ARTS AND LETTERS 159

sense oi tradition, the formal experimentation, the alert sophistication

of the Eliot-Pound group with the rich American subject-matter, the
folk-freshness of imagery, the brooding concern for the national
destiny in the Whitman-Sandburg line. Perhaps the best summation
of the tragedy of his life and the triumph of his achievement?for
it was a triumph, despite its incoherencies and obscurities?is con
tained in a poignant stanza from an undated poem:

Friendship agony! words came to me

at last shyly. My only final friends?
the wren and thrush, made solid print for me
across dawn's broken arc. ... or were
No; yes they
the audible ransom, ensign of my faith
towards far, now farther than ever
something away?

CRITICISM IN BULK

By STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN

Criticism, the more substantial of these two volumes,* comes to us

with the solid quarto appearance and double columns of a textbook,
and the Introduction explains that it "grew out of the needs of a col
lege course in the theory and practice of criticism which the editors,
among others, offer at the University of California at Berkeley." It
also comes, apparently unchanged except that the price is raised from
#5 to #7.50, as a trade anthology for general readers. On the basis
of a brief experience in the teaching of literary criticism, I would
hazard that Criticism is an excellent textbook; as a reader interested
in the subject, I do not think it is a very good anthology, or at least
not as good an anthology as it could readily have been.
^Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment. Edited by Mark
Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie. Brace and Co. 553 pages.
Harcourt^
1948. #7.50; Forms of Modern Fiction. Edited by William Van O'Connor. The
University of Minnesota Press. 305 pages. 1948. ?4.50.

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 160 ARTS AND LETTERS

of the older classics of English criticism:

The print most
editors
Pope, Young, Hume, Johnson, Wordsworth, Cole
Sidney, Dryden,
De Quincey, Pater, Arnold (while omitting others al
ridge, Shelley,
most as frequently anthologized: Daniel, Jonson, Addison, Reynolds,
Hazlitt, Lamb, Ruskin) ; add Plato's two principal discussions of the
and the whole of Aristotle's Poetics\ and still manage to devote
poet
two-thirds of their space to critics of our own century. The restric
tion of the book to criticism written in English was obviously ne

cessary; and we can only admire the editors' immediate breaking of

their rule to naturalize those two early settlers Plato and Aristotle.
The selections from our earlier critics are almost entirely the familiar
ones: Sidney's "Apologie" and Shelley's "Defense," Dryden on "Dra
matic Poesy" and De Quincey on "The Knocking at the Gate,"
Wordsworth and Coleridge taking off from the Lyrical Ballads, and
so forth. Some of these selections seem to be printed because they
embed historically important doctrines: Wordsworth's "emotion recol
lected in tranquillity," Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators," Pater's
"hard gemlike flame," Arnold's "high seriousness"; others, like the
chapters from Coleridge's Biographia, Dryden's essay, Johnson's
"Gray," and James's "Art of Fiction," because they are still relevant
to our in neither case can we with them.
needs; quarrel
As a textbook of modern criticism set against its English back
ground, "the foundations of modern literary judgment," Criticism is
the first book of its sort. It lacks
introductory and
the extensive
bibliographical apparatus, as well as the index, of such a work as
Smith and Parks' The Great Critics (which, including as it does Eu
ropean criticism, and going down only through Arnold, does not really
come in competition with it), but what little apparatus it has is ex
cellent. The classification of its contents into the categories of
"Source," "Form," and "End" is presented so as to leave
elastically
no ground for complaint, the book's brief introduction is enormously
fertile of other ways of operating, and each essay is accompanied by
a brief note giving at least the date of publication, and in most cases
the essayist's dates and a list of his other critical writing. Beyond
this the book has no biographical or bibliographical information, and
the essays themselves are not or slanted in any
explained, discussed,
way; all of which adequate teachers may very well find a blessing.
A few clarifying footnotes are added, and all foreign quotations are

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 161

translated1 (the editors miss a few, on pages 476, 492, and others,
but they make up for it by giving two translations of one on page
495). The book has been proofread in a very slipshod fashion, and
includes some typographical howlers (especially the Odets capitalist,
referred to by James T. Farrell, who becomes "important" rather
than "impotent") ; but these can readily be remedied in a future edi
tion.

The book's major fault, which should weigh less against it as a

textbook than as an anthology (and may even gain it greater class
room acceptance) is the lack of boldness in its representation of
modern critics. Most of our important critics are included (the
dozen outstanding omissions that come to my mind are Ezra Pound,
Francis Fergusson, William Troy, Caroline Spurgeon, John Living
ston Lowes, Wyndham Lewis, Maud Bodkin, F. O. Matthiessen, G.
Wilson Knight, Morton Dauwen Zabel, John Middleton Murry, and
F. R. Leavis), but in many cases they are represented with far from
their best work. Herbert Read
has his absurd "Surrealism and the
Romantic Principle" printed, with its happy discovery that poetry is
something like dreams, instead of one of his serious critical analyses.
Edmund Wilson is represented by his tour de force on "The Turn of
the Screw" and his timid exploration of Mrs. Wharton's wound,
rather than by one of his more significant essays. We are given
Allen Tate's half-hearted study of "Hardy's Philosophic Metaphors,"
when we could readily have had so splendid a piece of critical self
exploration as "Narcissus as Narcissus" (which would also have
eliminated the need for Stephen Spender's embarrassing "The Mak
ing of a Poem"). Instead of R. P. Blackmur's outdated manifesto,
"A Critic's Job of Work," we could have had any one of twenty
first-rate examples of Blackmur's actual critical practice.
The editors' general preference, apparently, and one of the prin
cipal reasons why the book seems so unsatisfactory as an anthology,
is for theory over practice, critical principles defined rather than
critical method displayed. It is only the latter, surely, that has given
our criticism the "richness" that the editor's boast of in their Intro
duction. In other cases, the problem seems to be a slighting of the
"essence" of a man's work. Kenneth for is repre
Burke, example,
^hus we mark the educational progress of half a century. George Saintsbury's
Loci Critici, published in 1903, leaves its Latin and Greek quotations untranslated;
the Smith and Parks book, which largely supplanted it in classroom use after 1932,
translates some of them; and this book, which in turn seems due to supplant Smith
and Parks, assumes, rightly, a need to translate every word not in English.

11

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 162 ARTS AND LETTERS

sented by one of his showpieces in the study of rhetoric, "Antony

in Behalf of the Play," rather than by any of his more important
studies of symbolic action, such as "Symbolic Action in a Poem by
Keats." I. A. Richards fares even worse, although he is given a
liberal amount of space. The whole of his little book Science and
Poetry is printed, taking up as much room as the Poetics, but for no
conceivable reason the editors have chosen to print it in the first
edition of 1926 rather than in the revised edition of 1935, unfairly
leaving Richards out on the limb, in regard to Yeats's poetic decline
and the relationship of Eliot's poetry to belief, from which he safely
climbed back more than a decade ago. The other Richards sample
is a chapter from Practical Criticism, presumably printed because it
includes Richards' own brilliant analysis of a line of poetry, but the
chapter is not comprehensible without its context in the book and
without the texts of the poems referred to. If the editors wanted to
display Richards' theory, a chapter from the book that inaugurated
modern criticism, Principles of Literary Criticism, would have made
far more sense; if they wanted to show his critical practice, his study
of Hopkins' "Windhover" would have been the obvious choice; and if
they wanted to show his work in practical criticism in a self-contained
essay, they should have printed "Fifteen Lines of Landor."
Not only our principal critics but the chief lines of contemporary
criticism are badly represented. A chapter from Christopher Caud
well's Illusion and Reality gives an excellent example of Marxist cri
ticism, but excerpts from George Thomson's Marxist analysis of Greek
drama and Alick West's reading of Ulysses would have looked much
better beside it than the tepid chapters by James T. Farrell and
Ralph Fox printed. Psychoanalytic criticism is represented only the
oretically, in Lionel Trilling's "Freud and Literature" (and faintly in
practice, with formal readings "from the Freudian point of view,"
by Edmund Wilson), while a number of excellent psychoanalytic
readings, from Ernest Jones on Hamlet to William Empson on Alice,
remain uncollected. The criticism that stems from Frazer, so fertile
for our time, is not represented at all, despite the brilliant studies
by Troy and Fergusson readily available, and we get folk criticism
only on the level of Constance Rourke finding folk metaphors in
Henry James.
These omissions are made more the obvious waste
painful by space
in the book: Poe's infuriating "Poetic Principle"; Joseph Wood

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 163

Krutch's adolescent whining about our "emotionally enfeebled age"

and "this meanness of human life" from The Modern Temper\ E. M.
Forster's philistine whimsey from Aspects of the Novel; a chapter
from David Daiches' The Novel and the Modern World almost thin
enough to be transparent; and a wonderful piece of academic thumb
twaddling from the PMLA, W. K. Wimsatt Jr.'s "The Structure of the
'Concrete Universal' in Literature," which contains what is certainly
the most memorable sentence in the book: "At the risk of being
tedious, I shall offer a few epistemological and ontological generaliza
tions."

The younger relatively unknown

and critics are hardly represented
at all: Wimsatt is half their contingent, and the other half is Joseph
Frank, whose fine piece of speculative aesthetics, "Spatial Form in
Modern Literature," is included in an unnecessarily cut version. The
only contributors to the book who have not so far published volumes
of criticism, besides Frank, are Auden and Warren, neither of whom is
precisely a "find" of the editors'. A few of the brilliant pieces our
younger critics have produced (Randall Jarrell's "Changes of Attitude
and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry" is an obvious example) would have
done much to invigorate a book suffering from nothing, really, but
anemia.

William Van O'Connor's Forms of Modern Fiction is a very differ

ent sort of thing, twenty-three essays "Collected in Honor of Joseph
Warren Beach," all dealing with the techniques of fiction. Some of
the some of the better ones, do not seem to have
essays, unfortunately
much to do with or his methods.
Beach In any case, O'Connor's
dedication of the book to him raises the delicate ethical problem of
dedicating work not your own. We have already had the blithe dedi
cation of the Warren-Calder edition of The Ancient Mariner to Mal
colm Cowley, and Eric Bentley's dedication of the Scrutiny anthology
to Crowe and any now we can expect one of our
John Ransom, day

Shakespeare editors to dedicate all the plays and sonnets to his wee
daughter. Eight of the essays are previously un
in the book either
published or appeared in quarterlies in 1948, presumably after ar
rangements had been made for including them here; the others date
back anywhere up to a quarter of a century. The book is thus not
a true but a after the an
symposium, symposium fact, anthology
focused on a topic.

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 164 ARTS AND LETTERS

O'Connor's laudable aim, as he explains in his Prefatory Note, is

"to make available a number of valuable studies otherwise difficult to
obtain." This has resulted, unnecessarily I think, in excluding most
of our major critics. Of the men who have so distinguished the last
three decades as a critical age, only T?te, Fergusson, Troy, Eliot, and
Zabel are represented, and of those, only T?te and Zabel by examples
of their best work. Fergusson's piece, "D. H. Lawrence's Sensibility,"
is inexplicably cut by half; Troy is represented by "Scott Fitzgerald:
The Authority of Failure," one of the least impressive of his very im
pressive studies; and Eliot contributes only i(Ulysses, Order and
Myth," one of his slightest performances (and suddenly reprinted not
only here but in the Schorer anthology and in Miss Givens' James
Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism).
Of studies never published
fiction in book form, O'Connor had,
readily available to him, Richards' "Passage to Forster," any of
Blackmur's Dostoevski pieces, Troy on Lawrence or Mann, Eliot
on Wilkie Collins or Virginia Woolf; if he were willing to draw on
out-of-print books or pieces previously anthologized, he had Burke
on Mann and Gide or on Mann alone, Empson on Woolf, and Eliot's
remarkable essay on
James.
Most of the contributors to be American, seem
except for two or
three Britons, including either Eliot or Eric Bentley and David
Daiches, depending on how you figure (or, if you figure like Oscar
Williams, whose current anthology proudly claims as American both
Eliot and Auden, neither). A good half the essayists are young and
relatively unknown?here contributors' notes would have been par
ticularly helpful?and it is among these that O'Connor had his big
chance. He does about as well as can be expected, getting a wide
variety of preoccupations, from the vast problem of naturalism in the
novel in Charles Child Walcutt's piece to the pin-point focus of
Proust's "tone" in C. W. M. essay, and an even wider
Johnson's
range of points of view. The great value of such an anthology is
that it is to a large extent self-correcting: thus Schorer's monist in
sistence that the only good novel is a modern novel, and that Moll
Flanders is consequently pretty poor stuff and not fiction at all, is
automatically countered by T?te in the next essay with his insistence
that there is more than one sort of fiction, and that Moll Flanders
is not a
novel, but a very and mature one. In the same
only great
fashion, Richard Chase's "The Brontes, or, Myth Domesticated,"

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 165
shows how not to usea method, the mythic, that in William Troy's
hands elsewhere in the book is revealed as extraordinarily fruitful;
and even Eliot's slight piece on Ulysses shows to how much Daiches,
five chapters above him, was wilfully blind.
The shocking fact about the young writers represented in the book,
and O'Connor can certainly not be blamed for it, is not that they are
wild or reckless or half-baked, but that they are entirely tame and
fully-baked. How timid and academic most of their criticism is, com
pared to that of their elders! The job they do for the most part is
careful, sound, dully competent, unassailable, neat as a pin and about
as exciting. Only one essay by a relatively unknown critic in the
book, Robert Bechtold Heilman's "The Turn of the Screw as Poem,"
is genuinely bold, speculative, and first-rate. Heilman writes directly
in the body of important modern criticism, extending Troy's use of
the Garden of Eden myth as an analogue to the Jamesian situation,
paralleling Quentin Anderson's discovery of Henry James Sr.'s formal
theology in his son's work, and emerging with the story more com
plex and meaningful, I think, than any previous critic has found it
(although why thereby a "poem," except purely for the eulogistic
word, Heilman never manages to demonstrate). Several other fa
miliar things in the book are good, with small reservations: there is
enough insight in Robert Wooster Stallman's "Life, Art, and 'The
"
Secret Sharer' to make us wish he would give up his concern with
bibliography, stop quoting so many other critics to so little effect,
and make more use of his own solid critical intelligence; Eric Bent
ley's "The Meaning of Robert Penn Warren's Novels" seems both
very perceptive and rather peripheral, and would have been entirely
acceptable if he had called it "A Meaning."
Unlike Criticism, Forms of Modern Fiction does not overemphasize
critical theory in relation to critical practice: only five of its twenty
three pieces are rather than which seems a reason
general particular,
ble proportion. The other eighteen cover most of the important
modern novelists: two essays each on and one on
Joyce James, apiece
Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the Brontes, Faulkner, Forster,
Gide, Huxley, Proust, Conrad, Woolf, Norris, Warren, and Greene.
With the
addition of Walter Allen's "A Note on Andr? Malraux,"
Blackmur on Dostoevski, Burke or Troy on Mann, Ralph Ellison's
"The Blues of Richard Wright," George Woodcock on Silone, and
one of the several good pieces on Kafka, the coverage of our impor

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 166 ARTS AND LETTERS

tant novelists would have been substantially complete, and the critical
temperature rather higher.
A number of miscellaneous
questions remain to be asked of the
editor and the individual contributors: whether Warren's review of
Cowley's Portable Faulkner, which is more a call for detailed study
than that study itself, warrants the space more than the Introduction
it reviews; whether stories show the ex
Hemingway's early really
haustion of moral values, as Schorer
rather than their dizzy claims,
triumph; whether Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction (which this re
viewer has not read) is actually comparable to Aristotle's Poetics, as
T?te suggests; whether Stephen Dedalus is really a self-portrait of
James Joyce, as David Daiches insists, or only a deliberately ridicu
lous fraction; whether Jane Eyre could actually have been saved by
Richard Chase's girl's-camp ideal of love, "the noble, free companion
ship of man and woman"; whether, finally, more than five contribu
tors to any anthology should be allowed to discuss the "objective
correlative." Nevertheless, despite all these quibbles, O'Connor's
is a and a one, or as a one as we
anthology stimulating good good
have any to expect.
right

In a different sense, in the sense that its principal faults?the em

on rather than the for the comfort
phasis theory practice, preference
second-rate?are our faults too, the out
ably anthology put by Schorer,
Miss Miles and McKenzie is as good a one too as we have any right
to expect. Yet we have to consider the possibility of a better an
than we one that could advance our rather
thology deserve, gains
than merely consolidate Such them.
anthology would confine an
itself to modern criticism in English, as the O'Connor book does, but
would include twice its number of critics, as the Schorer book does. It
should contain enough apparatus to make it adequate for textbook
use, that is, as much as the Schorer has, plus some biographical in
formation and a full index. It should include our dozen or so major
critics, another two dozen of our good and vitally-important minor
and a few essays unknowns, to show what the
critics, by younger

people are doing and how much of their elders' practice has filtered
down. Each of the critics should be represented by a piece that shows
his method, or one of his principal methods, in operation; that studies
an author, a work, or a body of work: not by his theory, although
it should be a piece full enough and typical enough for his theories

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 167
to emerge. essay should represent
Obviously, the his work at its
best as well as its most
typical, and wherever possible should be one
that indulges O'Connor's praiseworthy aim of bringing relatively
unavailable valuable pieces back into circulation. Ideally, such a book
should be a symposium, with all the contributors asked to deal with
the same author or each from his own in
work, particular angle;
practice, this is obviously
impossible, and we would have to settle
for a partial symposium or a straight anthology. Even so, such a
book would raise great difficulties, not the least of them the problem
of getting a publisher, since it would have to be almost as sizable as
the Schorer book, without any hope of comparable textbook sales
(it would be too high-keyed, for one thing; no student could take
that much unadulterated good work without occasional benches of
tedium on which to relax). Neither Criticism nor Forms of Modern
Fiction is this dream anthology, certainly; but it is to their credit that
each, in its way, sets us to musing on such a book. Both are monu
ments to the importance and fecundity of modern criticism; what we
need is not a monument so much as a of and belts to
system gears
convert all that energy into power to drive us farther ahead.

A TENNESSEE COBDEN
By CRANE BRINTON

Cordell Hull in the Washington of the mid-Twentieth Century

must have looked back on his Tennessee with even more
boyhood
wonder than most old men who set to work on their memoirs. He
does not let himself get sentimental about his early days, nor does
he dwell on them at length. The four chapters out of the hundred
and twenty-four of this long book* which he gives to his life in
Tennessee are as matter-of-fact as all the rest. But the world they
describe seems more than a lifetime and not at all
away matter-of
fact.
*Memoirs
of Cordell Hull. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1948. 2 vols.
1804
pages. $10.50.

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