re* This function often seems to include the religious.

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ligious, psychological, biographical, and historical—which make up the poem itself, and which make the aesthetic ex­ perience of it possible. Such understanding, however, is dan­ gerous to some extent, for it may produce moral, religious, or cognitive reactions in us as readers that will block our aesthetic experience and thereby deny a particular work of art its status as art for us. iS Criticism, therefore, can have very specific historical interests; indeed Vivas sees "two general categories of criticism," the one that focuses on the formal aspects of the work which result in the "rapt intransitive attention" and the other which considers more extrinsic aspects.39 There is here, however, a hint of a form-content dichotomy, not unlike Ransom's struc­ ture-texture dichotomy, that would conflict with pure organicism; and Vivas must explain the relationship between the two. In order to do so he offers us a definition of the "object" of the poem, a term that should indicate his rejection of radical organicism. He speaks of this "object" as existing on three levels: i) as it "subsists prior to its revelation in language," 2) as it "insists" in the language of the poem, and 3) as it "exists" outside the poetic context as a post-poetic conceptualization.40 In light of his organicist leanings we might presume that all of these are absolutely distinct entities and cannot be spoken of in any sense as the same "object," yet this is not Vivas's full intention. There is very little reason to speak of the poem's "object" (singular) unless there is some significant relationship among its several modes of existence. The poem's "existent" object has only the most tenuous relationship with the "insistent" object, the latter being, because of the poem's self-sufficient or self-enclosed nature, identical with the poem itself. The "existent" object is simply our reduction into propositions of the poem's fullness of experience; at best it can be said to merely "suggest" the original. This is the poem's basic and indispensable function: It gives us the world. We read into the world the poem's order and intelligible action; and the nature of the actors and their

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destinies become the means by which we understand our­ selves and our fellows.41 Conceptualizations like "the quixotic man" are inadequate to the masterpieces from which they are derived, but are a val­ uable part of our social heritage. On this side of the work of art, therefore, Vivas has offered us a variety of aesthetic historicism. The artist, for example Cervantes, has helped us grasp our world, literally enabled us to talk about it meaning­ fully. It is not to say that men did not act "quixotically" before Cervantes wrote, but it is to claim that without his great work, or a work like it, we would not have been so easily able to talk, about those actions and to assume behind our words the full implications of Don Quixote itself. On this level of interest, where Vivas confines himself wholly to the phenomenon of the work and our subsequent abstractions from it, there is no real problem in asserting that the "insistent" and "existent" objects are wholly different while claiming that the latter "suggests" the former. No closer re­ lationship is necessary in order to understand what a profound claim Vivas has here made for poetry. On the other hand, the distance between the "subsistent" and "insistent" objects is a little more problematic. The former, we recall, has some status "prior to its embodiment in poetry," and the definition of this status takes us beyond the phenomenal level into metaphysical speculation. Vivas most emphatically insists that the artist "discovers" as well as "creates" in the process of giving us the poem. Because of this, he says that the "subsistent" object "has two different positions." In respect to culture, at any time, it may be found prefigured in it but so embedded and so inchoately realized, and insofar as it is at all realized, so little grasped at the conscious level by the members of the culture as to be, for them, practically non-existent. Insofar as the object is already realized the poet merely imitates—he is a reporter and not a poet. He is a poet only when his creative activity discloses values and meanings which the culture is ready to espouse and adopt, which are

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knocking, so to speak, at the gate of history, seeking ad­ mission, or have surreptitiously entered history and become operative in the culture, but have not yet been identified, revealed, given a name and a dramatic mask.42 Unfortunately, this is not helpful in either clearly separating the discoverer and the creator or in collapsing them into iden­ tity. We might presume that it is the latter course which Vivas wishes to follow, but in this passage he seems to withdraw in one hand what he has offered in the other. The object is not quite but almost "realized"; it has entered culture but needs a "name"; the poet creates meanings and values but only those that culture is already preparing to espouse, those that exist although we are unaware of them. Vivas defends this theory by claiming that it is the only way in which we can explain how the finite mind of the poet can be truly creative; such creation, he argues, cannot be ex nihilo, and he confines "creativity" to the "level of culture,"43 to the phenomenal level where it appears to us that the poem is something new and unique. Metaphysically speaking, however, the poet "discovers" the meanings and values which he "informs" into the poetic structure.* This may seem to be a different face from the one Vivas was to present in his practical criticism, particularly in his book on D. H. Lawrence published seven years after the first printing of the long passage quoted above. This later work spoke of the artist as "transsubstantiating" the "subject matter" of the poem, which is no more than the poet's "data of experience," by adding to it and producing a "literally new object."44 In this book he concerns himself only with the phenomenology of the artistic process; hence he can, as we noted above, eschew any interest in the a priori antecedents of the symbolic forms (the poems) conceived by the poetic mind. But in discussing the "subsistent" object he does not hesitate to assign it "ontic *In this point Vivas has merely resorted to an up-dated version of Augustinian sign theory and its metaphysical bases. For a good dis­ cussion of this medieval epistemology see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language.

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status"45 thereby giving it a full-blown existence—as meaning­ ful and valuable.* That is, he speculates metaphysically that the poet is a discoverer of meanings and values which exist prior to his act of "realizing" them in the poem. More recently Vivas has sought again to restate his position and to defend it against its several opponents. I shamelessly appeal to subsistent values which, I claim, the poet discovers in the act of creating, and such an appeal is profoundly offensive to the nominalistic mind of the age. It is not the paradox that offends; it's the rejection of nominal­ ism, the acceptance of value realism that shocks, offends and cannot be tolerated. Or even entertained as a possibility.48 What is a possible ground for objection here, however, is not the assertion of the paradox which is an act of faith beyond logical refutation, but rather a failure to follow the full impli­ cations of his "value realism" everywhere. As a metaphysician he knowingly embraces the paradox; he calls his own philos­ ophy "quasi-Platonic" and thereby asserts with even more force the claim he makes for the poet as "discoverer," the claim of art as imitation. "The artist," Vivas says, "cannot lie; that for him is tantamount to suicide."47 He must, to phrase Vivas's argument in the terms of a much earlier Platonist, present us with a vision of the "Golden World" above the "Brazen World" of our daily experience. We might also recall that Vivas speaks of the artistic process (the production of a uniquely meaningful work in a specific medium) as an act of the "constitutive imagination" which presupposes the primary act of the imagination that is our fundamental means of perceiving our world. This primary power is common to all men, and as such in no way distin­ guishes non-poets from poets. He argues that on this level "we * This idea, of course, is fundamental to his whole philosophy. It is the argument for the ontic status of meanings and values that is the heart of The Moral Life and the Ethical Life, a work that he claims marked a profound shift in his philosophic beliefs.

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are all poets" at least to some extent,48 but we do not always function as such. That is to say, our minds do not always func­ tion as "a constitutive agency," and in the sense of being poets we do not always use language creatively. Most of us "lack the creative gift of the poet" because we are "inefficient or idle" in the exercise of our symbolic powers. Thus he claims "that between the rudimentary constitutive and the sophisticatedly poetic use of language lies an important difference. But it is one of degree, not of kind."49 The "important difference" is a simple matter of "efficiency," and the poetic or artistic process must be seen to exist in the primary act as well as in that which follows. A radical organicist might well object that this does not allow for the kind of qualitative distinction between the language of poetry and the language of everyday discourse that makes for a truly organic poem, that it does not conform to the "symbol-sign" distinction that Vivas himself describes. If the primary act of mind is also "poetic" there is a shadowy re­ semblance here to Crocean idealism in the unification of the act of perception and the full expression of that perception. But Vivas rigorously rejects Croce for these very principles.50 We should not forget that he clearly separates the primary function of the symbolic imagination from the specific poetic function that follows it. Truthfully we must see Vivas struggling against both of these radical positions, and it is this struggle that makes him of interest in a study of historicism. The poet is a more energetic "seer" and a more sophisticated "maker" than are we average men. Insofar as he is first a seer and secondly a maker—that is, insofar as the meanings and values in the poem have their own ontic status beyond the poem's structure—the resultant formcontent dichotomy denies radical organicism. Yet on "the level of culture" where we less efficient seers read the poem the dualism is not apparent. Vivas confines his organicism to this phenomenal level of human perception; in the broader meta­ physical realm his theory is mimetic. One might argue that this organicism is merely an illusion and ask why it is necessary to insist on it at all. For Vivas the answer lies in what he

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derives from Cassirer's epistemology. Poetic activity is the primary means by which artists give us new and valuable visions of our world, visions that are revitalizing as they awaken us to new possibilities. There is, nevertheless, a conflict between Vivas the meta­ physician concerned with a priori meanings and values and Vivas the literary critic concerned only with phenomenological analyses of works as self-enclosed units. In his applied criticism he rarely urges the importance of the former; we will remem­ ber his claim that a priori speculations were unnecessary in his book on D. H. Lawrence. The existence of real values, he admits, is beyond empirical proof, and metaphysical questions are unimportant, it would seem, for pure literary criticism. But Vivas also argues, in more theoretical passages, that there are no real "similarities between [the object] imitated or repre­ sented and [the "object" which] does the imitating";51 and unfortunately it is not quite clear whether he is speaking here metaphysically or phenomenologically. If this is a metaphysical assertion, then the term "imitation" would be quite in line with his "value realism," but the denial of any similarities be­ tween the two "objects" would seem to negate the whole con­ cept of discovery. If this is a phenomenological analysis, then the separation of the informed substance of the poem from any extrinsic object is consistent within his general theory but the term "imitation" is misleading. It is undoubtedly the twin poles of the paradox that also led him to talk of the subsistent object as almost but not quite realized, a matter of vague de­ grees that never really clarifies the relation between the sub­ sistent and insistent objects or the poet as discoverer and as creator. Vivas explains that his paradoxical claims are an answer to what he feels is a necessary defense of art. "It was because of what I take to be the high respect we owe art," he says, "that I was forced, in the exploration of its problems, to find my way to the mato grosso of metaphysics."52 But it is a broader need than this that led him to his "value realism."53 His metaphysical speculations are a response to his awareness of the need for a

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permanent or resistant set of values against which or on the basis of which one might construct an ethically aware society. This aspect of his aesthetics is similar to Roy Harvey Pearce's traditional historicism. Pearce and Vivas are both uncomfort­ able with the idea that the artist creates in a world devoid of a priori meanings and values; they must posit some sort of "basic style" or "ontic object" to be imitated. What Vivas's paradox offers, however, is a stronger sense of the poet's vital role in the social process—a role that perhaps ultimately de­ serves the honorific title of "creator." It is the poet who "real­ izes" the meanings and values that culture is ready to espouse, who makes them available to us in the immediate structure of the poem. This is surely a valid kind of "creation" though a somewhat mechanical variety when he describes the poet as a "midwife" using "the forceps of language."54 In this sense he can hardly urge, as he does elsewhere, that the poet "adds something to what was already there" before the creative act took place.55 Yet if Vivas ultimately cannot have a creative act that is as free from imitation theory as he sometimes seems to want, he offers us a version of metaphysical historicism that is certainly ample compensation. For those who share his faith in the subsistence of real meanings and values beneath the level of our conscious cultural milieu this historicism is a profound justification for poetry.

18 6

Chapter X

Murray Krieger The Ambition of a New Historicism Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. τ. s. ELIOT, Four Quartets In his efforts to formulate a new historicist theory Murray Krieger draws extensively on the work of Leo Spitzer and Eliseo Vivas. It is not unjust to say that their struggles with the organicist-historicist dilemma guided him to the more crucial aspects of his own aesthetics, but Krieger's study of the New Criticism and his broad familiarity with the history of aesthetics also contribute to his keen philosophic awareness. There is in his criticism extensive evidence of his effort to build upon the available tradition of literary theory as he sees this tradition opening new possibilities rather than confronting dead ends, and because of this he understands fully the extrava­ gance of the claims he wants to make as well as the inadequacy of the philosophic language he must use to make them. In a very real sense he is a newer apologist for poetry than the critics he discussed in his first book, for it is in response to the apparent dead end of new critical organic theory that he wants to build out a new historicism. Above all, in this philosophic welter of ideas, he never loses sight of the true "place" of criticism, that it is always subservient to the literary work it seeks to explain.1 Theory, for Krieger, is valuable only to the extent that it is derivative of our experience of literature itself;

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it is adequate only as it succeeds in accounting for that ex­ perience. χ In The New Apologists for Poetry Krieger first outlines the full implications of an organicist-historicist theory. Based on the traditional new critical distinction between referential prose discourse and contextual poetic language, the new historicist, he says, "may grant the referential-contextual dichotomy and distinguish poetry as uniquely contextual. But then he is troubled by the difficulty of showing how poetry thus defined, can manage to present our experiential world to us."2 The "trouble" arises, as he knows, because radical organicism defines an absolute state of being. However impossible an unqualified organicism may appear to be, a partial organicism is impossible, is in effect no or­ ganicism, and the alternative to organicism is destructive of all that recent theory has taught us about poetry.3 In spite of this absolutism Krieger argues that the organicist's conception of poetic "autonomy" is not a disguised form of artsakism. It merely asks that poetry not be forced to serve other ends than the strictly "poetic"; and the "poetic functions" of poetry may include a sense of the poem's vital relationship with the world beyond its structure.4 Neither is organicism, for Krieger, a Crocean identification of the creative mind's powers to intuit and to express. He follows, rather, the tradition of T. E. Hulme (and behind Hulme, Bergson) in defining the poet's creative act as in a re­ sistant medium, where language has a status in being beyond the poet's mind. This leads him to reject all philosophic Ideal­ ism that, in the manner of Coleridge, fails to account for the "function of language in poetic creation."5 What Krieger sees as Coleridge's inability to explain how his "secondary imagina­ tion," the peculiar poetic power, is truly creative in its "echo" relationship with the "primary imagination" parallels the difficulty Eliseo Vivas encounters in distinguishing between the

MURRAY KRIEGER

primary and secondary activities of his "constitutive imagina­ tion." In this respect Krieger must be seen as moving apart from Vivas as he also moves away from Romantic Idealism. To interpret either Coleridge or Vivas wholly in this manner, of course, is to be blind to the full intentions of their theories; clearly both men envision poetic creativity as vitally concerned with language. Yet their partial identity and partial separation of the poetic process and the primary act of all human percep­ tion involves them in the dilemma of declaring that all men are poets and that all acts of perception are poetry. The poem loses, therefore, its own status in being. Krieger wants to avoid these difficulties by arguing that an adequate critical methodol­ ogy need concern itself only with the phenomenon of the poem and the phenomenology of our experience of it; literature, he says, speaks "phenomenologically, not metaphysically."6 Poetic creativity is the genius of the poet working with language, but language resists his advances, is "recalcitrant" before his efforts not wholly unlike the physical materials of the painter or sculptor. As language exists for the poet coming upon it at a point in the history of an already well-developed culture—as a racial repository of existent and possible meanings and of con­ ventional grammatical and poetic forms—it may indeed seem to be an objective and material thing capable of the kind of manipulation we associate with physical mediums.7 Admittedly, we cannot insist that the language of poetry is literally like a hunk of granite, nor does Krieger do so; what is significant is the sense in which the poet must take his words as they come to him and then do with them what he is able. This concept of language is crucial for the new historicism that Krieger proposes. It is at once a rejection of the charge that the organicist sees the artist creating ex nihilo (without resorting to Vivas's "value realism") and an affirmation that the artist necessarily begins as a time-bound resident of his moment in history. The poet is creative; he employs the old words (in their

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current usage) to make a new one, the poem. Krieger accepts Spitzer's claim of "words with their meanings preserved" which are nevertheless "transfigured" as they enter into the poem's organic context,8 and he elaborates on this paradox by describing the poet's act as a "bending" of language. He is careful always to urge that the poet does not "destroy" the old words.9 Neither does this idea of "bending" indicate that the poet has a rationally preconceived idea that he forces language to fit, as was the case with Frederick Hoffman; such would necessitate a form-content dichotomy that Krieger's organic theory specifically denies. "Bending," rather, refers to a series of rapid and not always rational confrontations between the poet and the language he is in the process of making into a poem. The poet makes his choices in full awareness of his language's cultural meanings in order to achieve what was, as he began to work, no more than a faintly intuited new mean­ ing. The most we can say, Krieger argues, is that the poet "feels" that his "bendings" are right, that he makes bendings upon bendings until he "instinctively" recognizes that the struggle between his genius and the recalcitrant material of language has issued in the poem—a poem that was in no way predictable from either the poet's original intention or the rational possibilities of his language. There is, of course, a terminological difficulty in this descrip­ tion of the poetic act that arises from the acceptance of the radical organicism in Spitzer's old word-new word paradox. To speak only of "bending" the old words would not indicate a difference in "kind" between the language of poetry and the language of culturally determined meanings, but Krieger's organicism would have the poet literally create a new and unique word or poem. He cannot be satisfied with Vivas's distinctions of "degree." Furthermore, "creativity," for Krieger, implies a more active function than it does in Vivas's idea of the poet as "midwife" (although as we have seen Vivas too argues for a creative act that "adds something to" the materials used to construct the work). Krieger's paradox is one of phe­ nomenal extremes, a polarity between words with culture-

MURRAY KRIEGER

bound meanings and the unique meaning informed in the poem. Vivas's paradox, insofar as it is truly a paradox, rests in an opposition between poetry's phenomenal and metaphysical existences. The problem is to express in the propositional language of criticism the non-propositional nature of the paradoxical poem. If terms like "bending" are inadequate, so much more so are descriptions like "miracle" or Spitzer's "magic." The organicist is frequently forced to borrow religious terminology, like "transubstantiation," to describe the poetic act. Krieger is aware of the unsatisfactory nature of this language, but he confesses that "more than this the contextualist cannot say, any more than he can say precisely how the transformation (or should I say transubstantiation?) of the elements into the unique and accommodating form occurs."10 Convinced of the power of the poet's genius and the uniqueness of the poetic object, the critic has little choice, according to Krieger, other than to make the best of his situation. In order to emphasize the sense in which he sees the poet's struggles with his "recalcitrant materials" yielding a truly selfsufficient poetic object, the Contextualist frequently resorts to a language suggestive rather of a physical than a linguistic art. This becomes a kind of metaphoric criticism, but Krieger argues that it is at least resourceful as it guides us to a full understanding of the poetic "miracle" that the organicisthistoricist critic would defend. He points out his agreement with Sigurd Burckhardt's ideas on poetic language.11 The poet, says Burckhardt, must "transform language into a true me­ dium" by giving it "corporeality" or a "substance of its own." He accomplishes this by "driving a wedge" between words and their old meanings, by "dissolving" the sign-function of lan­ guage through the traditional prosodic devices of the pun, zeugma, repetition, and others.12 At the same time Burckhardt, like Krieger, does not intend that this process destroy the old meanings. He analyzes three poems (one each by Herrick, Hopkins, and Stevens) in order to detect in the poetic language a dynamic progression of

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cultural awareness. This progress consists primarily in the lesser or greater degree in which the poet's struggle to wrest a new meaning from the old words is evident in the texts them­ selves. Burckhardt, as a colleague of Roy Harvey Pearce, asserts that "for the poet, the condition of language is the human condition,"13 but in this he has posited no "basic style" that is traceable to the "unique style" of the poem. He has taken Pearce's concept of humanitas only insofar as it implies the poet's opposition to the conventions of his medium, language. His description of this process and the "corporeality" of the poetic object parallel Krieger's claim that the poet's struggle with his language both "preserves" it and "transubstantiates" it into a unique artifact. Our experience with poetry convinces us that the poet does not really destroy the old words; to claim that he does would deny the possibility of communication. To claim more, that the poem is a unique new word, is to assert the paradox. Krieger performs his own version of an Husserlian phenomenological reduction on the methodology of criticism, yet he diverges from modern "phenomenological" interpretation in his insistence on the solid substance of the poem itself. Poetry is not, for him, a transparent medium revealing the workings of an author's mind; it is an "immediate" object of experience, and criticism is concerned fundamentally with the phenomeno­ logical transaction between the reader and the poem. He also moves away from critics like Pearce and Auerbach by refusing to posit any "basic styles" in culture which the poet transfers into the poem. Pearce's concept of humanitas stresses the exis­ tential condition of man through the writer's confrontation with his social milieu. Borrowing from ego psychology (par­ ticularly from Erikson) Pearce sees the creative act arising from the struggle of a tradition-bound artist to rescue his society from its tendency toward reductive stasis; the artist in asserting his own individual identity does so in the context of his na­ tional identity. Humanitas summarizes the conflict between the "inner" and the "outer" worlds. Krieger, on the other hand, defines the existential dilemma faced by the artist as a confron-

MURRAY KRIEGER

tation with the recalcitrant medium of his art—in this particu­ lar case, with propositional language. It is through this lan­ guage that we sense culture, but more importantly, it is the logical structure of language itself that interests Krieger. Rather than discussing the presence in the individual work of cul­ ture's "basic styles," Krieger discusses the preservation in the individual work of traditional (and culturally determined) linguistic forms. He has, then, reduced his vision of literary meaning and value to a wholly literary world somewhat remi­ niscent of Rene Wellek's concept of "Perspectivism," but he moves beyond Wellek by claiming that through language we can escape from this closed literary world into the world of human experience. Whereas Pearce founds his historicism on the conflict of "inner" and "outer" worlds, Krieger focuses his aesthetics on the "inner experience" of the artistic transaction* For Krieger the critic's primary attention is directed toward the Active world created in the poem by the poet; but this world is built from the materials of language, and the artist must pay the price of using a medium so intimately bound up with culture's propo­ sitional habits. Thus Krieger argues, paradoxically, that the very medium of the organic synthesis leads us back out of the poem into the world of easy, universal conceptualizations. If Krieger is concerned at all with "basic styles," culture's limiting traditions, it is only as an inference that comes via literature. This is the role of the history of ideas in his criticism, and it is an important role. Yet beyond this Krieger admits to his methodology no solid, formed cultural identity and no meta­ physically posited "value realism." Outside the propositional world of language, or conversely, the ordered aesthetic ex­ perience of the poem, the human condition, Krieger proposes, appears to be chaotic. Moreover, it is the poet's "vision" in the poem that balances this sense of chaos against our sense of * Much of what I discuss in this and the preceding paragraph is treated in Krieger's The Classic Vision; at the time of my writing this was in manuscript form (though complete), and I am unable to give specific page references.

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language's culturally oriented—and deadening—abstractions. The poet, or his observer-character, stands between pure chaos and pure order, between Dionysus and Apollo. This is the most crucial metaphor in Krieger's historicism, serving as his struc­ tural-thematic escape from pure organicism. It is essential that we keep it in mind as we proceed with our discussion, for Krieger's Manichaean vision of human experience is less easily grasped than more traditional historicist conceptions of man's social existence. Pearce's idea of "basic styles" abstracted in intellectual history and rendered vital in the psychic drama of the poet's struggle for identity seems somehow more human­ istic because it is more available. Krieger's assumptions about the existential dilemma of man are more anguished yet perhaps ultimately more exalting for man as he lives between the threat of chaotic madness and the crippling blindness of cultural abstractions. 2

The Contextualist's insistence on the poetic miracle has, therefore, its Kierkegaardian implications. The critic must evidence a "primary act of faith toward the object as unique and the experience it illuminates as unique, even if his neces­ sary obligation to his language makes the gesture somewhat quixotic." This demands a critical methodology analogous to "existentialist-personalist" philosophy; to insure his full ex­ perience with the object, the critic resists his inherent tendency to Platonize the work. Without this leap of faith the activities of what Ransom called our "Platonic censor" will "murder" the poem by denying it its individuality.14 Admittedly, the assertion of the organic nature of the poem is itself an act of faith in the same manner that Eliseo Vivas's "value realism" was beyond empirical proof. It is the expression of what one group of literary critics and artists feel to be the full impact of their experience of art. Such a concept means that criticism itself can, perhaps must, be said to be "creative." The critic first plunges willingly into the poem's context in order that it may become "his subject,"

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that he may grasp it in all of its non-referential capacity.15 As critic he must struggle with the limitations of his critical lan­ guage while trying to remain faithful to the unique existential quality of his aesthetic experience and the object that con­ trolled that experience, but the nature of the poetic miracle will frustrate him, make him always short of adequacy. In these circumstances the critic needs to be sufficiently imaginative to adjust the two poles of experience to one another without destroying either. He must be "creative" enough to communi­ cate propositionally the full sense of the unique context of the work he is criticizing.16 If such a theory implies that our con­ ceptions of individual works are likely to change from genera­ tion to generation (even from reading to reading), Krieger readily admits that this is the case. Yet we cannot say that the theory is relativistic in the manner of Wellek's "Perspectivism," for it is only the "conception" of the object that lacks stability. The organic, Krieger might say "corporeal," nature of the poem is beyond the evolutions of taste.17 From this basic position Krieger develops his new historicist theory. In a footnote to an essay reprinted in The Play and Place of Criticism he directly responds to Roy Harvey Pearce. He [Pearce] asks me to extend my methodology into a new historicism, one that would move from my acknowledgment of the creative role of language in the making of the poem to an insistence on the historical dimension of this creatively endowed language. Consequently this language would be seen as expressing the inner stance of its author as a man in time and in culture: poetry would come to be treated as a kind of existential anthropology.18 The essay to which this note is attached, "The 'Frail China Jar' and the Rude Hand of Chaos," was, he states, written before he read Pearce's challenge, but it is nevertheless a crucial working out of the very problem of the new historicism that Pearce confronted in his concept of humanitas. Pearce, Auerbach, and Krieger all base their historicist interests on the idea of the artist struggling to write at a particular time. Yet J 95

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unlike Pearce and Auerbach, Krieger does not see the artist as "determined" by his stance in culture; the artist is artistically free to make of the materials available to him a unique vision of his world. It is finally this vision, the ordering of the artist's experience of his world, that is the poem. Thus for Krieger literature is not "true" in any traditional sense of merely imi­ tating the forms and meanings of its milieu. Its "truth" is only as a vision made manifest, or as Spitzer says, a vision as poem. Krieger proposes the concept of poetry's miraculous embodi­ ment of language that is at once unique and culture-bound in order to escape from what he sees as the damaging dualism of Ransom and Pearce. It is an attempt to make a virtue of what Wellek saw as the dilemma of the poem of its own time and of all times. This is to say that he sees the work as having only a single mode of existence, its organic, or miraculous, or paradoxical unity. But his critical methodology need not con­ fine itself to a single manner of approach, and Krieger specifically sets for himself the task of uniting literary criticism and literary history.19 I do not mean to suggest that he has managed to resolve the paradox. I would rather claim that he has more strongly affirmed it. The question of the poetic miracle still remains: how do the historically fixed old words, the materials by means of which the poet realizes his vision, retain their old meanings in the transforming work? By affirming the paradox Krieger necessitates that we answer the question in two ways. On the one hand, we can say that they do not really retain their old meanings, at least not while we are experiencing the organic work aesthetically. This, of course, is a direct borrowing of Vivas's idea of "rapt intransitive ex­ perience," the aesthetic transaction wherein the work of art exists wholly as a work of art.20 On the other hand, as we approach the work as scholar-critics the words tend to function only in their referential or historically bound meanings; it is the task of the scholar-critic to determine, as best he can, the exact nature of the artist's materials in order to better facilitate our experience of what he has made from them. Krieger, therefore, asserts the necessity of a dualism in

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Contextualist critical methodology. The separation of the critic's aesthetic experience and his cognitive critical act also is derived from the aesthetic theory of Eliseo Vivas, but the ar­ gument that the two must never be confused does not mean that they are wholly unrelated. The critic as he submits himself to the "symbolic" structure of the poem must suspend his cognitive interest in the "sign-functions" of the words; yet as his task is viewed in total, he must be both the existential experiencer of the "symbol" and the scholar-historian tracing its "sign" meanings.21 Admitting that he can never quite explain where the one function fades into the other, where the old words "miraculously" become new ones, he can only attempt to guide us toward that "magic" point where we can ourselves experience fully the uniqueness of the work. We can dismiss Krieger's theory if we refuse to grant the organic miracle; we can claim that we have no more than his word that literature functions this way, and it does not seem so to us. Yet if we accept the miracle, we can consistently do no more than he has done in conceiving of a dualistic critical methodol­ ogy that at least allows us to talk, however inadequately, about the organic poem. Organic theory, Krieger claims, does not deny "meaning" to literature.22 The very purpose of the organic or "objectivist" philosophy, as far as it is analogous with existentialist-personalist philosophy, is to avoid that kind of subjectivism which would make each reader an artist recreating the work in his own image.23 As I argued in my discussions of Leo Spitzer's aesthetics, organicism implies a kind of "impressionistic" meth­ odology, but meaning and value for the objectivist reside in the object. To allow the poem to "function as only poetry can," Krieger says, frees poetic meaning and value from either psychologism or the absolutism of Platonic theory; that is, it refuses to reduce what is truly poetic to extrinsic meanings or norms.24 The symbolic meanings are neither wholly emotive nor propositional. The critic confronting the closed context of the poem, the phenomenon itself, must, in Krieger's term, "intuit" the poem's meanings and values; then, acting as our

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Virgil, our scholar guide, he leads us toward a full experience of the object, retracing slowly and arduously the steps of the creative process by seizing upon the old words, artistic con­ ventions, and traditional concepts used by the poet. A major objection to this approach could be raised by the literary critic who would defend a more objective or scientific critical methodology. Krieger's approach is seemingly too "personal"; everything depends upon our acceptance of the critic's experience as the correct experience. We have many examples of intelligent and sensitive men who disagree about a poem's meaning; whose interpretation should we accept? But Krieger does not claim that any one critic is likely to fully "intuit" all of any work's meanings and values. Indeed, intui­ tions are likely to change from reading to reading. The purpose of his insistence on the critic's job as scholar, furthermore, is designed to ground his approach in some empirically observ­ able "facts" by which we can measure his performance. For Krieger, we might say, the poem is not immersed in history but emerges from history, and the critic is vitally interested in that emergence. If we must understand the old words in order to grasp the poem's new meaning, we must restrict our method of research only to those matters which will lead us to a full understanding of the new Word. We must never allow our interest in the background, as Harry Hayden Clark urged, to obscure the primary concern we have for the foreground, the work itself. Assuming that any truly valuable critical methodology, and the theory which supports it, "must be adequate to the literary experiences for which it is to account...," Krieger rejects those critical methodologies which offer wholly extrinsic interpreta­ tions or superimposed critical dogma.25 A theory "adequate" to the material it must study is a theory that grows out of that material (or, as he says, our experience of it), and this is what he means by the poem "constituting its own poetic."26 It is not theory deductively arrived at, but that which is demanded by the poems themselves. He gives full expression to this idea in the last paragraph of A Window to Criticism wherein he has

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constructed a poetic theory based largely on his comprehensive reading of Shakespeare's sonnets. So we have returned once more, as always, to the Sonnets. In treating them for themselves, I have found in them a key to the nature of metaphor, of poetry, and of poetics as well. For me they have been a microcosm that illuminates the macrocosm of poetry. Just as, taking the lead from Auerbach, I have used the typological instrument of the figura at crucial places throughout this work, so it should be clear that I have used the Sonnets themselves figurally, finding them to serve me as the typological figura of poetry at large and of modern poetics. I have tried to make clear both the prefiguring and the fulfillment. Thanks to the Sonnets, the substance of my own book becomes its method.27 In this usage he has wrenched Auerbach's figura out of its place in the tradition of Biblical exegesis.28 What he seems to want is a part-whole relationship that will allow him to evolve from certain prominent sonnets or small groups of sonnets a poetics that will encompass the whole sequence. In the process, moreover, he perhaps too boldly uses the poems as a demonstra­ tion of his theoretical principles. It seems a dangerous activity for an organicist who argues for the individual integrity of each work of art to project a general poetics out of his reading of a relatively small number of specialized kinds of poems by a single author. Krieger uses the figural concept, however, to justify this projection; he argues that while he has allowed his understanding of the sonnets to be formed into a general poetics, the theory must not be seen to reduce the individual poems into universal abstractions just as Auerbach argued that the metahistorical relations of two historical events must not be seen to dissolve their importance as unique, individual events in their own right. In effect, Krieger strips Auerbach's figural methodology of its doctrinaire implications by cutting it free from JudeoChristian orthodoxy, but he does not deny it the idea of histor­ ical relationship. Like Burckhardt, Krieger strives to move

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from the unique poetic event to a sense o£ the transcending development of poetic creativity. In so doing he rejects Auerbach's metaphysics as he does that o£ Vivas. His critical meth­ odology oscillates between the particular object (or poem) and a propositional statement about the dynamic nature of poetic tradition. We must understand, then, that the poetic theory Krieger strives to demonstrate in A Window to Criticism is never conceived of as perfectly adequate to all of the poetic works it must consider. He demands that the critic constantly retest and restructure his approach. Ideally, any theory would be altered by every new aesthetic experience, would continue to grow, to become more comprehensive and more exact; yet it is not desirable that it grow too rapidly. Although art aspires to an absolute status in being, literary theory must play a kind of relativistic game by grasping after the certainty of universal propositions while remaining always alert to their inadequacy. This is why Spitzer argued that all exegesis is finally circular, and it is why the methodology proposed by Krieger involves the derivation of poetic principles out of the texts that these principles must in turn explain. For both it is an acceptance of the necessary tautology of historicist criticism. 3 The actual substance of the theory that Krieger constructs begins specifically with the organicist-historicist dilemma. There is on the one hand the unique existential context of cultural forces and there is on the other hand the unique poetic context of the literary work; but, most problematically, there is the relation between the two.29 The concept of "thematics" presented in The Tragic Vision represents the first crystallizations of this theory. "Thematics," of course, does not imply the traditional meaning of "theme" as a fully embodied "idea" embedded in the text,30 nor is it quite what Frederick Hoffman would have it in his use of the term, a "cultural image" to which the style of the work must adjust itself. For Krieger thematics arises from what he calls

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introductory chapter of The New Apologists for Poetry. The poet, he says referring particularly to Donne, takes the part of the casuist by constructing in the language of his poem, in its metaphors and images, an apparently logical argument. But it is only apparently so, because poetic language does not function in the rational, propositional way demanded by true logic. It is, then, a false argument which seeks our poetic commitment while we read the poem, but which also conflicts with our rational awareness that no really logical argument has been offered.31 The extent of Krieger's debt to the New Criticism is perhaps most evident here; his focus on the witty metaphorical function of Donne's language in the "Canonization" owes much, as he tells us, to Cleanth Brooks's reading of the same poem.32 From this reading he begins to construct his poetics. The tensional relationships of the metaphoric language urge us to see the world in the poem as orderly, but our awareness of this "literary casuistry" forces us to conclude that this is essentially a "literary casuistry," and he first discusses this idea in the long falsification. The contextual logic, built as it is upon the ma­ terials of the poet's experience (experience reflected "sign-like" in the old words), is belied by that experience. For Krieger, Donne in the act of embodying his vision in the poem seems to be calling our attention to the real chaotic nature of the poet's own experience. Charles Feidelson's concept of the symbol which at once affirms and denies its own validity is very much what Krieger is defining here, but Krieger sees in this equivo­ cal nature the essence of poetry's ability to capture a vision of an historical moment while at the same time transcending that moment. "Thematics," therefore, is the study of the relation between the aesthetic (the closed, perfectly formed organic context) and the existential (the poet's vision of human experience). Insofar as much of modern literature seems to proclaim that this relation is essentially between aesthetic order and experien­ tial chaos, an adequate theory would be necessarily Manichaean. That is to say, the vision presented as poem indicates that "the

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world of felt human experience" must be "a bewildering com­ plex of seeming contradictions."33 But we must remember that this is no metaphysical assertion that poetry makes. Unlike the Marxian attempt to identify the existential-thematic with the aesthetic-formal by collapsing art into the dialectical historical process, Krieger offers here a version of aesthetic historicism which sees in the poetic vision a moment in the historical consciousness of the poet. His phenomenological critical meth­ odology confines itself to the work and what that work seems to argue about the "phenomenology of our moral life."34 Thus what Feidelson sees as the Symbolist poet's necessary Manichaeism Krieger more broadly interprets as the fundamental poetic vision offered by much modern poetry, not simply in the poems of Donne, but in major works that range from Shakespeare to Eliot, from Dostoevsky to Camus. The relationship between the vision in the poem and the vision realized in the experiential world is merely inferential. Krieger wants to avoid Northrop Frye's fallacy of "existential projection" by assuming nothing beyond the pure "literary" vision, but in truth he cannot always resist the temptation of talking about the Manichaean nature of reality as if it were authentic. Theoretically, and he repeatedly asserts this, he stops short of existential projection and therein demonstrates once more his differences with Pearce. Pearce assumes the existence of "basic styles" in culture that may be traced to the poem's "unique" structure. Krieger assumes the unique structure of the poem and infers from this a vision of the condition of man. For Pearce the cultural milieu is firmly grounded and struc­ tured in time, but the individual artistic expression never seems to break free into timelessness. For Krieger the unique art work claims its fundamentally timeless mode of existence, but it has only an indirect (inferred) relationship with sociohistorical experience. To inform a vision of utterly contradictory or Manichaean experience in the organic poem, he insists, demands that the poet "account for the total breadth of experience." The poet can do this by the formulation of an "extreme situation."

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The extreme . . . is both more pure and more inclusive— pure in the adulterations it rejects and inclusive in the range of less complete experiences it illuminates even as it passes them by. Thus at once the rarity and the density, the order and the plenitude.35 Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is, for Krieger, a "paradigm" of the operations of the extreme, containing within its unity the natural oppositions of experience. The ill-defined, mixed components of the life [Mann] deals with follow the path of their most dangerous tendencies to extremes that are at once polar and reversible, opposed and identical.36 Mann formulates the extreme by forcing the chaotic nature of experience, as he envisions it, to the very point of logical ab­ surdity, to that sense of absolute polarity wherein the devil is identical with the saint. Mann's hero, Leverkuhn, as he grows to an aesthetic stature which seems to contain formally the absolute contrarities of human moral experience, figuratively passes through the whole range of human experiences. This concept is a difficult but most exciting one. The "aes­ thetic complexity" of the work as it appears to define the Manichean nature of human experience, as the vision as poem argues that human experience is confused and chaotic, pre­ sents us with an historical meaning. The poem as object is the poet's vision of his world, but Krieger, unlike Hoffman or Pearce, posits no hard, resistent historical "facts" or "styles" to which this poem must be true. Instead, the poem, he claims, is a "miraculous" "mirror-window" which as it calls attention to itself as poetic world (its mirror function) also opens out to present us with its vision of the non-poetic world (its window function). Through its status as "miracle"—its preservation of the old words while asserting the new Word—the poem emerges from its moment in history bringing with it the full complexity and vitality of that moment. It is in this sense that Krieger speaks of the "incarnate metaphor," the result of a

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creative process where the poem is "substantively, bodily made, in defiance of all other discourse and its logic." Sigurd Burckhardt's insistence on the poem's "corporeality" here supports Krieger's more ambitious claim that the poem becomes an "effigy" of an apparently Manichaean world, giving us a "single, reduced moment of vision," "an historical moment" ordered and immediate as it never can be on the non-aesthetic level of experience.37 The strength of this new historicism rests upon its full aware­ ness of the organic theory which forms its foundation. The claims it makes for poetic powers are indeed extravagant, but in fact they only echo the centuries of poetic theory which have tried in vain to capture the elusive essence of poetic genius. The organicist is not the first to resort to the concept of miracle. Krieger is ultimately forced to admit, under the watchful eye of W. K. Wimsatt, that his version of the new historicism results in a kind of reverse Platonism which, as it finds repeated evidence in modern literature that many poets see their existen­ tial world as chaotic, abstracts this view as a general rule of much of modern literature and as a phenomenological assertion about the nature of reality presented in that literature. The important distinction that he wants to make in his continuing discussion with Wimsatt, however, is that this is a Platonism arrived at through the experience of literature and not through a series of metaphysical assumptions that are later used to reduce poetry to abstract generalizations.38 Although art makes no propositional truth claims according to Krieger, to the extent that it succeeds in convincing its reader that its vision is "true," the reader will modify his own world view in order to encompass the poem's new vision. Properly considered this is the most vital and valuable function of art,39 but it is not a simple matter of transferring the illusory order of the poem into the world of general human experience. The way in which art affects our daily lives must be seen as a part of the complex series of rational and non-rational epistemological processes by which we as men grasp our world. Here again Krieger is following Eliseo Vivas; we can exercise our reason

MURRAY KRIEGER

on the aesthetic experience, but in doing so we destroy it as we "stereotype and institutionalize these perceptions so that they can enter the history of ideas, ideology, and formalized ac­ tion."40 For Krieger as for Vivas the difference between "in­ sistent" and "existent" meanings and values is qualitative. Admittedly this theoretical consistency is not bought cheaply. Pearce's historicism may seem valuable to us primarily because it gives us easier access to the work-world relationship—even as it robs us of a more exalted sense of literary creation. Krieger's organicism demands a more difficult historicism wherein poetic meaning must be structurally rather than propositionally allied with culture. New critical "tension" and "paradox" are raised to the level of world vision.

4 The final proof of any theory, of course, is in its application; this is particularly true for a critical methodology which claims that it derives its fundamental principles from the experience of poetry itself. Moreover, it is only in his practical criticism that we can see demonstrated Krieger's assertion that poetry "constitutes its own poetic." In his study of Shakespeare's sonnets he consistently works from within his historicist's awareness of the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan conventions and a familiarity with Elizabethan English.* It is this scholarly awareness, however, that is most frequently challenged, and Harry Levin argues that Krieger's knowledge of Elizabethan English is a most inadequate one.41 The charge stems from a feeling that the readings of the sonnets are "forced," and if by "forced" Levin means that the poems have been subsumed to a ready-made principle, to a too hastily "universalized" poetics projected from the analysis of too small a sample, the attack is indeed a damaging one. But if Levin's argument means that he can find no parallel in the general structure of Elizabethan English to support Krieger's interpretations of certain key * A good example is his discussion of the "language of law and bookkeeping" as it appears in sonnets 30 and 31, A Window to Criti­ cism, p. 180.

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

works, if Levin is arguing that for the literate Elizabethan these words could not have had the particular meanings Krieger discovers in the sonnets, he has completely misunderstood the organicist-historicist methodology. It was possible, we should remember, to ask Eliseo Vivas why, in the light of his "value realism" he should insist on organicism at all. For Krieger organicism is more directly and vitally a part of his total theory. Levin's attack appears to be made from a relativistic point of view; the general structure of Elizabethan English will not support certain interpretations that Krieger would make for the sonnets. This would deny, however, the idea that the poet can make new meanings out of the old words, and this, of course, is the fundamental principle of Krieger's organicist-historicist "miracle." Levin is no organicist, but he does see the poet's most vital relation to both his culture and his literary tradition as dialectical. In a more radical sense, Krieger uses his faith in the organic nature of the poem as a key to what the poet was able to make of his materials, his culture-bound language,* and as the touchstone against which he can measure the relevance and irrelevance of variant readings. In his essay on Pope's "Rape of the Lock," he explores the implications of eighteenth-century philosophic developments in order to grasp the conflict between man's "will to order" his universe and the damaging assaults on this *In The Classic Vision Krieger turns the Levin-Pearce dialectic into what he calls "dialogistics" which results from the visionary artist's efforts (either as "tragic" or "classic" visionary) to balance the tension between the existential chaos and the ethical order of social abstractions. The balance is achieved in "dialogue" in language, which miraculously affirms both the Dionysian and Apollonian extremes of human experi­ ence. Insofar as Krieger flirts with the temptation of "existential projection," the literary vision of dialogistics can be extended toward the Manichaean nature of the modern world wherein man stands be­ tween the limiting demands of his social structure and the frightening allure of demonic experience. If we extend the literary vision in another direction, it becomes a paradigm for the organic poem itself wherein the balanced structure contains both the old words with their ethically justified, yet abstract, social significance and the new Word created by the poet in the freedom of his aesthetic act.

20 6

MURRAY KRIEGER

order in the ideas of Hume and Kant.42 Through an analysis of Pope's brilliant use of the couplet as zeugma, he demon­ strates the creation of a poetic tension that reflects aesthetically the challenge of an existential world robbed of its comforting universal order by juxtaposing it to the "illusory universe" of poetic order. It has been charged that in this critical analysis the term "miracle" is too strong, too metaphorical, and too fraught with emotional and religious connotations; and, furthermore, noth­ ing in the scholarly explication that Krieger offers us of Pope's poem can be claimed as uniquely the result of his particular methodology. Krieger would answer, however, that if his re­ peated measuring of the structural details against the ideal whole seems to "work," then his approach has yielded a more nearly "correct" reading of the poem. Because of his formalist faith he can assert that "The Rape of the Lock" is more than just a frivolous "occasional" poem, that in the process of trans­ forming its thematic material into its aesthetic structure it presents us with a vital and meaningful vision of the world as Pope saw it. But the poem as it espouses the historically relative meanings and values of Pope's vision must be meaningful for us as presentday readers, must transcend its historical roots while not denying them. Krieger's historicist critic makes extravagant claims that ultimately cannot be proved propositionally, and perhaps the term "miracle" is as adequate as any other. The critic is denied the possibility of success, but at the same time he is challenged to lead the way toward that full understanding of the poem that "constitutes its own poetic." Rather than being a theory of critical infallibility, it is a theory that should invite scholarly discussion and debate. The historicist critic, in his propositional use of language, must concern himself mostly with the poem's "empirical" matter, the time-bound flow of history that is miraculously informed in the poem's context. Yet all of this has as its goal a new kind of "archetypal dimension" for poetry.43 By seeing the artist's work with his recalcitrant ma-

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

terials as analogous to the sculptor's work in stone, Krieger gives vital new meaning to the traditional prosodic conception of "ekphrasis." Rather than the mimetic sense of poems which simply copy more material works of art, he interprets ekphra­ sis in the sense of Yeats's "artifice" of "hammered" gold. Again, of course, the analogy is metaphorical; the poem is not literally "corporeal" like a golden bird or the sculptor's statue, yet the poem is in its unique way an object "hammered" out of the empirical stuff of life, the poet's life. Its form as organic whole gives it something more than the mere illusion of solidity; it is spatial as it is also temporal in its unfolding. "Ekphrasis," no longer a narrow kind of poem defined by its object of imitation, broadens to become a general principle of poetics, asserted by every poem in the assertion of its integrity.44 Still in search of a "general principle of poetics," the effort here may appear more viable than that presented in A Window to Criticism (although it is essentially the same principle). Krieger's attempt to join the archetypal and the empirical is an answer to his impression that art is both of its own time and of all times. It is the dual mode of existence that historicist criticism must espouse in spite of our awareness that the work is a single, informed structure. Krieger wants the best of both worlds; the one binds the work to a specific time and the other enables the work to renew itself (its innermost meanings) in every generation. As A. O. Lovejoy claimed, the present under­ standing of the poem is vitally dependent upon the historical awareness of the reader, but Krieger would argue that tracing "unit ideas" is not enough. Poetry must be at once immediate and objective: neither the mediated objectivity of the normal discourse that through freezing kills, nor the unmediated subjectivity that our idolators of time-philosophy would want to keep as the un­ stoppable, unrepeatable, unentitled all; neither life only

MURRAY KRIEGER

frozen as archetypal nor life only flowing as endlessly em­ pirical, but at once frozen and flowing ..., at once objective and immediate, archetypal and empirical.45 In this he has not explained away the new organicist-historicist's paradox; he has merely accepted its full implications. The work's eternal recurrence as archetype challenges every reader in his most conventional beliefs because, as Charles Feidelson said, it asserts the absurdity of its own existence. As the poem's form is founded upon a polarity in the extremes of experience, the opposition between the saint and the demon, Krieger ar­ gues that it accounts for all of the possibilities of human ex­ perience, those of the poet at the moment of creation and those of the reader as he confronts the mirror-window. In the poet's struggle with his world, as it is embodied in the poem, we are forced to see ourselves and our own private struggles, for as Eliseo Vivas says, "the nature of the actors and their destinies become the means by which we understand ourselves and our fellows."46 Krieger's aesthetics honestly confronts the problems of a new organicist historicism and strives to preserve what is valuable in the two disparate traditions that it would combine. Like any theory it offers itself for our approval, for testing against our experience of art. As with any form of organicist theory it must consciously and consistently eschew the ready and easy propositions of a scientific methodology. In this most recent effort to close the gap between the literary critic and the scholarhistorian we should remember the description given by R. B. Heilman of the methodological proceedings of each. Against [the critic's] analysis that must hope to persuade, the historian offers evidence that undertakes to prove . . . ; against a view of genius as mystery, he agrees with Taine that it is a product of conditions.47 What Krieger would have is the value of knowing the "con­ ditions," but also the claim for "genius" and some degree of "mystery." To do so he must give up all pretension to empirical proof and merely "hope to persuade."

Chapter Xl

Toward a New Historicism Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered, τ. s.

ELIOT,

Four Quartets

The absence of a conclusion here is in part an admission of defeat. I cannot conceive of a "concluding statement" for the massive amount of theoretical speculation that has been pre­ sented above. There have been several conclusions already; each theoretical proposition has been measured according to its own first principles and according to its own logical implica­ tions. In many cases it is premature to offer conclusions for theories that are still being evolved by their very active creators. There is perhaps so much yet to be presented that any conclu­ sion would be outmoded before it could be set in type; at least it is my hope that this is so. This is a specialized world with its own particular problems and rewards, but it should be evident from the work of the men we have studied that the values of literature make these efforts worthwhile. A final chapter, however, may legitimately return to the major issues of the body of the text, and I will do so in order to move this discussion of the new historicism in a direction that seems, on the basis of all that has gone before, profitable—even necessary. Yet I do not hope for easy solutions to the many problems that lie ahead; at best I propose only to raise relevant questions. Roy Harvey Pearce through his concept of humanitas insists that the critic view the work of art as the product of a dialectic between the artist and his society. This dialectic must be seen in a historical movement. Harry Levin goes even farther by

TOWARD A N E W HISTORICISM

fading distinctions between art and life so that art becomes the clearest manifestation of cultural progression. Both Pearce and Levin see in the medium of art (their interests are pri­ marily literary, hence the medium is language) the potentiali­ ties for measuring history. Language for the poet is the key to time present and time future, and for the reader it is the key to time present and past. The nature of language provides the historicist critic with the justification for his claim that litera­ ture has "then-now" meanings and values. But what exactly is the "nature of language"? Murray Krieger, following the lead of the New Critics, sees the language of poetry as quali­ tatively distinct from that of normal or habitual discourse. Ad­ hering to the Romantic poets' notion of organicism, he sees the poem as a self-enclosed, "discrete" object professing its own unique meanings and values. Yet Krieger struggles against the organicist's dilemma of a totally self-enclosed—and thus in­ accessible—poetic object. He does so in terms of Leo Spitzer's idea that poetic language paradoxically preserves the acculturated meanings and values of language while transforming the old words into a literally new Word, the poem. This is Krieger's "miracle," and with it he attempts to refute Pearce's claim that the meaning of the poem is somehow "determined" by the cultural meanings of the words employed by the poet. In all of this, however, we are not much nearer understand­ ing the claims of a new historicism; this is a far too sketchy outline of a linguistic theory. Recently Krieger stated more clearly and convincingly than ever his sense that the language of poetry is both "meriating" and "immediate";1 that is, the poem stands as an object of experience in itself while it also gives rise to a communication of experiences between poet and reader. He refers to this as a new archetypal definition of poetry, the poem which in the organic perfection of its struc­ ture achieves stasis while it preserves the eternal flux of ex­ perience in the temporal nature of our response to it. Such a definition requires that we consider the meaning of the poem in terms of the response elicited by the poet's peculiar manipu­ lation of language. Meaning is not simply a matter of the

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

reader's psychic stance, his predisposition to "see" in certain ways; meaning is the result of an interaction of the reader and the work wherein the work, as the aesthetic experience dom­ inates, becomes what Stephen Pepper calls a "control object." The reader is enrapt, to borrow a term from Eliseo Vivas, and forced to enter the world of the work, filled as it is with the very stuff of the time in which it was created. But the experi­ ence is truly meaningful only when the work succeeds in "engaging the reader's own biases in such a way that these biases . . . become accessible to the possibilities of reappraisal offered by the work."2 This is not really a new conception of the aesthetic trans­ action; it has been the heart of all poetic theory since Aristotle. Even in the Poetics there is a tacit assumption that one can grasp the full implications of the "final cause" of tragedy by defining its "formal cause"; catharsis, the defining response to tragedy, is determined by the structure or "plot" of the drama. We should remember that structure and effect are so closely related in Aristotle's mind that he argues that catharsis can be evoked even by a simple plot summary. In a broader poetics, and perhaps somewhat in disagreement with Aristotle, modern literary critics have turned more and more toward a definition of the role of language in affecting certain "poetic" responses to literature. Adding to this the new historicist's belief that language is both bound to the time and culture which used it and yet transcends that time in the unique structure of the poem, we are brought to a necessary conclusion: the new historicist critic must turn to a study of the means by which language creates an aesthetic response. The poem is seen as a "process" which grasps and guides its reader to his fullest appreciation of the poem itself, and this process recurs again and again in each succeeding generation of readers (perhaps in each individual reading), binding the present not only to the past, to the moment of the poem's creation, but to all of the intervening time between creation and reading. Literature in the very materials of its existence brings history into being. As the poet's vision, locked in the poetic structure, is freed

TOWARD A NEW HISTORICISM

from the restrictions of his social milieu, so the reader's vision of his world is set free by the structure of his response to the work. Through art we have a special communication of ex­ periences that at once argues for sameness with difference, for timelessness and the destructive rush of time, for the fulfill­ ment and the figure of that fulfillment. It is this sense of humanity, a more complex version of Pearce's humanitas, that Wallace Stevens discovered in the final stanza of "The Idea of Order at Key West." Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The Maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. The "rage to order words" binds the "maker" to his reader, and this expression in "keener sounds" makes the reader aware not only of himself, but also of his "origins," of his present and the "ghostlier demarcations" of his past. The Marxist philos­ opher Lezek Kolakowski, in many ways a very traditional historicist, proposes that man constantly asks himself: . .. is the existence of each of us merely a collection of facts, one following another and exhausting itself within its dura­ tion, or is every fact something more than the mere content of the time which comprises it—namely, an anticipation, a hope for other facts to come, the revelation of a fragment of the final perspective of fulfillment?3 For Kolakowski "revelation" is the most fundamental drive of man's intellect, but revelation rests not simply on projecting the future, but on, as Van Wyck Brooks claimed, first building out a past. It is man's impulse toward "relation" that precedes his conjectures about revelation, and it is art which provides the clearest, if finally imperfect, experience of human relations in time. But how may we go about studying this experience? What clues do we have that can guide us in our understanding of

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

literature as it is conceived by the new historicist? The task is demanding; it involves investigations of language that go far beyond traditional linguistic analysis into the psychology of literary response and human perception, into epistemology and perhaps the broader realm of the philosophy of history or cultural evolution—into what might be called a "grander anthropology."4 Hints offered by Stevens and Kolakowski indicate that seeing oneself in a cultural perspective involves a primary act of self-awareness. One must first be made aware of his own mental processes before he can insert the "subject" into an objective (historical) context. The act is essentially that of autobiographical composition in the manner proposed by Van Wyck Brooks and Henry Adams or is related to Erikson's concept of ego development. For both the poet and the reader the aesthetic experience provides an act of self-discovery. The poet as he struggles to realize his vision of his world in the language of his poem, as he searches for his own identity in the limiting structure of a national identity, "makes" his vision and identity, "sees" in his battle with the limiting potentialities of his culture new possibilities of which even he had been only dimly aware. From this conflict of self and other, of "inner" and "outer" worlds, of poet and acculturated language, emerges the poem—out of the past and thrusting into the future. The reader, as he tries to understand the individual work, is grasped by that work, forced to see in the terms of the work itself the unique vision of the poet's world forever embodied in the work. But this is no simple historical relativism, for the work attacks the very center of the reader's being. Its structure, we might say, "structures" the reader's response by involving him in the poet's struggle to extend the potentialities of his cul­ turally limited medium. Somewhere in the aesthetic transaction two personalities meet, but they meet in a spirit of discovery born of the testing of cultural meanings and values, a testing of both the poet's and the reader's worlds. Something similar to this idea was once proposed by Kenneth Burke when he described the dynamic nature of literary re­ sponse as being triggered by "kinaesthetic imagery."® Burke

TOWARD A NEW HISTORICISM

saw the true power of the literary symbol as its potential to set oil in the mind of the reader a particular, structured response— giving rise to what we would call "meaning." A clearer expla­ nation of this activity might be gained by turning to recent developments in the aesthetics of the plastic arts. Ε. H. Gombrich has come to view the history of art as the evolution of certain basic styles which have their origin in the fundamentals of human perception. Stylistic variations result when the artist challenges his culture's "schemata," those functional modes of visual classification by means of which we \now the world around us. Each culture tends to develop particular schemata which provide for its members a categorical sense of what is. Gombrich calls this "mental set."6 The history of art is the history of violated "mental set," for the truly creative artist strives to reach possibilities for knowing or perceiving the world beyond the limitations of culturally determined cate­ gories. He must break free of them, yet he must not destroy the old forms completely else he risks destroying the meaningful continuity of art history (and, an anthropologist like Claude Levi-Strauss would add, the continuity of cultural history as well). Thus the artist moves from the old schemata to a new vision not yet adopted by society. There exists in the form of the work itself a tension between old and new, the very essence of historical movement. In the work we can virtually "feel" the processes of change, the rearrangement of old schemata, the breaking down of "mental set," and we are thereby called to attend to the schemata of our own world. We are asked to become aware of ourselves in the process of knowing; we enter both the poet's world as he knew it and made it and our own world refreshed by our experience of the poet's daring struggle against the status quo. In this way art is truly "critical" of society as Harry Levin claimed, for in the aesthetic transaction, by virtue of art's essential self-denying nature (we should recall Feidelson's "symbol" and Krieger's poet as "casuist"), it teaches us to question and deny easy habitual concepts by putting us through the actual process of knowing. At least by analogy it seems possible to explain the aesthetic

REDISCOVERY OF HISTORICISM

experience of poetry according to a violation of a similar kind of mental set. The structural integrity of the poem results from the poet's refusal to bow before his culture's habitual forms of expression. The poem, which like Feidelson's symbol portrays its own process of becoming, captures the process of knowing from the poet's struggle to know and forces the reader to repeat this same process in the aesthetic experience. Yet the reader does not simply know what the poet knew; that is, the aesthetic experience is not simply a vision of the poet's world as he saw it. Rather, the reader learns to know his present world as the poet came to know his. What we recognize most quickly in the structure of the work is what Wilhelm Dilthey called an "expression" of a mind very much like our own. At this point we have come full circle in the study of historicism, for the best statement of this aesthetic experience was given by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke, and I quoted it in the first chapter. The historicist, he urges, must enter into the very souls of those who acted, . . . consider their works and cultural contributions in terms of their own premises and, in the last analysis, through artistic intuition . . . give new life to life gone by—which cannot be done without a transfusion of one's own life blood.7 This is the first movement, but it does not explain the full impact of art nor the full meaning of historicism. Meinecke continues his definition by claiming that historicism "consists in nothing more than the corroboration of the infinitely creative power of the spirit, which although it does not guarantee us rectilinear progress, yet promises an eternally new birth of valuable historical individualities within the bounds of na­ ture."8 There is, I believe, too much humility in Meinecke's "nothing more." I would claim that the historicist's view of literature offers nothing less than a corroboration of the free­ dom of human creativity within the bounds of historical meaning. Once again, the sameness with difference, the con­ crete universal, the redemption of time.

Notes CHAPTER I

1. Dwight Lee and Robert Beck, "Meaning of 'Historicism,'" American Historical Review, 59 (1954), 568-77. 2. Carlo Antoni, L'Historisme (Geneva, 1963), French trans. Alain Dufour. 3. Hayden V. White, Translator's Introduction, From History to Sociology by Carlo Antoni (Detroit, 1959). 4. Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, IIIIV (New Haven, 1965). 5. John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness (New York, 1968), p. 19, n. 15. 6. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1957), p. 3, et passim. See also Popper, The Open Society, II (Princeton, 1950), 255-56. 7. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (New York, 1965), pp. 10, 107. 8. Hans Meyerhoff, The Philosophy of History in Our Time (New York, 1959), p. 299. 9. Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History (Cleveland, 1956), p. 23. 10. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), PP- 236, 33511. Hayden V. White, "Romanticism, Historicism, and Realism: Toward a Period Concept for Early Nineteenth-Century Intellec­ tual History," The Uses of History (Detroit, 1968), pp. 45-58. 12. Charles Beard and Alfred Vagts, "Currents of Thought in Historiography," American Historical Review, 42 (1937), 466f. 13. White in Antoni, From History to Sociology, p. xvii. 14. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, III, 24, 99. 15. Friedrich Meinecke, "Historicism and its Problems," The Varieties of History, ed. F. Stern (Cleveland, 1956), p. 283.

NOTES

16. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), p. 239. 17. Meinecke, "Historicism and its Problems," p. 284. 18. Wellek, The History of Modern Criticism, III, xiii. 19. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, 1954), particularly the chapter, "Concrete Universal." 20. Henry Thomas Buckle, "Introduction to History of Civiliza­ tion in England," Varieties of History, p. 127. 21. See particularly William Dray's rejection of this theory, Laws and Explanation in History (London, 1957). 22. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York, 1964). 23. White in Antoni, From History to Sociology, p. xxi. 24. R. G. Collingwood, "From The Idea of History," The Philos­ ophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans MeyerhofI (New York, !959), PP- 76, 81. 25. Antoni, L'Historisme, p. 124 (my English translation). 26. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, rev. ed. (New York, 1957), p. 518. 27. Friedrich Engel-Janosi, The Growth of German Historicism, Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science, series 62, #2 (1944), pp. 15, 18, et passim. 28. R. B. Heilman, "Historian and Critic: Notes on Attitudes," Sewanee Review, 73 (1965), 437-38. CHAPTER II

1. R. B. Heilman, "Historian and Critic: Notes on Attitudes," Sewanee Review, 73 (1965), 426, 432. See also his "History and Criticism: Psychological and Pedagogical Notes," College English, 27 (1965), 32-38· 2. Rene Wellek, "Periods and Movements in Literary History," English Institute Annual, 1940 (New York, 1941), p. 83. See also Norman Foerster, "Literary Scholarship and Criticism," English Journal, 25 (1936), 224; and J. L. Lowes, "Presidential Address," PMLA, 48 (1933), 1399-1408. 3. Warner Berthoff, "The Study of Literature and the Recovery of the Historical," College English, 28 (1967), 477-86. 4. F. R. Leavis, The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1948), p. 14.

NOTES

5. Bateson in The Importance of Scrutiny, p. 17. 6. Leavis in The Importance of Scrutiny, pp. 20-22. 7. F. W. Bateson, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), 26, 13, 14. 8. Ibid., pp. 18-19. 9. F. R. Leavis (ed.), A Selection from Scrutiny, II (Cambridge, 1968), 292-93. 10. Bateson in A Selection from Scrutiny, II, 305, 307, 308. 11. Leavis in A Selection from Scrutiny, II, 309-13. 12. F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934), pp. 5-6. 13. Ronald S. Crane, "History Versus Criticism in the Univer­ sity Study Literature," English Journal, 24 (1935), 650. 14. John Crowe Ransom, "Strategy for English Studies," South­ ern Review, 6 (1940), 234. 15. Allen Tate, "The Present Function of Criticism," Southern Review, 6 (1940), 246. 16. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967). 17. Howard Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Litera­ ture (Ithaca, 1948), pp. 58-59. 18. John Macy, "Preface," The Spirit of American Literature (New York, 1913). 19. George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste, III (London, 1906), 609. 20. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, particularly pp. 173-80. 21. G. M. Trevelyan, "History and Literature," Yale Review, 14 (1924), 109-25. See also J. L. Lowes, "Presidential Address," PMLA, 48 (1933), 1399-1408; Harry Levin, "Pseudodoxia Academica," Southern Review, 6 (1940), 263-69; Arthur Mizener, "Scholars and Critics," Kenyon Review, 2 (1940), 412-22. These articles were all part of a pedagogical symposium entitled "Litera­ ture and the Professors" published in Autumn 1940 in Kenyon Review and Southern Review. For an interesting exchange on this topic see articles by John Bury and Trevelyan reprinted in Fritz Stern's, Varieties of History, pp. 209-45. 22. Tate, "The Present Function of Criticism," p. 240. 23. John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness (New York, 1968), particularly pp. 278-79.

NOTES

24. Murray Krieger, "Literary Analysis and Evaluation—and the Ambidextrous Critic," Contemporary Literature, 9 (1968), 290-310. 25. George Edward Woodberry, "Two Phases of Criticism: His­ torical and Esthetic," Criticism in America (New York, 1924)» PP48> 53> 63, 69, 71. 26. George Edward Woodberry, Appreciation of Literature (New York, 1921), pp. 4, 5, 13, 18. 27. Louis Teeter, "Scholarship and the Art of Criticism," ELH, 5 (i938)> !73-9428. Jones, The Theory of American Literature, pp. 13-14· See also F. A. Pottle, The Idiom of Poetry (Ithaca, 1946). 29. Wellek, "Periods and Movements in Literary History," pp. 79-80. 30. Rene Wellek, "Six Types of Literary History," English In­ stitute Essays, 1946 (New York, 1947), p. 113. 31. Ibid., p. no. See also "Literary Theory, Criticism and His­ tory," Sewanee Review, 68 (i960), 1-19. 32. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1942), pp. 43, 150-55. 33. Wellek, "Periods and Movements in Literary History," p. 87. 34. Wellek in Theory of Literature, p. 152. 35. Wellek, "Periods and Movements in Literary History," pp. 89, 93. 36. Wellek in Theory of Literature, pp. 155, 156. 37. E. D. Hirsch discusses these same difficulties in Wellek's theory. See Validity in Interpretation, pp. 212-14. 38. Wellek in Theory of Literature, p. 155. 39. Harry Hayden Clark, "American Literary History and American Literature," The Reinterpretation of American Litera­ ture, ed. Norman Foerster (New York, 1928), p. 181. See also G. E. Woodberry, "Two Phases of Criticism: Historical and Esthetic," Criticism in America (New York, 1924), p. 60. 40. Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature Since I8JO (New York, 1915), p. 43. 41. Howard Mumford Jones, "Literary Scholarship and Con­ temporary Criticism," English Journal, 23 (1934), 751. 42. Bliss Perry, The American Mind (New York, 1912), p. 43. See also Η. M. Jones on Moses Tyler, Theory of American Litera­ ture, p. 106.

NOTES

43. Marshall Van Deusen, A Metaphor for the History of Amer­ ican Criticism (Copenhagen, 1961), p. 41. 44. Howard Mumford Jones, "The European Background of American Literature," The Reinterpretation of American Litera­ ture, pp. 62-82. 45. Paul Kaufman, "The Romantic Movement," The Reinterpretation of American Literature, pp. 114-38. 46. Bateson in A Selection from Scrutiny, II, 316. CHAPTER III

1. Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism (New York, 1965), p. xiii. 2. Lionel Trilling, "Parrington, Mr. Smith and Reality," Parti­ san Review, 7 (1940), 32. 3. John Higham, "The Rise of American Intellectual History," American Historical Review, 56 (1951), 461. 4. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927), I, iii; II, iii; III, xx. 5. Ibid., Ill, xxvii. 6. Ibid., I, i. 7. Vernon Louis Parrington (ed.), The Connecticut Wits (New York, 1926), p. xi. 8. Parrington, Main Currents, Vol. I, 368. 9. Ibid., II, 383. 10. Ibid., Ill, xix, 376, 241-53. 11. Granville Hicks, "The Critical Principles of V. L. Parring­ ton," Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly, 3 (1939), 448. 12. Parrington, Main Currents, II, i. 13. Parrington, Connecticut Wits, pp. ix-x. 14. Parrington, Main Currents, III, 69-86, particularly 82-83. 15. Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, reprinted in the Inclusive Edition of Leaves of Grass, ed. Emory Holloway (Garden City, 1928), p. 496. 16. Ibid., "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," p. 531. 17. Ibid., pp. 523-24. 18. Parrington, Main Currents, III, 78. 19. Ibid., I, vi. 20. Ibid., II, 439, 440, 466, 58. 21. Ibid., Ill, 240. 22. Ibid.

NOTES

p.

23.

Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, 1963),

54. 24.

J. A. Ward, The Search for Form (Chapel Hill, 1967), pp.

40-41. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Ibid., p. 34, n. 9. Parrington, Main Currents, III, 345, Ibid., pp. 339-40. Ibid., pp. 340-41.

336, 337, 339.

CHAPTER IV

x. Bernard Smith, "Parrington's Main Currents," New Republic, 98(1939),42. 2. Granville Hicks, "The Critical Principles of V. L. Parring­ ton," Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly, 3 (1939), 447. 3. Ibid., p. 456. 4. Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., "Parrington and the Decline of Ameri­ can Liberalism," American Quarterly, 3 (1951), 295-308. 5. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, II (Princeton, 1950), particularly 257-58. 6. George Steiner, Language and Silence·, Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York, 1967), pp. 342, 328. See also Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ­ omy, trans. Ν. I. Stone, I (New York, 1904), 356-57. 7. Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York, 1935), pp. 95-96.

8. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1939), p. 14. See also Peter Demetz's discussion of this point in Marx, Engels and the Poets (Chicago, 1967), pp. 66-67. 9. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York, 1955), p. 86. 10. Joseph Freeman, Introduction, Proletarian Literature in the United States, ed. Granville Hicks, et al. (New York, 1935)» P- J511. Michael Gold, "America Needs a Critic," The New Masses, ι (1926), 7. See also the editorial statement of Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly, 1 (1936), i. 12. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Boston, 1963), p. 89. 13. See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (New York, 1968), and Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, II (Princeton, 1950), particularly 21 iff.

NOTES 14. Max Eastman, "Karl Marx Anticipated Freud," The New Masses, 3 (1927), 12. 15. John Middleton Murry, The Necessity of Communism (London, 1932), p. 32. 16. Leszek Kolakowski, "The Priest and the Jester" Dissent, 2 (1962), 222.

17. Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets, p. 5. 18. Mikhail Lifshitz, "Literature and the Class Struggle," Literature and Marxism, ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1938), P- 75· 19. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, p. 61. 20. See V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, 1966); also the discussion of Erich Auerbach's "figural method" in the chapter below on Roy Harvey Pearce. 21. V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (New York, 1932), p. 451. 22. Robert Weimann, "The Soul of the Age: Towards a Historical Approach to Shakespeare," Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (New York, 1964), p. 41. 23. Arnold Kettle, "From Hamlet to Lear," Shakespeare in a Changing World (New York, 1964), pp. 146-71. 24. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, particularly pp. 33-39, 92. 25. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York, 1957), P- 91· 26. Friedrich Engels, Literature and Art (New York, 1947)1 p· 41. See also Max Rieser, "Russian Aesthetics Today and Their Historical Background," JAAC, 22 (1963), 47-53; and "The Aesthetic Theory of Social Realism," fAAC, 16 (1957), 237-48. 27. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, p. 149. 28. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 102. See Edmund Wilson's discussion of this point in The Triple Thinners (New York, 1948), p. 212. 29. Norman Foerster, American Review, 2 (1933), 107 -111. 30. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, I, 310. 31. Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets, pp. 68-70. 32. Freeman, Proletarian Literature, p. 19. 33. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, pp. 333-34, and G. V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (London, 1953), p. 12. 34. Ralph Fox, The Novel and the People (London, 1937), pp. 19-23.

NOTES

35. For an extensive discussion of this problem see Nicholas Lofkowicz, Theory and Practice. 36. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1958), Ρ· 51· 37. Edmund Wilson, "The Historical Interpretation of Litera­ ture," The Triple Thinkers, p. 263. 38. Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism (New York 1939), p. 378. See also Richard D. Charques, Contemporary Litera­ ture and Social Revolution (London, 1934), pp. 9-10, 43; and Max Eastman's rejoinder, that "art is neutral," in Enjoyment of Poetry (New York, 1939), pp. 227-33. 39. Gold, "America Needs a Critic," p. 7. See also Joseph Freeman, "Poetry and Common Sense," The New Masses, 3 (1927), 10; and Max Eastman's rejoinder in The Literary Mind, pp. 157-58. 40. Calverton, Liberation, pp. 461-62. See also Louis Aragon, "From Dada to Red Front," American Writer's Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York, 1935), particularly p. 37. 41. Calverton, Liberation, p. xi. On other occasions Calverton is not so rigid; see New Ground of Criticism, p. 59, and Liberation itself, pp. 461-62. 42. Joseph Freeman, "Literary Theories," The New Masses, 4 (1929), 12-13. 43. Granville Hicks, Part of the Truth (New York, 1965), p. 116. 44. Granville Hicks, Where We Came Out (New York, 1954), p. 38. 45. Hicks, The Great Tradition, p. 95. 46. Ibid., p. 317. 47. Granville Hicks, "Literature and Revolution," English Jour­ nal, 24 (1935), 237. 48. Hicks, The Great Tradition, p. 317. 49. Ibid., particularly pp. 109-22. 50. Ibid., p. 130. 51. Granville Hicks, Figures of Transition (New York, 1939), particularly pp. 256, 259. 52. Hicks, The Great Tradition, p. 298. 53· lbid_ , 54. Granville Hicks, "The Crisis in American Criticism," The New Masses, 8 (1933), 5. 55. Ibid.

NOTES

56. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961), p. 357-

57. Granville Hicks, "The Failures of Left Criticism," The New Republic, 103 (1940), 347. See also Part of the Truth, p. 109. 58. Hicks, "The Crisis in American Criticism," p. 4. 59. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (New York, 1931), p. 66. 60. Ibid.., p. 194. 61. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, 1941), p. 61. 62. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, II (New York, 1937), 38. 63. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 87-88. 64. Ibid., pp. 258-92. 65. Ibid., p. 21. 66. Burke, Counter-Statement, particularly p. 69. 67. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, ΙΓ, 31-32. 68. William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Bur\e and the Drama of Human Relations (Minneapolis, 1963), pp. 200-208. 69. Burke, Counter-Statement, p. 98. 70. Ibid., p. 58. 71. Ibid., p. 244. 72. Henry Bamford Parkes, The Pragmatic Test (San Fran­ cisco, 1941), pp. 218-19. 73. Kenneth Burke, "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," American Writer's Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York, 1935), p. 87. 74. Ibid., Discussion, pp. 167-68. 75. R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York, 1946), pp. 360-62. CHAPTER Ν

1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 9^), P- 435· 2. Ibid., 487. 3. Ibid., see particularly p. 501. 4. Van Wyck Brooks, "On Constructing a Usable Past," Dial, 64 (1918), 341. See also James Harvey Robinson, The New History (New York, 1912). 5. Norman Foerster, "The Literary Prophets," Boo\man, 72 (1930),36. τ

NOTES

6. Henry Steele Commager, "The Search for a Usable Past," American Heritage, 16 (1965), 95. 7. Bernard De Voto, The Literary Fallacy (Boston, 1944), p. 43. 8. Sherman Paul, "The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage," New Leader, 48 (1965), 20. 9. Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 196. 10. George Santayana, "Three Philosophic Poets," Essays in Literary Criticism (New York, 1956), p. 3. 11. George Santayana, "The Elements and Function of Poetry," Essays in Literary Criticism, p. 191. 12. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York, 1896), pp. 269, 270. 13. Ibid., pp. 27-28, 161. 14. Irving Singer, "Introduction," Essays in Literary Criticism, p. xix. 15. James Ballowe (ed.), George Santayana's America: Essays on Literature and Culture (Urbana, 1967), pp. 105-59. 16. Santayana, "The Elements and Function of Poetry," pp. 301 and 302. 17. Ibid., p. 303. 18. Ballowe, pp. 28-29, n. 6. 19. Brooks, "On Constructing a Usable Past," p. 341. 20. Randolph Bourne, History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays (New York, 1920), p. 18. 21. Sherman Paul, Randolph Bourne, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers #60 (Minneapolis, 1966), p. 45. 22. Bourne, History of a Literary Radical, pp. 29-30. 23. Ibid., pp. 197, 198. 24. Ibtd., p. 29. 25. Paul, Randolph Bourne, pp. 45-46. 26. Van Wyck Brooks, "America's Coming-of-Age," Three Essays (New York, 1934), p. 45. 27. Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York, 1 9 5 5 ) , P- 393· 28. Gorham B. Munson, "American Criticism and the Fighting Hope," Yale Review, 20 (1931), 568-69. See also Munson, "The Young Critics of the Nineteen-Twenties," Boo\man, 70 (1929), 369-73· 29. Lewis Mumford, "The Image of Randolph Bourne," New Republic, 64 (1930), 152.

NOTES

30. Dorothy Teall, "Bourne into Myth," Bookman, 75 (1932), 598. 31. Lewis Mumford, "The Image of Randolph Bourne," New Republic, 64 (1930), 152. 32. Samuel Sillen, "The Challenge of Randolph Bourne," Masses and Mainstream, 6 (1953), 24-62. 33. Edward Dahlberg, Alms for Oblivion (Minneapolis, 1964), p. 81. See also Lillian Schlissel, "Introduction," The World of Randolph Bourne (New York, 1965), p. xxvii in particular. 34. Van Wyck Brooks, "America's Coming-of-Age," p. 45. 35. Brooks, "Letters and Leadership," Three Essays, p. 121. 36. Brooks, "America's Coming-of-Age," pp. 52, 55. 37. Ibid., p. 76. 38. Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, 1947), p. 81. 39. Rene Wellek, "Van Wyck Brooks and a National Litera­ ture," American Prefaces, 7 (1942), 303. 40. Van Wyck Brooks, Sketches in Criticism (New York, 1932), pp. 280-85 particular. 41. Brooks, "Letters and Leadership," p. 184. 42. Foerster, "The Literary Prophets," p. 37. 43. Brooks, "America's Coming-of-Age," pp. 79, 83, 100. 44. Ibid., p. 109. 45. Van Wyck Brooks, "The Literary Life in America," Three Essays, p. 273. 46. Brooks, "Letters and Leadership," p. 137. 47. Wilhelm Dilthey, Meaning in History, ed. H. P. Rickman (London, 1961), pp. 67-68. 48. De Voto, The Literary Fallacy, p. 38. 49. Wellek, pp. 292-306. 50. Edmund Wilson, "Mr. Brooks's Second Phase," New Repub­ lic, 103 (1940), 452. 51. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York, 1964), p. 17. 52. Wilson, "Mr. Brooks's Second Phase," pp. 453-54. 53. Paul, "The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage," p. 19. 54. Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York, 1947), p. 299. 55. Paul, "The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage," p. 20.

NOTES

56. Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson (Urbana, 1967), p. 3. 57. Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries (Boston, 1956), p. 409. 58. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York, 1931). 59. Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinners (New York, 1948), P- 257· 60. Charles Frank, Edmund Wilson (New York, 1970); P- 69. 61. Edmund Wilson, "We Don't Know Where We Are," New Republic, 140 (1959), pp. 13-14. 62. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York, 1940), pp. 189, 195. 63. Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York, 1952), pp. 640-50. 64. Wilson, The Triple Thin\ers, p. 204. 65. Wilson, To the Finland Station, p. 438. 66. Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York, 1964), pp. 51-56. 67. Wilson, Axel's Castle, pp. 268, 292, 293, 294. 68. Wilson, To the Finland Station, pp. 16, 13, 18, 17. 69. Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York, 1962), particularly pp. 635-69. 70. Wilson, The Triple Thinners, pp. 269, 270. 71. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1963), particularly p. 279. 72. Kazin, Contemporaries, p. 410. 73. Dilthey, Meaning in History, p. 131. 74. Paul, "The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage," p. 19. 75. Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York, 1924), p. 195. 76. Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life (New York, 1951), p. 20. 77. Howard L. Parsons, "Religion and The Conduct of Life: A Review of Lewis Mumford's Work," Journal of Religion, 34 (!954). 3778. Mumford, The Conduct of Life, p. 137. 79. Parsons, "Religion and The Conduct of Life," p. 47. 80. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York, 1926), p. 166. CHAPTER VI i. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1945); p. 482.

NOTES

2. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (New York, 1931), p. 199. 3. John Crowe Ransom, "An Address to Kenneth Burke," Kenyon Review, 4 (1942), 233, 221, 231. 4. Francis X. Roellinger, Jr., "Two Theories of Poetry as Knowledge," Southern Review, 7 (1942), 702. 5. John M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, 1958), p. 146. 6. John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder (New York, 1PS0)) particularly pp. 126-27. See also "Yeats and His Symbols," Kenyon Review, 1 (1939), pp. 310-11. 7. John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: II, The Final Cause," Kenyon Review, 9 (1947), 640-58. 8. See a fuller argument by William J. Handy, "The Ontological Theory of the Ransom Criticism," University of Texas Studies in English, 35 (1956), 32-50. 9. John Crowe Ransom, "Editorial Notes," Kenyon Review, 2 (!94°), 34510. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York, 1938), p. 156. 11. Ransom, God Without Thunder, pp. 3, 217. 12. John Crowe Ransom, "Criticism as Pure Speculation," The Intent 0} the Critic, ed. Donald StauSer (Princeton, 1941), p. 239. 13. John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: A Note in Ontology," Cri­ tiques and Essays in Criticism, 1920-48, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), p. 36. 14. Ibid., pp. 39, 46. 15. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 348. 16. John Crowe Ransom, "Flux and Blur in Contemporary Art," Sewanee Review, 37 (1929), 353-66. 17. John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time (Princeton, 1965), p. 267. 18. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 316. 19. Ransom, "Flux and Blur in Contemporary Art," p. 363. · 20. Ibid., p. 363. 21. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Bloomington, 1963), particularly pp. 82-87. 22. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, 1941), p. 281. 23. Ibid. 24. Ransom, "Preface," The World's Body, p. x.

NOTES

25. Ransom, "Poetry: II, The Final Cause," p. 644. 26. John Crowe Ransom, "Classical and Romantic," Saturday Review of Literature, 6 (1929), p. 127. 27. Ransom, The World's Body, pp. 158,161, 162. 28. See God Without Thunder, p. 315; The World's Body, p. 45; "Inorganic Muses," Kenyon Review, 5 (1943), 293. 29. Ransom, "Criticism as Pure Speculation," p. 235. 30. Ransom, "Classical and Romantic," p. 127. 31. Ransom, The World's Body, p. x. 32. Ransom, "Inorganic Muses," Kenyon Review, 5 (1943), P- 279· 33. See particularly "A Poem Nearly Anonymous"; "Shake­ speare's Sonnets"; "Sentimental Exercise"; in The World's Body. 34. Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 226. 35. John Crowe Ransom, "The Concrete Universal: Observa­ tions on the Understanding of Poetry," Poems and Essays (New York, 1955), p. 185. 36. Ransom, The World's Body, particularly p. 340. 37. Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 208. 38. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 209. 39. Ransom, "Inorganic Muses," p. 286. 40. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 349. See also Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, pp. 339-40; Murray Krieger, New Apolo­ gists for Poetry, p. 83. 41. Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 208. See also Francis X. Roellinger "Two Theories of Poetry as Knowledge," p. 701. 42. Krieger, New Apologists for Poetry, pp. 85-87. 43. Jbid., p. 81. 44. Ransom, "Criticism as Pure Speculation," p. 241. 45. Krieger, New Apologists for Poetry, p. 85. 46. Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 95. 47. John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: I, The Formal Analysis," Kenyon Review, 9 (1947), 441-43. 48. Ransom, "Classical and Romantic," p. 127. 49. Ransom, God Without Thunder. See also The World's Body, pp. 238-39. 50. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 165. 51. Ransom, "Poetry: II, The Final Cause." 52. Richard Foster, The New Romantics (Bloomington, 1962), p. 40.

NOTES

Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 279. Ransom, God Without Thunder, particularly p. 325. 55. Stewart, The Burden of Time, p. 48. 56. Frederick A. Pottle, "The New Critics and the Historical Method," Yale Review, 43 n.s. (1953), p. 22. 57. Ransom, The World's Body, pp. 339-40. 53. 54.

CHAPTER VII

1. R. B. Heilman, "Historian and Critic: Notes on Attitudes," Sewanee Review, 73 (1965), 426. 2. Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate (London, 1952), p. 29. 3. Ibid., pp. 63, 3. 4. Ibid., p. 61. 5. Ibid., p. 169. 6. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), p. 1. 7. Ibid., p. 89. 8. Ibid., pp. 6f, 55. 9. Ibid., pp. h i , 114. 10. R.W.B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (New York, 1959), p. 27. 11. Ibid., p. 31. 12. Ibid., p. 33. 13. R.W.B. Lewis, "Hold on Hard to the Huckleberry Bushes," Trials of the World (New Haven, 1965), p. 99. 14. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint, p. 48. 15. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expres­ sion in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. viii. 16. Ibid., pp. x, 315. 17. F. O. Matthiessen, The Responsibilities of the Critic (New York, 1952), pp. 181-82. 18. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 123-31. 19. Ibid., pp. 56ft. 20. Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 283. 21. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York, 1944), p. xiv. 22. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 628.

NOTES

23. Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1954), P- 4· 24. Ibid., p. 11. 25. Ibid., p. 23, n. 4. 26. Ibid., pp. 11-12, 24-25. 27. Ibid., p. 258. 28. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York, 1949), p. xi. 29. Ibid. 30. Frederick J. Hoffman, "Form and Circumstance: A Study of the Study of Modern Literature," Approaches to the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature (Michigan State University Con­ ference, 1961), p. 5. 31. Ibid., p. 67. 32. Frederick J. Hoffman, "The Knowledge of Literature: Sug­ gestions for American Studies," American Quarterly, 10 (1958), 203, 204. 33· lbld34. Hoffman, "Form and Circumstance," p. 6. 35. Ibid., p. 15. 36. Bernard Duffey, "Some Questions of Method," ELH, 31 (1964), 322, 327. 37. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal No (Princeton, 1964), pp. 158-79. 38. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), pp. vi, ix. 39. Ibid., pp. ix, xi, 6. 40. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York, 1963), p. vi. 41. Ibid., p. 56. 42. Harry Levin, Contexts of Criticism (New York, 1957), pp. 197-98. 43. Harry Levin, fames Joyce, rev. ed. (New York, i960), par­ ticularly pp. 219, 20. 44. Levin, The Gates of Horn, p. 4. See also Contexts of Criti­ cism, pp. 187-88. 45. Ibid., pp. 21, 17. 46. Ibid., p. 51. A recent article by John Barth ("The Literature of Exhaustion," The Atlantic, 220 [1967], 29-35) explores an identical position.

NOTES

47. Ibid., p. 55, 66. 48. Ibid., pp. 21, 56. 49. ZfoW., p. 83. 50. Ibid., p. 21. 51. Harry Levin, "Toward a Sociology of the Novel," Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1965), 154. 52. Levin, Contexts of Criticism, p. x. 53. Levin, "Toward a Sociology of the Novel," p. 153. 54. Levin, Contexts of Criticism, p. 181. 55. Levin, "Toward a Sociology of the Novel," p. 154. CHAPTER VIII

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953), p. 38. 2. Ibid., p. 63. 3. Ibid., p. 19. 4. Ibid., p. 17. 5. Ibid., p. 63. 6. Ibid., p. 138. 7. Ibid., p. 64. 8. Erich Auerbach, "Figura," Scenes from the Drama of Euro­ pean Literature (New York, 1959), pp. 58-59. 9. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 64-65, 43. 10. Ibid., p. 169. 11. Rene Wellek, "Auerbach's Special Realism," Kenyon Re­ view, 16 (1954), 301. 12. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 391. 13. Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism (Princeton, 1964), p. 56. 14. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 484. 15. Robert A. Skotheim and Kermit Vanderbilt, "Vernon Louis Parrington: The Mind and Art of a Historian of Ideas," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 53 (1962), 103, 104, 107. 16. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1936), P- 1517. Leo Spitzer, "Geistesgeschichte Vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), Ϊ94. 18. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p. 7.

NOTES

19. Α. Ο. Lovejoy, "Reflections on the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 16-17. 20. A. O. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 264. 21. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, pp. 14, 16, 17. 22. A. O. Lovejoy, "Preface," Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1948), p. xii. 23. Leo Spitzer, "History of Ideas Versus Reading of Poetry," Southern Review, 6 (1941), 600, 603. 24. Margaret Starkey, "The History of Ideas and Literary Studies," Modern Language Quarterly, 13 (1952), 264-67. 25. Lovejoy, "Reflections on the History of Ideas," p. 9. 26. Ibid., p. 11. 27. Ibid., p. 14. 28. Ibid., p. 12. 29. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas," p. 264. 30. Spitzer, "Geistesgeschichte Vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism," p. 202. 31. Lovejoy, "Reply to Professor Spitzer," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 204-19. 32. Roy Harvey Pearce, "A Note on Method in the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948), 372, 373, 376. 33. Roy Harvey Pearce, "American Studies as a Discipline," College English, 18 (1957), 181. 34. Pearce, "A Note on Method in the History of Ideas," pp. 377, 378. 35. Roy Harvey Pearce, "Pure Criticism and the History of Ideas," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1948), 122-32, particularly pp. 128-31. 36. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), p. 12. 37. Americo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton, 1954), p. 31. 38. Roy Harvey Pearce, Historicism Once More (Princeton, 1969), p. 4. 39. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 61. 40. Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. IO-II. 41. Roy Harvey Pearce and Sigurd Burckhardt, "Poetry, Lan-

NOTES guage and the Condition of Modern Man," Century Review, (1960), 19. 42. Pearce, Historicism Once More, pp. 27, 29, 3 1 . 43. Ibid., pp. 29-30.

4

44. Ibid., p. 61. 45. Pearce, Historicism Once More, p. 36. 46. Pearce, Historicism Once More, pp. 264-65. 47. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America

(Baltimore,

1953)48. Erik H . Erikson, Childhood P- 34549. Pearce, Historicism

and Society ( N e w York, 1963),

Once More, p. 106.

50. Ibid., pp. 168, 159, 173. 5 1 . Ibid., p. 161. 52. Ibid., pp. 173-7453. Ibid., p. 28. 54. Ibid., p. 56. 55. Ibid., p. 28. 56. Ibid., p. 19. 57. Ibid., pp. 23-24. 58. Pearce, "Poetry, Language and the Condition of Modern Man," p. 15. The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 13. 59. Pearce, 60. Ibid., pp. 13-14CHAPTER IX

1. and 2. 3.

Murray Place of Ibid., p. Charles

Krieger, "Contextualism was Ambitious," The Play Criticism (Baltimore, 1967), particularly pp. 154-56. 164. Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature

(Chicago, 1953), p. 49. 4. Ibid., p. 5 1 . 5. Ibid., p. 45. 6. Ibid., pp. 73-74. 7. Ibid., p. 18. 8. Ibid., pp. 43, 86, 92, 1 1 2 - 1 3 . 9. Ibid., p. 73. 10. Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism (Princeton, 1964), pp. 65-66. 1 1 . Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton, 1948), p. 10.

235

NOTES

12. Ibid., p. ii. 13. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, p. 64. 14. Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton, 1962), p. 219. 15. Ibid., pp. 188-89. 16. Ibid., pp. 71-72, n. 2. 17. Rene Wellek, "Leo Spitzer," Comparative Literature, 12 (1960),319. 18. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, pp. 13, 32, n. 7. 19. Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature, p. 194, η. i.

20. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, p. 19. 21. Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature, p. 194, η. i.

22. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, p. 11. 23. Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature, pp. 141-42. 24. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, p. 27. 25. Ibid., pp. 19-25. 26. Ibid., p. 11. 27. Ibid., pp. 27-28. 28. Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Chicago, i960), pp. 273, 276. 29. Eliseo Vivas, Preface to the Gateway Edition, Creation and Discovery (New York, 1965), p. xi. 30. Eliseo Vivas, Creation and Discovery (New York, 1955), p. 84. 31. Vivas, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 276-79, 286. 32. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), p. 107. 33. Ibid., p. no. 34. This idea is discussed in many places but particularly in the title essay of The Artistic Transaction (Columbus, 1963). 35. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York, 1946), particularly pp. 6-10. 36. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), p. 74. 37. Ibid., p. 116. On this see also Rudolf Carnap, "Logic," Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), particularly, p. 109. 38. Ibid., p. 117.

NOTES

39. Vivas, The Artistic Transaction, p. 58. 40. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), p. 137. 41. Vivas, D. H. Lawrence, p. 280. 42. Vivas, Creation and Discovery, pp. 137-38. 43. Vivas, Preface to the Gateway Edition, p. xiii. 44. Vivas, D. H. Lawrence, p. 6. 45. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), p. 141. 46. Vivas, Preface to the Gateway Edition, p. x. 47. Ibid., pp. xi, xv. 48. Vivas, D. H. Lawrence, p. 179. 49. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), pp. 84, 87, 83. 50. Ibid., Creation and Discovery, p. 79. 51. Ibid., pp. 138-39. 52. Vivas, Preface to the Gateway Edition, p. xv. 53. Eliseo Vivas, The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Colum­ bus, 1950). 54. Vivas, Creation and Discovery (1955 ed.), p. 87. 55. Vivas, Preface to the Gateway Edition, p. xi. CHAPTER Χ

1. Murray Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore, 1967), particularly pp. 3-16. 2. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Bloomington, 1963), pp. 199-200. See also The Tragic Vision (New York, i960), p. 236. 3. Krieger, The Tragic Vision, p. 237. 4. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 21. See also p. 169, and The Tragic Vision, p. 230. 5. Ibid., pp. 66-67, 68. See also his "Benedetto Croce and the Recent Poetics of Organicism," Comparative Literature, 7 (1955). 252-58, and "Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Literature," Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), p. 232. 6. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 215. See also A Window to Criticism·, Shakespeare's "Sonnets" and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1964), p. 19η. 7· Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 68n. 8. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 4. 9. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 71. See also p.

NOTES

198; The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 158; and A Window to Criticism, pp. 14-15. 10. Ibid., p. 199. 11. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, pp. 14-15. 12. Sigurd Burckhardt, "The Poet as Fool and Priest," ELH, 23 (1956), 279-98. 13. Sigurd Burckhardt and Roy Harvey Pearce, "Poetry, Lan­ guage and the Condition of Modern Man," Century Review, 4 (i960), 13. 14. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, pp. 10, 246-47, 244. 15. Ibid., p. 251. See also The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 20. 16. The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 10. 17. Ibid., p. 161. 18. Ibid., p. 53, n. 1. 19. Ibid., p. 158. 20. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, pp. 25, 129. 21. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 159. 22. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 25. 23. Ibid., p. 130. See also "Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Literature," Interpretation: Theory and Practice. 24. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, pp. 5, 126-27. 25. Krieger, The Tragic Vision, p. 244. 26. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 105. 27. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, p. 218. 28. Harry Levin, Yale Review, 54 (1965), 264. 29. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, 205-206. 30. Ibid., p. 241. 31. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, pp. 10-18. 32. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 3-22. 33. Krieger, The Tragic Vision, p. 242. 34. Ibid. 35. Krieger, The Tragic Vision, p. 256. 36. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, p. 210. 37. Ibid., pp. 211-17. 38. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 214, n. 1. 39. Krieger, The Tragic Vision, pp. 243-44. 40. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, p. 214. 41. Levin, p. 264. 42. Krieger, The Play and Place of Criticism, p. 63.

NOTES

43. Ibid., p. 119. 44. Ibid., p. 124. 45. Ibid., p. 127. 46. Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Chicago, i960), p. 280. 47. R. B. Heilman, "Historian and Critic: Notes on Attitudes," Sewanee Review, 73 (1965), 432. CHAPTER XI

1. Murray Krieger, "Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Literature," Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 211-42. 2. Arthur Efran, "Logic, Hermeneutic, and Literary Context," Genre, 1 (1968), 225. 3. Lezek Kolakowski, "The Priest and the Jester," Dissent IX, 3(1962),217. 4. Noam Chomsky speaks of such a grand alliance in Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966). 5. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1941), p. 31. 6. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, i960), particu­ larly p. 227. 7. Friedrich Meinecke, see Note 15, Chap. I. 8. Ibid., see Note 17, Chap. I.

A List of Works Cited (Arranged According to Critic or Topic) ERICH AUERBACH

"Figura," Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. New York, 1959. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, 1953. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON AUERBACH

Krieger, Murray. A Window to Criticism. Princeton, 1964, pp. 4-12, 55-56,^175-76. Wellek, Rene. "Auerbach's Special Realism," Kenyon Review, 16 (1954), 299-307. MARIUS BEWLEY

The Complex Fate. London, 1952. RANDOLPH BOURNE

History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays. New York, 1920. The World of Randolph Bourne. Ed. Lillian Schlissel. New York, 1965. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON BOURNE

Dahlberg, Edward. Alms for Oblivion. Minneapolis, 1964, pp. 79-86. Mumford, Lewis. "The Image of Randolph Bourne," New Republic, 64 (1930), 151-52. Munson, Gorham B. "American Criticism and the Fighting Hope," Yale Review, 20 (1931), 568-69. . "The Young Critics of the Nineteen-Twenties," The Bookman, 70 (1929), 369-73.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

Paul, Sherman. Randolph Bourne. Minneapolis, 1966. Sillen, Samuel. "The Challenge of Randolph Bourne," Masses and Mainstream, 6 (1953), 24-62. Teall, Dorothy. "Bourne into Myth," The Bookman, 75 (1932), 590-99. VAN WYCK BROOKS

Emerson and Others. New York, 1927. New England: Indian Summer, 186^-1915. New York, 1940. "On Constructing a Usable Past," The Dial, 64 (1918), 337-41· The Ordeal of Mar\ Twain. New York, 1933. The Pilgrimage of Henry James. New York, 1925. Three Essays on America. New York, 1934. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York, 1947. Sketches in Criticism. New York, 1932. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON BROOKS

Foerster, Norman. "The Literary Prophets," The Bookman, 72 (i93°)> 35-44Paul, Sherman. "The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage," The New Leader, 48 (1965), 19-20. Wellek, Rene. "Van Wyck Brooks and a National Literature," American Prefaces, 7 (1942), 292-306. Wilson, Edmund. "Mr. Brooks's Second Phase," New RepubUc, 103 (1940)' 452-54· SIGURD BURCKHARDT

"The Poet as Fool and Priest," ELH, 23 (1956), 279-98. , and Roy Harvey Pearce. "Poetry, Language and the Condition of Modern Man," Century Review, 4 (i960), 1-15. KENNETH BURKE

Attitudes Toward History. 2 vols. New York, 1937. Counter-Statement. New York, 1931. A Grammar of Motives. New York, 1945. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge, 1941. "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," American Writer's Congress. Ed. Henry Hart. New York, 1935.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON BURKE

Parks, Henry Bamford. The Pragmatic Test. San Francisco, WRansom, John Crowe. "An Address to Kenneth Burke," Kenyon Review, 4 (1942), 219-37. Rueckert, William H. Kenneth Bur^e and the Drama of Human Relations. Minneapolis, 1963. CHARLES FEIDELSON, JR.

Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago, 1953. PAUL GOODMAN

The Structure of Literature. Chicago, 1954. GRANVILLE HICKS

"The Critical Principles of V. L. Parrington," Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly, 3 (1939), 443-60. "The Failures of Left Criticism," The New Republic, 103 (I94°)j 345-47·

Figures of Transition. New York, 1939. The Great Tradition. New York, 1935. "Literature and Revolution," English Journal, 24 (1935), 21939·

Part of the Truth. New York, 1965. Small Town. New York, 1946. Where We Came Out. New York, 1954. FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN

"Form and Circumstance: A Study of the Study of Modern Literature," Approaches to the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature. East Lansing, 1961. "The Knowledge of Literature: Suggestions for American Studies," American Quarterly, 10 (1958), 199-205. Charles Allen and Carolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, 1947. The Mortal No. Princeton, 1964. The Twenties: American Writingin the Postwar Decade."New York, 1949.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON HOFFMAN

Dufiey, Bernard. "Some Questions of Method," ELH, 31 (1964), 318-29. MURRAY KRIEGER

"Benedetto Croce and the Recent Poetics of Organicism," Comparative Literature, 7 (1955), 252-58. The Classic Vision. Baltimore, 1971. "Literary Analysis and Evaluation—and the Ambidextrous Critic," Contemporary Literature, 9 (1968), 290-310. "Mediation, Language and Vision in the Reading of Litera­ ture," Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore, 1969. The New Apologists for Criticism. Bloomington, 1963. "Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism: Ariel and the Spirit of Gravity," Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism. New York, 1966. The Play and Place of Criticism. Baltimore, 1967. The Tragic Vision. New York, i960. A Window to Criticism. Princeton, 1964. CRITICAL COMMENTARY

ON KRIEGER

Levin, Harry. ["Review of A Window to Criticism"], Yale Review, 54 (1965), 264. HARRY LEVIN

Contexts of Criticism. New York, 1957. The Gates of Horn: Study of Five French Realists. New York, χ Φΐ>· fames Joyce. New York, i960. The Power of Blackness. New York, 1958. "Pseudodoxia Academica," Southern Review, 6 (1940), 263-69. ["Review of A Window to Criticism"], Yale Review, 54 (1965), 264. "Toward a Sociology of the Novel," Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), 148-54. R.W.B. LEWIS

The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, 1955.

A L I S T OF W O R K S

CITED

The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction. New York, 1959. Trials of the World. New Haven, 1965. A. o .

LOVEJOY

Essays in the History of Ideas. New York, 1948. The Great Chain of Being. New York, 1936. "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 257-78. "Reflections on the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 3-23. "Reply to Professor Spitzer," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 ( I 944)> 204-19F. O.

MATTHIESSEN

American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York, 1941. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York, 1963. The Responsibilities of the Critic. New York, 1952. CRITICAL

COMMENTARY

ON

MATTHIESSEN

Ruland, Richard. The Rediscovery of American Cambridge, Mass., 1967, pp. 209-273. LEWIS

Literature.

MUMFORD

The Conduct of Life. New York, 1951. The Golden Day. New York, 1926. "The Image of Randolph Bourne," New Republic, 64 (1930), 151-52. Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York, 1924. CRITICAL

COMMENTARY

ON

MUMFORD

Parsons, Howard L. "Religion and The Conduct of Life: A Review of Lewis Mumford's Work," The Journal of Religion, 34 ( I 9 5 4 ) > 37-49VERNON

LOUIS

PARRINGTON

(ed.). The Connecticut Wits. New York, 1926. (ed.). Giants in the Earth, by O. E. Rolvaag. New York, 1927. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York, 1927. 245

A LIST OF WORKS CITED CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON PARRINGTON

Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr. "Parrington and the Decline of Ameri­ can Liberalism," American Quarterly, 3 (1951), 295-308. Hicks, Granville. "The Critical Principles of V. L. Parrington," Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly, 3 (1939), 443-60. Skotheim, Robert A. and Kermit Vanderbilt. "Vernon Louis Parrington: The Mind and Art of a Historian of Ideas," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 53 (1962), 103-107. Smith, Bernard. "Parrington's Main Currents," New Republic, 98 (1939)» 4°'43· Trilling, Lionel. "Parrington, Mr. Smith and Reality," Partisan Review, 7 (1940), 24-40. ROY HARVEY PEARCE

"American Studies as a Discipline," College English, 18 (1957), 179-86. The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton, 1961. Historicism Once More. Princeton, 1969. "Literature, History and Humanism: An Americanist's Dilem­ ma," College English, 24 (1963), 364-72. "A Note on Method in the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948), 312-19. , and Sigurd Burckhardt. "Poetry Language and the Condition of Modern Man," Century Review, 4 (i960), 1-15. "Pure Criticism and the History of Ideas," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1948), 122-32. The Savages of America. Baltimore, 1953. JOHN CROWE RANSOM

"An Address to Kenneth Burke," Kenyon Review, 4 (1942), , 2I9'37· "Classical and Romantic," Saturday Review of Literature, 6 ( (1929). ^5-27. "Criticism as Pure Speculation," The Intent of the Critic. Ed. D. Stauffer. Princeton, 1941. "Editorial Notes," Kenyon Review, 2 (1940), 345-50. "Flux and Blur in Contemporary Art," Sewanee Review, 37 (^29) > 353-66·

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

God Without Thunder. New York, 1930. "The Idea of a Literary Anthropologist," Kenyon Review, 21 (!959).121-40. "Inorganic Muses," Kenyon Review, 5 (1943), 278-360. The New Criticism. Norfolk, 1941. Poems and Essays. New York, 1955. "Poetry: A Note in Ontology," Critiques and Essays in Criti­ cism, 1920-48. Ed. R. W. Stallman. New York, 1949. "Poetry I: The Formal Analysis," Kenyon Review, 9 (1947),

„ 44Ι"43>

"Poetry II: The Final Cause," Kenyon Review, 9 (1947), 640«

58'

"Wordsworth: Notes Toward an Understanding of Poetry," Kenyon Review, 12 (1950), 498-519. The World's Body. New York, 1938. "Yeats and His Symbols," Kenyon Review, 1 (1939), 310-11. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON RANSOM

Bradbury, John M. The Fugitives: A Critical Account. Chapel Hill, 1958. Handy, William J. "The Ontological Theory of the Ransom Critics," University of Texas Studies in English, 35 (1956), 32-50. Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Bloomington, 1963, pp. 82-87, 209-16. Roellinger, Francis X., Jr. "Two Theories of Poetry as Knowl­ edge," Southern Review, 7 (1942), 690-705. Stewart, John L. The Burden of Time. Princeton, 1965. Young, Thomas Daniel (ed.). John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography. Baton Rouge, 1968. GEORGE SANTAYANA

Essays in Literary Criticism. New York, 1956. George Santayana s America: Essays on Literature and Cul­ ture. Ed. J. Ballowe. Urbana, 1967. The Sense of Beauty. New York, 1896. LEO SPITZER

Essays on English and American Literature. Princeton, 1962.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

"Geistesgeschichte Vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 191-203. "History of Ideas Versus Reading of Poetry," Southern Review, 6 (1941), 584-609. Linguistics and Literary History. Princeton, 1948. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON SPITZER

Krieger, Murray. A Window to Criticism. Princeton, 1964, pp. 12-13, 31-32, 65-66. Wellek, Rene. "Leo Spitzer," Comparative Literature, 12 (i960), 310-34. ELISEO VIVAS

The Artistic Transaction. Columbus, 1963. Creation and Discovery. New York, 1955 (Gateway ed. New York, 1965). D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. Chi­ cago, i960. The Moral Life and the Ethical Life. Columbus, 1950. CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON VIVAS

Krieger, Murray. A Window to Criticism. Princeton, 1964, pp. 59-63. RENE WELLEK

"Auerbach's Special Realism," Kenyon Review, 16 (1954), 299-307. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven, 1963. A History of Modern Criticism /750-/950. 3 vols. New Haven, «

I965'

·

"Leo Spitzer," Comparative Literature, 12 (i960), 310-34. "Literary Theory, Criticism and History," Sewanee Review, 68 (i960), 1-19. "Periods and Movements in Literary History," English Insti­ tute Annual 1940. New York, 1941. "Six Types of Literary History," English Institute Essays 1946. New York, 1947. , and Austin Warren. Theory of literature. New York, 1942.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

"Van Wyck Brooks and a National Literature," American Prefaces, η (1942), 292-306. EDMUND WILSON

Axel's Castle. New York, 1931. "Mr. Brooks's Second Phase," New Republic, 103 (1940), 45254> . Patriotic Gore. New York, 1962. The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. To the Finland Station. New York, 1940. The Triple Thinners. New York, 1948. "We Don't Know Where We Are," New Republic, 140 (1959),

WCRITICAL COMMENTARY ON WILSON

Frank, Charles. Edmund Wilson. New York, 1970. Fraiberg, Louis. Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criti­ cism. Detroit, i960. Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries. Boston, 1956, pp. 405-11. Paul, Sherman. Edmund Wilson. Urbana, 1967. Podhoretz, Norman. Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing. New York, 1964.

DISCUSSIONS OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Pearce, Roy Harvey. "A Note on Method in the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948), 312-19. . "Pure Criticism and the History of Ideas," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1948), 122-32. Skinner, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in the His­ tory of Ideas," History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53. Spitzer, Leo. "Geistesgeschichte Vs. History of Ideas as Ap­ plied to Hitlerism," Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 191-203. . "History of Ideas Versus Reading of Poetry," Southern Review, 6 (1941), 584-609. Starkey, Margaret. "The History of Ideas and Literary Studies," Modern Language Quarterly, 13 (1952), 264-67.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED MARX AND MARXIAN CRITICISM

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York, 1961. Botkin, B. A. "Regionalism and Culture," The Writer in a Changing World. New York, 1937. Calverton, V. F. The Liberation of American Literature. New York, 1932. Demetz, Peter. Marx, Engels and the Poets. Chicago, 1967. Eastman, Max. "Karl Marx Anticipated Freud," The New Masses, 3 (1927), 10-13. Engels, Friedrich. Literature and Art. New York, 1947. Fox, Ralph. The Novel and the People. London, 1937. Freeman, Joseph. Introduction, Proletarian Literature in the United States. New York, 1935. . "Literary Theories," The New Masses, 4 (1929), 12-13. Gold, Michael. "America Needs a Critic," The New Masses, ι (1926), 7-10. Kettle, Arnold. "From Hamlet to Lear," Shakespeare in a Changing World. Ed. A. Kettle. New York, 1964. Kolakowski, Leszek. "The Priest and the Jester," Dissent, 1 (1962), 215-35. Levin, Harry. "Toward a Sociology of the Novel," Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), 148-54. Lifshitz, Mikhail. "Literature and the Class Struggle," Litera­ ture and Marxism. Ed. Angel Flores. New York, 1938. Lofkowicz, Nicholas. Theory and Practice: History of a Con­ cept from Aristotle to Marx. New York, 1968. Lukacs, Georg. Aesthetic, 2 vols. Neuwied am Rhein, 1963-. . The Historical Novel. Trans. H. and S. Mitchell. Boston, 1963. . Studies in European Realism. New York, 1964. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ­ omy. 2 vols. Trans. Ν. I. Stone. New York, 1904. . Selected Wor\s. 2 vols. London, 1945. , and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York, 1939. Murry, J. M. The Necessity of Communism. London, 1932. Plekhanov, G. V. Art and Social Life. London, 1953.

A LIST OF WORKS CITED

Rieser, Max. "The Aesthetic Theory of Socialist Realism," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16 (1957), 237-48. . "Russian Aesthetics Today and their Historical Back­ ground," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 22 (1963), 44-53Smith, Bernard. Forces in American Criticism. New York, *939· . "Parrington's Main Currents," New Republic, 98 (193°), 40-43. Steiner, George. Language and Silence. New York, 1967. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ann Arbor, i960. Weiman, Robert. "The Soul of the Age: Towards a Historical Approach to Shakespeare," Shakespeare in a Changing World. Ed. A. Kettle. New York, 1964. THE THEORY OF HISTORY, HISTORICISM, AND LITERARY HISTORY

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston, 1918. Antoni, Carlo. From History to Sociology. Trans. Hayden V. White. Detroit, 1959. . L'Historisme. Geneva, 1963. Bateson, F. W. English Poetry and the English Language. London, 1934. . "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), 1-27. Beard, Charles and Alfred Vagts. "Currents of Thought in Historiography," American Historical Review, 42 (1937), 460-83. Bentley, Eric (ed.). The Importance of Scrutiny. New York, 1948. Berthoff, Warner. "The Study of Literature and the Recovery of the Historical," College English, 28 (1967), 477-86. Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. Trans. S. K. Langer. New York, 1946. Castro, Americo. The Structure of Spanish History. Trans. E. L. King. Princeton, 1954. Commager, Henry Steele. "The Search for a Usable Past," American Heritage, 16 (1965), pp. 4-9.

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Crane, R. S. "History Versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature," English Journal, 24 (1935), 645-67. Curtius, Ernst R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. R. Trask. New York, 1953. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Meaning in History. Ed. H. P. Rickman. London, 1961. Dray, William. Laws and Explanation in History. London, *957Engel-Janosi, Friedrich. The Growth of Historicism. Balti­ more, 1944. Erikson, Erik H. Young Man Luther. New York, 1958. Foerster, Norman. "Literary Scholarship and Criticism," Eng­ lish Journal, 25 (1936), 224-32. Gallie, W. B. Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. New York, 1964. Gombrich, Ε. H. Art and Illusion. Princeton, i960. Heilman, R. B. "Historian and Critic: Notes on Attitudes," Sewanee Review, 73 (1965), 426-44. . "History and Criticism: Psychological and Pedagogical Notes," College English, 27 (1965), 32-38. Higham, John. "The Rise of American Intellectual History," American Historical Review, 56 (1951), 453-71. Huppert, George. "The Renaissance Background of Histori­ cism," History and Theory, 5 (1966), 48-59. Jones, Howard Mumford. "Literary Scholarship and Contem­ porary Criticism," English Journal, 23 (1934), 740-58. . The Theory of American Literature. Ithaca, 1948 (rev. ed. 1965). Leavis, F. R. (ed.). A Selection from Scrutiny. 2 vols. Cam­ bridge, 1968. Lee, Dwight and Robert Beck. "Meaning of 'Historicism,'" American Historical Review, 59 (1954), 568-77. Lukacs, John. Historical Consciousness. New York, 1968. Macy, John. The Spirit of American Literature. New York, I9I3· Meyerhoff, Hans. The Philosophy of History in Our Time. New York, 1959.

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Mizener, Arthur. "Scholars and Critics," Kenyon Review, 2 (1940), 4x2-22. Noble, David. Historians Against History. Minneapolis, 1965. Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature since I8JO. New York, 1917. Perry, Bliss. The American Mind. New York, 1912. Popper, Karl. The Open Society. 2 vols. Princeton, 1950. . The Poverty of Historicism. Boston, 1957. Pottle, Frederick A. "The New Critics and the Historical Method," Yale Review, 43 (1953), 14-23. Robinson, James Harvey. The New History. New York, 1912. Saintsbury, George. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste, 3 vols. London, 1906. Stern, Fritz. The Varieties of History. Cleveland, 1956. Teeter, Louis. "Scholarship and the Art of Criticism," ELH, 5 (1938)» !73-94Trevelyan, G. M. "History and Literature," Yale Review, 14 (1924), 109-25. Van Deusen, Marshall. A Metaphor for the History of Ameri­ can Criticism. Copenhagen, 1961. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism /750-/950.3 vols. New Haven, 1965. . "Literary Theory, Criticism and History," Sewanee Review, 68 (i960), 1-19. . "Periods and Movements in Literary History," English Institute Annual 1940. New York, 1941. . "Six Types of Literary History," English Institute Essays 1946. New York, 1947. , and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York, I9.42,

White, Hayden V. "Romanticism, Historicism, Realism: To­ ward a Period Concept for Early Nineteenth-Century Intel­ lectual History," The Uses of History. Detroit, 1968. Wimsatt, W. K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York, 1957. Woodberry, George Edward. Appreciation of Literature. New York, 1921.

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Woodberry, George Edward. "Two Phases of Criticism: His­ torical and Esthetic," Criticism in America. New York, 1924. MISCELLANEOUS

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer. New York, 1955. Barth, John. "The Literature of Exhaustion," The Atlantic, 220 (1967), 29-35. Berthoif, Warner. The Ferment of Realism. New York, 1965. Blackmur, R. P. Form and Value in Modern Poetry. New York, 1946. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. New York, 1947. Carnap, Rudolf. "Logic," Factors Determining Human Be­ havior. Cambridge, Mass., 1937, pp. 107-18. Cassirer, Ernst. Essay on Man. New Haven, 1944. . Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. New Haven, *953· Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York, 1966. Colish, Marcia. The Mirror of Language. New Haven, 1968. De Voto, Bernard. The Literary Fallacy. Boston, 1944. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York, 1938. Efran, Arthur. "Logic, Hermeneutic, and Literary Context," Genre, 1 (1968), 214-29. Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. New York, 1963. Foerster, Norman (ed.). The Reinterpretation of American Literature. New York, 1928. Foster, Richard. The New Romantics. Bloomington, 1962. Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre. New Brunswick, 1963. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, 1967. Jaspers, Karl. Reason and Existenz. Trans. W. Earle. New York, 1955. Kenner, Hugh, "Language as a Closed Field," Learners and Discerners: A Newer Criticism. Ed. Robert Scholes. Char­ lotte, 1964. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of An Ending. London, 1966. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford, 1966. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago, 1966. . Structural Linguistics. Trans. C. Jacobson. New York, 1967.

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Lowes, J. L. "Presidential Address," PMLA,

48

(1933), 1399-

1408.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God. New York, 1965. Morrison, Claudia C. Freud and the Critic. Chapel Hill, 1968, pp. 176-91. Pottle, F. A. The Idiom of Poetry. Ithaca, 1946. Ruland, Richard. The Rediscovery of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass., 1967. Schlauch, Margaret. Antecedents of the English Novel. Lon­ don, 1963. Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York, 1967. Tate, Allen. "The Present Function of Criticism," Southern Review, 6 (1940), 236-46. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York, 1950. Ward, }. A. The Search for Form. Chapel Hill, 1967. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London, 1957. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. (Inclusive ed.) Garden City, 1926. Wimsatt, W. K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington, 1954. Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver, 1937.

Index Aaron, Daniel, 67 Adam, Villiers de l'lsle, 94 Adams, Henry, 48, 75-76, 91, 92, 96, 98, 130, 214 aesthetic-formal vs. thematicexistential, 57-58, 63, 64, 78-79, 201-2 all-embracing pattern, 54, 60, 61, 64-68, 111. See also Hicks, Granville American socialism, 67 analytic philosophy, 10 Antoni, Carlo, 4, 12, 120 Aristotle, 41, 57n, 68, 69, 109, 170n, 212 Arnold, Matthew, 17, 62, 70, 78, 86, 87, 109, 120 Auerbach, Erich, 140n, 141, 14651, 159, 164, 166, 192, 195, 196, 199, 200; on Dante, 149; eschatological vision, 147; existentialist dilemma, 149; figural method, 148ft, 199; on Hegel, 149, 150; historicism, 150; liturgical plays, 148; on Plato, 149; problematicism, 149; realism, 146-51; separation of styles, 146 Augustin, St., 182n autobiographical tradition, 83, 88, 92, 98, 171, 214. See also Adams, Henry; Bourne, Randolph Babbitt, Irving, 85, 93 Ballowe, James, 81

Bancroft, George, 44n Barnes, Djuna, 46, 47 Bateson, F. W., 16-20, 20-21, 22, 23, 29. 3 1 ) 164, 174-75 Baudelaire, Charles, 48 Beard, Charles, 44n, 130 Bellow, Saul, I28n Bergson, Henri, 46, 47, no, 112, 118, 139n, 188 Berkley, Bishop, 171 Berthoff, Warner, 16, 35, 40n Bewley, Marius, 48n 124-25, 126, 128, 162 Blackmur, R. P., 72 Boas, George, 26n Botkin, B. A., 6on Bourne, Randolph, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82-85, 91) 92. 94. 98 99. too, 101, 102; autobiographical tradition, 83; classicism, 82; criticartist, 82, 83, 84; genteel tradition, 82; moral vision, 82 Bradbury, John M., 109 Brandes, George, n , 40 Brooks, Cleanth, 117, 128, 201 Brooks, Van Wyck, 50, 74, 75, 7677, 78, 81, 84, 85-90, 91, 92, 94, 96n, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105,106,107,108,118, 119n, 120, 124, 125, 131, 134, 143, 160, 162, 213, 214; continuous present, 77; creative imagination, 74, 83; creative prophet, 79, 98; criticartist, 87; critic as witness, 84; on Croce, 79; liberalism, 86;

257

INDEX Brooks, Van Wyck (cont.) Marxism, 86; moralism, 85; religion and philosophy, 78, 86; romantic nationalist, 86; usable past, 77ff Brown, Norman O., 97 Browne, Sir Thomas, 130 Brunetiere, Fernand, 10 Bryant, William Cullen, 159 Buber, Martin, 113 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 10 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 191-92, 199, 204 Burke, Kenneth, 54, 67, 68-73, 96n, 105, 106, 107, 108, 122, 125n, 133, 170n, 173, 214; on Arnold, Matthew, 70; extrinsic and intrinsic criticism, 69-70, 122; forensic art, 71-72; Freudianism, 69; Marxism, 68, 71, 72; mimesis, 70, 72; as moralist, 72; statistical criticism, 69; as Structuralist, 68; Symbolic Form, 68, 70 Cabell, James Branch, 48-51, 105, 106. See also Parrington, Vernon Louis Calverton, V. F., 57, 62, 67 Camus, Albert, 202 Carlyle, Thomas, 87, 91 Carnap, Rudolph, 21 Cassirer, Ernst, 83n 177, 178, 179, 185 Castro, Americo, 157, 165n categorical imperative, 80, 98, 100, 102 Cervantes, Miguel, 181 Chicago logical positivists, 21 Chomsky, Noam, 96 Clark, Harry Hayden, 29, 198 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 113n, 116, 188, 189 Colish, Marcia, 182n 258

Collingwood, R. G., 10-11, 12, 89 Commager, Henry Steele, 77 Communist Manifesto, 73 Comte, August, 1 1 Connecticut Wits, 38, 41 Contextualism, 116, 118, 154, 161, 169, 191, 194, 196-97 Cooper, James Fenimore, 90, 127 Corneille, Pierre, 134-35 Corpus Christi drama, 57, 148 Crane, Hart, i28n, 158 Crane, Ronald S., 21 creation and discovery, 66, 81, 87, 124, 178, 181-82, 183, 186 critic-artist theory, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 98, 106. See also Bourne, Randolph critic as witness, 83, 84, 92, 98 Croce, Benedetto, 12, 30, 79, 95, 184, 188 Curtius, Ernst, i39n Dahlberg, Edward, 84 Dante, 149 Demetz, Peter, 56, 59 Descartes, 171 DeVoto, Bernard, 78, 89 Dewey, John, 7, 24, 25 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 8n, 68, 88, 98, 216 dissociation of sensibility, 130-31 Donne, John, 201, 202 Dos Passos, John, 93 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 202 Dreiser, Theodore, 82, 132 Duffey, Bernard, 137 Eastman, Max, 55-56, 87 Edel, Leon, 97 Edwards, Jonathan, 131 Eliot, T. S., 68, 69, 115, 125, 130, 202 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 40, 43, 46, 75. 9i. 99) 100, 131, 170

INDEX 132-33; historical relativism, 135; historicist tautology, 134n Great Chain of Being, 113n

Empson, William, 117 Engels, Friedrich, 53, 54, 58 Erikson, Erik, 5011, 80, 8511, 97, 14311, 160, 192, 214

Hampel, C. G., 10 Hartley, David, 113n Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 29, 48n, 85, 86, 124, 126, 160, 161 Hegel, 5, 8, 9, 38, 44, 55, 57. 7*> 93, 95, 110, 135, 149, 150,159, 162 Heilman, R. B., 13, 14, 15, 17, 23, 209 Heraclitus, 6 Herder, 11 hermeneutics, 24, 55n, 154 Herrick, Robert, 191 Hicks, Granville, 40, 54, 63-68, 72, 93, 94, 105, 106, 107, 166; allembracing pattern, 54, 60, 64-68; critical monism, 64-65; on Dickinson, 65, 66; form-content dichotomy, 63, 65; Industrial Revolution, 65; on James, Henry, 65, 67; mimesis, 64-65; on Parrington, 52-53; on Wilde, 66 Higham, John, 36, 37 Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 22, 24, 25,154, 157

Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 169-72, 201, 202, 215, 216; on Berkley, 171; on Descartes, 171; on Emerson, 170; history of epistemological sensibilities, 171; on Hume, 171; on Melville, 170; nationalistic historicism, 170, 171; organicism, 169,171; poet as Manichee, 170; problematicism, 170; on Puritanism, 171; on Ramist logic, 171; romanticism, 169, 170; symbolism, 169ff; on Whitman, 170 Fiedler, Leslie, 97 figural method, 148ff. See also Auerbach, Erich; Krieger, Murray Foerster, Norman, 77, 130 formalism, 46, 119, 120, 123, 128, 132, 135, 156, 157, 161, 163, 165 formalist aesthetics, 138 Fox, Ralph, 60 Fraiberg, Louis, g6n Frank, Charles, 92 Frank, Joseph, 46-47 Frank, Waldo, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 91, 96, 97, 107, 109, 132, 173 Frye, Northrop, 50, 51, 137, 202 Gallie, W. B., 10 Gauss, Christian, 92 gestalt psychology, 58n Goethe, 7, 8 , 1 1 , 83n Gold, Michael, 62 Gombrich, E. H., 215 Goodman, Paul, 132-35; aesthetic historicism, 134; on Corneille, 134-35; formalism, 135; Freud,

historical mindedness, 5 historical relativism, 3n (defined), 8, 9, 19, 20, 26, 27, 106-7, 135, 136, 145, 150, 158-66, 214 historicism, 14, 15, 16, 35, 36, 38, 46, 48, 57, 74, 88, 89, 94, 95, 96, 101, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 145, 146, 150, i5on, 153, 156, 161, 162, 172, 174, 176, 186, 193, 194, 205, 211, 213, 216; aesthetic historicism, 11-12, 46, 51, 78, 79, 81, 82, 95, 131, 134, 143, 181, 202; certainty of interpretation, 9; continuity, 4, 6, 7; danger of, 56, 59; dilemma of,

250

INDEX historicism (cont.) 27, 107, 129, 155, 166, 187, 188, 191, 196, 200, 206, 209; historicist attitude, 6, 59, 70; Marxian historicism, 54, 56, 71, 78, 94; metaphysical historicism, 9-10, 55, 139, 162, 186; nationalistic historicism, 11, 46, 124, 125, 129, 162, 170, 171; naturalistic historicism, 10-11, 24, 55; new historicism, 8, 12, 13, 15, 27, 30, 31, 55, 74. 78. 121, 122m ,123, 131, 132, 163, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 187, 188, 189, 195, 204, 210, 211, 212, 214; preliminary definition, 4-8; tautology, 13, 15, 2728, 56, 57, 134n, 200 history of ideas, 18, 125, 146, 15155. 156, 157,160, 174, 193, 205. See also Lovejoy, A. O. Hitler, Adolf, 66, 73 Hoffman, Frederick J., 86, 135-38, 190, 200, 203; aesthetic reality, 137; Form and Milieu, 136-37, 138; form-content dichotomy, 136; formalist aesthetics, 138; on Hersey, John, 138; historical relativism, 136; on Junger, Ernst, 138; stylistics, 137; thematics, 137 Holmes, Oliver W., 159 Hopkins, G. M., 191 Howells, William D., 40, 48 Hulme, T. E., 188 humanitas, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 210 Hume, David, 171, 207 Huppert, George, 4n Husserl, 5, 192 Idealistic philosophy, 6, 7, 8 incarnate metaphor, 118. See also Krieger, Murray 260

James, Henry, 45-48, 76, 93, 124, 160 James, William, 24 Jaspers, Karl, 54 Jefferson, Thomas, 40 Jones, Howard Mumford, 22, 26, 29 Joyce, James, 46, 47, 48, 95, 140 Jung, C. G., 173 Junger, Ernst, 138 Kant, 6, 46, 80, 108, no, 114, 115, 177, 178, 207 Kazin, Alfred, 58n, 91, 98 Keats, 73 Kenner, Hugh, 157n Kermode, Frank, I39n Kettle, Arnold, 58 Kierkegaard, i5on, 194 Kolakowski, Leszek, 56, 213, 214 Krieger, Murray, 24, 5on, 116, 117, 118, 137, 150, 172, 187-209, 2x1, 215; aesthetic historicism, 202; archetypal criticism, 207-8, 2 1 1 ; on Auerbach, 200; on Camus, 202; on Coleridge, 188, 189; constitutive poetics, 198, 207; corporeality, 192, 195, 204, 208; dialogistics, 2o6n; Dionysus and Apollo, 194, 2o6n; on Donne, 201, 202; on Dostoevsky, 202; effigy, 204; ekphrasis, 208; on Eliot, 202; existential projection, 202, 2o6n; existential-thematic vs. aesthetic formal, 201-2; existentialist-personalist philosophy, 194, 197; extreme in poetry, 202-3; form-content dichotomy, 190; history of ideas, 193, 205; Idealism, 188, 189; impressionism, 197; incarnate metaphor, 118, 203; Manichaeism, 194, 201, 202, 203, 204, 2o6n; on Mann, 203; mediation

INDEX in language, 2 1 1 ; miracle, 191, 194, 196, 197, 203, 204, 206, 207, 2 1 1 ; mirror-window, 203, 209; organicism, 187, 188; organicisthistoricist dilemma, 187, 188, 191, 200, 206, 209; contra Pearce, 192-94, 201, 205; on Pope, 206, 207; on Shakespeare, 199, 202,205; thematics, 200-201; on Vivas, 200 Lanier, Sidney, 159 Lawrence, D. H., 48, 182 Leavis, F. R., 16-20, 21, 31 Lenin, 92, 93 Levin, Harry, 58-59n, 95, 138-44, 146, 162, 205-6, 210, 211, 215; aesthetic historicism, 143; activism, 142; on Brandes, 140; tabulation, 139; on Joyce, 140; literature as institution, 141; nationalistic historicism, 139; parody and satire, 142-43; realism and symbolism, 140; scholar as critic, 139; scrupulous critique, 142; sociological criticism, 142; on Taine, 140 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 96, 215 Lewis, R.W.B., 125-28, 137, 166; on Bellow, I28n; on Cooper, 127; on Crane, I28n; existentialism, 126; on Hawthorne, 126; history of ideas, 125; irony, 126, 127; on Melville, 126; nationalistic historicism, 125; New Adam, 125-26; picaresque saint, 127; relativism, 128; on Silone, 127-28; type characters, 127 Lewis, Sinclair, 46, 49 literary criticism, 14, 15, 16-20, 2022, 78, 123, 196-97, 209 literary history, 14, 15, 16-20, 12223,129-32; encyclopedic method, 22-23; interest in content, 29-30;

literature as document, 29; statistical analysis, 24; value judgments, 22. See also Wellek, Rene literature as inferior, 29, 41, 42 literature's dual mode of existence, 15, 16, 20-22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 36, 53,101,105-9, 112,113,121,122, 144, 150,155, 166, 179, 196, 208. See also literary criticism; literary history, literature's interpretation and evaluation, 14, 22-24, 36, 41, 120-21 Locke, 133n Longfellow, 45, 85, 159 Lovejoy, A. O., 146, 151-55, 156, 160, 174, 208; contextualism, 154; metaphysical pathos, 152; relativism, 154; statistical method, 154; unit idea, 6n, 151ff, 208 Lowell, J. R., 45, 159 Lowes, John Livingston, 154 Lukacs, Georg, 53, 55, 57n, 58, 59, 65, 68, 127, 14m; average hero, 58,65 Lukacs, John, 4 Luther, Martin, 85

250

Mallarme, Stephane, 46 Marcuse, Herbert, 97 Marvell, Andrew, 18, 20 Marx, Karl, 5, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 91, 109, 135, 159 Marx's law, 55-56, 62, 66 Marxian literary theory, 52-73, 75, 77, 78, 93, 95,107,111,162, 202; activism, 61-63; aesthetics, 54; critical certainty, 55, 60, 63, 68, 102; existential-thematic vs. aesthetic-formal, 57-58, 63, 64; form-content dichotomy, 57-58, 63; gnostic fatalism, 61-63;

INDEX Nashville Agrarians, 6on nationalism, 74, 77, 81, 125, 126, 157, 170. See also historicism, nationalistic New Adam, 44n, 125-26. See also Lewis, R.W.B. New Criticism, 3, 17, 21, 78, 101, 108, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124, 126, 127, 131, 136, 156, 161, 187, 188, 201, 211 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 9 Noble, David, 44n, 50

Marxian literary theory (cont.) Hegelian1 Idealism, 54; historical prophecy, 3, 53; mimesis, 57-59, 60-63, 72, 78; monistic criticism, 53. 57. 64; mysticism, 55-56; radical progressivism, 60; reactionarism, 60; Revolutionary poetry, 59, 60; rhetorical poetry, 63; sacramental time, 56; scientific methodology, 55; social types, 58; teleology, 54, 60, 63; Utopian literature, 60 Matthiessen, F. O., 48n, 50n, 12932, 138, 139, 156; aesthetic historicism, 131; on Browne, Sir Thomas, 130; comparative criticism, 130; on Dreiser, 132; on Edwards, Jonathan, 131; on Emerson, 131; on Melville, 130; nationalistic historicism, 129; organic symbols, 129; Puritan synthesis, 131; on Whitman, 131 Meinecke, Friedrich, 7, 8, 88, 216 Melville, Herman, 100, 126, 130, 170

organicism, 46, 83, 87, 100-101, ii3n, 116, 155, 164, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175,176, 180, 184,187, 188, 190, 194, 196, 197, 204, 205, 206, 208, 211

Meyerhoff, Hans, 5 Michelet, Jules, ix, 92, 95, 98 Miller, J. Hillis, 5, 7 mimesis, 37, 57, 58n, 60-63, 64-65, 79, 92, 115, 117, 124, 162, 183, 184, 185, 186, 208 Mizener, Arthur, 21 More, Paul Elmer, 85, 93 Morris, William, 60, 87 Morrison, Claudia C., 96n Mumford, Lewis, 74, 77, 84, 94, 99-101, 102, 105, 106; apocalyptic vision, 99; moral vision, 99; philosophy of open synthesis, 100; Utopian organicism, 101 Munson, Gorham, 83 Murry, J. M., 56 Napoleon, 55n

Parkes, Henry Bamford, 71 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 35-51, 52, 53, 61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 85, 86, 91, 92, 96, 97, 102, 105, 106, 107, 131, 138, 151, 153, 162, 166; aestheticism, 44, 45; on Cabell, 48-51, 86; on Connecticut Wits, 38-39, 41; continuity of American thought, 38; cultural historian of literature, 35-38; on Emerson, 43; great man theory, 38, 41, 42-43, 44; historicism, 46f; on Howells, 40, 48; inferior literature, 41; on James, Henry, 46, 49; on Lewis, Sinclair, 46, 49; literature as document, 41, 78; on Main Currents, 36-37; Marxism, 40-41, 53; mimesis, 37; on Poe, 45, 48; progressive spirit, 40-41; realistic epistemology, 44; romantic vs. realistic literature, 39-40; search for form, 45-51; on Sinclair, Upton, 40, 49; thematics, 44, 78; on Whitman, 42-43

262

INDEX Parsons, Howard, 99 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 29 Paul, Sherman, 78, 82, 83, 90, 91, 98, 99 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 96, 114, 1320, 145,155-66, 186, 192-94, 195, 196, 201, 203, 205, 2o6n, 210, 213; basic styles, 164, 186, 192, 193, 194, 202; concrete universal, 163; on Crane, Hart, 158; existential historicism, 161; form-content dichotomy, 163-64; on Hawthorne, 160, 161; historical relativism, 158-66; humanitas, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 192, 195, 210, 213; on fames, Henry, 160; contra Krieger, 192-94, 201, 205; organicism, 164; problemadcism, 159; on Stevens, Wallace, 159; symbolist as historian, 161; traditional historicism, 156, 186; on Twain, 160; unique styles, 165; usable past, 160; on Whitman, 157; on Williams, W. C., 158 Pepper, Stephen, 212 Perry, Bliss, 29, 30 Personalism, 83. See also Whitman Perspectivism, 27-29, 193, 195. See also Wellek, Rene Petrarch, 205 phenomenology 5. See also Husserl Plato, 109, 124, 183, 197 Podhoretz, Norman, 94 Poe, 29, 45, 48n, 85, 86 Pope, Alexander, 18, 206, 207 Popper, Karl, 5, 7, 10 Positivism, 10, 1 1 Pottle, Frederick A., 120 problemadcism, 147, 148, 159, 162 Proust, Marcel, 46, 95 250

quantum theory, 24 Ranke, Leopold, 10, 11 Ransom, John Crowe, 21, 78, 10521, 122, 126, 136, 166, 180, 194, 196; dualism, 107, 110, i n n , 115, 116, 121; dual mode of existence, 113; epistemology, 108, 110, 113; formalism, 119; historian vs. critic, 120-21; Imagination and Fancy, 116; Kant, 108, 110; language of poetry, 121; mimesis, 117; ontological criticism, 116, 117, 119, 122; organic poem, 116; on Plato, h i , 194; poetry as knowledge, 116, 118, 121; political activism, 114; prose and poetry, 112-13, 115, 121, 166; rational surface, 108; realism, 112-13; religious orthodoxy, 118-19, 122; Southern Agrarianism, 120; structure and texture, 112, 117-19, 121, 122; world's body, 113-15, 118, 119, 121 realism, 44, 48, 112-13, 117, 139-41, 146-51 relativity theory, 24 Reuckert, William, 70 Richardson, H. H., 100 Rimbaud, Arthur, 94 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 142 Robinson, James Harvey, 44n, 76 Roellinger, Francis, Jr., 108 Rolvaag, O. E., 53n romanticism, 4, 6, 13, 39-40, 48, " 3 , 69, 170 Rourke, Constance, 75 Ruland, Richard, 78 Ruskin, John, 87 Sainte-Beuve, 10 Saintsbury, George, 23, 154 Santayana, George, 45, 79-81, 82,

INDEX Santayana, George (cont.) 86, 98, 100, 101, 1 1 2 ; act of imagination, 79, 80; categorical imperative, 100, 102; classicist, 80; creative imagination, 81; genteel tradition, 81; poet as prophet, 80; poetry and religion, 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 159 Schiller, Friedrich, 80, 97, 1390 Schlauch, Margaret, 140n Schlissel, Lillian, 84 Scholes, Robert, 139n Schopenhauer, Arthur, 114 Scott, Sir Walter, 58 search for form, 45, 76 Shakespeare, 57-58, 199, 202, 205 Shapiro, Karl, 175 Shelley, 99, 115, 116 Sidney, 49 Sillen, Samuel, 84 Sinclair, Upton, 40, 49 Skinner, Quentin, 16n Smith, Bernard, 52-53, 61, 62 Smith, J. Allen, 50 spatial form, 46, 47 Spenser, Edmund, 173 Spitzer, Leo, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155,172-79, 187, 190. 191, 196, 197, 200, 2 1 1 ; depth psychology, 173; impressionism, 176; linguistic theory, 174; mystical intuition, 173, 175, 176; organicism, 173, 174, 175, 176; philological circle, 173-74; on, Spenser, Edmund, 173; stylistics, 174; traditional historicism, 172 Stalin, Joseph, 66 Starkey, Margaret, 153 Steiner, George, 54 Stern, Fritz, 5 Stevens, Wallace, 159, 191, 213, 214 subjectivism, 3n, 5, 7, 8 250

Sullivan, Louis, 100 symbolism, 46, 47, 94, 95, 107, i69ff. See also Burke, Kenneth; Kreiger, Murray; Spitzer, Leo Taine, H., 10,14, 50,140 Tate, Allen, 21, 24, 108-9, 116 169 Teall, Dorothy, 84 Teeter, Louis, 25, 26n, 28 thematics, 31, 42, 44, 78, 137, 200-201. See also Hoffman, F. J.; Krieger, Murray Thoreau, H. D., 82, 90 Timrod, Henry, 159 Trevelyan, G. M., 24 Trilling, Lionel, 36, 96n, 97, 158, 159 Trotsky, Leon, 58, 59 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 11, 130 Twain, Mark, 82, 90, 160 Tyler, Moses Coit, 138 unit idea, 6n, 29, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160, 208. See also Lovejoy, A. O. usable past, 77, 78, 88, 90, 95, 97, 98, 160. See also Brooks, Van Wyck Valery, Paul, 47 Van Deusen, Marshall, 30 Vico, Giambattista, 12, 95, 97, I 39 n Vivas, Eliseo, 177-86, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 200, 204, 205, 206, 209, 212, 214, 215; activities of mind, 179; aesthetic historicism, 181; aesthetic transaction, 178, 179, 193, 196, 212, 214, 215; on Cervantes, r8r; constitutive imagination, 177, 183-84, 189;

INDEX creation and discovery, 178, 181-82, 183, 186; Crocean Idealism, 184; dual mode of existence, 179; form-content dichotomy, 180, 184; on Lawrence, 182; metaphysical historicism, 186; mimesis, 183, 184, 185, 186; neo-Kantian epistemology, 177; nominalism, 183; objects of the poem, 180-83; organicism, 180, 184; phenomenal vs. metaphysical criticism, 181-82, 184, 185; Platonism, 183; poem as knowledge, 178; rapt intransitive attention, 178, 180; value realism, 183, 185, 189, 193, 194, 206 Ward, J. A., 46, 47, 48 Wasserman, Earl, 173 Watt, Ian, 140n Weimann, Robert, 57 Wellek, Rene, 3n, 4, 5, 7, 9, 15, 26-29, 86, 87, 89, 129, 143, 145, 149, 158, 173, 175. 193. 195. 196

250

White, Hayden V., 4, 6, 9n, 12 Whitman, Walt, 42-43, 48, 75, 82, 83, 87, 96, 100, 105, 106, 131, 157, 170 Whittier, J. G., 159 Williams, William Carlos, 75, 158 Wilson, Edmund, 61, 63, 73, 74, 89, 90-98, 101, 102, i4on, i43n, i7on; categorical imperative, 98; critic artist, 98; dualism, 94-98; Hegelian synthesis, 93, 95; historical imagination, 91; historicism, 94, 95; literary prophecy, 98; Marxism, 92-93, 95; mimesis, 92; naturalism, 95; romanticism, 95; symbolism, 94, 95; usable past, 95 Wimsatt, W. K., 204 Winters, Ivor, non, 119 Woodberry, G. E., 25 Woolf, Virginia, 48 Wordsworth, William, ii3n Worringer, Wilhelm, 46-47, 50 Wren, Christopher, 100 176, Yeats, W. B., 208