'our critical spirit is prodigiously fecund.' It is strenuously trying, he says, quoting Matthew Arnold, 'to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself'; and this it is 'actually accomplishing,' he declares on his own account, not through its 'actual performances or apparent direction,' but simply through its 'native vigor.' To write thus, however, is to subscribe to the current confusion of quantity with quality. We do not need more, but better criticism, if we are to have better readers and better writers. It is difficult to see how a mere continuance and multiplication of our usual types of criticism could ever rouse from sleep this 'noble and puissant nation' of ours, destined, according to the anthologist, to fulfill Milton's prophetic vision. Certainly our 'apparent direction' is not toward the kind of nobility that Milton had in view, nor toward the kind of intellectual situation that Arnold desired: for we are alien from the essential doctrine and discipline that guided both the Puritan humanist and the Victorian humanist. We are naturists, and our criticism is historical, psychological, expressionistic, impressionistic. Adopting the spirit and method of science, our historical and psychological critics concern themselves with description and explanation, with fact instead of value, with cause instead of result. One of our 'sociological' critics, for example, is satisfied when he has shown in a study of Sherwood Anderson 'how impossible it would have been for him to have written another tragedy like "Othello," another novel like "Persuasion"; and one of our 'psychoanalytical' critics restricts his function to tracing 'Poe's art to an abnormal condition of the nerves and his critical ideas to a rationalized defence of the limitations of his own taste.' These are ambitious tasks, they are even interesting tasks; but they do not in the least forward the central aim of criticism, which is the determination and the application of standards of value. 'Othello' and 'Persuasion,' the works of Poe and of Sherwood Anderson, these remain what they were: unvalued expressions. Our impressionistic critics, the followers of Anatole France, are even less helpful, dealing as they do with themselves rather than with works of art. Obedient to the romantic cult of uniqueness and to the skeptical spirit encouraged by science, they throw over the task of evaluation and with admirable candor tell us that they are interested only in selfexpression, that is, in new creation rather than in criticism of what has already been created. They tell us that truth is 'the adoration of second-rate men,' and that they wish to be first-rate men like Carlyle and Macaulay, poor judges but great artists"They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.' These impressionists we should give leave to be as charming as they can, but for criticism we must turn elsewhere. If we turn to the expressionists, the followers of Croce, we shall find a theory useful so far as it goes. In the spirit of romanticism, they regard each work of art as a unique expression, and in the spirit of science, they measure its beauty quantitatively. In doing so, however, they endeavor, unlike the impressionists, to escape from themselves into the work of art and to judge it as the artist himself might have judged it, asking: To what extent does it express the intuition that gave it birth? This is a very sensible and pertinent question, properly the first question we must ask of a work of art. But it is not the only question. We must make bold to ask also, Is it true? Is it good? What kind of truth does it offer, and what is its ethical quality? These are the last questions that humanity has traditionally asked of works of art, and we must ask them to-day if we are to prepare an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. 'We stand to-day' (to quote our anthologist once more) ‘in the center of a vast disintegration. In America the situation is complicated by the peculiar problems of our own culture. Our forces and problems must be organized before the artist can do his work. Perhaps the reason why the creative spirit has never (in literature) experienced a full flowering in America, and is at present enervated in Europe, is that the artist exhausts his creative energy in a squandrous [sic] and unavailing struggle before this synthesis can be reached.' No longer is the situation in America really 'peculiar.' No longer is America the only great frontier nation, no longer is it solitary in that provincialism that Poe and Emerson and Whitman deplored, no longer is it alone in its severance from the vital traditions of the past; Europe likewise has lost her moorings and is drifting without apparent direction, although her unconscious tradition, her profound under-current, is far stronger than ours. Everywhere, the need of the age is integration, the establishment of a significant relation between the present and the past. We are sufficiently aware of the arbitrary elements in the integrations of the past; it is time for us to become aware of the arbitrary elements in our present thought that are delaying the integration of the future. THE END INDEX COMPILED BY JOHN H. WALDEN Abandon, 71; as used by Whitman, 160. Actual, ideal, and real, Lowell's discus- sion of, 130-33. Adhesiveness, and individualism, Whit- Eschylus, his 'Prometheus Vinctus' an America, celebrated by Whitman, 179, 180; new culture in, 184-87; the American culture, 224. American life, Whitman's criticism of, American politicians, Whitman's charac- American qualities, the average, 197, 198. Anderson, Sherwood, realist, 223. of, 8, 20; and morality, the relation of, Arts. See Fine arts. Assumptions, of the new humanism, Architecture, the appeal of, to Emerson, Athenian dramatists, Poe's valuation of, 20. See Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles. Aristocracy, in literature, 195; natural, Augustine, 242. Aristophanes, Emerson's estimate of, 80; Arnold, Matthew, urges claims of form Austen, Jane, her knowledge of character, Babbitt, Irving, 'new humanist,' 236 n. Ballet, Emerson's impression of, 99. |