=== Page 1 ===
191

PARTISAN REVIEW

WINTER, 1944
PAUL VALÉRY
In Memory of Henri Bergson
HAROLD ROSENBERG
Arthur Koestler: The Fate of a Radical
RICHARD V. CHASE
History vs. The City of God
WYLIE SYPHER
The Metaphysicals and the Baroque
F. O. MATTHIESSEN
Henry James' Portrait of the Artist
EDMUND WILSON
The Prose of Joseph E. Davies
JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY
An Interview with Marc Chagall
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The Ballad of Billie Potts

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PARTISAN REVIEW

VOLUME XI, No. I. WINTER, 1944

THE METAPHYSICALS AND THE BAROQUE 3 Wylie Sypher
IN MEMORY OF HENRI BERGSON 18 Paul Valéry
THE HAND THAT FED ME 22 Isaac Rosenfeld
MR. WHEELWRIGHT'S WISDOM 37 Ernest Nagel
THESE PURISTS 42 W. C. Williams
THE INTELLECTUAL 43 Karl Shapiro
HISTORY VS. THE CITY OF GOD 45 Richard V. Chase
THE BALLAD OF BILLIE POTTS 56 Robert Penn Warren
HENRY JAMES' PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 71 F. O. Matthiesen

ART CHRONICLE
I. An Interview with Marc Chagall 88 James Johnson Sweeney
II. Painters' Objects 93 Robert Motherwell
THREE POEMS 98 Randall Jarrell

BOOKS
The Case of the Baffled Radical 100 Harold Rosenberg
The Two Republics 104 James Burnham
Gandhi in Mayfair 106 George Orwell
The Empty Net 114 Jean Stafford

VARIETY
Joseph E. Davies as a Master of Prose 116 Edmund Wilson
Middle-Aged Artists 119 William Phillips
Virgil and War 122 F. W. Dupee
The Rukeyser Imbroglio 125 Rebecca Pitts

Editors: WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV, DELMORE SCHWARTZ.

PARTISAN REVIEW is published at 45 Astor Place, New York 3, N. Y.

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Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.
357

=== Page 4 ===
THIS ISSUE:

WYLIE SYPHER, of the English department at Simmons College, is
the author of a book on slavery in the 18th century. . . . PAUL VALERY,
whose criticism and poetry has been translated into many languages,
is presumed to be somewhere in Nazi-occupied France. . . . ISAAC
ROSENFELD is a young Chicago writer who is now on the editorial
staff of The New Republic. . . . ERNEST NAGEL is in the department
of philosophy at Columbia University. . . . W. C. WILLIAMS, the
well-known poet and novelist, practices medicine at Rutherford, N. J.
. . . KARL SHAPIRO will publish a new volume of poetry early in 1944.
He is in the Medical Corps of the U. S. Army and at present sta-
tioned somewhere in the Pacific. . . . RICHARD V. CHASE, of the
English department at Columbia University, was among the contribu-
tors to “The New Failure of Nerve” series. . . . ROBERT PENN
WARREN, whose second novel, At Heaven's Gate, was published in
the summer of 1943, is now teaching at the University of Minnesota.
. . . F. O. MATTHIESSEN, professor of English at Harvard, is the
author of American Renaissance and other critical works. . . . JAMES
JOHNSON SWEENEY, widely known as an art critic, will shortly publish
a study of T. S. Eliot's 4 Quartets. . . . ROBERT MOTHERWELL is a
young painter from the West Coast now living in New York City. . . .
RANDALL JARRELL, author of Blood for a Stranger, is now serving in
the air force of the U. S. Army. . . . HAROLD ROSENBERG, a frequent
contributor to PARTISAN REVIEW, has recently published a volume of
verse entitled Trance Above the Streets. . . . JAMES BURNHAM is the
author of The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. . . .
GEORGE ORWELL is the London correspondent of PARTISAN REVIEW.
. . . JEAN STAFFORD is a young writer whose first novel will shortly be
brought out by Harcourt, Brace. . . . EDMUND WILSON, who now
writes the book-page for the New Yorker, is at work on a study of the
Russian classics. . . . F. W. DUPEE, formerly on the editorial staff of
PARTISAN REVIEW, is in the English department at Columbia Uni-
versity. . . . REBECCA PITTS, a young writer from Indianapolis, has
published critical work in many periodicals.

=== Page 5 ===
The Metaphysicals and the Baroque
Wylie Sypher

THE lodestone of modern criticism of poetry, as well as of the
practice of poetry itself, is the passage in Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria suggesting that the poetic imagination balances or reconciles
opposite or discordant qualities. Coleridge's emphasis upon an imagi-
native discordia concors, the opposition of impulses within a poem,
has stimulated a criticism that is always seeking out or wondering
at complexities, ambiguities, tensions, and the shifts in tone associated
with irony. If a sense of these is not evoked from the reader, the poem
is suspected of approaching the oversimplified, the naive, the senti-
mental, the pretty.

The supposition has been, since T. S. Eliot became a force in
verse and the evaluation of verse, that this tortuous and even tortured
progress is akin to the “metaphysical” poetry of the seventeenth
century, and of John Donne in particular. Many poets like Ransom,
MacLeish, Tate, Frost, Edith Sitwell, and Eliot himself have been
identified with the “metaphysical.” The reputation of Donne, in fact,
has for a time overborne that of Milton, who is at the moment
recovering a little from the slurs of T. S. Eliot and those who have
complained that Milton writes an artificial language and is forever
in danger of tumbling from his poetic “elevation.” Roused by Eliot's
remarks upon Milton's verse, Sir Herbert Grierson, Charles Williams,
E. M. W. Tillyard, and C. S. Lewis have had the daring to protest.
The tacit opposition into which Donne and Milton have been thrown,
and the simultaneous expansion of Donne's and shrinkage of Milton's
reputations, more and more seem to have been a critical aberration.
C. S. Lewis, in particular, has raised issues that bear upon today's
poetry and criticism of poetry. A reaction against Donne seems to
be under way in criticism, though not (yet?) in verse itself.
What seems not to have been stressed is that Donne and Milton
3

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4 PARTISAN REVIEW
alike belong in a tradition that can be identified as baroque. Eliot's
opposition between the "wit" and the "magniloquence" of the seven-
teenth century is misleading. Donne and Milton are but two mani-
festations of the mannerism that can likewise be seen in the painting
of Caravaggio, El Greco, the Poussin s, or Rubens. In spite of notable
essays by Wölfflin, Fokker, and others, and the comments of Mario
Praz, Geoffrey Scott, Austin Warren, and Sacheverell Sitwell, sur-
prisingly little has been done to interpret the baroque, the complexity
of which seems not to be generally understood. What modern critics
of poetry, especially, have done is to isolate Donne and his "meta-
physical" behavior from the behavior of the body of the seventeenth-
century writers, painters, sculptors, and architects. We have talked
about only one seventeenth-century "manner" yet have presumed
that we are somehow attuned to that variously mannered century.
Thus our professed admiration of Donne is in a sense hollow and
affected, and our depreciation of Milton wilful. The fact is that
Milton is more characteristic of his century than Donne, and that
a defense of Milton can be extended to even other grounds than the
very good ones upon which Williams, Tillyard, and Lewis have built.
If we understand the baroque, it is questionable tactic to elevate
Donne at the expense of Milton.

Our attraction to the "metaphysical" springs rather from our
own restless sensibility than from any wide rapport with the seven-
teenth century, which is as often "mancered" in the flamboyant
and operatic way as it is "mancered" in the narrow intricacies
of Donne. Even the inward, overwrought "metaphysical" verse of
Donne differs from the "metaphysical" verse of T. S. Eliot, who
though he has a good many of the discords and instabilities of the
baroque, is nevertheless too diffident, too wistful, too pallid and spare
to have more than a similarity of certain poetic devices in common
with Donne. Eliot has none of the genuine "metaphysical" abandon—
he is too finicking, too tasteful. The impulsiveness of Donne is what
so definitely marks him as baroque. In spite of his whimsical incon-
gruities—the evening "spread out against the sky/Like a patient
etherised upon a table" -Eliot never commits himself to the delib-
erate extravagances of Donne, Crashaw, or even the pietistic George
Herbert. The Donne-like abandon is more apparent in Ransom or
Tate, although they too lack the authentic and shameless "conceit."

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METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 5
In any event, the "metaphysical" verse must be considered in rela-
tion to the whole baroque mannerism.

II

The baroque bears within itself the tensions and oppositions
that make it so inaccessible to definition yet so accessible to feeling.
Even if each of the arts has its own methods of manipulating its
special medium, it is helpful and suggestive in any consideration of
the literary baroque to observe what happens in the plastic and
visual arts of the period, all the while being mindful that certain
parallels cannot be entirely conclusive, and that any comparison be-
tween arts has limitations.

Originating in an unbalance of temperament and in the exploi-
tation of technical facility, the baroque in painting, sculpture, and
architecture was a reaction against a "grand style." If beauty in
the high Renaissance was thought to be, as Alberti said, a "kind
of harmony and concord of all the parts" on a monumental scale,
the characteristic baroque effect was that of surprise and audacity-
the effect so often calculated by the counter-reformation. This freak-
ishness was already evident in Euphonism and the Italianate "conceit"
of the Elizabethans. Above all, the baroque is "mannerced." Yet it
is inexact to speak of any one baroque "manner."

There were at least four "manners," any combination of which
was, of course, possible in the individual painter, sculptor, or architect.
The degeneration of any of these "manners" into the garish senti-
mentality of the counter-reformation does not concern us here.

First, there was the "shocking" actualism of painters like Cara-
vaggio, Ribera, or the innumerable "tenebrists." Second, there was
a distortion, a tension of the instant that might amount to the bizarre,
a "disturbed balance" that ran from the anguish of El Greco's design
and color or the more violent chiaroscuro of Rembrandt to the
psychological nuances in the smiles of portraits by Frans Hals. This
distortion was also manifest in the audacious "illusionism" of the
baroque by which whole ceilings were painted away. In this "man-
ner," as in the first, appeared what Wölfflin has well called a bold
"grasp of the purely momentary" and a "convergence upon single
striking effects." Nowhere is there a more thoroughgoing control of
diagonals, of atectonic designs, or of subordination of detail to a
single dominant impression, the "unity" of the baroque. Third, there

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6 PARTISAN REVIEW

was that exuberance of the counter-reformation, the ornamental
“manner”—a surrender to the operatic effects of the Carracci, Guido
Reni, or, above all, Rubens. Here too were illusion and change and
movement, and a purely visual appeal of the surface. This operatic
“manner,” like the two preceding “manners,” might expand into
“open” compositions in which the colossal ceased to be monumental
and became frankly and sumptuously rhetorical—the difference be-
tween Raphael’s School of Athens and Rubens’ Rape of the Sabines,
or Peace and War. In such paintings the recessional composition and
unstable equilibrium of the “shocking” realists were swept into large
decorative flourishes. If this rhetorical “manner” was at all realistic,
it played with the actual, as Wölfflin says, only for the sake of con-
trast. Lastly, there was a reaction against these three “manners” in
the somewhat academic pastoral of the Pousins, or the mellow idyls
of Claude Lorrain. This milder, more poised and measured rhetoric,
with few emphatic accents, might seem, at first glance, alien to the
baroque agitation; but no one could mistake either the Pousins or
Claude for other than painters of their age. They were not less
“rhetorical” than Rubens, even if they were more stately and re-
strained. Lyric as it may be, the purely momentary luminescence of
Claude, his cultivation of the visual, would link him with the baroque
if nothing else did. Yet both Claude and the Poussi ns stood at the
terminus of the legitimate baroque, and showed effects not entirely
characteristic of it. The Poussins, especially, belonged in part to the
eclectic and academic art of Rome or the France of Louis XIV,
which had a sedate Augustan carriage of its own in Le Sueur, Le
Brun, and Le Nôtre. Nevertheless it must be realized that the “aca-
demic” art, usually contrasted with the baroque, may itself be distinc-
tively baroque when it strives for “elegance” rather than correctness
and severity—when, in short, it becomes rhetorical.
With certain modifications, what applies to painting applies
likewise to sculpture or architecture by Michaelangelo, Borromini,
Bernini, Wren, or Vanbrugh.

III

The passage from baroque to rococo (another matter often mis-
ceived) was an easy and natural one—the passage from Rubens
to Watteau, Boucher, or Tiepolo, or from the ornate heroic romances
like William Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida to the nice precisions of

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METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 7

Pope. The rococo was a gayer, a more suave, baroque in which the
heavier accents disappeared amid decorative intricacies. The rococo
was an attenuated and brittle baroque. The baroque unity of effect
by which everything was subordinated to one or two irresistible ef-
fects, relaxed into an engaging and fragile variety of detail. Yet the
rococo did not disintegrate into the details that composed it, for
(here is a point of consequence in literature-the poetry of Pope,
for example) whereas the baroque had exploited every possible incon-
gruity, the rococo painting, architecture, verse, and prose was one of
"fitness," "taste," and "true wit." The sense of congruity and conso-
nance was the sense by which the baroque was transformed into
the rococo.

In poetry, the transition was evident in the movement from
Donne to the Cavaliers, Waller, and Pope. During this progress the
contradictory impulses of Donne began to clash more superficially;
"wit" became increasingly external, a matter only of verbal distortion
and opposition rather than of internal cleavage. As has been said,
the impulses began to run parallel, and cleverness became largely
an adjustment of language.

Take, for example, the wrenching antitheses of love and death,
flesh and spirit, in Donne's The Relique:

When my grave is broke up againe
Some second ghest to entertaine,
(For graves have learn'd that woman-head
To be to more than one a bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright haire about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And thinke that here a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their soules, at the last busie day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

There was an abundance of verbal distortion in Donne, but the
oppositions were for the most part deeply internal; the trifling be-
trayed a complexity of attitudes. Compare with this inward com-
plexity the wit of Waller's On a Girdle:

It is my Heaven's extreamest spheare,
The pale which held the lovely Deare,

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8 PARTISAN REVIEW

My joy, my griefe, my hope, my love,
Doe all within this circle move.

These neat oppositions of sense and phrase, looking backward to
the practice of Donne, presently evolved into what George William-
son has called a balanced pattern of neo-classical wit—into the nimble
juxtapositions of Pope.

In brief, a poetry of congruity, but very sprightly, evolved from
a poetry of deeply clashing impulses. The tensions and psychological
paradoxes of the baroque resolved themselves in an expression more
external, attenuated, and gracefully "occult."

In its toughness and dramatic attack the poetry of Jonson was
as "metaphysical" as that of Donne, just as, in their way, portraits
by Van Dyck were as baroque as those by Frans Hals. But there was
not the distortion that one finds in Donne. Already Jonson had the
sense of coherence and consonance so utterly alien to the Dean of
St. Paul's. There was a continuity, however, from this Jonsonian
metaphysical verse through Herrick, the Cavaliers, Waller, and the
Restoration wits, to Mat Prior and Pope, who retained a great deal
of the dramatic metaphysical sting, though not with so irregular or
subtle a movement as in Jonson or Suckling. Thus, in a sense, there
was no opposition whatever between the distorted and "metaphysical"
baroque and the rococo, but rather a reasonably evident progression
from Donne to Pope.

IV

So much, of course, largely concerns one of the baroque "man-
ners"—the distorted baroque of complex tensions. As for the "shock-
ing" realism, the sort of thing to be observed in Ribera, Rembrandt's
anatomical studies, and certain statuary by Bernini, this revulsion
from the "grand manner" of the high Renaissance is best seen in the
appalling tragedies by Middleton, Ford, Webster, or Tourneur, or
in the satires of Donne and his more physiological exhibitions of his
love. Indeed, the "manner" of Donne is not in doubt. He had little
of the operatic, the academic, or the pastoral rhetoric, although he
had "learned and fantastic elaborations" of conceit, as Grierson calls
them. He composed with the tense distortion of El Greco. Caravaggio,
notoriously, specialized in the "vulgar." However, like Caravaggio,
Donne was rebellious; like Caravaggio, Donne exploited effects, often
outrageously. Although more complex and clever, Donne appears,

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METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 9

at moments, as ill-bred as Caravaggio sometimes was, and as insolent.
But Donne was more mercurial and versatile than Caravaggio. He
was as competent a master of psychological vocabulary as Frans Hals
or Rembrandt. Donne watched intensely his adjustment to the mo-
ment. Nothing was stable; the world flickered as he saw it through
a sensibility that could not be stabilized for twenty lines. The arbitrary
constructions of Rembrandt or El Greco were repeated in the almost
impudently irregular course of The Extasie, or any of the verses in
which he exposed his relation to women. Donne's every observation
was wilfully foreshortened by his perplexed egoism. Nowhere in
English verse are the momentary and poignant so recklessly mani-
pulated as in Donne, who delighted in the audacities of the natural-
istic and "disturbed" baroque.

The hard actualism of Donne's metaphors is particularly signi-
ficant; and his characteristically baroque intrusion of the material,
especially the incongruous, was transmitted throughout the seven-
teenth century in painting, architecture, and sculpture. Compare the
counter-reformation effigies of saints in which not only anatomical
detail but even the handling of stuffs contribute their bizarre "effect"
with the amazing profusion of freakish imagery in George Herbert
and writers of "emblems." Even Herrick retained the sharp details
of flowers. The Cavalier and Restoration wits continued to trifle with
the flesh in such a way as to mock the very sentiment they professed.
And there was the notorious actualism of Cleveland:

I like not tears in tune, nor will I prize
His artificial grief that scans his eyes.
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses' rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen's the spout,
Where the rain water of my eyes run out.

This baroque "realism," in fragile and lively form, was gradually
modified into the delicate extravagance of the rococo. This engaging
rococo detail was already apparent in Lovelace's verses on Elinda's
glove:

Thou snowy farme with thy five tenements!
Tell thy white mistris here was one
That call'd to pay his dayly rents . . .

The same "witty" paradox was in Watteau-the hard little Flemish
remarks that he would not obliterate from his most idyllic scenes-

=== Page 12 ===
10 PARTISAN REVIEW
the luster of satins, the glitter of jewels, the smirk of his puppet-like
figures who play at sentimentality. The Rape of the Lock shows how
Pope also kept his eye no less fixedly upon "unpoetic" little facts.

V

As for the operatic and pastoral "manners," they belong in that
great seventeenth-century tradition represented by the painting of
Rubens and the Poussins, the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne,
the heroic play, the Miltonic organ voice, and the sweeping ca-
dences of Dryden. Even if Dryden has of late met approval and
the baroque in the fine arts is no longer dismissed out of hand, our
admiration of seventeenth-century poetry is held within the confines
of our distrust of "rhetoric." We dislike the extravagant and pastoral
baroque, both of which are rhetoric.

The most inclusive definition of the baroque is an eccentric or
hypertrophied rhetoric. The Renaissance evolved a rhetoric of a monu-
mental kind in Raphael's School of Athens, Titian's Pesaro Madonna,
the early designs for St. Peter's, the sculpture of the Medici Chapel,
and the King James Version. By an elaboration and emancipation
of this rhetoric the operatic baroque achieved its most characteristic
effects.

Our position toward the seventeenth century is anomalous. How-
ever much we admire the strained effects of Donne, we are averse to
"magniloquence" as such; witness Eliot's objection to the "deteriora-
tion" of language in Milton. Consequently we are out of the strongest
currents of the seventeenth century, wherein the "metaphysical" ex-
pression must be viewed against the wider baroque impulses that
moved about and through it. We make concessions to the opera or
even to the "superb caprices" of Rubens that we hesitate to make to
Miltonic language. We feel the tensions and ambiguities of the seven-
teenth century, but not the accompanying baroque assertiveness and
release. This aspect of the baroque is purely kinetic—an abandon, a
katharsis, whether it be the exclamatory violence of Donne or the
Miltonic grandiloquence and surrender to movement. Repose was to
be found only in the broad majesty of Poussin's arcadian landscapes
or the measured progress of Comus and Il Penseroso. But these, too,
were rhetoric.

Large issues are involved in an appreciation of this ornate ba-
roque—nothing less, in fact, than one's attitude toward rhetoric.

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METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 11
After all, the depreciation of rhetoric is a new thing in criticism, not
antedating the nineteenth century and the Coleridgean assumption
that language is not the "dress of thought," but integral with meaning.
Because rhetoric may have been abused, we have a distaste for all
rhetoric, a distaste that must limit our understanding of the classics
and most writers in the classical tradition.
Possibly a distinction can be made. According to Aristotle, who
discussed rhetoric in its original terms of the spoken word (and Mil-
ton, like Virgil or Homer, but unlike Donne, is to be read with the
tongue rather than with the eye) "if a speaker manages well, there
will be something 'foreign' about his speech, while possibly the art
may not be detected, and his meaning will be clear. And this is the
chief merit of rhetorical language" (Rhet., III, ii, 6-7). Aristotle held
among the proper functions of rhetoric the adornment or embellish-
ment of a discourse that is soundly constructed. Aristotle's view is the
classic one sanctioned by Quintilian, who assumed that every speech
"consists at once of what is expressed and that which expresses, that
is to say, of matter and words" (Inst. III, v, 1). Indeed, Quintilian
held a Jesuítical or counter-reformation view that rhetoric is eloquen-
tia: "The ornate is something that goes beyond what is merely lucid
and acceptable. It consists in forming a clear conception of what we
wish to say, secondly in giving this adequate expression, and thirdly
in lending it additional brilliance, a process which may correctly be
termed embellishment" (Inst. VIII, iii, 61).
This sort of embellishment of structure well managed occurs in
a Roman Colosseum or triumphal arch, a St. Peter's, a historical
canvas by Rubens, an Aeneid, or a Paradise Lost. The nineteenth
century had a "rhetoric" of its own in both architecture and poetry.
Ruskinesque "Gothic" is a "pure" rhetoric, and to that extent false—
the embellishment is the structure; the structure is the embellishment.
Note that Ruskin so entirely misconcieved Gothic as to presume that
a mediaeval cathedral is synonymous with the naturalness, change-
fulness, redundance, savageness, etc. of its decoration. Here the elab-
oration and the construction are one—as in the poetry of Shelley.
The rhetoric of Prometheus Unbound differs from the rhetoric of
Paradise Lost, as the rhetoric of the Houses of Parliament differs from
the rhetoric of Vanbrugh and Wren, who "engage" the orders, as
did the builders of the Colosseum or as did Sansovino in designing
the Library of St. Mark. Keats is nearer to Milton and Virgil.

=== Page 14 ===
12 PARTISAN REVIEW
Crashaw is an instance of an entirely baroque rhetoric, antipodal
to the "romantic" rhetoric of Shelley. The feeling of both poets is
intense; yet in Crashaw the substance can be more readily detached
from the eccentric and distorted rhetoric. Crashaw's rhetoric is more
"external," possibly because the imagery is not a matter of feeling,
as it is in Shelley. Crashaw's is the rhetoric of the Gesu Church, of
Correggio in painting away the dome of the cathedral at Parma, or
of Bernini in designing the baldachin of St. Peter's; it suggests the
extravagant handling of drapery in counter-reformation statuary. Both
Crashaw and Bernini exemplify the baroque "maniera," "manner,"
or "style"-that which the seventeenth century conceived as added to
what is wrought. The Theophila by Edward Benlowes is another
instance of this "deliberate, conscious perversity of language."

Nor has rhetoric a decorative value alone. The rhetoric of the
Renaissance and of the baroque has a high associative value. It is a
"formal" embellishment that depends for its effect upon tradition.
It is conventional, almost ritualistic; it is allusive, with inherent "cul-
tural" associations, echoes that reverberate from the past and from
one's cultivation in the "classics." An extreme instance would be poems
composed by reference to seventeenth-century poetical dictionaries.
The facade of St. Peter's, the pastoral elegy, allegoric painting or
sculpture depend upon such associations. One might remark that
T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound employ a rhetoric having such cultural
associations. There is, however, no question of rhetoric in Eliot or
Pound: both are highly allusive, but neither fulfils the essential con-
dition of rhetoric that it "embellish." Indeed, Pound approves of the
statement by Rémy de Gourmont that "Le style, c'est de sentir, de
voir, de penser, et rien plus." However "foreign" the allusion in Eliot
or Pound may strike us as being, there is no Miltonic "elevation";
that is what Eliot dreads the interruption between the surface and
the core. His own practice is even averse to the calculated extravagance
that marks the wit of Crashaw or Donne.

In the sense that rhetoric is traditional, it can serve as a norm.
One measures a facade by Sansovino against the Colosseum, Tasso
against the Aeneid, the Aeneid against the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The baroque was essentially a revulsion against the norm; it directed
its rhetoric toward certain abnormal or atectonic effects, as did Bernini
or Rubens or Milton. Lycidas is filled with a strange, almost shock-

=== Page 15 ===
METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 13
ingly personal distortion of rhetoric, recalling Michelangelo's sculp-
ture:

Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,
And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise,
Phœbus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies . . .

The rhetoric of the eighteenth century, when it failed of the
rococo taste and refinement, was not ordinarily successful. Hence the
Wordsworthian reversion to a language of common life.

VI

The fact remains, however, that critics who have identified form
with substance (particularly those who have followed I. A. Richards)
may have denied an entirely legitimate employment of rhetoric. In
so doing they undermine a proper evaluation of Virgil or Milton or,
for that matter, the exquisite rhetoric of Pope. No one would deny
the claims of poetry in which the language is functional, in which there
is no interruption between the surface and the core. Yet is there not
a "romantic" and "semantic" fallacy in the view that in estimable
poetry substance and language are one? Is not the rhetoric of Shelley
as false as that of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is not false?

By report, a New Zealand prisoner of war lately wrote to the
Red Cross explaining that because he is eager to become a poet, he
wishes to be sent books upon metres of English verse and the mythol-
ogy of ancient Greece. Possibly he is not in error. In a sense poetry
is a ritual. One of its rituals-its liturgy, in the phrase of C. S. Lewis
-is its rhetoric (in the sense of its embellishment). Arnold said that
the protestantism of the protestant religion, its nakedness, is the result
of individualism. This same individualism in poetry expressed itself
only imperfectly in the so-called "romantic" poets, who to a large
degree continued to practice a poetic liturgy or ritual sanctioned by
tradition. Wordsworth at one time determined to compose in the
plain language of men, to strip his poetic performance of the ritual
of gaudyverse. But in some of his most successful passages he con-
tinued the rhetorical gestures that had always patently set poetry
apart from common speech. Keats and Byron, and often Shelley,

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14 PARTISAN REVIEW
performed the same ritual. Thus the “romantics” practiced an inhib-
ited and partial protestantism in poetry.
Not until Whitman was the individualist-protestant-poet really
emancipated from the iconography of rhetoric; not until his barbaric
yawp did the language of poetry become “functional” and entirely
“individual.”

Nor has it indicated any return to poetic ritual. T. S. Eliot has
intimated that in religion the spirit killeth and the letter giveth life;
thus he rejects the extremes of liberal protestantism. Critically and
poetically he is, however, a liberal protestant, in spite of the fact that
his verses are weighted with references to tradition—“classical” is his
word. Poetically, a parallel to ritual is rhetoric. There is no reason,
of course, why an Anglo-Catholic in religion and a royalist in politics
should be a ritualist in poetry. Nevertheless Eliot’s evident attempt
to stand upon something like consistency (because of his repudiation
of liberalism) ought to lead to something like ritual in poetic method.
But he disapproves of this ritual because it leads to what he calls the
interruption between the surface and the core of such poets as Milton.
An orthodox classicism will not object to this interruption, but instead
will assume that “substance” is distinguishable from “form.” The
abiding classical conception is that of art as téchne, a craft in dealing
with what is said. Dr. Johnson’s belief that language is a “dress of
thought,” Dryden’s definition of true wit as a propriety of words and
thoughts, Quintilian’s elaborate recipes for oratorical effect, and Aris-
totle’s observation that the language of tragedy is “embellished”—
these are a legitimately classical or ritualist view of poetry. The oppos-
ing view, that language is integral with meaning, is anti-classical and
expressionist. Dr. Johnston’s Vanity of Human Wishes is a monu-
mentally classical and rhetorical achievement, confined within the
limits of an iconography. Thus Eliot’s profession of classicism is troub-
ling, in view of his remarks upon Milton. His proper trinity might
have been royalism in politics, Anglo-Catholicism in religion, and
“rhetoric”—a kind of liturgy—in poetry. A ritualist in religion and
politics should be the last to complain of the Miltonic ritual in poetry
or to observe that Milton’s language is “artificial” and “conventional.”
The protestantism of the protestant tradition in literary criticism does
not seem to have been attained until I. A. Richards’ contention that
“form” in poetry cannot be considered apart from its “substance,”
that the “way” and the “whither” cannot be distinguished. Eliot’s

=== Page 17 ===
METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 15

attitude toward Milton would seem to commit him to this very
“naked” protestantism.
One might venture the surmise that sooner or later any reversion
to ritual in religion or politics will involve a toleration of the ritual of
verse, which in its largest sense is rhetoric—the sort of rhetoric to be
found in its most ritualistic form in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Beowulf,
or Milton. It is the rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintilian—and the Jesuits.
Any such toleration will mark the retreat from individualism in poetry
and the criticism of poetry. It will also mark, certainly, a reversion
from what Richards has aptly called the modern “dissolution of con-
sciousness,” the psychological individualism that evoked, first, the
private language of modern poetry, then the criticism of Richards
himself. A more sympathetic evaluation of Milton may be the first
token of a reaction in poetry that has already occurred on one level
in Anglo-Catholicism and on another level in Eliot’s “royalism.”

VII

For us, at the moment, the issue lies beween Donne and Milton.
And it is Donne who is, after all, an eccentric figure. Milton stands
more nearly at the center of the seventeenth century. He exhibits
almost every baroque “manner”; perhaps Samson Agonistes and
Paradise Regained, alone, are not “mannered” (they suggest, in-
stead, a grave academism). To be sure Milton does not represent
the explosive baroque; he often bears himself, as in Comus, with the
Augustan restraint of the Poussins. We may say, nevertheless, that
the decorative and even gorgeous “movement” of Miltonic prose, of
Ly cidas, of Paradise Lost represents an Anglican art of the counter-
reformation:

Th’imperial ensign, which full high advanc’t
Shon like a meteor, streaming to the wind
With gems and golden lustre rich emblaz’d,
Seraphic arms and trophies: all the while
Sonorous mettal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host ups ent
A shout that tore Hell’s concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.
All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand banners rise into the air
With orient colours waving: with them rose

=== Page 18 ===
16 PARTISAN REVIEW

A forrest huge of spears: and thronging helms
Appear'd, and serried shields in thick array
Of depth immeasurable . . . . .

This scene has all the baroque "great imagined space" in which fig-
ures move freely. In the verse-paragraph there is the same handling
of masses as in the colossal drama of St. Peter's, or the full-blooded
performance of Rubens in the Medici series. The Miltonic Eden with
its slope hills, cool recesses, and vernal groves in which dance the
Graces and Hours is a pastoral more monumental than the Poussins
ever painted. In the milder, more gently modulated tones of Claude's
rhetoric are Il Penseroso and L'Allegro, with their lyric shimmer
and evanescence of russet lawns, fallow gray, and glooming battle-
ments. Never was T. S. Eliot more perverse than in observing that
Milton fails in visual imagination and that his poetry is not "serious."
Then too there is the Miltonic realism, the distinctively baroque jux-
taposition of the actual with the elaborate, the august, the idyllic,
the idealized. This sort of play with realistic detail-the cock strutting
to the barn door in L'Allegro-shows how the baroque assimilated
the genre. The homely passages so consummately handled in the
paysage by Ruy’s dael or Hobbema reappear in Milton's cottage chim-
ney smoking between aged oaks. One suspects that critics have been
amiss regarding the scene in which Eve, the hausfrau, prepares for
Adam and Raphael the dinner that will not cool. We may not like
the culinary apparatus; it seems incongruous, coming as it does in
conjunction with the large dignity of Adam our primitive great sire.
Traditionally "epic" as such apparatus may be, here is also a char-
acteristically baroque effect-the intrusion of everyday matters along
with elevated passages. To our eye, a distracting naturalism appears
everywhere in the baroque: in the muscularity of certain statuary by
Michaelangelo, in the curious little dogs that bound about the corners
of Rubens' most elaborate spectacles, in the violent accent upon non-
essentials in the painting of Rembrandt, in the rustication of stones
in facades designed by Vanbrugh. These culinary matters were no
less "low" for Milton than for us. That is the point. They are "low."

So far it has seemed that Milton is "externally" baroque, that
his baroque quality depends largely upon elaboration and rhetoric.
But he is baroque in an inward sense as well. As Wölfflin says, the
baroque, in spite of its exploitation of the surface, has a certain incon-
clusiveness, an unwillingness to say everything clearly. Undoubtedly

=== Page 19 ===
METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE 17

certain baroque obscurity is due simply to violence of expression, as
in Donne, or to the extreme condensation and dislocation of imagery,
due to eccentric or wilful associations. Thus the baroque “distortion”
produces its own “suggestion” which is in part a result of “strange-
ness.” This condensation, this suggestion are likewise in some of the
greatest passages of Milton, as arresting as they are inconclusive.
Surely one of the fascinations of Lycidas is its obliqueness:

Next Camus, reverend Sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge,
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
Ah; who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came and last did go,
The pilot of the Galilean lake,
Two massy keyes he bore of metals twain
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain) . . .

An almost cabalistic obscurity intensifies the Miltonic passages on
God. Like Rembrandt, like Michaelangclo, Milton is inscrutable with
an inscrutability more profound than Donne’s, tantalizing as Donne’s
may be.

With the coming of Dryden and the heroic play, this inscrutabil-
ity is wiped away. Although Dryden preserves the assertive, manly
rhythm of the baroque, its realism, attack, and almost metaphysical
accent, he is not so complex as Milton. We admire Dryden because
he is forthright, not as Donne or Milton are forthright—in expressing
perplexity—but rather as vigorously dealing with matters that have
been, for the moment, simplified. Dryden wavers, shifting as he does
between one resolution and another; but at every instant, he seems
clear enough. The inscrutability of both Donne and Milton is apt to
result from a painful perplexity at the moment of composition; hence
a deep baroque “distortion” and complexity. The rhetoric of the
heroic play is refreshing and kathartic. But the heroic play does not
have the inward agitation of the profounder baroque—the baroque
of Michaelangclo, of The Duchess of Malfi or The Changeling, of
Donne’s Divine Poems, or of Lycidas. Donne, then, stands in genuine
relationship with Milton. Both must be seen against the authentic
“movement” of the seventeenth century. When thus seen, Milton is
the greatest of the baroque poets, the most polyphonic.

=== Page 20 ===
In Memory of Henri Bergson
Paul Valéry

EDITOR'S NOTE.—The following is the translation of an address deliv-
ered before the French Academy shortly after Bergson's death on
January 4, 1941. There are undoubtedly political intentions in Valéry's
celebration of his Jewish colleague as the representative and regenera-
tor of the French tradition, as well as in his contraposing of Bergson
and Kant, and in his statement that Bergson was the last great name
in the history of the European intelligence. This was said at a time
when the Nazi propagandists and their Vichyite collaborators were
hailing the advent of a new European Renaissance. Valéry, however,
does not hesitate to paint the “new age” ‘in the darkest colors.

AT the beginning of this year which finds France at the bottom,
its life subjected to the most difficult ordeals and its future almost
beyond the reach of the imagination, I felt that I ought to express
to this Society our common hope that the times to come may be less
bitter, less sinister, and less dreadful than those through which we
have been living since 1940.

But in the very first days of this new year the Academy received,
so to speak, a blow on the head. Last Saturday, January 4th, Henri
Bergson died at the age of 81, succumbing, apparently without pain,
to a congestion of the lungs. On Monday his body was taken from
his home to the cemetery at Garches. The funeral was necessarily
extremely simple, and all the more affecting on that account. No
ceremony, no speeches—but so much the more silent reflection and
feeling of exceptional piety among all those present. About thirty
people were gathered in the parlor around the coffin. The French
government was represented by Ambassador de Brinon, the Minister
of Public Education by M. Lavelle. I conveyed to Madame Bergson
the condolences of the Academy, and she asked me to thank you in
her behalf. Very soon they came for the coffin, and on the threshold
18

=== Page 21 ===
IN MEMORY OF HENRI BERGSON 19
of the house we bade our last farewell to the greatest philosopher of
our time.

He was the pride of our society. Whether or not we were at-
tracted to his philosophy, whether or not we followed him in the
profound quest to which he devoted his life, and in the truly creative
evolution of his thought—constantly maturing in boldness and free-
dom—we possessed in him a most authentic model of the highest
intellectual virtues. His name, universally recognized, carried a sort
of moral authority in things of the mind. France was able to appeal
to that name and to that authority under circumstances which I am
sure all of you well remember. He had many disciples, who followed
him with a fervor and almost a devotion which no one else in the
world of ideas has so far been able to arouse.

I do not intend to discuss his philosophy—this is not the time
for it. Any such estimate ought to be very profound, and it could only
be so if made in the light of clear days and in the fullness of intel-
lectual activity. The very old, and consequently very difficult, prob-
lems with which M. Bergson dealt, like those of time, of memory
and, chiefly of living development, were given new life by him—thus
curiously altering the situation in which philosophy found itself some
fifty years ago. At that time the powerful Kantian criticism, armed
with a formidable apparatus for the verification of knowledge and
with a very skillfully articulated abstract terminology, dominated edu-
cation and had even imposed itself upon politics, to the extent that
politics can have any contact with philosophy. M. Bergson was neither
won over nor intimidated by the harshness of this doctrine, which
laid down so imperatively the limits of thought. He undertook to
raise metaphysics from the kind of discredit and neglect in which he
found it. You know what reverberations were caused by certain lec-
tures he gave at the College of France and what renown his hypo-
theses and analyses achieved throughout the whole world. While the
philosophers of the eighteenth century had been, in the main, under
the influence of physical-mechanical conceptions, our illustrious col-
league fortunately allowed himself to be attracted by the sciences of
life. He found his inspiration in biology. He thought of life, and un-
derstood it and conceived it as the bearer of spirit. He was not afraid
to pursue, during the observation of his own consciousness, certain
insights into problems that will never be solved. He had performed,
however, the essential task of restoring and vidicating the taste for a

=== Page 22 ===
20 PARTISAN REVIEW
type of thinking that is nearer to our essence than any purely logical
development of concepts can be especially since it is generally im-
possible to give these concepts definitions that are not controversial.
The true value of philosophy is simply to lead thought back to
itself. This activity demands from him who would describe it, and
who would communicate what is revealed to him of his inner life, a
special application and even the invention of a manner of expression
suited to his purpose, for language exhausts itself at its own source.
At this point the full capacity of M. Bergson's genius showed itself.
He dared to borrow from poetry its magical weapons and he com-
bined that power of poetry with that precision from which no mind
fed on the exact sciences can ever allow itself to deviate. He made
use of the most apt and novel metaphors and images to recreate in
the minds of others the discoveries which he had made in his own
and the results of his inner experiences. Out of this came a style
that did not need to be pedantic in order to become philosophical.
This confused and even shocked some people. But many were happy
to recognize in the flexibility and gracious richness of his language
certain peculiarly French graces and shadings which the previous
generation had regarded as something against which serious thinking
ought to be on guard. May I remark that this renewal was practically
contemporaneous with that produced in music by the appearance
of the subtle and very graceful work of Claude Achille Debussy. Both
were characteristic French reactions.

Nor was this all. Henri Bergson, great philosopher and great
writer, was also, as he should have been, a great friend of men. Per-
haps his mistake lay in believing that men were worthy of friendship.
He worked with all his heart for the union of minds and ideas, be-
lieving that these stand above political organisms and forces. Though
is it not, perhaps, just the opposite that is bound to take place? Per-
haps we must regard as typically human the very varied antagonisms
that divide men—and prominent among these antagonisms is that
which brings the partisans and servants of this idea of unity into con-
flict with those who do not accept it and who regard it as a dangerous
delusion.

No doubt M. Bergson believed that the very fate of the spirit is
inseparable from the feeling of its presence and of its universal value;
in this, as well as in other ways, he was at one with religious thought.
The meaning of life, even in its simplest and humblest manifesta-

=== Page 23 ===
IN MEMORY OF HENRI BERGSON 21
tions, seemed to him essentially spiritual. We can imagine therefore
what must have been the state of that vast and deep mind in the
presence of events that destroyed so many beautiful forecasts and so
swiftly and so violently changed the face of things. Was he able to
retain his faith in the evolution of our species towards an ever higher
level? I do not know. For unaware that he had been in Paris since
September and not learning of his presence here until the moment
when I was told of his death, I had not been to visit him. But I do
not doubt that he was cruelly stricken to the very depths of his being
by that total disaster the consequences of which we are now experi-
encing.
An extremely elevated, pure and superior type of thinking man,
perhaps one of the last to have thought exclusively, deeply and super-
latively! In a period when the world thinks and meditates less and
less; when civilization seems to reduce itself from day to day to
nothing more than the memories and traces we preserve of its many-
sided richness and its free and exuberant intellectual production;
while miseries, anxieties and constraints of every kind suppress and
discourage the undertakings of the mind—in such a period Bergson
seems already to belong to a bygone age, and his name to be the last
great name in the history of the European intelligence.

=== Page 24 ===
The Hand That Fed Me
Isaac Rosenfeld

Dear Ellen,
It was very sweet of you to send me a Christmas card. It was
really a wonderful gesture, and so simple! When you prepared your
Christmas list you included me—and that’s all there was to it.
You know, in that one day of ours I never did manage to find
out who your friends were (not that I wasn’t eager to!). But I
imagine your list went something like this: aunts, uncles, cousins; girl
friends; boy friends. It amuses me to think that I must have been
included in the latter group, in the company, let us say, of John,
Bob, Steve, Chick, etc. I am quite willing to share the honor with
them, even though the names of my colleagues must be entirely
imaginary and even though you probably put my own name last on
the list. But perhaps you had me in mind all along, knowing what a
gesture that would be! Naturally, you must have assumed I’m not in
the army. I’m not quarreling with you, but there’s something a little
glib in that assumption. Why, so far as you are concerned, should I
not be in the army? Do you follow me? Is it simply a habit of think-
ing so that whenever—rarely!—you do come to me, you immediately
say, “Joe? Oh, he’s still around.” I can see no other way, unless, God
save my mind, you’ve taken to obtaining information from my friends,
whom you have sworn to secrecy. But how should you know who
my friends are, since I never found out yours?
Of course, I may have mentioned Otto to you—he was very
much on my mind that day. Would you believe it, while we were
walking down Hoyne Avenue and I was, permit me, impressing
you with all I had, I kept wondering what Otto would do in similar
circumstances, and I was gloating, sure that he would never have
been able to give such a fine account of himself! Furthermore, I still
22
Dec. 21

=== Page 25 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 23
gloat over it although for all the fine impression I made you never
answered my letters and even once, when I called on you (for per-
haps the tenth time) you actually hid from me. I know all about it.
Your brother came to the door and he seemed to have half a mind
to admit me; but behind him I could hear a commotion of shushing
and whispering, and I'm sure it was you, ducking into the pantry and
telling them to say you were out and on no account to let me in.
Of course, what makes all this slightly ridiculous, is the fact
that it happened three years ago. But why did you wait three years
before sending me a card? What was wrong with the Christmas of
the very same year, or the one of the year following? Ah, I know
how your mind works. On Christmas, 1939, you suppressed all
thought of me. In 1940 you allowed yourself to think, but only to
the following extent: "If I send him a Christmas card now, he'll
think I've been unable to forget him. So we'll wait another year or
two. By that time it'll be quite clear, when he gets my card, not that
I've been unable to forget him, but that I have so good a memory
that I can even recall the name and address of a man whom I saw
only once, three years ago." Am I right?

But it's a trivial thing and why attach so much importance to it?
I suppose you would have me believe that. You would have me be-
lieve that your card was only a way of acknowledging a pleasant
day that you had hitherto failed to acknowledge. Something brought
it to your mind—say, an onion you had eaten recently. And so the
card, yes?

Not on your life, Ellen, not for one moment will I believe it.
For if it were only a trivial matter, would you have waited three
years? You would have sent me a card at once, or even phoned me
on the following day, as you'd promised. Trivialities are the things
women rush into, feeling they're important. The important things,
however, are what they mull over, plot, deliberate, all to no end. It
took you three years, Ellen, to convince yourself that a single after-
noon you had spent with me was trivial!

So there you are.
But one more thing. On your card you have written, "From
Ellen. Do you remember me?" A pretty little disingenuous note! I
assure you, your card was sent in the deepest conviction that I had
not once ceased to think of you. I'm sure of it. If you thought I'd
forgotten you, you wouldn't have dared send a card. What, a man

=== Page 26 ===
24 PARTISAN REVIEW

should receive a card from a certain Ellen and wonder who she is?
Any time you'd leave yourself open! Or, on the other hand, was it a
rather coy way of insinuating that you'd all but forgotten me? You
see, if you are willing to admit that I may have forgotten you, isn't
that another way of suggesting that you barely, barely manage to
remember me?
Nonsense! I know perfectly well that you've never forgotten
me. But who are you, Shakespeare, that the smallest scrap of your
writing should be covered with commentaries? Enough of that.
Do you remember me?
Indeed!
Joseph Feigenbaum

Dec. 22

Dear Ellen,
It just occurred to me that while I wrote you at some length,
yesterday, I forgot the obvious subject of our correspondence-Xmas.
So I'm writing you again to wish you a merry Xmas.
Yours,
J. F.
P.S. Of course, I could just as well send a Xmas card.

Dec. 23

Dear Ellen,
Since I wrote to you twice, I might just as well have said some-
thing worth saying. After all, even if we have "forgotten" each other,
we still have our three years to look back on-years, may I add, all
the more interesting because we did not, in any way, spend them
together.
Please understand my motive. If it seems sentimental to you,
then you're a fool, and I've no fear of offending you when I say so.
And besides what can you do about it? Can you threaten to break
off our friendship? Can you threaten to stop writing? As if you would
ever write! You see, Ellen, by avoiding me you've put yourself com-
pletely in my power. But that's hardly worth pointing out.
Our whole meeting comes back to me. I remember that sum-
mer, no work, no friends, no conversation, the realization I was meant

=== Page 27 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 25
for WPA. What a wonderful summer of self-discovery! Believe me,
chaos is the mother of knowledge. It's a distinguished family: indo-
lence, poverty, frustration, seediness—these are the blood relations
of that little monster, Mr. Knowthyself. I shall never again be afraid
of turning myself inside out, like an empty pocket—what treasures
of lint and fuzz! Do you follow me, Ellen? I mean to say, it is some-
times a good thing to shake yourself out, and go around unhappy-
you lose most of your delusions. A happy man takes a great risk—
of believing that he is what he seems to be.

Well, I was forced to go on WPA; forced outwardly, that is, for
inwardly I went as a free man. I knew what to expect. My friends
(“my generation” as it became fashionable to call them) were all
on one cultural project or another. I would go on the Writers' Project
and fill out a time sheet as well as any one else. All such matters,
which are done with only half a will, are called ways of keeping body
and soul together; actually, they are ways of keeping them apart.
That is, you do what you do, and you don't have to worry about
undergoing any changes. WPA was a great social invention, it was
refrigeration on a mass scale. It took us as we were, and froze us as
we were; it preserved us, it kept us from decaying. But what's all
this? I merely wanted to say a few things it was impossible to say
when we walked out of the relief station together, and I find that I
am overdramatizing myself.

I hadn't thought there would be such a long line at the C.R.A.
office, so many Negroes, Poles, old men. Not a single applicant for
the Writers' Project among them. It is so much better to be an unem-
ployed writer than an unemployed anything-else that I felt especially
sorry for them. An unemployed plumber, for example—a man who
is starving because there are no toilet bowls for him to fix. There is
something so pathetic in that! A writer, at least, is always writing.
Whatever happens, he records it. It begins to rain—he says to him-
self: it is raining. He walks down the stairs—he says to himself: I
am walking down the stairs. He is always writing in his head, and it
does him good. But what good does it do a man to go around fixing
toilet bowls in his head? Pig misery! So there I was, looking at the
men around me and recording them, putting down their coughs, their
leanness, the dirt, the stubble on their faces, and meanwhile thinking:
here am I, a writer, this is me, etc., etc.

=== Page 28 ===
26 PARTISAN REVIEW
Ellen, you look at yourself only in mirrors. Relying on a piece
of glass the way you do, you probably have little notion of the actual
figure you cut. That day, when you were not smearing on lipstick
while looking into a compact-mirror, you were sucking the point of a
pencil, and rolling it between your lips. That you, who refuse to
write to me, should have come into my life at the point of a pencil!
Now I might almost begin to flatter you to dwell on the image
of a girl, a little above average in height, more than ordinary in ap-
pearance, a girl, though I suspect the word, quite beautiful, standing
there in the basement among all the coughing old men, surrounded
by steampipes, benches, notices plastered on the wooden walls: Be-
kanntmachung, Avviso. And all the while this girl rolls the point of
a pencil in her mouth. Do you know, after you had caught my eye,
you stuck your tongue out at me. First the pencil, and then the tongue.
Ellen, Ellen!
It would have meant very little. It would only have been a study
in violent contrast, squalor and flirtation, sex and the relief office-
and, as a matter of fact, I was not sure at the beginning that it meant
anything more. But immediately the element of personal worth en-
tered. Almost at once I talked to you, you will recall, as though you
were more than a pretty girl with a pencil stuck in your mouth. It was
you who did the flirting, made the advances. Do I wear make-up?
Do I carry a purse full of compacts, powderboxes, lipsticks? Under-
stand, I accuse you of nothing. I am glad you behaved as you did.
Perhaps because I am not thin and old and coughing, you saw to it
that I should notice you. But it was I who saw to all the rest.
I want you to observe that you were ahead of me in the line.
When your preliminary interview was over and your preliminary
papers were filled out, you could have gone home. I expected you,
at any moment, while you were idling around the basement, I expected
you to break away, perhaps with a slight nod in my direction, and
go home. But I knew you would not. I said nothing, you will remem-
ber, I even pretended not to notice you. But how carefully I watched
you, and how pleased I was! There you were, waiting for me, and it
was all voluntary on your part, and even somewhat embarrassing.
The pretexts you invented! First you sat down on one of the benches
and stretched and yawned as though you were tired. Then you re-
moved your shoes and rubbed your feet-such pretty feet, if I may
say, and just barely dirty! By that time I thought I might dare

=== Page 29 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 27
acknowledge that I knew you were waiting for me. I smiled. I mo-
tioned to you. But you would not admit it. You wouldn't look at me.
You curled up on the bench where you sat and pretended to go to
sleep-a wonder no one saw you and put you out. I knew you were
waiting for me, that you had already acknowledged me even more
deeply than I had acknowledged you-since at the outset I was only
responding to a flirtation, but what were you responding to? I don't
flirt. You were therefore responding to me! It made me so happy,
somewhat dizzy, it was even slightly alarming. I sang a song, I joked
with the man who stood ahead of me in line, a short and chubby
Negro whom I liked immensely. I offered him cigarettes. When he
took only one, I slipped some more into his hip pocket, so carefully,
I might have been stealing his wallet. He was now my friend. Having
become your friend, I was everybody's friend. I even smiled at the
relief worker who interviewed me, a bitter hag who resented my
happiness and detained me with unnecessary questions, as though to
extract my secret. And when I was through with her and came out,
startled to find you absent from the bench, only to see you standing
at the door, so clearly, so obviously waiting!

That whole afternoon, Ellen, the walk to your house, your
friendliness, your kindness in asking me up and inviting me to have
lunch with you! Even now I can hardly believe that I should ever
have received such gifts of kindness. Such absolute friendship, com-
radeship, trust, good will, and with it all the constant promise of
intimacy: one moment you are at my shoulder, the next, you take
my arm, or my hand, or you pretend a mosquito has landed and you
slap my cheek. And what a lunch! Rye bread and borscht, served by
your father, and with such good nature, even after he had learned my
name and drawn certain unavoidable inferences. Borscht, further-
more, with bits of green onion floating in it. I was so happy to learn
you were Russian! I consider myself a Russian, you understand. As
a Jew, I am also a German, an Italian, a Frenchman, a Pole, I am
all Europe-but a Russian, foremost.

I am sure that all this did not come to naught because I am a
Jew. To begin with, you are the kind of gentile who knows how to
say "goy"-a word I distinctly heard you use. There is only one
nation on the earth-the nation of those who call the rest of the world
"goyim." We Jews use it in contempt, because of our fears, but it
is capable of elevation into a word of pride and brotherhood. No,

=== Page 30 ===
28 PARTISAN REVIEW
that is not the reason why we "broke up." There are only two possi-
bilities, one very flattering to me, the other, degrading.
To take the base one first, I observed, when I entered your house
and when I was eating lunch, that you avoided all reference to WPA.
Your presented me to your father, and later to your brother, as an
old friend from school whom you bumped into downtown while
looking for a job. You would not admit that you had applied for
WPA, and you would not have them know that I, too, had done so.
What a false and wicked pride, and since you evidently know some-
thing about such matters—what utter disloyalty to your class! Your
father, a carpenter as I recall, was obviously unemployed. He had
that look about him. And your brother, who was building a model
airplane in the middle of the day, evidently had nothing better to do.
So what was there to be ashamed of? And what if your mother, as
I gather from her absence, was the only one working in the family?
What of it? Must you be ashamed? But perhaps you were even more
ashamed of me than of yourself. Perhaps the very fact that you met
me in a relief station was enough to queer me. Then why flirt with
me and bring me to your home?

But apart from all that, what a fool you were not to go through
with your WPA application. I scoured all the rolls, inquired at all
the projects where you might conceivably have been taken on, but
no one had heard of you. Ah, what you missed! Myself, I went on
to the Writers' Project and compiled a 100,000 word report on pigeon
racing in Chicago, including a life-size biography of Josiah Breen,
the pigeon fancier. And what did you do? Pickle works, belt-buckle
factory, typist, stenographer, secretary? You are a traitor to your
class, Ellen, to your better instincts and your better capacities, and
you allowed what we call "the most crucial experience of our genera-
tion" to slip by you. But this is a digression.

As I say, you may have been ashamed to know me, or to con-
tinue seeing me because I was going on WPA. Or perhaps, even
because I had caught you in the act, applying for the national dispen-
sation. This, of course, is only a possibility; and I may be wrong.
Assuming that I am, and that you had your own and better reasons,
there remains another possibility, which I am very eager to entertain.
It does me good.

This is mystery. It involves a whole world, of which you are the
hub. At the center, beside you, let me place a young man, of respect-

=== Page 31 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 29

able, and somewhat better family than your own, a man whom we
shall call Willard. Am I warm? When we met, you had already known
Willard for a period of two years. He, a serious fellow, perhaps a
student of law, or already a lawyer, could not help but have serious
intentions. He doesn't laugh very often, your Willard; and when you
do, opening your mouth wide, it disconcerts him. Furthermore, when
you suck pencils in his presence, or show him your tongue, he is more
than a little embarrassed. But what can you do about it? You were
to marry him. You were then, I should judge, twenty-four, the age
when one begins observing that a woman is not growing any younger.
Besides, you are used to him, miserable habit. He is good to you, he's
solid, he looks down on WPA, he smokes cigars. What then? How else
are you to act when this wistful, melancholy, timid, cynical and so
appealing young writer comes along and speaks to you as a man has
never spoken before, and dwells on you, and intimates, and sighs and
stares? It is, after all, shocking to discover that one's fiance is not the
ultimate man on earth, and that another, a man you met in a base-
ment, who has never kissed you or walked you through the park, is
capable of preempting the emotions you have already consigned and
wrapped and, furthermore, of providing you with new ones. Nyet,
krasavitsa moya?

Ellen, if this be true, then your reticence is a tribute! Thank you
for ignoring me, thank you for your silence. For it means you realized,
in those few hours, that going with me would make irrecoverable your
whole past life and its commitments. After all, women have been
known to keep several men on a string. Thank you for not binding
me. For it means you feared the string, and where it might lead you.
And what if the string should break? The fear that a string might
break is the fear of love!

But look at all these pages I have written, and where will I
find an envelope large enough? Ellen, unintentionally, merely out of
a desire to say a few things I had not said before, I have invoked
more of the past than I had intended. It has brought me back to that
helpless, pitiful state of mind—I despise it—where a man lives on
promises. I have drugged myself into believing what I believed three
years ago—your promise to call me, to write to me, to see me again.
Now I know you will write, if only a few words, and I know you will
answer me at once.
Always yours,
Joe

=== Page 32 ===
30 PARTISAN REVIEW Dec. 29

Dear Ellen,

Christmas passed, and nearly six days have gone by. I tell my-
self that you have been very busy over the holidays, that you haven't
found time to write. But I knew full well that if you were going to
write, you would already have done so. Why do you deny me this?
Is it my pride or your presumption? Have I touched too sensitive, too
deep a point? Or could it be that I have merely bored you?

I tell myself I have bored her. But how can that be when I
still believe in the love she seemed to have offered me? Is it possible?
If the world were made up of such haphazard, ill fitting emotions,
no pattern at all would exist—it just wouldn't hang together.

Excuse me if I have used the word love in vain. But the more I
have thought of you, the more I have grown to believe that I have
a right to use it. It is almost as though I have written these letters to
make myself believe that you love me. God knows what I have writ-
ten! God knows why I go on!

I suppose every man sometimes has the urge to pour himself out,
release all the stops and let go. My sense of caution should tell me that
few men have the right to confess; only murderers and hardened
criminals, never men who are merely unhappy. Those who have really
committed crimes, those who have an actual guilt lying over them—
they have something to say. But the rest of us—perhaps we become
liars when we open our mouths, liars or pathetic wishers, and half
of what we say may be false, and the other half merely the result of
a vain striving for a sense of personal history.

Then why do I go on? Why do I persist in writing to you in the
face of what must surely amount to a personal humiliation? I'll tell
you why—and may the telling damn you! A man feels humiliated
only when he is cast down from one position to a lower one. Some
men never learn their lesson. No sooner humiliated, they attempt to
injure someone else in return. These are the unpleasant characters,
the personalities charged with an explosive that any touch may set off.
Your Willard may be of such a type—not because he is mean; he
may even be sweet in his own way—but only insofar as he lacks
subtlety. But our other type of man is a different sort entirely. When
he is humiliated he does not bound back with a rage that destroys his
perception. Instead, he learns. He sees most clearly what concerns him
most closely; and he accepts it and makes it a part of himself. When

=== Page 33 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 31

he has been utterly humiliated, he observes that he has touched bot-
tom; having reached bottom, he knows there's no lower he can fall.
There's a comfort, a perpetual cushion in certain kinds of misery—
you rest on it, just as a contented man rests at the top of his career.
Top or bottom, either way—but no struggling in the middle!

Does this succeed in explaining myself to you? Most likely not.
I feel you must learn something about the way in which I live, in
order to understand why, after three years have passed, I shower you
with letters, to which I expect no answer.

I live in what I consider to be a state of exile. Among the friends
I have at present is a certain Zampechini, an Italian refugee, and a
certain Lutzck, a German refugee. I have told them, "Boys, we are
in exile together. Not from our separate countries, but from history."
But why proceed in this fashion, at this level, away over your head?
It is enough to state briefly the following conditions:

1. I am alone.
4. The last six women I approached unconditionally turned
me down.
2. There is a war on and I am out of it on all fronts; neither
losing nor profiting by it, and not even employed.
3. I live in a rooming house, on the allowance my father very
grudgingly gives me.
5. Ever since WPA folded up,

but never mind the rest.

I was going to tell you more. I wanted, first, to tell you every-
thing; then, a little; now, nothing. Ah, what's the difference? I can-
not bear to tell you what I have suffered, because I am proud of it,
and it would only bore you. Enough. Let this be a last effort at expla-
nation in a letter full of abortive efforts. As a man who, quite confi-
dently, has touched bottom, both in what he has suffered and in per-
sonal esteem, I feel nothing I do can injure me. Your rebuffs are not,
definitely not a further humiliation. I understand myself too well.
I am of the brotherhood of paupers who endure everything at their
own expense. And so, if I go out of my way and out of my time to
reach after a promised happiness of three years back, this, too, a
deliberate delusion, is also at my own expense. And perhaps even the

=== Page 34 ===
32 PARTISAN REVIEW
greatest irony is my knowing that while you refuse to answer my
letters, you also fail to understand them.
But, no fear. I shall plague you no longer.
Feigenbaum

Dec. 31

Dear Ellen,
Contrary to the word I had given, I called on you yesterday. I
am writing today to identify myself, to make it perfectly clear that
it was I, and no one else, who called.
He said you were out. Who, I do not know. Perhaps it was
“your Willard.” I believed him, made no further inquiries. I left
no message and no name. In a fit of humiliation I withheld my name.
I am writing today to repudiate that humiliation. It was not of the
bottom variety; it was of the rising sort that struggles midway between
its origins and its hopes. It was not true to nature. My humiliation
admits no hopes.

Now that there can be no doubt in your mind as to the identity
of your caller, I may go on to the next point. By calling on you I
satisfied a partial longing. Naturally, complete satisfaction would have
come only with my seeing you. But as it is I saw your house, the door
which opened, the stairs that led up, the door that closed in my face.
Willard does not count. I am indifferent to him. My point is that
with yesterday’s closing of the door I accepted as closed our whole
relationship. I shall no longer plague you with letters, no longer make
any attempt to see you. And this is the truth. You may rely on it, not
because I have promised you—my promises are evidently as little to
be trusted as yours. But it is so because I have at last accepted it, and
have willed it to be so. I find that this decision, against which I have
been fighting ever since your Xmas card came, has, surprisingly, lib-
erated me.

For what I have to say actually has nothing to do with humilia-
tion. Very simply, Ellen, I love you. It is so easy to say, and one can
say it as well as another. Why did I have to torture myself?
I love you. And why do I love you? Because you came to me.
Because, in the basement of the relief station you noticed me before
I noticed you, and because your flirting was not in response to an
act of mine, but an overture, an opening entirely of your own. For

=== Page 35 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 33

this, all my gratitude. Because, at a moment when you did not yet
exist for me, I already existed for you. Isn't this reason enough?

No, it needs further explaining. I feel that the more I love you,
the less you understand me. You must know that a man like myself,
so deeply displeased, dissatisfied with himself as I am, can only be
saved by an act of graciousness. A blessing, external and gratuitous
must come to him. For he will destroy whatever is internal, whatever
comes out of himself. The lower he falls, the more he will demand
and the louder he will clamor for salvation. An absolute beggar
demands the entire world.

This is why I love you. But if I love you because you flirted with
me, I am, at the same time, inclined to disapprove your flirtatiousness.
I could understand flirtatiousness in a nun. But in a woman like your-
self, Ellen! A nun, let us assume, is repressed. But you! Not repres-
sion but bonheur, bliss at every pore. Now that I no longer need
withhold anything, now that I am free, I may tell you what I felt
when I first saw you. Believe me, and here enters another irony, my
first sight of you was intuitive proof that I would have you! That is
what is called spontaneous love. Love pre-exists in the heart, and when
it finds its object it leaps out and enters it and does its business, estab-
lishing a conviction, while the timid soul still tells itself it has no more
than an "interest." But I do not delude myself. I saw and at once
believed, and I knew what I saw and what I believed, and so strong
was my conviction that even the three years that passed and the frus-
trations of the last week have not deprived me of it. Yes, I was sure.
Furthermore, I still am. For it will not go away. I still see you as I
saw you then, excited, plump, in a tight black dress, your arms bare,
your hair loose, your feet in sandal-shoes. I have torn that dress from
you a thousand times, but I have done it reverently, in my mind ob-
serving that same delicacy, that attention to detail I would observe
in fact. Thus I have seen you naked, and I do not revile myself with
the thought that what is only imaginary for me must be actual for
one or many a man. It is my possession. The nakedness with which I
have endowed you is solid and unique, both in the actuality it has
for me, and in its expression, which is entirely its own and not com-
pounded of other women. Nor is the look of your body a wish fulfil-
ment, for I do not assemble you out of separate female perfections-
that art of day dreaming! No, for your breasts, as I imagine them,
are even too large for my preference and your thighs could do with

=== Page 36 ===
34 PARTISAN REVIEW
a little less hair. I have, furthermore, distilled a set of odors to go with
your hair and your arm pits, and these, again, are distinctive; and I
have supplied your skin with textures, and have given you appropriate
sounds-laughter for love play, a sharp intaking of the breath for
passion, and a wildness of hissing and moaning devoid of all language.
This is that solemn nakedness to which we bring not only our passion,
but our capacity for a sensual revenge. But it is not brutal; it is tender.
And above all it is persistent in the face of a thousand complications
I can never make out.

And then the pencil in your mouth, the tongue stuck at me, and
the conversation and your waiting for me and the walk and the invi-
tation to your house, the lunch, and your promise and the happiness
almost, almost reached, and the conviction established beyond over-
throwing! Was it from this that I was to expect denial?

We lean toward the imperfect-it was too good to be true. But
this is no explanation. It will satisfy only a shallow, a skeptical intel-
ligence. The perfect must be true! What else is perfection, and why
do we demand it? But however I explain it, I still do not understand.
I refuse to believe my own reasons.

What then? I love you enough to think evil of you. I am angry
enough to know that what I saw and believed, you, too, saw-but
did not believe. You acknowledged a conviction without sharing it.
And nothing human can be colder!

Look how similarities endanger us. You, with the pencil in your
mouth, knew me well enough, from your own traits, to destroy me.
I am of the same erotic type as you. I, too, must be fed. My whole
life can be explained by hunger. You knew you would have to offer,
give, yield. If only you had not known! If only your perception had
been clouded with that animal stupidity for which we are, occasion-
ally, so grateful in women! Or, if only I had known better! I should
have known that a woman will make a concession on one point only
when she has prepared some reservation on another. As it was, you
managed to concede everything, yet withheld everything. The evil
in your flirtatiousness was that it went beyond flirtation; it offered
love, real love, in order to snatch it away. It was the old game played
to its fullest, criminal in its intelligence, the absolute cheat.

Well, it's over and done with. Of course, in outdoing me you
also had to deny yourself. But a woman will count her self-denial at
a small cost when the game is so large and she masters it. But it's over,

=== Page 37 ===
THE HAND THAT FED ME 35

it's over. Yet it persists. Certain patterns are dangerous. We form them
once and follow them always. And if a man will attach, as I have
done, a whole morality to a single incident, he will always be at the
mercy of "incidents." The insight he will gain will give him no peace.
He will be forced to employ it everywhere, with all the subtle damage
it can do him. And at a time like the present when there is no place
for unhappy men, no understanding they can count on, no mood they
can share, what good will their insight do them?
But, Ellen, I release you. I go back to my own cares, reluctantly,
I admit, but with a certain confidence. My place in the world—see
how quickly one can spring from his place in bed to his place in the
world! Can a woman do as much?—my place in the world is assured,
no matter how difficult it be, for I am my own assurance. I am that
man—and there are many like me—whose place is entirely contained
in his own being. So long as I exist, that is my place, my function.
I do not justify myself. I merely point this out: I have so little, so
little pride, so little belief, so little outward appetite, I am so pared
down to my own core, that I cannot help believing I am an essential
man. And besides, WPA will come back, have no fear. Do you think
I wrote my report on pigeon racing for nothing? It stands there in
the files, waiting, ready to be taken up again. Some day, when the
war is over, and the machines have been removed from the old build-
ings, after the dust has settled and the activity has died down, the
steel vaults will be unlocked and the steel files will be brought out,
and the pigeons will flutter again. Once again the world will take
account of us—we bare, pared, essential men. The earth will once
again acknowledge loneliness, as real as her own mountains. What else
can be done? We may be a generation—we may, as well, be an
eternity. But perhaps a new wrinkle in disasters? Perhaps the night
and the wolves and the waves we howled about back in the 'thirties—
when there was still a little twilight—will really come down to blot
out, swallow, and wash us away? What will be will be.
One only looks to his own accountable and natural future. But
here, I shan't write much longer. The New Year is coming. Ellen,
Ellen, at last I am free. One moment you were my great bitterness,
and now I am in the clear, rid of you. My life will find another bit-
terness, perhaps of a higher fresher quality, perhaps even a bitterness
in some successful thing. What does it matter? I am cushioned at the
bottom and only look forward to what I may expect. For after all,

=== Page 38 ===
36 PARTISAN REVIEW

what is humiliation? It does not endure forever. And when it has
led us underground to our last comfort, look, it has served its purpose
and it is gone. Who knows when new heights may not appear? A
man has only so much in common with his experience. The rest he
derives from God knows where.

I believe some men are capable of rising out of their own lives.
They stand on the same ground as their brothers, but they are, some-
how, transcendental, while their brothers are underground. Their
only secret is a tremendous willingness-they do not struggle with
themselves!

Ellen, all I mean to say is this: I still believe in human happiness,
and in my own to boot. If I cannot make my claim on you, I will
make it on life, demand that existence satisfy the longings it arouses.
It must, it must! For that is happiness: the conviction that something
is necessary.

But how dare I speak of happiness? After all, I was once con-
vinced that you were necessary. And what is necessity without fulfil-
ment? Is it possible? I shall say it is. Be gentle to the unfulfilled, be
good to it. We are accustomed to sing the joys of the happy, the ful-
filled men. Let us also sing the joys of the desolate, the empty men.
Theirs is the necessity without fulfillment, but it is possible that even
to them-who knows?-some joy may come.

I forgive you and release you, Ellen. You are beautiful-go.
But God, if you only knew, if you only knew how willing I am-
always-to take the risk of my happiness!

A Happy New Year!

Love,
Joseph

=== Page 39 ===
Mr. Wheelwright's Wisdom
Ernest Nagel

IN the Spring 1943 issue of The Chimera, Mr. Philip Wheelwright
takes the trouble to comment on my contribution to the PARTISAN
REVIEW “New Failure of Nerve” symposium. His article shows him
to be highly skilled in the arts of condescension and polysyllabic name-
calling, and I shall not dispute his mastery in these fields.* But he also
tries to defend the thesis that "there are sources of valid insight, and
indispensable factors in man's total wisdom, which cannot be decisively
tested by scientific techniques." It is with this issue that I wish briefly
to concern myself.

What is Mr. Wheelwright's defense? Apart from dogmatic affir-
mation, it consists entirely in pointing out certain alleged limitations
of “scientific techniques,” and in asserting as a consequence that
“essentially human canons”—incapable of being stated as propositions
verifiable "by the strict techniques of science”—must be taken as
authoritative in considering problems affecting human destiny. How-
ever, he makes a case for his conclusion only by adopting a sophistical
though familiar rhetorical device: he deliberately caricatures the
claims of his critics by exaggerating them, and then scornfully rejects
those claims as utterly absurd. More specifically, he identifies scientific
method with the special techniques of a special science, namely, phy-
sics; and since he can challenge with apparent plausibility the prac-
ticality of employing that “method” for settling specifically human
questions, he succeeds, to his own immense satisfaction, in laying low
his naturalistic adversaries.

In point of fact, however, none of the contributors to the “New
Failure of Nerve” symposium did identify the use of scientific method

* Since Mr. Wheelwright's style of thinking, unlike mine, is presumably not
“mor.osemantic," he has suffered a curious lapse in interpreting my use of the
term “malicious” (which I employed to characterize certain philosophies of
science) as a term of abuse. My use of the word was modelled upon Santayana's
characterization of Locke's psychology. Santayana employed it, as I did, to de-
scribe the outcome, and not the motives, of a certain type of analysis.

37

=== Page 40 ===
38 PARTISAN REVIEW
with the use of one specialized technique of inquiry. And I am fami-
liar with no naturalist, whether “positivist” or not, who recommends
the application of the differential equations of modern physics for
solving moral problems. Nor does a scientific naturalism stand or fall
with the assumption that all warrantable propositions are expressible
in quantitative terms. In history, in psychology, in biology, even in
physics, propositions are entertained and asserted which involve only
“qualitative” distinctions, without being thereby one bit less subject
to the authority of scientific canons. On the contrary, though precision
is a scientific ideal—an ideal which in some domains is most ade-
quately realized when quantitative measurements are introduced—
vague propositions may be accepted when precise ones are not attain-
able; and in any case, vague propositions will in general be at least
the starting points for further inquiry. Vagueness, a certain amount
of indefiniteness in the content of propositions, does not therefore
constitute a theoretical obstacle to the use of scientific method. More-
over, no one familiar with the actual content and procedures of the
sciences will be inclined to deny that for many propositions which
are tentatively accepted the available evidence is incomplete and pre-
carious, and that the inclusion of propositions into the body of certified
doctrine requires the use of judgment and intellectual imagination
whose exercise is not reducible to definite rules.
These observations are elementary, though not irrelevant to the
consideration of Mr. Wheelwright's article; for if they are sound,
they impugn the pertinence of nearly everything that he has to say.
Naturalists do not deny that men have vital aspirations, luminous
visions, or profound moving moments of living; they do deny that
any of the products of such experiences are, taken by themselves, cases
of knowledge. The fundamental contention of modern naturalists is
that warranted beliefs, whether vague or precise, whether about
nature or man, must be capable of standing up under the scrutiny of
public examination. Such a scrutiny consists in the use of scientific
method: in deducing the consequences entailed by one's assumptions,
and in controlling the validity of those assumptions in the light of a
critical use of sensory data.
There is room for commenting on but two of the specific points
Mr. Wheelwright raises. Consider first his dictum that “spiritual
qualities such as tonal beauty, nobility, and holiness cannot be either
affirmed or denied of a situation on the basis of purely experimental

=== Page 41 ===
MR. WHEELWRIGHT'S WISDOM 39

techniques," and his connected claim that "there are valid kinds of
evidence other than the publicly experimental." Now expressions such
as "tonal beauty," "nobility," and "holiness" are notoriously vague
if not thoroughly ambiguous, and there is room for doubt whether two
people ever use them in exactly the same sense. I make the point only
to suggest that it may be difficult to know what one is talking about
when such terms are taken without some further analysis. It simply
will not do to say that since those expressions are frequently used,
there must be a common core of meaning associated with each of
them. For terms like "democracy," "fascism," or "race," are also
frequently used, and there is good evidence that not all who use them
are making any objective attributions whatsoever.

For the sake of the argument, however, I shall assume that Mr.
Wheelwright's terms do possess sufficiently clear meanings. The ques-
tion then is how we can decide that a given individual does possess
the attribute, say, of nobility. Thus, suppose we wish to determine
whether Mr. Wheelwright has a noble character. Can we do so in any
other way except on evidence that is publicly experimental-noting
that a public experiment is not necessarily one that is carried
out with the techniques of the physical laboratory? Do we not have
to note his actions, and come to some sort of decision on the basis of
what is publicly observed or observable? It may happen, of course,
that if Mr. Wheelwright does not appear in public very often, or that
even if he does so appear he does not become involved in actions of
the sort deemed appropriate for judging nobility of character; the
available evidence will then be quite undecisive. Or he may publish
something, and his readers are led to conjecture that he is one sort
of person rather than another; but unless his readers are overrash, they
will treat their conjecture as a hypothesis, draw whatever conclusion
they can which are entailed by it, wait for further observational data.
which will test them, and perhaps finally form a competent judgment
on his spiritual qualities. But how does ascertaining whether Mr.
Wheelwright is in fact noble differ in principle from ascertaining
whether, for example, an electric current is flowing through a wire?
My argument does not depend, it should be noted, on the assumption
that the meaning of "being noble" can be specified simply in terms
of overt behavior, though this possibility cannot be automatically
ruled out. I recognize that many terms, for example "electric current,"
derive their meaning from a complicated theoretical framework, and

=== Page 42 ===
40 PARTISAN REVIEW
that their meaning cannot in general be adequately specified by
enumerating a definite class of observable attributes. My sole point
is that even in the case of attributes which are defined in terms of a
complex theory, a warranted decision as to their presence or absence
in a situation can be made only on the basis of "public experiments."
Mr. Wheelwright may claim, however, that while other people
can discover his spiritual qualities only on the basis of a procedure
such as outlined, he himself has other means at his disposal. He may
claim that he has a direct insight into his own character which others
cannot have. I am not sure whether he does make such a claim, but
if he should and if his claim were true, he would be unusually fortu-
nate. For most men can discover what sort of creatures they are only
by painful public experience: by noting their responses to men and
events, and by piecing together the evidence so gathered. But however
this may be, the essential point is that such a claim, were it made,
would itself require adjudication-it could not be taken as self-certi-
fying, and would have to be examined in the light of public evidence.
But if this is admitted, the scientific naturalism for which I am arguing
against Mr. Wheelwright is in principle also granted.
Consider next Mr. Wheelright's views on the possibility of ex-
plaining so-called "higher emergent qualities" (such as purposive be-
havior) in terms of theories of inorganic matter. He thinks that al-
though the question is at present undecided if taken strictly, such
explanations would be practically worthless even if they were avail-
able; for according to him "no group of mundane scientists could
ever live long enough to calculate the equation" connecting the move-
ments of inorganic particles of matter with the actions of men. More-
over, and this is perhaps his chief point, although there may be ma-
terial conditions for human behavior, that behavior is radically con-
tingent and is not necessitated absolutely by those conditions: "No
total synthesis, no super-super-formula comprehending all behavior
patterns in the universe is ever possible. For time is open; there is
always a next case, which may or may not conform to the formulas
already elaborated. . . . The really important, epoch-moulding, his-
torically decisive actions of men have a way of defying the best laid
predictions." For these reasons the human scene is said to be so distinct
from inorganic nature that the logic which is authoritative for inquiry
into the latter cannot be adequate for inquiry into the former.
But this is really a curious argument. In the first place, Mr.

=== Page 43 ===
MR. WHEELWRIGHT'S WISDOM 41
Wheelwright assumes a remarkable prescience as to what will be the
structure of physical theory in terms of which human behavior may
"ultimately" be explicable. He is convinced that no practically ade-
quate physical explanation will ever be forthcoming. He may of
course be right. But a hundred years ago he would doubtless have
claimed with the same assurance that no practically adequate theory
of mechanics would ever explain the phenomena of heat; and in this
case he would most certainly have been wrong. Like everyone else,
I do not know whether an explanation of human behavior in terms
of some general theory of physics will ever be achieved. I do believe,
however, that the hypothesis that such explanations may be given,
has been, and continues to be, a most fruitful one, and is worth
exploring to the utmost. But in the second place, Mr. Wheelwright
introduces a glaringly red herring when he raises the question of the
contingency of human behavior. In what way is the "openness" of
time more relevant for the discussion of human behavior than it is for
the study of inorganic phenomena? Is not his point concerning the
alleged impossibility of an all-comprehensive formula just as pertinent
for a philosophy of natural science as it is for a theory of human
nature? The clear answer is that his observations are just as relevant
and pertinent to the one case as they are to the other; he is therefore
guilty of an obvious non-sequitur when he concludes in the inadequacy
in matters of morals of the logical canons operative in physical inquiry.
What has the alleged fact that the decisive actions of men defy the
best laid predictions to do with the question whether there are other
canons of cognitive validity than those employed and recognized in
the positive sciences? Do best laid predictions in matters physical never
go astray? And does he believe that the "human canons" he finds
expressed in great works of literature enable us to anticipate the
"epoch-moulding" acts of men? Surely his answer to this last question
must be in the negative. But if the answer is negative, precisely what
limitations of scientific method are exhibited by the fact that works
of literature have a special subject-matter? Mr. Wheelwright has
certainly produced no competent evidence to show that the "wisdom"
he finds in such books as Plato's Symposium or Hamlet is not capable
of "verification by the strict techniques of science" unless, indeed,
he begs the question at issue by equating "the strict techniques of
science" with "the techniques of physical measurement."
Mr. Wheelwright is primarily a moralist whose chief concern is

=== Page 44 ===
42 PARTISAN REVIEW
with problems involved in the discipline of "the Inner Self." The
many questionable assumptions behind his distinction between "the
inward" and "the outward" are undoubtedly the rock bottom premises
from which he thinks, but this is hardly the place to consider them.
It is worth noting, however, that according to him education should
aim among other things, at "the discipline and encouragement of
discriminating sensitivity to the best values which speak, or may speak,
within men's hearts." Which values, and in what manner are they
to be judged "best"? Men's hearts "speak" differently in different
climes and at different times, and one cannot simply take the fact that
values are "spoken" as evidence that they are valid or even compatible
with one another. But on this crucial point Mr. Wheelwright wraps
his wisdom in an aristocratic silence.

THESE PURISTS

Lovely! all the essential parts,
like an oyster without a shell
fresh and sweet tasting, to be
swallowed, chewed and swallowed.

Or better, a brain without a
skull. I remember once a guy in
our anatomy class dropped one
from the third floor window on
an organ grinder in Pine Street.

W. C. WILLIAMS

=== Page 45 ===
THE INTELLECTUAL

What should the wars do with these jigging fools?

The man behind the book may not be man,
His own man or the book's or yet the time's,
But still be whole, deciding what he can
In praise of politics or German rimes;

But the intellectual lights a cigarette
And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile
Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget
What he has been resuming all the while.

He talks to overhear, she to withdraw
To some interior feminine fireside
Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw
Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride,

Making him think of cats, a stray of which
Some days sets up a howling in his brain,
Pure interference such as this neat bitch
Seems to create from listening disdain.

But talk is all the value, the release,
Talk is the very fillip of an act,
The frame and subject of the masterpiece
Under whose film of age the face is cracked.

His own forehead glows like expensive wood,
But back of it the mind is disengaged,
Self-sealing clock recording bad and good
At constant temperature, intact, unaged.

43

=== Page 46 ===
44
PARTISAN REVIEW
But strange, his body is an open house
Inviting every passerby to stay;
The city to and fro beneath his brows
Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day.

Think of a private thought, indecent room
Where one might kiss his daughter before bed!
Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb,
Console your neighbor for his recent dead;

Do something! die in Spain or paint a green
Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did),
Or start another Little Magazine,
Or move in with a woman, have a kid.

Invulnerable, impossible, immune,
Do what you will, your will will not be done
But dissipate the light of afternoon
Till evening flickers like the midnight sun,

And midnight shouts and dies: I'd rather be
A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn
Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free,
Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn.

I'd rather be a barber and cut hair
Than walk with you in gilt museum halls,
You and the puma-lady, she so rare
Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls.

Go take yourselves apart, but let me be
The fault you find with everyman. I spit,
I laugh, I fight; and you, l'homme qui rit,
Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.

October 24/43
KARL SHAPIRO

=== Page 47 ===
History vs. The City of God
Richard V. Chase

LIKE previous centuries, ours has invented an abstract “man”
who is supposed to embody the fundamental qualities of human
nature. The twentieth-century “man” is irrational and religious.
Pareto, and the other “Machiavellians,” have endowed this “man”
with what Pareto called a “sociology”; the psychoanalysts have sup-
plied him with an unconscious full of overwhelming primordial images
and tyrannical instincts; Bergson has given him a “life force” and a
primitive religion. It has remained for A. J. Toynbee* to provide
him with a world history.

Perhaps most of the irrationalists of our time have had their
roots deep in the Christian religion. Their sense of the evil and
treachery in human nature is often close to the sense of Original Sin.
Their mysticism, especially in the case of Bergson, merges with
Christian mysticism. With the exception of the neo-Thomists, how-
ever, Toynbee is the most overtly Christian of all; and we must go
back to St. Augustine to understand Toynbee’s idea of history.

When Gibbon wrote at the end of his History that he had “des-
cribed the triumph of barbarism and religion,” he grievously damaged
the prestige of Christian historiography. But time heals wounds, and
the tradition that ran from St. Augustine’s City of God and Orosius’
History against the Pagans in the fifth century to Bossuet’s Universal
History in the seventeenth has come down to Toynbee’s Study of His-
tory in the twentieth. For although the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries rejected the Augustinian historical theory, Toynbee has em-

* Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in 1889; educated at Winchester and
Balliol; Political Intelligence, 1918; delegate to the Paris Peace Conference;
Professor of History at U. of London, etc. Three volumes of the History appeared
in 1934 and three more in 1939. At least three more are yet to come.
45

=== Page 48 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW
braced it anew, with the emotions of one who has come home after
wandering frantically among the materialists. To Augustine, the sack
of Rome heralded the end of the sinful City of the Pagans; Toynbee
believes that we may have arrived at a similar crisis when western
man "made a holocaust of his own children in our great Western
Civil War of A.D. 1914-18." The age of reason and science which
flourished from the time of Gibbon to our time becomes, in the mind
of Toynbee, a new age of paganism. And as the Christian church in-
herited the Roman universal state, so, he hopes, a new church will
inherit an Anglo-Saxon universal state. St. Augustine thought that
history was one long preparation for the coming of the savior; Toyn-
bee, who has heard of about 25 times as many civilizations as Augus-
tine, still thinks so. Whereas Gibbon thought that progress was man's
increasing ability to amend his own "crimes, follies and misfortunes,"
St. Augustine and Professor Toynbee think it is an ascension from the
earthly City of Destruction to the heavenly City of God.
Toynbee's History shows how thoroughly we are repeating the
religious experience of the late days of antiquity. The mysteries of
death and resurrection, which filled the ancient world with the coming
of the Oriental fertility cults, are the very fabric of A Study of History.
That our own culture is deeply concerned with these matters is suf-
ficiently proclaimed by works like The Plumed Serpent, The Waste
Land and Finnegans Wake. The intuitions of the conservative profes-
sor of history have become those of Lawrence, Eliot and Joyce, though
Toynbee would frown on these writers if he were acquainted with
their writing. The apocalyptic announcement about the
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
and the searching "in stony places" for the resurrected life in Eliot's
short poem are repeated with endless ramification in Toynbee's
several thousand pages of universal history.
That history should be universal is one of Toynbee's basic
dogmas; A Study of History tries to encompass all known civiliza-
tions. Toynbee is inspired by the wide visions of Ibn Khaldun, de
Gobineau, Turgot and Lord Acton. He believes, with Acton, that a
universal history does not have to be "a burden on the memory"
and that it can be "an illumination of the soul." He attributes Acton's
memorable failure ever to write his vast history of liberty to "the

=== Page 49 ===
CITY OF GOD 47

sterilizing influence of Industrialism upon historical thought." He
believes that Acton's mind was paralyzed by the division-of-labor
philosophy of historical writing, which has resulted in such disjointed
compendia as the Cambridge Histories. Whether or not he is right
about Lord Acton (and I don't think he is), Toynbee is certainly
wrong in his belief that the mediocre compendium history written
by specialists is the inevitable result of applying the scientific method
to history. Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs does not imply the Cam-
bridge Histories any more than Sir Isaac Newton implies Henry Ford.

A world history, however, must be composed of the separate
civilizations which the specialists have described. Toynbee rejects the
belief of the Enlightenment that western culture is the single fruit of
all previous societies. This idea, he says, indicates the overweening
pride of "Homo Occidentalis Mechanicus," who thought of him-
self as a "Lord of Creation" on whose boundaries lived other kinds
of people known as "Natives." There are, in fact, at least twenty-one
civilizations in the history of the world of comparable merit and
interest. Seven of these societies are still living, and of these ours is
only one.

Toynbee singles civilizations out according to their religions; he
disavows political, economic, environmental and aesthetic criteria,
believing that these always prove superficial. His civilizations are thus
the Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumeric, Mayan, Syriac, Indic,
Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (in Russia), Orthodox
Christian (main body), Far Eastern (in Korea and Japan), Far
Eastern (main body), Iranic, Arabic, Hindu, Mexic, Yucatec and
Babylonic. But to think of societies as discrete units would be, ac-
cording to Toynbee, to subscribe either to the fallacy of materialism
or to the crude organic morphology of Spengler. He feels that there
must be some encompassing medium. And this is where, having
masterfully distinguished his twenty-one societies as "intelligible fields
of study," Toynbee dissolves his distinctions into a mystic holism. He
loses himself in long, loosely selected quotations from Gerald Heard
(The Ascent of Humanity), General Smuts (Holism and Evolution)
and Bergson. Bergson is usually the bridge on which he passes from
his evidence to his cosmic generalizations. Bergson, says Toynbee,
"feels Life and feels it as a whole"; Life is a continuum evolving
toward the divine. The twenty-one civilizations are united across
space and time by their creative élan and by their striving "upward"
Bngineer.
Langer
Fartune
Jan 1949
Reince
Dante

=== Page 50 ===
48 PARTISAN REVIEW
in the range of life above Sub-man to the stage of Superman. All
human societies, including the modern primitive societies, have accom-
plished the first and so far the greatest of feats by mutating from the
sub-human to the human. The twenty-one civilizations have all tried,
unsuccessfully, to make the further mutation into the realm of Super-
men, which Christians call the City of God.
Toynbee's general practice, then, is to enumerate the historical
methods of his naturalist or scientific predecessors, to find them,
(along with the methods of the German idealists, culminating in
Spengler) inadequate, and to convey his own meaning by the devices
of religious mythology. He accuses the naturalists of failing to respect
the Vital Principle, a mistake which he calls the "Apathetic Fallacy."
One senses the relief and exaltation in the passage of A Study of His-
tory in which Toynbee, having laboriously collected his facts, makes
his far-reaching generalizations. These passages are permeated with
the spirit, as well as most of the words, of the New Testament. Science
fails him on the brink of general truth; the study of matter gives
way to the study of Life and Spirit.
The world mythology of death and resurrection-the myth of
Christ is the most perfect example-is the truest intuition of mankind.

2.

The first three volumes of the History describe the genesis and
growth of civilizations. When Toynbee asks himself how civilizations
come into being, he first examines the two master explanations of
Race and Environment. In an interpolated essay (a small masterpiece)
he dismisses all racial theories of the Houston Stewart Chamberlain
order. He then interprets Race to mean the Divine élan as it mani-
fests itself in man. Toynbee canonizes Environment into the weapon
of the Devil. Darwin's "variation," for instance, is really the striving
through the environment. Civilizations are born by undergoing an
"ordeal" in "response" to a "challenge." They must weather the
titanic struggle of superhuman forces which arouse them from the
static to the dynamic.

The myths of Faust and Job explain the birth process in cosmic
terms. A society is tempted by the Devil to shake off its static torpor.
The Devil challenges God by trying to destroy man; his office is to

=== Page 51 ===
CITY OF GOD 49
upset the static equilibrium, since God in His Perfection is incapable
of doing so alone. By trying to destroy man, the environment has
done the work of God. The challenge itself may take a physical or a
human form. Deserts, mountain ranges, jungles, oceans, droughts,
overpopulation, invasions, slavery, migrations, all have presented
their challenge to man. There is a golden mean, however, in the
severity of the challenge, and history is full of failures, testimony that
the Devil has had the best of it. The Polynesians, who achieved the
beginnings of a high civilization on Easter Island, were finally unable
to sustain the formidable challenge of the ocean and have ever since
responded only to the soft challenge of their islands. The Spartans
petrified into an "arrested civilization" through over-specialization in
response to an overly severe military challenge.
It will be observed that there is a large element of naturalism
in this Toynbeean struggle of Challenge-and-Response. His account,
for example, of how the Eskimos and the Nomads "reverted to animal-
ism" by merging themselves with the functions of the animals is
solidly and finely drawn. And his account of environmental forces
generally shows a tenacious mind at work. At every important juncture
of the book, however, when we feel that the facts warrant a toughly
limited generalization, we are asked to follow Toynbee into the realms
of myth and religion. But it is Toynbee's sense of the natural dif-
ficulty of human life, and not his walking with God, that lends
dignity to his History; and sometimes it lends dignity to his God.
Civilizations grow after birth in a rhythmic pattern of stasis and
movement by responding to a series of different challenges. The élan
of Prometheus (the mythical type of the growth process) repeatedly
overturns the static Zeus. As each ordeal it successfully sustained, the
civilization comes nearer and nearer to the City of God. The criterion
of growth is of course not an increasing command over the environ-
ment: it is the transfer of human energy and attention from the
world to the mind, from the natural to the spiritual, from science
to religion. The world seems ultimately contemptible to Toynbee,
and the intellectual disciplines which deal closely with man's inter-
actions with nature seem to be vulgar and even beastly techniques.
James Burnham sums up the historical theory of the "Machiavel-
lians" (Mosca, Michels, Pareto) thus: "Historical . . . science is
above all the study of the élite, its composition, its structure, and the
mode of its relation to the non-élite." Burnham will find in Toynbee

=== Page 52 ===
[p-92, the ego fall in the elits
50 PARTISAN REVIEW
the world historian who meets his qualifications; but he will not find
a substantial reason for regarding this method as "historical science."
Paret o simply asserted the élite theory of history with an ill-tempered
crankishness; Toynbee, on the other hand, drifts toward it, out of a
deep religious reverence for sainthood. But the result is the same.
Toynbee believes that civilizations are led "upward" by "gifted individuals," who form "creative minorities." The creative minority acts
as a kind of middleman between God and the masses. It does not, according to Toynbee, rule by force while a civilization is still growing;
it persuades the masses by "charm" and unconscious suggestion. The
masses follow by acts of "mimesis," though just what these acts are
is never made clear. The "gifted individuals" are those who can
mystically relive in their souls the death and resurrection of the divine
hero. They, and the civilization they lead, attain their goal by "the
movement of Withdrawal-and-Return." They withdraw from the
world, that is, when some great task faces them; in the privacy of the
spirit they prepare themselves to return reborn to the world and take
up the challenge.
At this point we begin to understand that Toynbee is writing
a vast drama; in fact, a Greek tragedy. His idea of Greek tragedy is
that of his fellow English anthropologist-Hellenists, Frazer, Jane Har-
rison and Gilbert Murray. In the hands of these scholars the Greek
tragedy has come to mean the drama of the "eniautos daimon" or
year spirit. The Golden Bough described the worldwide foundations
of the ritual death and rebirth of the fertility god. Jane Harrison in
her Prolegomena to Greek Religion and Themis took this cycle of the
death and rebirth of vegetation to be the central fact of Greek tragedy.
But like Toynbee, she found it necessary to convert the Greeks to Berg-
sonism. The Greeks, we are told, worshipped élan vital through its
representative, the spirit of the year. According to this school of
thought the main elements of a Greek tragedy (more or less ap-
parent in all the extant plays) are 1. the Agon or contest between
the vegetative fertility of summer and the death-dealing winter; 2.
the Pathos or the ritual slaying of the "eniautos daimon," which
signified the temporary success of winter; and 3. the Epiphany or
resurrection of the god with the promise of renewed life. In the Agon
of the Greek divinity we perceive the Toynbean contest of God in
man with the Devil in the environment. The Pathos of a civilization
occurs when it "withdraws" from the world, turning in upon itself
@
am
fertility god" to the Creature Spirit

=== Page 53 ===
CITY OF GOD 51

behind its own borders, as its spiritual leaders withdraw from life to
undergo the ordeal of submitting the conscious to the unconscious. This
is the critical moment according to Toynbee (as one must agree if one
has granted him the validity of the mystic experience at all),
for all depends upon the return to the new life for the purpose of
meeting the adversary. The Indians, says Toynbee, once failed in the
person of the Buddha, who dissolved himself in Nirvana. The Greeks
failed in the person of Plato, who withdrew but did not return to the
world. The Romans failed in the person of Marcus Aurelius, who lost
himself in the mystic City of Zeus. These men were annihilated in
the mystic experience-dismembered like the Greek god of the
tragedies in his sparagmos; the Christian Supermen of history, on the
other hand, have returned from death transfigured, and have led so-
ciety toward God.

Toynbee's theory of the growth of civilizations is clearly based
on two fallacies. One is the notion that you have explained movement
by asserting that there is an élan which makes things move. The other
is the belief in mutations. * The evolution from matter to Sub-man to
Man to Superman to God is accomplished, Toynbee holds, by a
series of decisive mutations: this is "our present insight into the in-
wardness of natural phenomena" (Vol. III, p. 192). One is therefore
mystified to learn (Vol. VI, p. 169) that "the principle of continuity
is of the essence of the movement of growth in whatever terms we may
try to describe or define it." This is plainly a contradiction, the result
of thinking sometimes as a naturalist and sometimes as a super-
naturalist. The full-time naturalist will agree with him on the general
principle of evolutionary continuity. He will not agree that our present
insight into nature discloses any mutations decisive or clear enough to
support a general theory of biology, let alone history. The effect of this
part-time naturalism is that Toynbee has really written two histories
in one book, incompatible and largely irrelevant to each other.

* "In the last twenty-five years . . . many new facts about evolution and
heredity have been discovered, and the balance has now swung over heavily and,
I think, permanently, in favour of Darwinism. Chief among these new facts is
the discovery that most mutations are not large but very small steps of change. . . .
In certain respects, indeed, modern evolutionary theory is more Darwinian than
Darwin was himself." Julian Huxley in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter,
1943.

@ is there contraction between mutations and "centainty -
if the "mutations are in a line of continuous development.

=== Page 54 ===
52 PARTISAN REVIEW

3.

From the evidence of the twenty-one "intelligentible fields of study,"
Toynbee concludes that a civilization breaks down when it is unable
to meet the crucial challenge of its career. Civilizations are hounded
by the "nemesis of creativity," the tendency, that is, of those who
create to fall victim to their own tools and to render themselves unfit
to meet new problems by having over-specialized their method of
dealing with old ones. By a kind of "reversal of roles," they become
the reactionaries. They now frustrate newly creative individuals, and
the crucial challenge, presenting itself again and again in the same
form and forcing the civilization into a more and more rigid pattern
of response, is never successfully met. The once "creative minority"
rigidifies itself into a "dominant minority," which can rule only by
force, since it no longer attracts the emotions of the masses. The
mimesis of the people, once poetic and pliable, now becomes me-
chanical, as an Orpheus, the ideal mimetic leader, turns into a Xerxes,
"the drill sergeant with his whip," who rides herd on the masses. The
dominant minority commits "the sin of Idolatry," i.e., infatuation
with past techniques and institutions. The infatuation of Orthodox
Christendom with the ghost of the Roman Empire and the self-
idolization of Athens as "the Education of Hellas" are examples of
this artificial stasis in the flux of time. (Gasser)

The "schism in society" between the dominant minority and the
people is aggravated by further schisms as the civilization declines.
Two small "proletariats," the internal and the external, break away
from the civilization. The internal proletariat is the new creative
minority; it "withdraws" from the world in order to create a universal
church, which is the lifeblood of the civilization of the future. The
external proletariat forms itself into barbarian war bands on the
periphery of the dying civilization. The dominant minority pur-
chases a reprieve from its fatal sentence by creating a universal state
in the "Indian Summer" of the civilization; the universal state, besides
achieving a temporary stasis by imposing a Pax Oecumenica on the
world, also functions in the future by providing an institutional frame-
work for the universal church of the future. Toynbee finds a great
deal of evidence among his twenty-one societies to support this scheme,
but its close correspondence to the disintegration of the Roman Empire
and the birth of Western Christendom is apparent.

=== Page 55 ===
CITY OF GOD 53

As for the fate of our Western Civilization, Toynbee is inclined
in these first six volumes to suspend final judgment. In our history
since the sixteenth century, however, he perceives the "three and one-
half beats of Rout and Rally" which spell out the doom of a dying
society. The Rout of the religious wars of the seventeenth century was
followed by the eighteenth-century Rally of peace and toleration. The
more serious Rout of the war of Nationalism from the eighteenth to
the twentieth century will be followed by the Rally of a Pax Oec-
menica. If our civilization conforms to the others, the universal-state-
to-be will pass through another beat of Rout and Rally before the
final paroxysm of extinction.

We learned that during the process of growth, scientific control
over the environment can not be taken as a criterion of progress. We
are now told that science is a sign of failure. Indeed, if science is not
actually the cause of social disintegration, it is at least an illness which
"an ironic or malicious or retributive Providence is apt to bestow
upon a society in disintegration." We have heard this often in our
religious times. And Toynbee is making the common mistake of first
confusing the parochial techniques of industrialism and war with
the scientific method, and then convincing himself that the scientific
method must be responsible for the plight of the world.

Volume V of A Study of History contains a remarkable list of
the kinds of thought and feeling that appear in a declining society; but
I shall not describe them here. The two master tendencies of a declin-
ing society, however, are "Archaism" and "Futurism," terms which
Toynbee uses literally. Archaism appears in such various manifesta-
tions as the dairying activities of Marie Antoinette, the revival of the
Irish language in Eire, and the enslavement of the Greeks to the
memory of the ancient City of Cecrops. But the brittle world of the
archaeist is doomed to be smashed by the elemental élan. Futurism,
per se, appears in the mechanical abolition of the past—for example
in the Westernization of Turkey, and in the classic Chinese case of
the Burning of the Books by the Emperor Ts'in She Hwang-ti. It is
proof both of Toynbee's celestial, bird's-eye-view method and of the
mistiness of his thinking that after basing his theory of growth on
Bergson, he presents Bergson as an example of "the anti-intellectual"
Futurism" of our time, and even shows that the "gentle" Bergson and
"violent" totalitarianism have a common animus. The futurist and
the archaist are predestined to fail because their utopias are mundane.

=== Page 56 ===
54 PARTISAN REVIEW

> But futurism points the way of salvation. In his failure to capture the
mundane future, the futurist glimpses the true path of Detachment
and Transfiguration. The ideal creative individual of a disintegrating
society is the dying savior-god-Christ and, in their several civiliza-
tions, Zagreu, Tammuz, Atts, Balder, Adonis and Osiris-whose res-
> urrection shows man the way out of the City of Destruction. Thus
the hope of a declining is still the hope of a growing civilization: the
mystic experience of detachment and rebirth. Sir James Frazer wrote
> the history of the dying gods without losing his faith in rational
thought. But to Toynbee, Frazer's long catalogue of the gods of death
and resurrection seems to say only that "one generation passeth away
and another generation cometh" and that "there is no new thing
> under the Sun." Frazer, Toynbee would say, has committed the
Apathetic Fallacy by not understanding the mystic message of the
second birth which these fertility gods had to give. And so Toynbee,
the greatest of living historians, joins that earnest quest of our time
after the elusive wraith of the crucial experience of the human being:
his birth.

4.

A Study of History is a startling achievement of the historical
> imagination. It has an extraordinary wealth of sensitive erudition,
which is occasionally marshalled into a beautiful synthesis of history
and mythology. One hopes that because of Toynbee the instruments
of historical study will be made more sensitive, that historical analysis
will be made more flexible (and that the imagination will learn to
encompass the ranges of time and space more knowingly.) But pre-
cisely because Toynbee himself loses his sensitivity when he passes
from nature to myth, he is able to convince himself that the two are
really one. As Lionel Trilling has said (PARTISAN REVIEW, May-June,
1942)

... if the historical sense is always with us, it must, for that reason, be refined
and made more exact. Above all, it must be kept complicated. History, like science
and art, implies abstraction. ... But in making our abstraction, we ought to be
aware of what we are doing; we ought to remember that our abstraction is not
equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which we have abstracted.
The historian ... should always be humbly aware of the limits of his abstraction
and be willing to complicate it.

Toynbee often alleges that the philosophical conclusions of the En-

=== Page 57 ===
CITY OF GOD 55
lightenment were not humble enough-indeed, he offers public
expiations for the excessive pride of rationalism. But he has far less
of humbleness, in Trilling's sense, than the thinkers of the Enlighten-
ment, though, like other religious men, he goes about the grandiose
business of the spirit as if he were performing an act of abject self-
discipline. He constantly makes the unwarranted abstractions of which
Trilling speaks: he abstracts a mythical élite from the masses, he
abstracts the mind and its processes from their genetic situations, and
in doing so, he all but separates history from man.
I think we must require of the historian that he never forget the
social realities of the present. Toynbee's English predecessors, like
Gibbon, Macaulay and Lecky, wrote history with the practical intent
of illuminating the obscure areas of present social thinking. Toynbee
does not illuminate the present: he dissolves it in his immense sweep
of past and future. He has, nevertheless, an implicit message for us
about the present. If we become a complete Toynbean, we shall
believe that enlightened social action is degrading or, at best, fruitless.
We shall believe that the wreckage of our time is an inevitable way-
station in a pre-determined cycle of history, and that even if we had
seriously tried, we could have done nothing to alter the course of the
cycle. We shall believe, furthermore, that though some élites are
"bad" and oppressive, others are "good" and humane. But if the
Enlightenment taught us one simple lesson by its estimate of the Chris-
tian élite, it was that this is not so. The principles and policies of Toyn-
bee's saintly élite (like those of all élites), not having been derived
from the study of nature and man, can be imposed on them only by
the violence of a form that does not fit its substance.
One finishes Toynbee's History with the sense of having had a
great and worthwhile experience. But the historian, one feels, should
not ask us to exchange the possibilities and probabilities of the real
world for the irrelevant mysteries of a celestial tragedy. I missed in
Toynbee the clear-headed empiricism and the natural sarcasm of his
English predecessors. I missed the sense, in short, of what men have
done, what men are doing and what men ought to do.
bace
gecer
Sollymos
Macmin
Lougure
boce

=== Page 58 ===
The Ballad of Billie Potts

Robert Penn Warren

(When I was a child I heard this story from an old lady who was a relative of
mine. The scene, according to her version, was in the section of Western Kentucky
known as "Between the Rivers," the region between the Cumberland and the
Tennessee. Years later, I came across another version in a book on the history of
the outlaws of the Cave Inn Rock. The name of Bardstown in the present account
refers to Bardstown, Kentucky, where the first race track west of the mountains
was laid out late in the eighteenth century.)

BIG Billie Potts was big and stout
In the land between the rivers.
His shoulders were wide and his gut stuck out
Like a croker of nubbins and his holler and shout
Made the bob-cat shiver and the black-jack leaves shake
In the section between the rivers.
He would slap you on your back and laugh.

Big Billie had a wife, she was dark and little
In the land between the rivers,
And clever with her wheel and clever with her kettle,
But she never said a word and when she sat
By the fire her eyes worked slow and narrow like a cat
In the land between the rivers.
Nobody knew what was in her head.

They had a big boy with fuzz on his chin
So tall he ducked the door when he came in,
A clabber-headed bastard with snot in his nose
And big red wrists hanging out of his clothes
And a whicker when he laughed where his father had a beller
In the section between the rivers.
56

=== Page 59 ===
BILLIE POTTS 57

They called him Little Billie.
He was their darling.

(It is not hard to see the land, what it was.
Low hills, and oak. The fetid bottoms where
The slough uncoiled and in the tangled cane,
Where no sun comes, the muskrat's astute face
Was lifted to the yammering jay; then dropped.
Some cabin where the shag-bark stood and the
Magnificent tulip-tree; both now are gone.
But the land is there, and as you top a rise,
Beyond you all the landscape steams and simmers
-The hills, now gutted, red, cane-brake and the black-jack yet.
The oak leaf steams unders the powerful sun.
"Mister, is this the right road to Paducah?"
The red face, seamed and gutted like the hills,
Slow under time, and with the innocent savagery
Of Time, the bleared eyes rolling, answers from
Your dream: "They names hit so, but I ain't bin.")

Big Billie was the kind who laughed but could spy
The place for a ferry where folks would come by
In the land between the rivers.
He built an inn and folks bound West
Hitched their horses there to take their rest
And grease the gall and grease the belly
And jaw and spit under the trees.
Big Billie said: "Git down, friend, and take yore ease!"
He would slap you on your back and set you at his table.

(Leaning and slow, you see them move
In massive passion colder than any love:
Their lips move but you do not hear the words
Nor trodden twig nor fluted irony of birds
Nor hear the rustle of the heart
That, heave and settle, gasp and start,
Heaves like a fish in the ribs' dark basket borne
West from the great water's depth whence it was torn.

Their names are like the leaves, but are forgot

=== Page 60 ===
58 PARTISAN REVIEW
-The slush and swill of the world's great pot
That foamed at the mountain-lip, and spilled
Like quicksilver across green baize, the unfulfilled
Disparate glitter, gleam, wild symptom, seed
Flung in the long wind: silent, proceed
Past meadow, salt-lick, and the lyric swale;
Enter the arbor, shadow of trees, fade, fail.)

Big Billie was sharp at swap and trade
And could smell the nest where the egg was laid,
He could read and cipher and they called him squire
In the land between the rivers.
And he added up his money while he sat by the fire
And sat in the shade while folks sweated and strove,
For he was the one who fatted and throve
In the section between the rivers.
"Thank you kindly, sir," Big Billie would say
When the man in the black coat paid him at streak of day
And swung to the saddle and was ready to go.
And rode away and didn't know
That he was already as good as dead,
For at midnight the message had been sent ahead:
"Man in black coat, riding bay mare with star."

(There was a beginning but you cannot see it.
There will be an end but you cannot see it.
They will not turn their faces to you though you call,
Who pace a logic merciless as light,
Whose law is their long shadow on the grass,
Sun at the back; pace, pass,
And passing nod in that glacial delirium
While the tight sky shudders like a drum
And speculation rasps its idiot nails
Across the dry slate where you did the sum.

The answer is in the back of the book but the page is gone.
And grandma told you to tell the truth but she is dead.
And heedless, their hairy faces fixed
Beyond your call or question now, they move

=== Page 61 ===
BILLIE POTTS
59

Under the infatuate weight of their wisdom,
Precious but for the preciousness of their burden,
Sainted and sad and sage as the hairy ass, who bear
History like bound faggots, with stiff knees;
And breathe the immaculate climate where
The lucent leaf is lifted, lank beard fingered, by no breeze,
Rapt in the fabulous complacency of fresco, vase, or frieze:

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace.)

Little Billie was full of piss and vinegar
And full of sap as a maple tree
And full of tricks as a lop-eared pup,
So one night when the runner didn't show up,
Big Billie called Little and said, "Saddle up,"
And nodded toward the man was taking his sup
With his belt unlatched and his feet to the fire.
Big Billie said, "Give Amos a try,
Fer this feller takes the South Fork and Amos'll be nïgher
Than Baldy or Buster, and Amos is sly
And slick as a varmint, and I don't deny
I lak bizness with Amos fer he's one you kin trust,
And hit looks lak they's mighty few.
Amos will split up fair and square."

Little Billie had something in his clabber-head
In addition to snot, and he reckoned he knew
How to skin a cat or add two and two.
So long before the sky got red
Over the land between the rivers,
He hobbled his horse back in the swamp
And squatted on his hams in the morning dew and damp
And scratched his stomach and grinned to think
How his Pap would be proud and his Mammy glad
To know what a thriving boy they had.
He always was a good boy to his darling Mammy.

(Think of yourself riding away from the dawn,
Think of yourself and the unnamed ones who had gone

=== Page 62 ===
60 PARTISAN REVIEW
Before, riding, who rode away from goodbye, goodbye,
And toward hello, toward Time's unwinking eye;
And like the cicada had left, at cross-roads or square,
The old shell of self, thin, ghostly, translucent, light as air:
At dawn riding into the curtain of whispering green,
Away from the vigils and voices into the green
World, land of the innocent bough, land of the leaf.
Think of your face green in the submarine light of the leaf.

Or think of yourself crouched at the swamp-edge,
Dawn-silence past last owl-hoot and not yet at day-verge,
First bird-stir, titmouse or drowsy warbler not yet.
You touch the grass in the dark and your hand is wet.
Then light: and you wait for the stranger's hoofs on the soft trace,
And under the green leaf's translucence the light bathes your face.

Think of yourself at dawn: Which are you? What?)

Little Billie heard hoofs on the soft grass,
But he squatted and let the rider pass,
For he didn't want to waste good lead and powder
Just to make the slough-fish and swamp-buzzards prouder
In the land between the rivers.
But he saw the feller's face and thanked his luck
It was the one Pap said was fit to pluck.
So he got on his horse and cantered up the trace.
Called, "Hi thar!" and the stranger watched him coming,
And sat his mare with a smile on his face,
Just watching Little Billie and smiling and humming.
Little Billie rode up and the stranger said,
"Why bless my heart, if it ain't Little Billie!"

"Good mornen," said Billie, and said, "My Pap
Found somethin you left and knowed you'd be missen,
And he ain't wanten nuthin nor proper his'n."
But the stranger did nothing but smile and listen
Polite as could be to what Billie said.
But he must have had eyes in the side of his head
As they rode along beside the slough

=== Page 63 ===
BILLIE POTTS
61
In the land between the rivers,
Or known what Billie was out to do,
For when Billie said, "Mister, I've brung hit to you,"
And reached his hand for it down in his britches,
The stranger just reached his own hand, too.

"Boom!" Billie's gun said, and the derringer, "Bang!"
"Oh, I'm shot!" Billie howled and grabbed his shoulder.
"Not bad," said the stranger, "for you're born to hang,
But I'll save some rope 'fore you're a minute older
If you don't high-tail to your honest Pap
In the section between the rivers."
Oh, Billie didn't tarry and Billie didn't linger,
For Billie didn't trust the stranger's finger
And didn't admire the stranger's face
And didn't like the climate of the place,
So he turned and high-tailed up the trace,
With blood on his shirt and snot in his nose
And pee in his pants for he'd wet his clothes,
And the stranger just sits and admires how he goes,
And says, "Why, that boy would do right well back on the Bardstown
track!"

"You fool!" said his Pap, but his Mammy cried
To see the place where the gore-blood dried
Round the little hole in her darling's hide.
She wiped his nose and patted his head,
But Pappy barred the door and Pappy said,
"That bastard has maybe got some friends
In the section between the rivers,
And you can't say how sich bizness ends
And a man ain't sure he kin trust his neighbors,
Fer thar's mortal spite fer him sweats and labors."
He didn't ask Little how he felt,
But said, "Two hundred in gold's in my money belt,
And take the roan and the brand-new saddle
And stop yore blubberen and skeedaddle,
And the next time you try and pull a trick
Fer God's sake don't talk but do hit quick."

=== Page 64 ===
62 PARTISAN REVIEW

So little Billie took his leave
And left his Mammy there to grieve
And left his Pappy in Old Kaintuck
And headed West to try his luck
And left the land between the rivers,
For it was Roll, Missouri,
It was Roll, roll, Missouri.
And he was gone nigh ten long year
And never sent word to give his Pappy cheer
Nor wet pen in ink for his Mammy dear.
For Little Billie never was much of a hand with a pen-staff.

(There is always another country and always another place.
There is always another name and another face.
And the name and the face are you, and you
The name and the face, and the stream you gaze into
Will show the adoring face, show the lips that lift to you
As you lean with the implacable thirst of self,
As you lean to the image which is yourself,
To set the lip to lip, fix eye on bulging eye,
To drink not of the stream but of your deep identity.
But water is water and it flows,
Under the image on the water the water coils and goes
And its own beginning and its end only the water knows.

There are many countries and rivers in them
—Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Pecos, Little Big Horn.
And Roll, Missouri, roll.
But there is only water in them.

And in the new country and in the new place
The eyes of the new friend will reflect the new face
And his mouth will speak to frame
The syllables of the new name
And the name is you and is the agitation of the air
And is the wind and the wind runs and the wind is everywhere.

The name and the face are you.
The name and the face are always new

=== Page 65 ===
BILLIE POTTS 63

And they are you.
Are new.

For they have been dipped in the healing flood.
For they have been dipped in the redeeming flood.
For they have been dipped in Time
And Time is only beginnings
Time is only and always beginnings
And is the redemption of our crime
And is our Saviour's priceless blood.

For Time is always the new place,
And no-place.
For Time is always the new name and the new face,
And no-name and no-face.

For Time is motion
For Time is innocence
For Time is West.)

Oh, who is coming along the trace,
Whistling along in the late sunshine,
With a big black hat above his big red face
And a long black coat that swings so fine?
Oh, who is riding along the trace
Back to the land between the rivers,
With a big black beard growing down to his guts
And silver mountings on his pistol-butts
And a belt as broad as a saddle-girth
And a look in his eyes like he owned the earth?
And meets a man riding up the trace
And looks right sharp and scans his face
And says, "Durn if'n hit ain't Joe Drew!"
"I reckin hit's me," says Joe and gives a spit,
"But whupped if'n I figger how you knows hit,
Fer if'n I'm Joe, then who air you?"
And the man with black beard says: "Why, I'm Little Billie!"
And Joe Drew says: "Wal, I'll be whupped."

"Be whupped," Joe said, "and whar you goen?"

=== Page 66 ===
64 PARTISAN REVIEW

"Oh, I'm just visiten back whar I done my growen
In the section between the rivers,
Fer I bin out West and taken my share
And I reckin my luck helt out fer fair,
So I done come home," Little Billie said,
"To see my folks if'n they ain't dead."
"Ain't dead," Joe answered, and shook his head,
"But that's the best a man kin say,
Fer hit looked lak when you went away
You taken West yore Pappy's luck
And maybe now you kin bring it back."
Little Billie laughed and jingled his pockets and said: "Ain't nuthen
wrong with my luck."

And said: "Wal, I'll be gitten on home
But after yore supper why don't you come
And we'll open a jug and you tell me the news
In the section between the rivers.
But not too early fer hit's my aim
To git some fun 'fore they know my name,
And tease 'em and fun 'em, fer you never guessed
I was Little Billie what went out West."
And Joe Drew said: "Durn if'n you always wusn't a hand to git yore
fun."

(Over the plain, over mountain and river, drawn,
Wanderer with slit-eyes adjusted to distance,
Drawn out of distance, drawn from the great plateau
Where the sky heeled in the unsagging wind and the cheek burned,
Who stood beneath the white peak that glimmered like a dream,
And spat, and it was morning and it was morning.
You lay among the wild plums and the kildees cried,
You lay in the thicket under the new leaves and the kildees cried,
For all your luck, for all the astuteness of your heart,
And would not stop and would not stop,
And the clock ticked all night long in the furnished room
And would not stop
And the El-train passed on the quarters with a whish like a terrible
broom

=== Page 67 ===
BILLIE POTTS 65

And would not stop
And there is always the sound of breathing in the next room
And it will not stop
And the waitress says, "Will that be all, sir, will that be all?"
And will not stop
And the valet says, "Will that be all, sir, will that be all?"
And will not stop
For nothing is ever all and nothing is ever all,
For all your experience and your expertness of human vices and of
valor
At the hour when the ways are darkened.

Though your luck held and the market was always satisfactory,
Though the letter always came and your lovers were always true,
Though you always received the respect due to your position,
Though your hand never failed of its cunning and your glands always
thoroughly knew their business,
Though your conscience was easy and you were assured of your
innocence,
You became gradually aware that something was missing from the
picture,
And upon closer inspection exclaimed: "Why I'm not in it at all!"
Which was perfectly true.

Therefore you tried to remember when you had last had whatever it
was you had lost,
But it was a long time back.
And you decided to retrace your steps from that point,
But it was a long way back.
It was, nevertheless, absolutely essential to make the effort,
And since you had never been a man to be deterred by difficult
circumstances,
You came back.
For there is no place like home.)

He joked them and he teased them and he had his fun
And they never guessed that he was the one
Had been Mammy's darling and Pappy's joy
When he was a great big whickering boy

=== Page 68 ===
66
PARTISAN REVIEW

In the land between the rivers,
And he jingled his pockets and he took his sop
And patted his belly which was full nigh to pop
And wiped the buttermilk out of his beard
And took his belch and up and reared
Back from the table and cocked his chair
And said: "Old man, ain't you got any fresh drinken water, this here
ain't fresher'n a hoss-puddle?"
And the old woman said: "Pappy, why don't you take the young
gentleman down to the spring so he kin git hit good and fresh?"
And the old woman gave the old man a straight look.
She gave him the bucket but it was not empty but it was not water.

Oh, the stars are shining and the meadow is bright
But under the trees is dark and night
In the land between the rivers.
Oh, on the trace the fireflies spark
But under the trees is night and dark,
And way off yonder is the whippoorwill
And the owl off yonder hoots on the hill
But under the trees is dark and still
In the section between the rivers.
And the leaves hang down in the dark of the trees
And there is the spring in the dark of the trees
And there is the spring as black as ink
And one star in it caught through a chink
Of the leaves that hang down in the dark of the trees,
And the star is there but it does not wink.
And Little Billie gets down on his knees
And props his hands in the same old place
To sup the water at his ease;
And the star is gone but there is his face.
"Just help yoreself," Big Billie said;
Then set the hatchet in his head.
They went through his pockets and they buried him in the dark of the
trees.
"I figgered he was a ripe 'un," the old man said.
"Yeah, but you wouldn't done nuthen hadn't been fer me," the old
woman said.

=== Page 69 ===
BILLIE POTTS 67

(The reflection is shadowy and the form not clear,
For the hour is late, is late, and scarcely a glimmer comes here
Under the leaf, the bough, in its innocence dark;
And under your straining face you can scarcely mark
The darkling gleam of your face little less than the water dark.

But perhaps what you lost was lost in the pool long ago
When childlike you lost it and then in your innocence rose to go
After kneeling, as now, with your thirst beneath the leaves;
And years it lies here and dreams in the depth and grieves,
More faithful than mother and father in the light or dark of the leaves.

But after, after the irrefutable modes and marches,
After waters that never quench the thirst in the throat that parches,
After sleep that sieves the long day's dubieties
And the cricket's corrosive wisdom under the trees,
After the rumor of wind and the bright anonymities,

You come, weary of greetings and the new friend's smile,
Weary of art of the stranger, worn in the wanderer's wile,
Weary of innocence and the husks of Time,
Prodigal, back to the homeland of no-Time,
To ask forgiveness and the patrimony of your crime;

And kneel in the untutored night as to demand
What gift—Oh, father, father—from that dissevering hand?)

"And whar's Little Billie?" Joe Drew said.
"Air you crazy," said Big, "and plum outa yore head,
Fer you knows he went West nigh ten long year?
"Went West," Joe said, "but I seen him here
Riden up the trace as big as you please
With a long black coat comen down to his knees
And a big black beard comen down to his guts
And silver mountens on his pistol-butts
And he said out West how he done struck
It rich and wuz bringen you back yore luck.
"I shore-God could use some luck," Big Billie said,
But his woman wet her lips and craned her head

=== Page 70 ===
68 PARTISAN REVIEW
And said: "Come riden with a big black beard, you say?"
And Joe: "Oh, hit wuz Billie as big as day."
And the old man's eyes bugged out of a sudden and he croaked like
sick bull-frog and said: "Come riden with a long black coat?

Oh, the night is still and the grease-lamp low
And the old man's breath comes wheeze and slow.
Oh, the blue flame sucks on the old rag wick
And the old woman's breath comes sharp and quick,
And there isn't a sound under the roof
But her breath's hiss and his breath's puff,
And there isn't a sound outside the door
As they hearken but cannot hear any more
The creak of the saddle or the plop of the hoof,
For a long time now Joe Drew's been gone
And left them sitting there alone
While the dark outside gets big and still,
For the owl doesn't hoot off there on the hill
Any more and is quiet, and the whippoorwill
Is quiet in the dark of the trees and still
In the land between the rivers,
And so they sit and breathe and wait
And breathe while the night gets big and late,
And neither of them gives move or stir
And she won't look at him and he won't look at her.
He doesn't look at her but he says: "Git me the spade."

She grabbled with her hands and he dug with the spade
Where the leaves let down the dark and shade
In the land between the rivers.
She grabbled like a dog in the hole they made,
But stopped of a sudden and then said,
"I kin put my hand on his face."
They light up a pine-knot and lean at the place
Where the man in the black coat slumbers and lies
With trash in his beard and dirt on his face;
And the torch-flame shines in his wide-open eyes.
Down the old man leans with the flickering flame
And moves his lips, says; "Tell me his name."

=== Page 71 ===
BILLIE POTTS 69

“Ain't Billie, ain't Billie," the old woman cries,
"Oh, hit ain't my Billie, fer he wuz little
And helto my skirt while I stirred the kittle
And called me Mammy and hugged me tight
And come in the house when hit fell night."
But the old man leans down with the flickering flame
And croaks: "But tell me his name."
"Oh, he ain't got none, fer he just come riden
From some fer place whar he'd bin biden,
And ain't got a name and never had none,
But Billie, my Billie, he had one,
And hit wuz Billie, hit wuz his name."
But the old man croaked: "Tell me his name."
"Oh, he ain't got none and hit's all the same.
But Billie had one, and he wuz little
And often his chin I would wipe the spittle
And wiped the drool and kissed him thar
And counted his toes and kissed him whar
The little black mark wuz under his tit,
Shaped lak a clover under his left tit
With a shape fer luck and I'd kiss hit-"
And the old man blinks in the pine-knot flare
And his mouth comes open like a fish for air,
Then he says right low, "I had nigh fergot."
"Oh, I kissed him on his little luck-spot
And I kissed and he'd laff as lak as not-"
The old man said: "Git his shirt open."
The old woman opened the shirt and there was the
the left tit.
It was shaped for luck.

(The bee knows, and the eel's cold ganglia burn,
And the sad head lifting to the long return,
Through brumal deeps, in the great unsolsticed coil,
Carries its knowledge, navigator without star,
And under the stars, pure in its clamorous toil,
The goose hoots north where the starlit marshes are.
The salmon heaves at the fall, and wanderer, you
Heave at the great fall of Time, and gorgeous, gleam

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70 PARTISAN REVIEW
In the powerful arc, and anger and outrage like dew,
In your plunge, fling, and plunge to the thunderous stream:
Back to the silence, back to the pool, back
To the high pool, motionless, and the unmurmuring dream.
And you, wanderer, back,
Brother to pinion and the pious fin that cleave
Their innocence of air and the disinfectant flood
And wing and welter and weave
The long compulsion and the circuit hope
Back,
And bear through that limitless and devouring fluidity
The itch and humble promise which is home.
And you, wanderer, back,
For the beginning is death and the end may be life,
For the beginning was definition and the end may be definition,
And our innocence needs, perhaps, new definition,
And the wick needs the flame
But the flame needs the wick.
And the father waits for the son.
The hour is late,
The scene familiar even in shadow,
The transaction brief,
And you, wanderer, back,
After the striving and the wind's word,
To kneel
Here in the evening empty of wind or bird,
To kneel in the sacramental silence of evening
At the feet of the old man
Who is evil and ignorant and old,
To kneel
With the little black mark under your heart,
Which is your name,
Which is shaped for luck,
Which is your luck.)

=== Page 73 ===
Henry James' Portrait of the Artist

F. O. Matthiessen

AMES' prefaces have established themselves exactly as he envisaged
them to Howells, as "a sort of comprehensive manual or vademecum
for aspirants in our arduous profession." No other writer of fiction has
bequeathed a comparable body of discourse for the understanding of
his art. Two of his novels, Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse,
have for their respective heroes a sculptor and a painter. But another
grouping of James' work, to which far less consideration has been
paid, presents even more intimately, if in the guise of fable, his por-
trait of the writer. He himself called attention to his stories dealing
with the life of art by composing one of the volumes of his collected
edition from them: The Lesson of the Master, The Death of the
Lion, The Next Time, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Coxon
Fund. But a single volume would not hold them all, and they ran
part way through the next: The Author of Beltraffio, and four shorter
pieces, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, Broken Wings, and The
Tree of Knowledge. The last of these shades off into the treatment
characteristic of many other James' stories: it is not primarily about
the nature of art or of the artist; it uses the situation of a sculptor,
whose family are in loyal conspiracy to hide from him his utter lack
of talent, for the kind of psychological concealments and revelation
so dear to James. The Coxon Fund, again, explicitly sets out to pre-
sent the type of peculiarly helpless artistic temperament represented
by Coleridge. But the center of reference in the others is to problems
which James knew from the inside and whose urgency was ever with
him, problems of the writer and his audience, of the lack of intelli-
gent appreciation and of the demands of his craft. They also drama-
tize the issue which is still our issue, the relation of the artist to
society.
The title stories of the two volumes, The Lesson of the Master
71

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72 PARTISAN REVIEW
(1888) and The Author of Beltraffio (1884), deal, in different ways,
with the split between life and art. The one "lesson" which Henry
St. George drills into young Paul Overt is not to be like him. The
Master has reaped all the material rewards of a successful writer, but
he has ceased to write important books and has come to look like
"a lucky stockbroker." The choice that he insists upon between the
world and the supremely exacting mistress of art may sound curiously
dated to a generation whose most effective symbol of the artist has
been a figure like Malraux, gathering the knowledge for his writing
as he served in the air force for Loyalist Spain. But the half century
since Henry St. George has known far more stream-lined ways of
selling out than that smooth English gentleman ever dreamed of, and
the choice still remains, even if not cast in James' monastic terms.
Equally dated is "the gospel of art" enunciated by Mark Ambient
in the pages of his masterpiece Beltraffio. The donnée here, as James
indicated in a still unpublished notebook, came to him from an
anecdote he had heard about John Addington Symonds (not about
Stevenson, as has long been the gossip). A situation was suggested
by the reported cleavage between Symonds and his wife, who, in no
sort of sympathy with his books, disapproved of their tone as "im-
moral, pagan, hyperaesthetic." The story which James invented to
dramatize such a situation concentrated on the battle between Mark
Ambient and his conventionally Christian wife over the control of
their child, and reached its lurid climax in her deliberately letting
the boy die from an attack of diphtheria rather than expose him to
what she conceived to be the corruption of his pagan father.
James worked under two handicaps here. He made Mark Am-
bient so completely the correct English gentleman that he hardly
succeeds in persuading us that he had really imagined him as a pagan
sensualist. And increasing this unreality is the fact that he set himself
to dramatize the aesthetic gospel of the eighties without quite indi-
cating, perhaps without being quite sure at this stage of his develop-
ment, exactly how much of it he accepted for himself. He was later
to portray in The Tragic Muse (1890), the brilliant futility of the
aesthetic in the eerie figure of Gabriel Nash. In The Author of Bel-
traffio he made some fine humorous thrusts at the excesses of the
movement. Nature faithfully copied art in Ambient's surroundings;
even the creepers on the brown old walls appeared to have been
borrowed from a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. And as though in revenge

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HENRY JAMES 73

for his aestheticism, Ambient's sister, who, in her faded velvet robe,
seemed to have the notion that "she made up very well as a Rossetti,"
was a weirdly affected imitation of everything that in Ambient was
original.

Ambient's own intense devotion to "every manifestation of hu-
man energy" is close to Pater's. And although James was to speak, a
decade after this story, of Pater's having had "a phosphorescence, not
a flame," there seems an inescapable kinship between Pater's aspira-
tion to be the hard gem-like flame and Strether's famous exhota-
tion to live. Moreover, when Strether tries to convey the multiple-
imaged fascination of Madame de Vionnet in likening her to a Re-
naissance medallion, "to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning
cloud," "to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge," to Cleo-
patra herself in her variety, we are not far from the elaborate spell
of Pater's Mona Lisa. A further comparison would have to reckon
with the fact that James' recurrent use of the word "morality" has
a residue, quite foreign to Pater, of the values of James' transcenden-
talist father. For Pater, despite his debt to Arnold, would hardly
have been able to rise to James' classic formulation, in the preface
to The Portrait of a Lady, that there is "no more nutritive or sug-
gestive truth . . . than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral'
sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in pro-
ducing it." Yet Pater and James would be in accord with Mark Am-
bient's "passion for form," and likewise with his conviction that the
artist must not falsify or smooth away details, but "must give the
impression of life itself."

The stories where James is writing from the heart of his own
aesthetic convictions are the best of the group, most of which belong
to the years 1893-6. These were crucial years for James. He had felt
that with The Tragic Muse he had reached a dead-end with the long
novel, and had turned to his anxious experiment with the stage. The
failure of Guy Domville, early in 1895, marked the end of that
chapter, and only a couple of weeks later he was writing to Howells:
"I have felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days-
every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or
by any one having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know
not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession." One great
change from the old days was that James had now found that the
magazines would hardly accept him any more, a serious matter for

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74 PARTISAN REVIEW
an artist now past fifty. He had only one answer: “Produce again-
produce; produce better than ever, and all will yet be well." And
even before the end of his letter to Howells he had rallied to the point
of taking delight in the fact that he was "bursting with ideas and
subjects."

He had already reached a partial resolution of his dilemma by
dramatizing the problems over which he had been brooding, even
though he could find for some of the resulting stories no more likely
channel of publication than The Yellow Book. The Death of the Lion
was printed by Harland with éclat as the leading item in his first
issue (1894), though James was increasingly to feel the incongruity
of having appeared among the newer aesthetics, the descendants of
Pater; and was to take characteristic solace that his "comparatively
so incurious text" had at least not provoked Beardsley into a perverse
illustration.

How little characteristic it was of him to view his problems
grimly is borne out by the tone of this story, where the situation is
the reverse of James' own, that of the sudden fame of a heretofore
unsuccessful writer. The whole is shot through with Flaubert's refrain
about "the hatred of literature," as the admiring young critic who
tells the story reflects that now Neil Paraday's rare talent is "to be
squeezed into his horrible age." But though the "lion" is soon ex-
hausted and thus killed by the violence with which he is taken up
by Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, the handling of the theme is on a comic
plane. No one at the country house where they are so ardently discus-
sing his new book, while he lies sick upstairs, may have read beyond
its twentieth page, and his hostess may end by losing his last manu-
script, but still he has had the unique privilege of being brought into
the sphere of his popular contemporaries, Guy Walsingham, the lady-
author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes, of The Other Way Round,
who turns out to be a man with a big red moustache.

How clearly James observed the role played by the best-selling
author of his day, and how little he envied it, may be read in the
winning portrait he gives of Greville Fane, another lady whose pen
dipped into gold. The reason why the critic—the most frequent nar-
rator for these stories—liked her so much is that she rested him so
from literature. He marvelled at her continued success, since her books
were in no relation to life, until he reflected that "It's only real suc-
cess that wanes, it's only solid things that melt." What endeared her

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HENRY JAMES 75

to him, as she traced the loves of the duchesses beside the widowed
cribs of her children, was her blind devotion to them alone. The
plot of the story turns around the contrast between her and her son,
who grows up to pretend to be a novelist, a fake disciple of form,
and, while waiting for "inspiration," sponges on her generosity. James'
tender handling of her character did not prevent him from comment-
ing on the vulgarization of taste accomplished by a lady who could
contribute volumes "to the diversion of her contemporaries," but who
"couldn't write a page of English." He had similar authors in mind
when, in The American Scene, he trained his eye upon "the little
tales, mostly by ladies, and about and for children romping through
the ruins of the Language, in the monthly magazines."

In The Next Time his approach to his own situation is no longer
so oblique, though the tone is still that of high comedy. Here Mrs.
Highmore, "one of the most voluminous writers" of the age, yearns
to be like her brother-in-law Ralph Limbert, "but of course only once,
an exquisite failure." He, on the other hand, had worn out his ener-
gies in the effort to sell. After The Major Key never even got the
publisher's money back, he tried for every popular device, but the
worst he could do couldn't escape from being "a shameless merciless
masterpiece" which only the critics read. It was the same to the end
of his short career. Even The Hidden Heart, planned as an adven-
ture story, turned out to be "but another female child." There was
to be no next time for him any more than for Mrs. Highmore. As
his critic friend, whose love was "the love that killed" with a popular
audience, was to sum it up: "You can't make a sow's ear out of a
silk purse."

The same phrase was turned by James about himself, imme-
diately after the disastrous opening night of Guy Domville, in a letter
to his brother William. But though he recounted the brutal shock of
having been hissed and booed by the gallery after responding to the
cry of "Author! Author!" he added: "Don't worry about me; I'm
a Rock." Yet the problem of an audience was to bother him to the
end. As he wrote in his notebook, The Next Time was suggested to
him "really by all the little backward memories of one's frustrated
ambition"; and he recalled particularly how, in his early years, he
had contracted to write some Paris letters for The New York Tribune,
and how, despite every effort, he had not been able to make them bad
enough to satisfy Whitelaw Reid. Broken Wings, written half a dozen

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76 PARTISAN REVIEW
years after the rest of the group, projected the situation of two wri-
ters, a man and a woman, who each had enjoyed a following in
society, only to have it fall away, and to come to the realization that
nothing was to be gained by an author in the country-house world,
a world which simply took all one's cleverness and had no imagination
to give. James said in his preface that he failed "to disinter again
the buried germ" of this story, but went on to ask, "When had I
been, as a fellow scribbler, closed to the general admonition of such
adventures?" And thinking perhaps also of his own moment of
popularity after Daisy Miller, he declared that "to dissimulate the
grim realities of shrunken 'custom,' the felt chill of a lower professional
temperature—any old notebook would show that laid away as a
tragic 'value.'"

Where James draws most deeply on his own accumulated
thoughts for these stories is in The Middle Years, in which the author-
narrator is of the novelist's own age. Dencoombe has been very sick,
and picking up, in his convalescence, his book of the year before,
he has a fresh impression of his work. Like James he is "a passionate
corrector" of his text, and thinking how much of his life it had taken
to produce so little art, what he longs for most is "Ah for another go,
ah for a better chance!" It is not necessary to force a too close parallel
with James' life, since his own health, very precarious earlier, had
developed by middle age considerable powers of endurance. Yet his
sister's death in England in 1892, the year before this story, had
heightened his feeling of isolation; and it is out of isolation that
Dencoombe cries: "I've outlived, I've lost by the way." Dencoombe
comes through to a renewed faith in creative possibilities, to the reas-
surance that there never is exhaustion in the abundance of material,
but only "in the miserable artist." But he is not to have another
chance. He recognizes that he is dying, and says with the eloquence
of James' own urgency: "We work in the dark-we do what we can
-we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion
is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

The very conception of The Figure in the Carpet (1896) sprang
from such passion. This was the story which James himself called
"a significant fable"; and he said that what had stimulated him to
write it was his acute impression of the Anglo-American's "so marked
collective mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation."
This story was designed as a plea for such mature criticism, as the

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HENRY JAMES 77
prefaces were to be another. In it the ideal readers are those for whom
"literature was a game of skill," since "skill meant courage, and
courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life." In
the view of the novelist Hugh Vereker that life could be conveyed only
indirectly, symbolically; his particular sense of it ran through all his
books as their "exquisite scheme," "like a complex figure in a Persian
carpet." James' title has given a phrase to the close textual criticism
which he helped to inaugurate. Gide used it in his journal (1927)
and Eliot, in introducing Wilson Knight's interpretation of Shake-
speare's imaginative patterns (1930) held it up as the critic's goal.
The impulse behind the phrase has quickened our awareness that the
task of the critic today, after a century of historical accretion, is to
see an artist's work not piece-meal but in its significant entirety, to
find his compelling portrait in his works.

2.
But the question that James' contemporaries might well ask was
where he found, round about him at that hour, any models on which
he could plead verisimilitude for his supersubtle Neil Paradays and
Ralph Limberts and Hugh Vererkers. He could only answer that
they had been "fathered but on his own intimate experience," that
they had been "drawn preponderantly from the depths of the design-
er's own mind." But such an origin, he insisted, did not permit their
being dismissed as unreal, since he had deliberately projected their
situations as a form of what he called "operative irony," as a means
of asserting that "if the life about us for the last thirty years refuses
warrant for these examples, then so much the worse for that life."
If pressed further, he could have specified, as he did in his letters,
how barren he found the sensibility of his milieu, in contrast with
the analytic alertness of the French or of Turgenev. There was no
novelist in England with whom he could share his aims. He saw quite
through the pointless elaborations of his somewhat older contemporary
Meredith. On finishing Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894) he was
moved to declare to Gosse that he doubted "if any equal quantity of
extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of
obscurities and alembications, ever started less their subject. . . ."
He granted that he might be overstating the case, but he could not
escape the conviction that many of Meredith's "profundities and tor-
tuosities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of

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78 PARTISAN REVIEW
the very simplest propositions." On the other hand, James was tem-
peramentally at the opposite pole from Hardy, and never got closer
to him than granting that Tess "is chock-full of faults and falsity, and
yet has a singular beauty."

He continued to appreciate Howells and was in intermittent
correspondence with him; but the one English practitioner of his craft
with whom he felt a kinship was Stevenson, whom, unfortunately,
he had come to know only a year before Stevenson left for the South
Seas. But James' letters show the pitch of his admiration, which prob-
ably seems excessive to most readers now. What drew James to him
was their common devotion to style. He also felt that he had at last
found a reader who could understand what "an abject density and
puerility" the current standards of criticism had fallen to. He was not
blind to Stevenson's limitations, to his frequent mere "cleverness," to
his "awfully jolly" side, but with Stevenson's departure he stated that
he had "literally no one" left to share with, that he was "more and
more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands,
of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to do it."
Then, during the rehearsals of Guy Domville, came the news of
Stevenson's death.

James was never to lose his avid curiosity in any potential incar-
nations of the artist, and, as late as 1914, in his essay on The New
Novel, he was welcoming the promise of D. H. Lawrence, and, too
generously, that of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie. Almost a
quarter of a century before, he had been writing Stevenson that "the
only news in literature" was "the infant monster of a Kipling." As
though by the law of opposites James had been fascinated by the
virility of his first stories, and thought that perhaps he contained "the
seeds of an English Balzac." But as the years went on and James
applied the demands of mature criticism, he wrote an incisive thumb-
nail critique to Grace Norton: "My view of his prose future has
much shrunken in the light of one's increasingly observing how little
of life he can make use of. . . . He has come steadily from the less
simple in subject to the more simple-from the Anglo-Indians to
the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to
the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish
to the engines and the screws. . . ." And the trouble with his handling
of "steam and patriotism" was that it was so "mixed up with God."
Just at this time, near the close of the century, James' attention

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HENRY JAMES 79
was attracted to a talent that he was to watch with interest for the
rest of his life. No two writers could be farther apart in their aims
than James and Wells, the apostle of craftsmanship and the greatest
journalist of the great age of journalism. Their interchange deserves,
therefore, more prominence than it has yet received as a symbolic
landmark in modern critical debate. It constitutes also a kind of
parable of the problems of the artist to put beside James' fictional
creations and thus to add some further strokes to his self-portrait.
James' first letter is in appreciation of Wells' critical interest in
The Turn of the Screw, and James' own statement that this story
“is essentially a pot-boiler and jeu d'esprit” might serve as a check
to our recent over-interpretation of it. What drew James to Wells was
a more abundant energy than Kipling's, an ability to convey visible
and audible life that he had so utterly missed in Meredith. After
reading Kipps he declared: “You are, for me, more than ever, the
most interesting ‘literary man’ of your generation—in fact, the only
interesting one.” He pronounced him in Tono Bungay to be “a very
swagger performer” whose “vividness and colour” would have been
the envy of Dickens. To be sure, James had to protest again and
again, as in The New Machiavelli, against “that accurst autobio-
graphic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the
cheap and easy.” He had known long since that their worlds were
other, but, under the spell of Wells' force, he said: “I always read
you. . . . as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all . . .
‘principles of criticism,’ canons of form, preconceptions of felicity,
references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition.”
Of course, James could not do any such thing for long, and he had
to comment to Mrs. Ward on the strange coexistence in Wells “of
so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so
little living.” This was always a basic criterion for James. But though
he finally had to tell Wells that he found his persistent neglect of
method to have become inexcusably “unconscious,” he was still forced
to add that there was no one else “who makes the whole apple-cart
so run away that I don’t care if I don’t upset it and only want to
stand out of its path and see it go.”
But a jarring climax to their relation came in the year before
James' death, when he was seventy-two and Wells forty-nine. Wells
issued a facile catch-all volume, the alleged literary remains of George
Boon. This included an amateurish parody of James and some very

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80 PARTISAN REVIEW
heavy-handed discussion of him. Boon asserts that "James has never
discovered that a novel isn't a picture. . . . That life isn't a studio."
He goes on to take exception to James' insistence upon composition
and comes to the conclusion that his people are all "eviscerated," that
his books are of an "elaborate, copious emptiness." "The only living
human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity
and an entirely superficial curiosity. . . . His people nose out suspicions,
hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings
do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a
church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light
and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently
placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string."
James wrote at once, in profound bewilderment since, having
enjoyed Wells so "enormously from far back," he had grown into
"the habit of taking some common meeting-ground . . . for granted,
and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which
made communication possible." "But" - he went on - "I am by nature
more in dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguided-
ness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that
a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated
mistake, can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to
think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as
long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes." The defense
that rose from such scrutiny rested its case squarely on "my measure
of fullness-fullness of life and of the projection of it, which seems
to you such an emptiness of both." Every sentence of this defense
should be read in its slow dignified context, but since the issues were
sharpened by Wells' reply, we had better turn to it.
He pointed up their fundamental divergence in attitude by say-
ing, "To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like
architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether
too prominent in the world of criticism and I assailed it in lines of
harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first
escape I had from the obsession of this war. Boon is just a waste-paper
basket . . . I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is
the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than your-
self. Since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I
did not express our profound and incurable contrast with a better
grace."

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HENRY JAMES 81

James' answer was immediate and forthright, not at all in the
manner with which Boon had charged him, the painful manner of a
hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. "I am bound to tell you that
I don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad man-
ners of Boon, as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your
poor old H. J. is concerned—I say 'your' simply because he has been
yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and
abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings:
as to which you have had copious testimony." He took up Wells' case
point by point. The comparison of a book to a waste-basket struck
him "as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that recept-
acle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the
affirmation of one's estimate of one's contemporaries by." He didn't
have to elaborate his often expressed belief concerning the age's pri-
mary root of corruption: as he had remarked to Howells some years
before, "The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the gen-
eral anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant
Bayadère of Journalism." Nor did he see it anywhere evident that
"my view of 'life and literature,'—or what you impute to me as such,
is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so
unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an
example in any measurable degree followed." The crux of the matter,
however, was that he had no view of life and literature "other than
that our form of the latter . . . is admirable exactly by its range and
variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and
shining experience of the individual practitioner. . . . Of course for
myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, what-
ever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that." No passage in
his prefaces had rung more eloquently of his aims.

He was not in the least taken in by Wells' specious contrast
between architecture and painting. His intimate knowledge of all
the plastic arts told him that "there is no sense in which architecture
is aesthetically 'for use' that doesn't leave any other art whatever,
exactly as much so. . . . It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes
importance. . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force
and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pre-
tence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I
wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only, yours faithfully, Henry
James."

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82 PARTISAN REVIEW
To that Wells could only reply: "I don't clearly understand your
concluding phrases-which shows no doubt how completely they
define our difference. When you say 'it is art that makes life, makes
interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by assuming
that you are using 'art' for every conscious human activity. I use the
word for a research and attainment that is technical and special."
That draws the central issue between them as sharply as possible,
since the emptiness or living intricacy of the figure in James' carpet
depends on whether he was using "art" as a mystical abracadabra or
with verifiable comprehension of the enormous value he imputes to it.
3
Three other stories, written at widely spaced intervals, may be
added to the group with which we started to give us James' answer
most compactly. The Madonna of the Future (1873) can tell us
why he saw so much value in art. The Real Thing (1893) is his most
intimate fable of what that value consists in. The Story In It (1903)
can demonstrate that art "makes life" only to the degree that it rises
from, and, in turn, serves to heighten felt experience.
The Madonna of the Future is one of James' earliest real ac-
complishments, though it may seem still very "literary," with the
detail of its unachieved canvas taken over from Balzac's Le Chef-
d'oeuvre inconnu, and the speech of a Florentine painter quoted from
Musset. But it puts very affectingly many of the problems of the
beginning artist, and it vibrates with James' peculiarly high spiritual
notes. It sprang from his own first immersion in Italian art, which had
been followed by a reluctant return home. In part, therefore, the
story dramatizes the special case of the American, as James had be-
gun to feel the burden of it. The old Yankee painter, who has lived
out his life in Florence, confesses sadly, and James' own anxiety is in
his voice: "We're the disinherited of Art! We're condemned to be
superficial! We're excluded from the magic circle! The soil of Amer-
ican perception is a poor little barren artificial deposit! Yes, we're
wedded to imperfection! An American, to excel, has just ten times
as much to learn as a European! We lack the deeper sense! We have
neither tact nor force! How should we have them? Our crude and
garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present. . . . We poor
aspirants must live in perpetual exile." To which the young narrator
rejoins, speaking for James' hopes: "Nothing is so idle as to talk about

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HENRY JAMES 83
our want of a nursing air, of a kindly soil, of opportunity, of the things
that help. The only thing that helps is to do something fine. There’s
no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create,
achieve.”
The intensity with which Americans like James and Poe and
Eliot have cared about art has been almost a compulsive reaction
against its neglect in their surroundings. It is significant, as Harry
Levin has said, that whereas Balzac’s story emphasizes the essential
vitality of life upon which art must be based, Hawthorne’s The Artist
of the Beautiful is concerned with the spiritual ideals which sustain
the artist, and James insists that such ideals may themselves be a delu-
sion and that the only health for the artist is in the constant practice
of his craft. For James, at the outset of his career, there was an even
deeper dread than that voiced by the old painter. He had seen in his
father’s generation, which was Emerson’s generation, so many artists
whose master canvases remained blanks, so many transcendental
geniuses without the concentration of talent. His own father was a
haunting case, possessing an amazing flair for style in individual
sentences but absolutely no organizing form, without which his books
remained unreadable. There was a further personal pressure behind
this story: here was James himself, already at the verge of thirty, and
with hardly a start in fiction. Was he to be yet another of Emerson’s
promising young men, afraid to take the plunge? Still, as he contem-
plated the old painter’s fatal mistake in so idealizing art that he never
brought it to earth, James could envisage an even worse fate in the
opposite extreme, that of cynical talent without an ideal. His particu-
lar American heritage spoke through him as he created the Italian
contriver of obscene animal figurines. To this heritage James was to
owe his deepest tones, the blackest threads in his design, the rare abil-
ity to suggest the horror of spiritual death. Such horror comes out in
this early story with the intensity of the narrator’s revulsion from
this sculptor’s declaration: “Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—
all human life is there!”
The rival claims of the real and the ideal in art, and the dread
that he might never find his own way of reconciling talent and genius,
had long since been resolved by James when an anecdote dropped by
his friend Du Maurier stimulated him to one of the lightest and yet
most searching affirmations of his aesthetic theory. He produced ex-
actly what he hoped for in his notebook recording that The Real
on
Many
ald
damner

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84 PARTISAN REVIEW

Thing “should be a little gem of bright quick vivid form.” The fable
here is so resiliently designed and brings out his ideas about art
through so many deft symbols that nothing short of the whole can
properly convey its effect. But James’ main convictions may be sug-
gested by recalling the situation. Major Monarch and his wife, the
real social thing, are desperately out of funds and want to sit for
illustrations for a modern society novel. The painter-narrator is
touched by their plight and reluctantly takes them on, but is imme-
diately faced with a whole series of problems. He has a detestation of
the amateur in art, and an awareness of the stultification involved in
type-casting—indeed, he is very like James in his deep-rooted desire
for character instead of types. Moreover, he confesses to an innate
preference for appearance over reality, for “the represented subject
over the real one.”

Does this mean that his art is an escape, a hollow evasion of ex-
perience as Wells found James? The answer involves James’ whole-
hearted repudiation of realism as mere literal reporting. The painter’s
regular model, Miss Churm, is anything but the real thing. She is a
freckled cockney, but a clever actress and so a constantly shifting
challenge to fresh embodiment; whereas the Major’s wife, a lady cer-
tainly, “is always the same lady” and soon comes to look “singularly
like a bad illustration.” The show-down occurs when a little Italian
model turns up with the confident belief that he can pose for an
English gentleman far better than the massive Major. He soon proves
that he is as good as Miss Churm, “who could look, when requested,
like an Italian.” His brilliant mimetic gift illustrates the necessary
doctrine of imitation for any branch of art. It tells the painter again
what he already knew, that action must be heightened by stylization,
if art is to convey the essence and not the accidents of life. And so he
is forced to turn away the Monarchs, with James’ experienced and
now thoroughly anti-transcendental “lesson”: “that in the deceptive
atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being
plastic.”

A kind of grace note to this discussion, concentrating directly on
the art of fiction, is sounded by The Story In It. One of the shortest
of James’ compositions, it amounts to another condensed parable of
his material and method. Maud Blessingbourne’s fondness for French
novels and D’Annunzio is in contrast with the simple absorption in
life of her hostess, Mrs. Dyott. An afternoon visit is paid by Colonel

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HENRY JAMES 85
Voyt, who, though this has not been told to Maud, is Mrs. Dyott's
lover. The conversation centers on Maud's reading on the contrast
between Anglo-Saxon fiction and the French. The Colonel holds
that "they do what they feel, and they feel more things than
we." Granting the superior continental maturity, Maud holds that
their fiction still lacks variety, that their lovers are all the same,
that, for instance, they never portray "a decent woman." The
Colonel contends that you must choose, since "the subject the novelist
treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for
the most part the decline of a relation. . . . If a relation stops, where's
the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence?" If you don't
choose, you're back in the floundering evasions of the English novel.
Maud doesn't argue, but she is not convinced. After the Colonel
has left, she indicates why she feels so sure of her grounds. She herself
is absorbed in the kind of inner drama which French fiction neglects.
She is in love, but she will not say with whom; the man does not even
suspect it, and she is determined, for unspoken reasons, that he should
not. Mrs. Dyott tacitly guesses the truth, that Maud is in love with
the Colonel, and when she next sees him, tells him so. He is aston-
ished, but has then to grant that Maud's "consciousness, if they let
it alone as they of course after this mercifully must-was, in the
last analysis, a kind of shy romance like their own, a thing to make the
fortune of any author up to the mark-one who should have the
invention or who could have the courage; but a small scared starved
subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody else
any good. Who but a duffer-he struck to his contention-would see
the shadow of a 'story' in it?"

Wells and his million followers would agree with the Colonel. I
have deliberately ended James' plea on one of his special cases of
scruples and renunciation, for such cases are recurrent threads in
his carpet. The question, however, remains whether they are too spe-
cial to make a living figure. Nothing could have shocked James worse
than Wells' notion that the patiently projected essence of his stories
amounted to nothing more than "a bit of string." For James, unlike
the aesthetics of the nineties, always insisted on the supreme impor-
tance of subject, yet insisted also that what was important could not
be legislated arbitrarily but must be determined by the artist's own
seasoned vision of experience, and that substance could be produced
only through form.

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om yutury 86 PARTISAN REVIEW
outward
The split between James and Wells, between the inner and the
outer world, between analytic subtlety and surface reporting, is a
sign of one of the great cultural maladjustments of our age. Both
James and Wells were damaged by it. The absence of critical apprehension forced James to his own extremes, to such overly ingenious
effects as that in The Figure in the Carpet itself, where the breathless
pursuit of Hugh Vereker’s "meaning” ends as the kind of arid curi-
osity against which Wells protested. The failure of James' contem-
plaries to respond to Flaubert’s challenge for composition compelled
James to insist upon it to such lengths that he finally objected to
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as “fluid puddings” because of their “defiance
of economy and architecture.” Though Wells did not have that tragic
blindness, his increasing indifference to any art is equally unbalanced.
His novels have profited less and less by any of James’ advice, and in
his carelessly thrown together Autobiography he dismissed them
altogether as of no lasting worth.

The consequences of this split between “highbrow” and “low-
brow” have been especially virulent in America, fed, on the one part,
by the divorce between our educated minds and experience which
Santayana named the genteel tradition; and, on the other, by the
enormous premiums paid to any sensationalism. Despite the fact that
he was himself the extreme case of a writer glutted by slabs of raw
experience which he could not assimilate, Thomas Wolfe discerned
one phase of our dilemma. At one extreme are “the laboring, farming
sort of people” from which Wolfe came, who think of the writer as
someone romantic and remote from their own lives. At the other
extreme are “the university-going kind of people, and these people
also become fascinated with the glamor and difficulty of writing, but
in a different way. They get more involved or fancy than the most
involved and fancy European people of this sort. They become more
‘Flauberty’ than Flaubert. They establish little magazines that not
only split a hair with the best of them, but they split more hairs than
Europeans think of splitting. The Europeans say: ‘Oh God, where
did these people, these aesthetic Americans, ever come from?’ . . . I
think all of us who have tried to write in this country may have fallen
in between these two groups of well-meaning and misguided people,
and if we become writers finally, it is in spite of each of them.”

Whitman escaped from one group, and James anticipated the
other. It has been the fashion of recent criticism to dramatize the

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HENRY JAMES 87
irreconcilable cleavage between the “lowbrows” and the “highbrows”
in our literature as stemming symbolically from these two writers.
But it is forgotten that James himself bridged the gap. At twenty-two,
as the smartest of destructive young reviewers for the newly-launched
Nation, he wrote his notorious apostrophe “from the intelligence to
the bard” of Drum Taps. But in later years, as Edith Wharton has
told us, he delighted in reciting Whitman’s lines, “in a mood of sub-
dued ecstasy”; and he took satisfaction too in what he called the
“flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy” of the letters to Pete
Doyle. Such ripened appreciation does not in itself accomplish a re-
conciliation; but as Santayana observed, James in his own work over-
came the genteel tradition “in the classic way, by understanding it.”
The value of James’ figure may be judged, as he insisted, only
if it is sought out through his work as a whole. Only thus may be
decided whether his scruples and renunciations are a sterile emptiness,
or the guides to a peculiarly poignant suffering and inner triumph.
One augury for life rather than death in his work has shone through
his whole relationship with Wells. As he said, in his final letter in that
interchange, it was when another “personal and intellectual history”
had been determined “in the way most different” from his own that
he most wanted to get at it—“precisely for the extension of life.” It
was the same with his relationship with his brother William, who from
the time of The Europeans to The Golden Bowl was writing well-
intentioned worried letters of uncomprehending counsel, only to have
Henry reply at the end that he would “sooner descend to a dishon-
oured grave” than to have written such “things of the current age”
as he had heard William express admiration for. “Yet,” he added,
“I can read you with rapture.” We appear to have the case then that
the seemingly special novelist is more outgoing in his interests than
either the great journalist or the lively philosopher. Attention, percep-
tion, sympathy, are all on his side. His portrait of the artist would
seem to challenge comparable qualities of our own.

=== Page 90 ===
Art Chronicle
1
An Interview with Marc Chagall

ONE of the better known European painters whom the war and
Nazism have driven to refuge in the United States is Marc Chagall.
Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1887. In 1907 he took up paint-
ing. From Vitebsk he went to St. Petersburg to study there under Bakst.
In 1910 he moved to Paris. Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in
1914 he returned to Russia for a visit. He remained there until 1922
when he returned to Paris, this time definitively, he hoped-only to be
forced out of France by the Nazis in 1941.
Perhaps the most striking characteristics of Chagall's work are the
persistence of certain images, apparently based on rural and religious
reminiscences of his childhood, and the anecdotal illogicality with which
they are arranged on his canvases. In his most recent work we still find
roosters, fiddling cows, floating brides, decapitated women carrying milk-
pails, rabbis clutching the Torah tight in their arms, and hall-clocks
slung from giant pickled herrings, very similar to those of his Vitebsk
period, twenty-five years ago. His earlier work seemed predominantly
idyllic in character. But since his arrival in this country he has painted
a large canvas, the Revolution, and a Descent from the Cross which have
stirred up questions regarding Chagall's point of view-his political,
aesthetic and religious ideologies-questions which, for the most part,
have hitherto gone unanswered by the artist himself due to his reluctance
to speak or to write about his work.

Chagall. "A painter should never come between the work of art
and the spectator. An intermediary may explain the artist's work with-
out any harm to it. But the artist's explanation of it can only limit it.
Better the understanding that grows from familiarity and the perspective
that will come after the artist's death. After all, it is better to judge a
painter by his pictures. His words, I am afraid, do nothing but veil the
vision."

Sweeney.-"But your work is well known to the art-public in this
country. It has enjoyed an extremely wide appeal. You are regarded
as one of the leading fantastic illustrators of the present century-a reac-
tionary from cubism and abstract art, a sympathizer with the emotional
emphases of German expressionism and a forerunner of surrealism in its
88

=== Page 91 ===
ART CHRONICLE 89
irrationality and dream-character. Thanks to the exhibition of major
work such as Moi et le Village and Paris par la fenêtre, and to large
retrospective exhibitions in New York, your name brings to mind at once
certain images. The constant recurrence of these images had both fixed
them in the public mind and whetted its curiosity. In them it sees a sug-
gestion of nostalgia for the surroundings of your childhood, a fairy-tale
atmosphere, or the illustration of some folk legends of your native Vitebsk.
It sees them as private symbols—using the term symbols to signify an
image used as an analogy for an abstract idea,—a dove, for example,
to represent peace. Your friend and admirer, Raissa Maritain, apparently
also sees them in a similar light in her recent appreciation of your work.
Yet the critic Florent Fels in Propos d'artistes once quoted you as stating
very flatly: ‘In my composition there is nothing of the fantastic, nor of
the symbolic.’

Chagall. — “That was many years ago, 1925, still it is just as true as
ever. There is nothing anecdotal in my pictures—no fairy tales—no
literature in the sense of folk-legend associations. Maurice Denis des-
cribed the paintings of the Synthetists in France about 1889 as plane
surfaces “covered with colours arranged in a certain order.” To the
cubists a painting was a plane surface covered with form-elements in a
certain order. For me a picture is a plane surface covered with represen-
tations of objects—beasts, birds, or humans—in a certain order in which
anecdotal illustrational logic has no importance. The visual effectiveness
of the painted composition comes first. Every extra-structural considera-
tion is secondary.

“Just as before the war of 1914, I constantly had the word litera-
ture, or ‘literary painting’ thrown at me, now I am constantly said to be
a maker of fairy-tales and of fantasies. As a matter of fact, my first aim
is to construct my picture architecturally, just as in their day the im-
pressionists did, and cubists did—along the same formal paths. The im-
pressionists filled their canvases with spots of light and shadow. The
cubists with cubic, triangular, and round shapes, I try to fill my canvases
in some fashion with objects and figures employed as forms—sonorous
forms like noises—passion-forms which should give a supplementary
dimension impossible to achieve through the bare geometry of the cubists’
lines or with the spots of the Impressionists.

“I am against the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘symbolism’ in themselves. All
our interior world is reality—and that perhaps more so than our apparent
world. To call everything that appears illogical, ‘fantasy’, fairy-tale, or
chimera—would be practically to admit not understanding nature.
“Impressionism and cubism were relatively easy to understand, be-
cause they only proposed a single aspect of an object to our considera-
tion—its relations of light and shade, or its geometrical relationships.
But one aspect of an object is not enough to constitute the entire subject
matter of art. An object’s aspects are multifarious.
“I am not a reactionary from cubism. I have admired the great cub-

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90 PARTISAN REVIEW
ists and have profited from cubism. But I have argued the limitations of
such a view even with my friend Apollinaire, the man who really gave
cubism its place. To me cubism seemed to limit pictorial expression
unduly. To persist in that I felt was to impoverish one's vocabulary. If
the employment of forms not as bare of associations as those the cubists
used was to produce 'literary painting,' I was ready to accept the blame
for doing so. I felt painting needed a greater freedom than cubism
permitted. I felt somewhat justified, later, when I saw a swing toward
expressionism in Germany and still more so when I saw the birth of
surrealism in the early twenties. But I have always been against the idea
of schools and only an admirer of the leaders of schools. Cubism was an
emphasis on one aspect only of reality-a single point of view-the
architectural point of view of Picasso-and of Braque in his great years.
And let me say in passing, Picasso's gray cubist pictures and his papiers
colles are in my opinion his masterpieces.
"But please defend me against people who speak of 'anecdote' and
'fairy tales' in my work. A cow and woman to me are the same-in a
picture both are merely elements of a composition. In painting, the
images of a woman or of a cow have different values of plasticity,-but
not different poetic values. As far as literature goes, I feel myself more
'abstract' than Mondrian or Kandinsky in my use of pictorial elements.
'Abstract' not in the sense that my painting does not recall reality. Such
abstract painting in my opinion is more ornamental and decorative, and
always restricted in its range. What I mean by 'abstract' is something
which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic
at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye
of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. In
the case of the decapitated woman with the milk pails, I was first led
to separating her head from her body merely because I happened to
need an empty space there. In the large cow's head in Moi et le village
I made a small cow and woman milking visible through its muzzle be-
cause I needed that sort of form, there, for my composition. Whatever
else may have grown out of these compositional arrangements is secon-
dary.
"The fact that I made use of cows, milkmaids, roosters and pro-
vincial Russian architecture as my source forms is because they are part
of the environment from which I spring and which undoubtedly left the
deepest impression on my visual memory of any experiences I have
known. Every painter is born somewhere. And even though he may later
respond to the influences of other atmospheres, a certain essence-a
certain 'aroma' of his birthplace clings to his work. But do not misunder-
stand me: the important thing here is not 'subject' in the sense pictorial
'subjects' were painted by the old academicians. The vital mark these
early influences leave is, as it were, on the handwriting of the artist.
This is clear to us in the character of the trees and card players of a
Cézanne, born in France,-in the curled sinuosities of the horizons

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ART CHRONICLE 91
and figures of a Van Gogh, born in Holland,-in the almost Arab
ornamentation of a Picasso, born in Spain,-or in the quattrocento
linear feeling of a Modigliani, born in Italy. This is the manner in
which I hope I have preserved the influences of my childhood, not mere-
ly in subject matter."
Sweeney.-"I know you have frequently stated 'art is international,
but the artist ought to be national.' Nevertheless, on your return from
Russia in 1922 after an eight years' sojourn there you came to the realiza-
tion that your native land-the Soviet no more than Imperial Russia-
had no need of you. You stated 'To them I am incomprehensible, a
foreigner.' Does this mean that you regard racism as more important
than nationalism and that you, as a Jew, were a foreigner even in
Vitebsk?"
Chagall.-"Race? Not at all. As a native of Vitebsk I was still as
close to Russia and to the soil as the day I left. But as an artist I felt
myself just as much a stranger to the official, aesthetic ideology of the
new government as I had been to the provincial art ideals of the Russia
I left in 1910. At that time I decided I needed Paris. The root-soil of
my art was Vitebsk, but like a tree, my art needed Paris like water,
otherwise it would wither and die. Russia had two native traditions of
art, the popular and the religious. I wanted an art of the soil, not one
uniquely of the head. I had the good luck to spring from the people.
But popular art-which I always love for that matter-did not satisfy
me. It is too exclusive. It excludes the refinements of civilization. I have
always had a pronounced taste for refined expression, for culture. The
refined art of my native land was a religious art, I saw the quality of
a few great productions of the ikon tradition-Rublev's work, for exam-
ple. But this was fundamentally a religious art and I am not, and never
have been, religious. Moreover, I felt religion meant little in the world
that I knew, even as it seems to mean little today. For me Christ was
a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the
modern world. To achieve the combination of refined expression with an
art of the earth, I felt I had to seek the vitalizing waters of Paris.
"I would like to say that my moves from country to country have
always been dictated by artistic considerations. Son of a laborer, I had
organically no other grounds for leaving my native land, to which I
think in spite of everything I have remained loyal in my art. As painter
and man of the people-and the people I consider the class of society
most sensitively responsive-I felt that plastic refinement of the highest
order existed only in France. Here is perhaps the source of my dualism
and my climatic maladjustments through all these years. Still I would
not say that I have been less able to acclimatize myself in Paris than
other foreign artists.
"Neither Vitebsk nor St. Petersburg offered me what I felt I needed
as a young painter setting out on his career in 1910. Similarly, after an
eight-year sojourn in Russia between 1914 and 1922, I found the ideology

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92 PARTISAN REVIEW
of the Soviet provided no better place for my ideals of what an art ex-
pression should be. The revolution had not replaced the atmosphere
which had proved so unsatisfactory to me in my early years in Russia
with a more congenial one. The ideal it proposed to its artists was to
become illustrators—to transport the ideology of the revolution onto the
canvas. Its aim was a pictorial photography, not a poetry of forms with
logic of associations relegated to a secondary level. My ideal was still
a picture above all—without subject, without ‘literature,’ as always.
“But again do not misunderstand me: there has never been a true
art but that has not been addressed solely to an elite; and equally there
has never been an art truly great which has not been addressed solely
to the masses. The fact is, an elite which is truly elite keeps in mind its
bonds with and roots in the masses. In the past the proprietor classes
possessed not only the great works of art of their period but also possessed
the faculty of immediately comprehending them. The masses held them-
selves apart. This is one answer to the question your Dr. Coomaraswamy
of the Boston Museum puts forward as a title to an essay, Why Exhibi-
Works of Art? The artist has lost his old public. The new public has not
yet found the artist. While it may be contended that artists of earlier
days were more fortunate in having in sight the specific function in
a church house or communal building for which their work was destined,
today it must be admitted that exhibitions in their real aspect serve as
important end for art in educating a new public.
“The year 1922 saw me back to the well-spring in Paris. And I can
freely say today that I owe all I have succeeded in achieving to Paris,
to France, of which the air, the men, nature were for me the true school
of my life and of my art—the waters which fed the soil in which my
art had its roots. In this way I found the international language in Paris
and have scrupulously striven to maintain the strength of my root soil
in Vitebsk.”
Sweeney.—“On your first visit to Paris Guillaume Apollinaire the
poet-critic from whom the term ‘surrealism’ has been reputedly adopted,
already pointed out a surnaturel character in your work; do you feel this
movement an important factor in recent art development and do you
feel your work has had any relation to the surrealist point of view?”
Chagall.—“Surrealism was the latest awakening of a desire to lead
art out of the beaten paths of traditional expression. If it had been a
little more reliable, a little more profound in its interior and exterior
expression, it would have crystallized into an important movement after
the example of those of the periods immediately preceding it. You ask
me if I make use of the surrealist approach. I began to paint in 1907
and in my work from the beginning one can see these very surrealist
elements whose character was definitely underlined in 1912 by Guillaume
Apollinaire.
“Again in Russia during the First World War, far from the Salons,
exhibitions and cafes of Paris, I began to ask myself: doesn’t the out-

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ART CHRONICLE 93

break of such a war call for a certain auditing of accounts? The recent
forms of the so-called realist schools, which for me embraced both im-
pressionism and cubism, seemed to have lost their vitality. It was then
that that characteristic which so many had treated disdainfully and lazily
as 'literature' began to come to the surface.
"On my return to Paris in 1922, I was agreeably surprised to find
a new artistic group of young men, the surrealists, rehabilitating to some
degree that term of abuse in the period before the war, 'literary painting.'
What had previously been regarded as a weakness was now encouraged.
Some did go to the extreme of giving their work a frankly symbolic
character, others adopted a baldly literary approach. But the regrettable
part was that the art of this period offered so much less evidence of
natural talent and technical mastery than the heroic period before 1914.
"As I was not yet fully acquainted with surrealist art in 1922, I
had the impression of rediscovering in it what I myself had felt at once
darkly and concretely between the years 1908 and 1914. But why, thought
I, is it necessary to proclaim this would-be automatism? Fantastic or
illogical as the construction of my pictures may seem, I would be alarmed
to think I had conceived them through an admixture of automatism. If I
put Death in the street and the violinist on the roof in my 1908 picture,
or if, in another painting of 1911, Moi et le Village, I had placed a little
cow with a milk-maid in the head of a big cow, I did not do it by
'automatism.'
"Even if by automatism one has succeeded in composing some good
pictures or in writing some good poems, that does not justify us in setting
it up as a method. Every thing in art ought to reply to every movement
in our blood, to all our being, even our unconscious. But every one
who has painted trees with blue shadows cannot be called an impres-
sionist. For my part, I have slept well without Freud. I confess I have
not read a single one of his books; I surely will not do it now. I am
afraid that as conscious method, automatism engenders automatism.
And if I am correct in feeling that the technical mastery of the 'realist
period' is now on the decline, then surely the automatism of surrealism
is being stripped rather naked."
JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY
II
Painters' Objects
The study of the beautiful is a duel in which
the artist cries out in terror before he is
vanquished.-Baudelaire
We know there is something odd, we might almost say unnatural,
about the conception of abstract art. . . We have accepted its existence

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94 PARTISAN REVIEW
almost without reflection on how strange, and indeed frightening it is,
that l'art moderne, in coming so far, had arrived here.
This disturbing sense of oddness is not confined to laymen. Braque,
Miró, and Picasso have each, with surprising anger, attacked the idea
of a wholly abstract art. Yet we might have expected Braque and Picasso,
after their cubist discoveries, and Miró and Picasso, after their use of
surrealist automatism, to evince a certain sympathy with the abstract
search. But no. Picasso replies that to search means nothing in painting:
"To find is the thing."

Is there, then, some difference between what we have always called
abstract art, and that extreme form of it, named non-objective art, which
is a difference in kind, and not, as we have supposed, merely in degree?
For painting plainly has always been a species of abstraction: the painter
has selected from the world he knows, a world which is not entirely the
same in each epoch, the forms and relations which interested him, and
then employed them as he pleased. Past art has had the external world
for the painter's model, however variously that world has been conceived.
The art of Picasso has differed in the degree of abstraction, but not in
the kind of abstraction, from the art of the Renaissance tradition of
which he is the bitter finale.

But, in the XXth century—as a result of certain conclusions, whe-
ther valid or not, drawn from the suppressed premises of cubism—we
find an extraordinary phenomenon: by many artists the external world is
totally rejected as the painter's model.
More particularly, those painters who are usually named non-objec-
tive, have replaced that model with arbitrary esthetic elements of the
simplest kind. These elements (and their relations) constitute a part of
the external world: they in no wise image it. In this, non-objective art
differs fundamentally, differs epistemologically, one might say, from other
modes of art. . . .

Still, it is not easy to rid oneself of the 'objects' of the external world.
Much of the power of Mondrian's austere and naked Compositions
derives from the "objects" of the external world, just to the extent that
we are aware that they are not present. One of the arguments, but not
the only argument by any means, which may be deduced from the non-
objective painters' works, might be phrased thus: Look! It is not difficult
to abandon that dull and tedious system of describing the "objects" of
the world for expressive purposes. We are too intelligent and advanced
for, so primitive a system. Besides, now we know all about the appearance
of the world's 'objects,' the human body, the perspective of space, the
manner in which light falls upon trees. To discover those things was the
historical task of the Renaissance. We are much more interested in the
structure of reality, or—if you object to the philosophical implication,
you English-speaking people with your conventional notion that art is

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ART CHRONICLE 95

principally a question of beauty-what interests us is the structure of
painting, not the appearance of the "objects" of the external world. An
empty canvas is more to the point, in being itself, an "object," and not
merely an awkward image of "real objects"; and is, moreover, as Kan-
dinsky says, "far lovelier than certain pictures." The problem is more
nearly how not to lessen the original virginal loveliness of the canvas. ...
From this direction the oddness of non-objective art is evident. It is
an art of negation, a protest against naturalistic descriptiveness as the
most adequate vehicle of expression for the modern mind. This protest
has not gone unheeded. No major painter of the present is primarily
descriptive in his means; and, among the interesting younger painters,
none is descriptive at all, so far as we know. The occasional exceptions
to this tendency occur against the painter's will, as in those passages
where he has not yet found adequate non-descriptive means, or where,
with other ends in view, he may still involuntarily, and by chance, seem
to refer to the external world.

Indeed at present, at this very moment, when non-objective painters
have made their point, we are able to feel much less strongly than earlier
in the century the historical necessity of the rigid self-imposed limitations
of abstract art. We are impelled instead to remark with Wallace Stevens:

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white.
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

*

It may be that the great Mondrian himself now feels such wants and
needs. Certainly his recent painting, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (Museum
of Modern Art, New Acquisitions) represents a marked shift on his
part from an intent of simple purification to one of expressiveness. . .
Now in his old age, and in a foreign country, Mondrian has as-
sembled all his remarkable resources for purely expressive ends. In
Broadway Boogie-Woogie the simple elements of his hitherto analytical
art have been transformed.* The former severe black bands are fractured

* The intrinsic value of this new picture cannot concern us here. Though it
has been sometimes judged a near failure, we regard it as the most important
work by Mondrian with which we are acquainted. The value, however, of a non-
objective painting, like that of a piece of "pure" music, cannot be proven. "Proof"
rests only on persuasion; and in our time we are persuaded by demonstration.
But the qualitative greatness of specific sensuous relations, which constitute the
content of non-objective art, cannot be demonstrated as one can demonstrate,
and apart from strictly formal qualities, the symbolic richness of the early Chirico,

=== Page 98 ===
96 PARTISAN REVIEW
into segments of color so intense in contrast that they jump, so short in
segment that they become a staccato rhythm against the larger rhythms
of the main structure; there are heavier, and by virtue of size (since all
the colors are pure) even more intense rests; and all the while the large
white background, the eternal World, reinforces the concrete and fugi-
tive drama. For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its
absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and
only the structure bared. The Modern. City! Precise, rectangular, squared,
whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and steril-
ized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie, the under-
ground music of the at once resigned and rebellious, the betrayed.
Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world.
* * *
As a result of the poverty of modern life, we are confronted with
the circumstance that art is more interesting than life. "Experience is
bound to utility," as André Breton says, "and guarded by common-sense."
The pleasurable "things" of other times for the most part no longer
exist, and those which do no longer suffice. With what our epoch meant
to replace the wonderful things of the past—the late afternoon encoun-
ters, the leisurely repasts, the discriminations of taste, the graces of man-
ners, and the gratuitous cultivation of minds—what we might have
invented, perhaps we shall never know. We have been made too busy
with tasks.
At what other time could the juxtaposition of a bright square on a
white ground have seemed so portentious!
The Surrealists alone among modern artists refused to shift the
problem to the plane of art. Ideally speaking, surrealism became a
system for enhancing everyday life. True, the Surrealists were always
saying that "poetry should be made by all"; but they did not mean
precisely what we have always meant by poetry. If they had been suc-
cessful, we might not have needed "poetry" at all. Still, their various
devices for finding pleasure—spiritual games, private explorations, public
provocations, sensory objects, and all the rest—were artificial enough
abroad before the war. In the hard and conventional English-speaking
world the devices simply could not work. Here it was the Surrealists who
were transformed. And it may be that their pioneer, and therefore often
naïve effort to enhance the life of the modern mind will be forgotten.
But in any case, it is not unimportant, this thing Alexander Calder
has done, in making objects of pleasure worthy of adults (Museum of
Modern Art, Calder Retrospective). Granted, most of us must see them
for instance. For the layman there is no "circumstantial evidence" in non-objective
art. This does not mean that value-judgments on non-objective art are arbitrary.
We merely remark that they cannot be proven; and add that it is difficult to see
how anyone, save certain painters, can even discriminate the content of such
works, not to speak of valuing them.

=== Page 99 ===
ART CHRONICLE 97
in museums or galleries, and that destroys half the fun. Still, there they
are! The playthings of a prince for us all. . . .
It was Mondrian's influence which first led Calder from his earlier
pleasantries, and toys for children, to these marvelous objects for the
adult mind: "I was very much moved by Mondrian's studio, large, beau-
tiful, and irregular as it was, with the walls painted white, and divided
by black lines and rectangles of bright color, like his paintings . . . and
I thought at the time how fine it would be if everything there MOVED;
though Mondrian himself did not approve of this idea at all." Later it
came to be Miró's shapes among those of abstract artists which Calder
liked best. But the essential conditions of his art remained the same: a
fruitful union, his native American ingenuity (a preference for tools,
rather than the brush), leading in turn to a fresh discovery (an art of
motion), coupled with the advances of European art (abstract forms)
and European thought (the Surrealist understanding of the desirability
of the object of pleasure). The consequence of this union is that
Calder's native American gifts become interesting to general culture.
There is something splendid about the form of motion, or, more
exactly, motion formed; and it is with this that Calder has enchanted us.
* * *
Certain individuals represent a young generation's artistic chances.
There are never many such individuals in a single field, such as painting
-perhaps a hundred to begin with. The hazards inherent in man's many
relations with reality are so great-there is disease and premature death;
hunger and alcoholism and frustration; the historical moment may turn
wrong for painters: it most often does; the young artist may betray
himself, consciously or not, or may be betrayed-the hazards are so
great that not more than five out of a whole young generation are able
to develop to the end. And for the most part it is the painting of mature
men which is best.
The importance of the one-man show of young Jackson Pollock
(Art of This Century) lies just in this, that he represents one of the
younger generation's chances. There are not three other young Americans
of whom this could be said. In his exhibit Pollock reveals extraordinary
gifts: his color sense is remarkably fine, never exploited beyond its proper
role; and his sense of surface is equally good. His principal problem is
to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's
medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself.
ROBERT MOTHERWELL

=== Page 100 ===
Three Poems

THE SOLDIER

In the first year of the first war called the World
I watched a world blaze skyward into States,
And faced across the trenches of a continent
The customers whom I was shipped to kill.
Then Each taught Each to give up for the All
His joys, his reason, and his blood;
And those who had lived for profit marched to die
For all the sad varieties of Good.

All integers alike—the young and old, the poor and poor—
Were shadowed past distinction by the deaths
The States sowed over continents like salt.
Those years the flesh was levered from our bones.
The atom scratching in the gutted sty
Lost faith in that outmoded evil, good;
And learned, the rifle steady at his back,
The functions of a variable: to die.

The westering lives were steadied to a north
A little different from that sombre pole
The centuries had dreamed was Chance or Fate;
We learned—our poor wits sharpened with their blood—
That last cold center of our wish was Trade.
Where our blood ran the German books are red;
Because we died a bank in Manchester
Ships textiles to the blacks the Reich had taxed.

THE BOYG, PEER GYNT, THE ONE ONLY ONE

"Well, I have had a happy life," said Hazlitt;
Swift's eye was big as an egg.
What did the Moor say? I forget.
The servant who killed Greville cried.
They all died well: that is, they died.

How can one learn all this from Works?
It wasn't Gulliver the keeper beat;

98

=== Page 101 ===
POEMS 99

The informer was impressed with Marx,
Not Capital. On the picnics
Those Sundays, no one mentioned politics.
They lived, they died. "I am what I am,"
Someone heard Swift stammer: he was crazy.
Beethoven, dying, learned to multiply.
What does it mean? Why, nothing.
Nothing?... How well we all die!

SCHERZO

To sit on a chair, to eat from a table,
Is right, is polite, is comfortable-
Or so they say;
I say so too, I suppose I know it,
If I didn't, still, I suppose I'd do it-
It's a way.

The errors one's acquaintances call life,
The drab habitual disasters
Of paupers dropped from märchen into Europe-
The woodman frozen with both feet in air
As stiff as compasses beneath the bomber
The banker sent as succor to his winter:
I read about them sitting in my chair.

And am them; we are all corrupted.
Each year I talk more like the other fools,
Like less, lie more, am almost liked-
What does it matter? All that I love dies,
Even my wishes perish in the winter
That darkens for our time above the lands.
The snow falls on the unjust and unjust.
If I wish for a life, if I wish for my death,
In the cells where I am dying,
Does it matter? Why care?
Does anyone care? Get up from your chair-
Is anything better? Who cares?
It is over.

RANDALL JARRELL

=== Page 102 ===
Books

THE CASE OF THE BAFFLED RADICAL

A NEW LITERATURE seems to have made its appearance—the literature
of conscience of the ex-Communist.
Primarily a movement among journalists, the literary abnegation of
"The Party" has already produced some outstanding novels, notably
Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine and Arthur Koestler's Darkness At
Noon.

This literature of the Communist backslider has little in common
with the epics of Party conversion known as "proletarian" writing a
decade ago. The dramas of Bolshevik piety drew their main thinking,
naturally, from the organization into which the initiate was delivering
himself. In contrast, the work of the de-converted Red belongs to the
main stream of modern writing; it is part of the tradition of doubt and
negation which has occupied first place in literature for the past 100
years. Upon the Communist precepts and practices Koestler lets loose
the disintegrating machinery of skepticism, ambivalence and psychiatry
—weapons of the type used by Joyce in assaulting Catholic education,
by Mann against the ethics of middle-class duty, or by Gide against the
accepted morality of personal relations.

Measured by the accomplishment of the masters of the past genera-
tion, both the art and the skepticism of Koestler are quite thin. But as
one of the best chroniclers of the moral Flight From Moscow, he brings
to the novel something new or long-neglected—political sophistication
and a serious sense of the human drama of public events. Koestler un-
derstands how modern man is defeated in the conference rooms and the
daily press, on the battlefields and in the dungeons of Europe. He is
aware of viciousness and weakness not only, as the older writers knew
it, as something inherent—he knows it also as something made, even
made "according to plan." . . . Perhaps the task of the artist today is
rendered more difficult by the increased brutality of our culture; he
is forced to deal with new problems and areas of data from which his
art, as such, will gain nothing—just as the soldier at the front finds it
harder to keep alive though the quality of his life is not raised by these
difficulties.

Koestler's Arrival and Departure* is the story of the education of
Peter Slavek, fugitive ex-Communist, in the dubious sources of his own
revolutionary heroism. Upon his arrival in "Neutralia" (there ought to

* By Arthur Koestler. Macmillan. $2.

100

=== Page 103 ===
BOOKS 101

be a law against such place-names), with which the book begins, Peter
has already given up his connection with The Party, after many months
in a Nazi concentration camp. Why? Because the very intensity of the
sufferings he had borne without cracking had helped to convince this
22-year old son of the middle class that his resistance was due to some
other source than loyalty to the Party. The rank-and-file Party members
had succumbed to the tortures of the Gestapo and had betrayed their
oath, and they admired this faithful Peter as a hero. But isn't there some-
thing suspicious, Peter asked himself, in being a hero?
Yet when he jumps ship at Neutralia, Peter is still a carrier of ban-
ners, determined to get back into the battle through offering himself as
a volunteer to the British. While waiting, however, for the slow pro-
cesses of the Consulate to lift him out of neutrality, he falls in love with
a French refugee, Odette, a girl whose moral philosophy is neatly sum-
med up by Koestler in the phrase, "After all—why not?"
The love affair, which Koestler handles rather spottily, ends abrupt-
ly when Odette leaves without warning for America. The sudden aban-
donment proves too much for Peter; he is smitten with a psychic paralysis
of the right leg, on which the Nazi torturers have left fatal stigmata of
cigar burns. The most exciting sequence in the novel is the unexpected
physical collapse of Peter as the scar of the burn in the bend of his
knee becomes a hole through which "the strength had run out of his leg
like water out of the bath of Sonia," the female psychoanalyst in whose
apartment he is staying.
The core of the book is the psychic analysis itself, during which the
half-allegorical figure of Dr. Sonia Bolgar rocks in her chair by the bed-
side of the fallen warrior, drawing from him the tale of his deeds and
his dreams. The surface layers of Peter's mental tissue contain the hor-
rors of his actual experiences in Nazi Europe—his capture, the black-clad
torturers, the "mixed transports" in which captured girls, gypsies and
Jews are dragged across the continent to nightmarish fates. But when
these memory fabrics are torn up by the analysis, they bring with them,
like an uprooted sod, growths belonging to still deeper fears and defeats:
childhood crimes, expiations and vows to which all his adult life has
chained itself through symbolic transferences and confusions of identity.
When the bottom is reached, and the original sin disinterred—the "acci-
dental" putting out of his brother's eye at the age of five, which he
knew subconsciously was not an accident at all—Peter is cured, "cured
of his illusions, both about objective aims and subjective motives."
The new Peter decides to cast aside all political totems—"What real
good had come of those quixotic crusades?" But a certain uneasiness
springs up in connection with this plan too. However disillusioned he
may have become, Peter is dedicated to political action, "he is not the
type to back out and cultivate a garden." Below the values uprooted
simply out of the need to act, characteristic of Peter and his generation.

=== Page 104 ===
102 PARTISAN REVIEW

The final episodes of Arrival and Departure indicate clearly the
poles of Koestler's thinking—they are the same as those that appear in
the works of Thomas Mann and a good deal of other modern literature.
On the one hand, the road of a relaxed yielding to events, cessation of
struggle, and personal self-indulgence (identified with love): "After all
—why not?" On the other, a leap in the direction of "duty," duty felt,
not arrived at by reason and even opposed to reason: "Here we go" is
the phrase Koestler uses as a key.
"Don't you think," the shot-up British flier asks Peter, "that it's rather
a boring game trying to find out one's reasons for doing something?"
Thus, as Castorp in The Magic Mountain is last seen advancing across
No Man's Land, the baffled Peter reaches action and even consciousness
of possessing moral values when he leaps out over enemy country in a
parachute. At the last moment, he had quitted the ship that was to take
him to America and the immoral Odette—since duty is better than
giving way. And he had made the final discovery that reasons are a thing
of the past, for we live at the end of the age of science and "a new god
is about to be born." "Here we go," trusting ourselves happily to the
void in the cradle of a parachute; perhaps out of this act of self-aban-
donment the future deity will take shape.
Because of the intelligence, and particularly the relevance, of his
novels, it is easier to praise Koestler than to indicate the correct propor-
tion of his lack. His thinking tackles boldly some of the most real dra-
matic situations of our time. And it never forgets the personal sufferings
of those who are caught in them. At the same time there is a pervading
glibness in Koestler, the journalist satisfying himself with devices aimed
at the reader's opinions. This glibness is not altogether a vice, since it
permits the author to put down quickly and cleanly events whose
meanings a more painstaking investigation might not reveal for a
long time or might even find to be out of reach entirely. Haste is
especially important for the chronicler of political conscience, since the
background of the drama changes so rapidly today that details of
doubt recorded about, say, Spain in 1935 no longer have the same
point if described in 1943.
But for the readiness of his formulas, Koestler pays a high price.
For instance, his handling of the psychoanalytical process is extremely
well planned, but the quality of the symbols is uneven; some are subtly
selected personal images, others are text-book clichés. The writing, too,
is marred by easily acquired phrases and ideas: phrases like "another
symbolic toy which he had hung on the Christmas tree of his guilt";
ideas like the theatrical notion of Peter that he has the duty to save
mankind and that at the time of the Flood "there should have been at
least one who ran back into the rain, to perish with those who had no
planks under their feet."
Also, for all its philosophical fashionableness, the conclusion of
Arrival and Departure, with its assertion of the necessary failure of the

=== Page 105 ===
BOOKS 103

modern mind in the face of historical problems and its call for a new
deity, is intellectually gross. For the book has not even raised the problem
of socialism versus fascism which it pretends to exhaust. It does not
criticise the particular political philosophy of Peter—he might as well
have been a heroic Protestant minister. It merely argues that heroism
is always the result of infantile guilt feelings, that the political always
violates the personal, and that any reasoned political action involving
sacrifices is therefore always wholly neurotic.

The notion that psychoanalysis gives plausibility to these conclusions
is extremely superficial. The analysis is shown to have destroyed Peter's
ability to make a judgment of fascism, whereas, actually, by removing
his dream interpretation of the enemy, analysis should have deepened
his consciousness of what fascism means. Koestler has all but left himself
in the position of trying to demonstrate the contradiction that without
neurotic compulsions man cannot behave intelligently.

Koestler approaches politics with a fixed philosophical dualism that
distorts his understanding of the tragedy of the left intellectual of the
past decade. In Darkness at Noon, also a novel of atonement, he did not
attack the jailers of Rubashov for specific violations of socialist values,
but placed the responsibility on Rubashov himself as representing with
them a metaphysical absolute—“the logic of history”—opposed to the
time (which also appears in Koestler's essays) was to cause Rubashov,
introduced as one of the revolutionary founders of the USSR, to con-
ceive his political life as nothing more than a series of crimes against
the individual—it was the guilt he incurred in “representing history”
that he expiated in confessing at the trial. Such a criticism of The Trials
is a metaphysical not a political or historical criticism, and in effect it
accepts the political and historical claims of the Communists while re-
jecting their moral ones.

But without concrete politics, no concrete politics. Un-
like Silone, whose fascists are living types, Koestler's novels of guilt talk
about characters more often than they reveal them dramatically. The
scene between Peter and Radich, Chief of the Political Department, is a
marvellous dramatic opportunity—utterly missed. The same is true of
Koestler's Communists; they remain invisible behind their “ideas.”

No doubt the ex-Communists are baffled in the face of the present
world situation. Koestler's prophecy that “a new god is about to be
born” has no other content than this bafflement. The new god is a reli-
gious or mythological device which fills his hero with serene enthusiasm
by ending his need to understand what is taking place. In this shape
confusion is positive and homeopathic. The trouble is that it makes
“Here we go” identical with “After all—why not?” and political action
into a sexual experience.

HAROLD ROSENBERG

=== Page 106 ===
104
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE TWO REPUBLICS
THE REPUBLIC. By Charles A. Beard. Viking. $3.00.
Professor Beard is not the first writer to give Plato the tribute of a
work modeled after the wonderful dialogue which, next to the Bible,
has been the most read book of the western world. There is no doubt
of Professor Beard’s intention: his title and subject-matter are the same,
and his Republic is also in dialogue form, presented as the record of
twenty-one informal evening seminars held, all but one of them, around
the fireside at “Hosannah Hill.”
However, Professor Beard has not written a Plato in modern dress.
Quite the contrary, his dialogue is not a neo-Republic but a counter-
Republic; he is not imitating but challenging Plato. Dr. Smyth remarks
scornfully, “If we go on this way we shall soon be like the disputants in
Plato’s Republic. Scholars today cannot tell whether they were concen-
trating on human justice or headed all the time for a consideration of
the immortality of the soul”; and Beard has himself say, “. . . I want
to steer entirely clear of both Socrates and Plato. In my opinion, Greek
metaphysics has done damage, not good, to the Western world and to
Christian thought and practice. If modern Europeans had devoted to
the study of The Federalist the attention they gave to Plato’s Republic,
they would have been far better off in every way.”
To challenge Plato at writing dialogues is an act of some boldness.
From every rhetorical phase of the contest I am afraid that Beard comes
off a distant second. There is in the language of his new work little of
Plato’s life and wit and frequent magnificence; there is none of Plato’s
swift dramatic power—Beard’s characters remain only mouthpieces
throughout; there is almost none of the irony, none of the absorbing
indirections, and nothing to put beside the great myths of Plato’s 7th
and 10th books or the richly scattered lesser myths and metaphors. But
I am sure that Professor Beard has not meant to compete with Plato in
rhetoric. It is Plato’s ideas, and, even more, his method, that he is oppos-
ing. In Beard’s implicit estimate, Plato wrote dogmatically, from the
point of view of a dualistic metaphysics that dictated a utopian analytic
treatment of the problems of politics and morality. Plato constructed an
ideal state out of metaphysically acceptable concepts, and had Socrates
declare irrelevant the question whether such a state is possible in prac-
tice. Not until the picture of the ideal state was fully drawn did he return
to possibility.
Beard wishes to reject the dogmatic, the utopian and the metaphysi-
cal, taking as his point of reference not an ideal Form but the actual
United States and its history. The constitution of his state is the actual
Constitution of this nation (the full text is included). Many questions
are left unanswered, many conflicting points of view deliberately unre-
solved. He often repeats that his appeal is to empirical method, to the
records and lessons of historical experience. The words of the Constitution

=== Page 107 ===
BOOKS 105

about separation of powers are not allowed to stand against the fact
that the legislative, executive and judicial powers are not clearly sepa-
rated; practice, not words, shows who votes, who rules, what liberties
citizens possess. "The hard-headed framers of our Constitution were not
as ingenious in speculation and in finespun definitions of ideas as Socrates
and his companions. . . . They refused to try by ideal standards the fruits
of necessity and the frailties of human beings. They sought to institute
a workable government and a workable society."

The general subject is announced in an introduction: "Suppose
then we set down or fix as our center of concern the Republic, our
Republic, as strengthened, developed, and governed under the Constitu-
tion of the United States." The chief theme, however—and this is
proving a surprise to readers who remember how close to economic de-
terminism many of Beard's past writings have been—is an interpretation
and defense of "constitutionalism"; "in my judgment, no other theme
of national policy is so important for us as constitutionalism—the civilian
way of living together in the Republic, the way of preserving our liber-
ties and the decencies of social intercourse against the frenzies of the
despotic and violent temper. How to preserve the idea of constitutional
processes . . . that is the task of the present and future, a task of civiliza-
tion, supreme over all others."

Around this subject and this theme the discussions of the seminars
are arranged: a series of calm, informative, wise reflections on the
nature and history of government, particularly of the government of
this country. The defense of constitutionalism, naturally, leads to modi-
fications and even reversals of Beard's earlier judgments. The economic
factor diminishes in importance; he now defends Hamilton and, on the
whole, the Supreme Court; and, in a direct reversal, takes the side of
Lincoln against the radical Republicans.

Many of the discussions are illuminating in detail, but the impres-
sion of the whole is unsatisfying. The truth is that Beard has not got
so far away from Plato as he insists, that Plato is less purely metaphysical
and Beard less entirely empirical than he would seem to believe. Plato's
republic is not, really, a mere ideal Form but rather an idealization of
ancient Sparta, which Plato half knew and half imagined, in contrast
to his own defeated and corrupt city. Beard's republic and his constitu-
tion are not, really, this actual nation and its actual Constitution but,
in part at least, an idealized version of this nation's past—not its present
and future—and of an eternal, most Platonic Form of constitutionalism.
"The principle of constitutionalism, composed of these four essen-
tial elements, is in eternal contradiction to the principle of authoritarian,
totalitarian, dictatorial government. . . . That principle is a permanent
principle even though constitutions as documents may be scrapped or
burned, and the principle of tyranny, however phrased, set up in its
place. The principle of constitutional government will always exist, we
may assume, as an idea or ideal, to be contrasted with the authoritarian

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106 PARTISAN REVIEW

principle of despotism." For such leaps into an empirical void, the lan-
guage itself becomes straight Platonic-Hegelian.
The reason, I think, is that constitutionalism, empirically interpreted
in terms of the actual Constitution of this country, does not provide an
answer to the empirical problems of the present and future; therefore
Professor Beard also must escape to the World of Being. This opinion is
confirmed by the fact that nowhere in the dialogue does Beard treat
plainly the two central developments of the present: the growth of the
unlimited bureaucratic state; and the bid of the United States for
world domination. Surely the first of these is the great threat to consti-
tutional government such as Professor Beard is defending, and is not
to be answered by a mere optimistic reminder that our form of govern-
ment has in the past proved flexible enough to meet new problems as
they arise. Nor, in the case of the second, is it enough, at the very time
when the United States is plunged into the mainstream of world poli-
tics, to linger on an American exceptionalism that was the temporary
product of local circumstance. "I believe that there will always be an
America, an America with unique characteristics. . . . America is fated
to be America, and all the pulling and hauling of world-planners cannot
alter that fact."

There is a revealing dramatic symbol of Beard's unwillingness to
meet the problem of the United States' now irrevocable enmeshment in
world politics. I have already noted that, of the twenty-one "seminars"
that compose the dialogue, all but one are presented as if held at Beard's
own house. That one, where he leaves his fireside-for a satirized cock-
tail party crowded with straw-built "world planners" -is entitled, "The
Republic in the World of Nations," and in this short episode alone, and
in only part of this, are the world political problems seriously dealt with.
Sorel once showed how all utopias, though ostensibly projects for
the future, are invariably sighs for the past. In spite of its knowledge, its
integrity, good will and intelligence, this new Republic, like its original,
is finally utopian.

JAMES BURNHAM

GANDHI IN MAYFAIR

BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOUR. By Lionel Fielden. Secker and Warburg,
3s. 6d.

If you compare commercial advertising with political propaganda,
one thing that strikes you is its relative intellectual honesty. The adver-
tiser at least knows what he is aiming at-that is, money-whereas the
propagandist, when he is not a lifeless hack, is often a neurotic working
off some private grudge and actually desirous of the exact opposite of
the thing he advocates. The ostensible purpose of Mr. Fielden's book is
to further the cause of Indian independence. It will not have that effect,

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BOOKS 107
and I do not see much reason for thinking that he himself wishes for
anything of the kind. For if someone is genuinely working for Indian
independence, what is he likely to do? Obviously he will start by deciding
what forces are potentially on his side, and then, as cold-bloodedly as
any toothpaste advertiser, he will think out the best method of appealing
to them. This is not Mr. Fielden's manner of approach. A number of
motives are discernible in his book, but the immediately obvious one is
a desire to work off various quarrels with the Indian Government, All-
India Radio and various sections of the British Press. He does indeed
marshal a number of facts about India, and towards the end he even
produces a couple of pages of constructive suggestions, but for the most
part his book is simply a nagging, irrelevant attack on British rule, mixed
up with tourist-like gush about the superiority of Indian civilization. On
the fly-leaf, just to induce that matey atmosphere which all propagandists
aim at, he signs his dedicatory letter 'among the European barbarians',
and then a few pages later introduces an imaginary Indian who denounces
Western civilization with all the shrillness of a spinster of thirty-nine
denouncing the male sex:

'. . . an Indian who is intensely proud of his own traditions, and
regards Europeans as barbarians who are continually fighting, who use
force to dominate other peaceful peoples, who think chiefly in terms of
big business, whisky, and bridge; as people of comparatively recent
growth, who, while they put an exaggerated value on plumbing, have
managed to spread tuberculosis and venereal disease all over the world
. . . he will say that to sit in the water in which you have washed, instead
of bathing yourself in running water, is not clean, but dirty and dis-
gusting; he will show, and I shall agree with him absolutely, that the
English are a dirty and even a smelly nation compared with the Indians;
he will assert, and I am not at all sure that he is wrong, that the use of
half-washed forks, spoons and knives by different people for food is
revoltingly barbaric when compared with the exquisite manipulation of
food by Indian fingers; he will be confident that the Indian room, with
its bare walls and beautiful carpets, is infinitely superior to the European
clutter of uncomfortable chairs and tables,' etc. etc. etc.

The whole book is written in this vein, more or less. The same nag-
ging, hysterical note crops up every few pages, and where a comparison
can be dragged in it is dragged in, the upshot always being that the East
is Good and the West is Bad. Now before stopping to inquire what service
this kind of thing really does to the cause of Indian freedom, it is worth
trying an experiment. Let me rewrite this passage as it might be uttered
by an Englishman speaking up for his own civilization as shrilly as Mr.
Fielden's Indian. It is important to notice that what he says is not more
dishonest or more irrelevant than what I have quoted above:

‘ . . . an Englishman who is intensely proud of his own traditions,
and regards Indians as an unmanly race who gesticulate like monkeys, are

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108 PARTISAN REVIEW
cruel to women and talk incessantly about money; as a people who take
it upon themselves to despise Western science and hence are rotten
with malaria and hookworm . . . he will say that in a hot climate wash-
ing in running water has its points, but that in cold climates all Orientals
either wash as we do or as in the case of many Indian hill tribes—not
at all; he will show, and I shall agree with him absolutely, that no West-
ern European can walk through an Indian village without wishing that his
smell organs had been removed beforehand; he will assert, and I am
not at all sure that he is wrong, that eating with your fingers is a bar-
barous habit since it cannot be done without making disgusting noises;
he will be confident that the English room, with its comfortable arm-
chairs and friendly bookshelves, is infinitely superior to the bare Indian
interior where the mere effort of sitting with no support to your back
makes for vacuity of mind,' etc. etc. etc.
Two points emerge here. To begin with, no English person would
now write like that. No doubt many people think such thoughts, and
even utter them behind closed doors, but to find anything of the kind
in print you would have to go back ten years or so. Secondly, it is worth
asking, what would be the effect of this passage on an Indian who hap-
pened to take it seriously? He would be offended, and very rightly. Well
then, isn't it just possible that passages like the one I quoted from Mr.
Fielden might have the same effect on a British reader? No one likes
hearing his own habits and customs abused. This is not a trivial con-
sideration, because at this moment books about India have, or could
have, a special importance. There is no political solution in sight, the
Indians cannot win their freedom and the British Government will not
give it, and all one can for the moment do is to push public opinion in
this country and America in the right direction. But that will not be
done by any propaganda that is merely anti-European. A year ago, soon
after the Cripps mission had failed, I saw a well-known Indian nationalist
address a small meeting at which he was to explain why the Cripps offer
had been refused. It was a valuable opportunity, because there were
present a number of American newspaper correspondents who, if handled
tactfully, might cable to America a sympathetic account of the Congress
Party's case. They had come there with fairly open minds. Within about
ten minutes the Indian had converted all of them into ardent supporters
of the British Government, because instead of sticking to his subject he
launched into an anti-British tirade quite obviously founded on spite
and inferiority complex. That is just the mistake that a toothpaste adver-
tiser would not make. But then the toothpaste advertiser is trying to sell
toothpaste and not to get his own back on that Blimp who turned him
out of a first-class carriage fifteen years ago.
However, Mr. Fielden's book raises wider issues than the immediate
political problem. He upholds the East against the West on the ground
that the East is religious, artistic and indifferent to 'progress,' while the
West is materialistic, scientific, vulgar and warlike. The great crime of

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BOOKS 109

Britain is to have forced industrialization on India. (Actually, the real
crime of Britain during the last thirty years has been to do the opposite.)
The West looks on work as an end in itself, but at the same time is
obsessed with a ‘high standard of living’ (it is worth noticing that Mr.
Fielden is anti-Socialist, Russophobe and somewhat contemptuous of the
English working class), while India wants only to live in ancestral sim-
plicity in a world freed from the machine. India must be independent,
and at the same time must be de-industrialized. It is also suggested
a number of times, though not in very clear terms, that India ought to
be neutral in the present war. Needless to say, Mr. Fielden’s hero is
Gandhi, about whose financial background he says nothing. ‘I have a
notion that the legend of Gandhi may yet be a flaming inspiration to
the millions of the East, and perhaps to those of the West. But it is, for
the time being, the East which provides the fruitful soil, because the East
has not yet fallen prone before the Golden Calf. And it may be for the
East, once again, to show mankind that human happiness does not de-
pend on that particular form of worship, and that the conquest of
materialism is also the conquest of war.’ Gandhi makes many appear-
ances in the book, playing rather the same part as ‘Frank’ in the literature
of the Buchmanites.

Now, I do not know whether or not Gandhi will be a ‘flaming
inspiration’ in years to come. When one thinks of the creatures who are
venerated by humanity it does not seem particularly unlike. But the
statement that India ‘ought’ to be independent, and de-industrialized,
and neutral in the present war, is an absurdity. If one forgets the details
of the political struggle and looks at the strategic realities, one sees two
facts which are in seeming conflict. The first is that whatever the ‘ought’
of the question may be, India is very unlikely ever to be independent in
the sense in which Britain or Germany is now independent. The second
is that India’s desire for independence is a reality and cannot be talked
out of existence.

In a world in which national sovereignty exists, India cannot be a
sovereign State, because she is unable to defend herself. And the more
she is the cow and spinning-wheel paradise imagined by Mr. Fielden,
the more this is true. What is now called independence means the power
to manufacture aeroplanes in large numbers. Already there are only five
genuinely independent States in the world, and if present trends continue
there will in the end be only three. On a long-term view it is clear that
India has little chance in a world of power politics, while on a short-
term view it is clear that the necessary first step towards Indian freedom
is an Allied victory. Even that would only be a short and uncertain step,
but the alternatives must lead to India’s continued subjection. If we are
defeated, Japan or Germany takes over India and that is the end of
the story. If there is a compromise peace (Mr. Fielden seems to hint at
times that this is desirable) India’s chances are no better, because in such
circumstances we should inevitably cling to any territories we had cap-

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110 PARTISAN REVIEW
tured or not lost. A compromise peace is always a peace of ‘grab what
you can.’ Mr. Fielden brings forward his imaginary Indian to suggest
that if India were neutral Japan might leave her alone; I doubt whether
any responsible Indian nationalist has said anything quite so stupid as
that. The other idea, more popular in Left-wing circles, that India could
defend herself better on her own than with our help, is a sentimentality.
If the Indians were militarily superior to ourselves they would have driven
us out long ago. The much-quoted example of China is very misleading
here. India is a far easier country to conquer than China, if only because
of its better communications, and in any case Chinese resistance depends
on help from the highly-industrialized states and would collapse without
it. One must conclude that for the next few years India’s destiny is
linked with that of Britain and the U.S.A. It might be different if the
Russians could get their hands free in the West or if China were a great
military power; but that again implies a complete defeat of the Axis,
and points away from the neutrality which Mr. Fielden seems to think
desirable. The idea put forward by Gandhi himself, that if the Japanese
came they could be dealt with by sabotage and ‘non-co-operation,’ is a
delusion, nor does Gandhi show any very strong signs of believing in it.
Those methods have never seriously embarrassed the British and would
make no impression on the Japanese. After all, where is the Korean
Gandhi?

But against this is the fact of Indian nationalism, which is not to be
exorcised by the humbug of White Papers or by a few phrases out of
Marx. And it is nationalism of an emotional, romantic, even chauvinistic
kind. Phrases like ‘the sacred soil of the Motherland,’ which now seem
merely ludicrous in Britain, come naturally enough to an Indian intel-
lectual. When the Japanese appeared to be on the point of invading
India, Nehru actually used the phrase ‘Who dies if India live?’ So the
wheel comes full circle and the Indian rebel quotes Kipling. And na-
tionalism at this level works indirectly in favour of Fascism. Extremely
few Indians are at all attracted by the idea of a federated world, the
only kind of world in which India could actually be free. Even those who
pay lip-service to federalism usually want only an Eastern federation,
thought of as a military alliance against the West. The idea of the class
struggle has little appeal anywhere in Asia, nor do Russia and China
evoke much loyalty in India. As for the Nazi domination of Europe,
only a handful of Indians are able to see that it affects their own destiny
in any way. In some of the smaller Asiatic countries the ‘my country
right or wrong’ nationalists were exactly the ones who went over to the
Japanese—a step which may not have been wholly due to ignorance.
But here there arises a point which Mr. Fielden hardly touches on,
and that is: we don’t know to what extent Asiatic nationalism is simply
the product of our own oppression. For a century all the major Oriental
nations except Japan have been more or less in subjection, and the
hysteria and shortsightedness of the various nationalist movements may

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BOOKS 111

be the result simply of that. To realize that national sovereignty is the
enemy of national freedom may be a great deal easier when you are not
being ruled by foreigners. It is not certain that this is so, since the most
nationalist of the Oriental nations, Japan, is also the one that has never
been conquered, but at least one can say that if the solution is not along
these lines, then there is no solution. Either power politics must yield
to common decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a night-
mare of which we can already catch some dim glimpses. And the neces-
sary first step, before we can make our talk about world federation sound
even credible, is that Britain shall get off India's back. This is the only
large-scale decent action that is possible in the world at this moment.
The immediate preliminaries would be: abolish the Viceroyalty and the
Indian Office, release the Congress prisoners, and declare India formally
independent. The rest is detail.*

But how are we to bring any such thing about? If it is done at this
time, it can only be a voluntary act. Indian independence has no asset
except public opinion in Britain and America, which is only a potential
asset. Japan, Germany and the British Government are all on the other
side, and India's possible friends, China and the U.S.S.R., are fighting
for their lives and have little bargaining power. There remain the peoples
of Britain and America, who are in a position to put pressure on their
own Governments if they see a reason for doing so. At the time of the
Cripps mission, for instance, it would have been quite easy for public
opinion in this country to force the Government into making a proper
offer, and similar opportunities may recur. Mr. Fielden, by the way, does
his best to throw doubt on Cripps' personal honesty, and also lets it appear
that the Congress Working Committee were unanimously against accept-
ing the Cripps proposals, which was not the case. In fact, Cripps extorted
the best terms he could get from the Government; to get better ones he
would have had to have public opinion actively and intelligently behind
him. Therefore the first job is—win over the ordinary people of this
country. Make them see that India matters, and that India has been
shamefully treated and deserves restitution. But you are not going to do
that by insulting them. Indians, on the whole, grasp this better than
their English apologists. After all, what is the probable effect of a book
which irrelevantly abuses every English institution, rapturises over the
'wisdom of the East' like an American schoolmarm on a conducted tour,
and mixes up pleas for Indian freedom with pleas for surrender to Hitler?
At best it can only convert the converted, and it may de-convert a few
of those. The net effect must be to strengthen British imperialism, though
its motives are probably more complex than this may seem to imply.
On the surface, Mr. Fielden's book is primarily a plea for 'spiritu-

* Of course the necessary corollary would be a military alliance for the
duration of the war. But it is not likely that there would be any difficulty in
securing this. Extremely few Indians really want to be ruled by Japan or Germany.

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112 PARTISAN REVIEW
ality' as against 'materialism.' On the one hand an uncritical reverence
for everything Oriental; on the other a hatred of the West generally,
and of Britain in particular, hatred of science and the machine, suspicion
of Russia, contempt for the working-class conception of Socialism. The
whole adds up to Parlour Anarchism—a plea for the simple life, based
on dividends. Rejection of the machine is, of course, always founded on
tacit acceptance of the machine, a fact symbolised by Gandhi as he plays
with his spinning-wheel in the mansion of some cotton millionaire. But
Gandhi also comes into the picture in another way. It is noticeable that
both Gandhi and Mr. Fielden have an exceedingly equivocal attitude
towards the present war. Although variously credited in this country with
being a 'pure' pacifist and a Japanese agent, Gandhi has, in fact, made
so many conflicting pronouncements on the war that it is difficult to keep
track of them. At one moment his 'moral support' is with the Allies, at
another it is withdrawn, at one moment he thinks it best to come to
terms with the Japanese, at another he wishes to oppose them by non-
violent means—at the cost, he thinks, of several million lives—at another
he urges Britain to give battle in the west and leave India to be invaded,
at another he 'has no wish to harm the Allied cause' and declares that
he does not want the Allied troops to leave India. Mr. Fielden's views
on the war are less complicated, but equally ambiguous. In no place does
he state whether or not he wishes the Axis to be defeated. Over and
over again he urges that an Allied victory can lead to no possible good
result, but at the same time he disclaims 'defeatism' and even argues that
could fight better if India were not a liability. Now, if this means any-
thing, it means that he wants a compromise, a negotiated peace; and
though he fails to say so, I do not doubt that that is what he does want.
But curiously enough, this is the imperialist solution. The appeasers have
always wanted neither defeat nor victory but a compromise with the
other imperialist powers; and they too have known how to use the mani-
fest folly of war as an argument.

For years past the more intelligent imperialists have been in favour
of compromising with the Fascists, even if they had to give away a good
deal in order to do so, because they have seen that only thus could im-
perialism be salvaged. Some of them are not afraid to hint this fairly
broadly even now. If we carry the war to a destructive conclusion, the
British Empire will either be lost, or democratised, or pawned to America.
On the other hand it could and probably would survive in something
like its present form if there were other sated imperialist powers which
had an interest in preserving the existing world system. If we came to
an understanding with Germany and Japan we might diminish our
possessions (even that isn't certain: it is a little-noticed fact that in terri-
tory Britain and the U.S.A. have gained more than they have lost in
this war), but we should at least be confirmed in what we had already.
The world would be split up between three or four great imperial powers

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BOOKS 113
who, for the time being, would have no motive for quarrelling. Germany
would be there to neutralize Russia, Japan would be there to prevent the
development of China. Given such a world system, India could be kept
in subjection almost indefinitely. And more than this, it is doubtful whe-
ther a compromise peace could follow any other lines. So it would seem
that Parlour Anarchism is something very innocuous after all. Objectively
it only demands what the worst of the appeasers want, subjectively it is
of a kind to irritate the possible friends of India in this country. And does
not this bear a sort of resemblance to the career of Gandhi, who has
alienated the British public by his extremism and aided the British Gov-
ernment by his moderation? Impossibilism and reaction are usually in
alliance, though not, of course, conscious alliance.
Hypocrisy is a very rare thing, true villainy is perhaps difficult as
virtue. We live in a lunatic world in which opposites are constantly
changing into one another, in which pacifists find themselves worshipping
Hitler, Socialists become nationalists, patriots become quislings, Buddhists
pray for the success of the Japanese army, and the Stock Market takes
an upward turn when the Russians stage an offensive. But though these
people's motives are often obvious enough when seen from the outside,
they are not obvious to themselves. The scenes imagined by Marxists, in
which wicked rich men sit in little secret rooms and hatch schemes for
robbing the workers, don't happen in real life. The robbery takes place,
but it is committed by sleepwalkers. Now, one of the finest weapons that
the rich have ever evolved for use against the poor is 'spirituality.' If you
can induce the working-man to believe that his desire for a decent stan-
dard of living it 'materialism,' you have got him where you want him.
Also, if you can induce the Indian to remain 'spiritual' instead of taking
up with vulgar things like trade unions, you can ensure that he will
always remain a coolie. Mr. Fielden is indignant with the 'materialism'
of the Western working class, whom he accuses of being even worse in
this respect than the rich and of wanting not only radios but even motor-
cars and fur coats. The obvious answer is that these sentiments don't
come well from someone who is in a comfortable and privileged position
himself. But that is only an answer, not a diagnosis, for the problem of
the disaffected intelligentsia would be hardly a problem at all if ordinary
dishonesty were involved.

In the last twenty years Western civilization has given the intellec-
tual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has
educated him in scepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in
the priviledged class. He has been in the position of a young man living
on an allowance from a father whom he hates. The result is a deep feeling
of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape.
But some psychological escape, some form of self-justification there must
be, and one of the most satisfactory is transferred nationalism. During
the nineteen-thirties the normal transference was to Soviet Russia, but
there are other alternatives, and it is noticeable that pacifism and An-

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114 PARTISAN REVIEW

archism, rather than Stalinism, are now gaining ground among the young.
These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and
therefore in effect demand very little. If you throw in a touch of Oriental
mysticism and Buchmanite raptures over Gandhi, you have everything
that a disaffected intellectual needs. The life of an English gentleman
and the moral attitude of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously. By
merely transferring your allegiance from England to India (it used to
be Russia), you can indulge to the full in all the chauvinistic sentiments
which would be totally impossible if you recognized them for what they
were. In the name of pacifism you can compromise with Hitler, and in
the name of ‘spirituality’ you can keep your money. It is no accident
that those who wish for an inconclusive ending to the war tend to extol
the East as against the West. The actual facts don’t matter very much.
The fact that the Eastern nations have shown themselves at least as war-
like and bloodthirsty as the Western ones, that so far from rejecting
industrialism, the East is adopting it as swiftly as it can—this is irrelevant,
since what is wanted is the mythos of the peaceful, religious and patri-
archal East to set against the greedy and materialistic West. As soon as
you have ‘rejected’ industrialism, and hence Socialism, you are in that
strange no man’s land where the Fascist and the pacifist join forces. There
is indeed a sort of apocalyptic truth in the statement of the German
radio that the teachings of Hitler and Gandhi are the same. One realizes
this when one sees Middleton Murry praising the Japanese invasion of
China and Gerald Heard proposing to institute the Hindu caste system
in Europe at the same time as the Hindus themselves are abandoning it.
We shall be hearing a lot about the superiority of Eastern civilization in
the next few years. Meanwhile this is a michievous book, which will be
acclaimed in the Left-wing Press and welcomed for quite different reasons
by the more intelligent Right.

GEORGE ORWELL

EMPTY NET

THE WIDE NET AND OTHER STORIES. By Eudora Welty. Har-
court, Brace. $2.50.

The stories in Miss Welty’s first volume, The Curtain of Green,
were not consciously profound, but implicit in them was an astute com-
mentary on human behaviour. The agencies for her implications were
humor, a contrived but clever architecture, taste, and arresting, if oc-
casionally deformed, prose. But in her new book, The Wide Net, the
author, warily picking her way through meanings and the amorphous
produce of the soul, or rocketing out of sight in a burst of fantasy, loses
her humor, leaves fissures in her masonry, forgets her breeding, and
writes eight stories in a language so vague that not only actual words
but syntax itself have the improbable inexactitude of a verbal dream.
Nor is the landscape any more precise, nor have the characters more

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BOOKS 115

than the most general physiognomy, the most uniform speech and at-
titudes and meditations.

Perhaps most unsuccessful are the two stories of a historical flavor.
I say "flavor" but I could say "odor" or "echo" or "tinge," for the past
is no more substantial than these. In "First Love," Aaron Burr figures
as a troubled, debonair shape in a black cloak, but there are no facts to
convince one that this is really Aaron Burr and not another man of the
same name with no discernible characteristics to distinguish him from
the table at which he sits. Similarly, in "A Still Moment," Audubon
accomplishes nothing to authenticate his identity but is only a deus ex
machina who, almost by accident, is a naturalist.

"The Purple Hat," a tale of a New Orleans gambling house and
told by a plump man in a bar, cannot be assigned an accurate adjective.
One has no idea why it was written. Like its focal point, the purple hat,
the story is an inexplicable assembly of doo-dads. I am not convinced
by the title story in which the dialogue is so cadenced it is hard not to
keep time with one's foot. And I am as languid as calmed down Ol'
Man River when, in "At the Landing," I have lived through death and
a flood and a seduction and the subsequent collapse of her social position
with a southern belle. "Livvie," recording the life of a young negro
woman married to a comatose but intermittently frightening old man,
is frequently charming and reminiscent of the earlier stories, for the
protagonist here is not rummaging through her emotions, but, with a
clear and immediate objectivity sees things like the crape myrtle trees
whose branches end in colored bottles to keep evil spirits away. "The
Winds" offers the summertime reflections of a little girl of sensibility
and warmth, and if it were not for the language out of whose smothering
density her thoughts must struggle and often fail to rise, she would, I
think, be the heroine of an artful story. But she, unlike Livvie, cannot
observe for she looks through a haze which distorts while it beautifies
the world.

And even in "Asphodel," a story potentially as wry as "Old Mr.
Grenada" or "Clytie," Miss Welty does not completely satisfy. Here is
her familiar material: prim, evil-minded spinsters recounting with lust
and horror the antics of a philanderer and the sufferings of his wife. As
in the other stories, there is wanting the confidence and directness
promised in the opening paragraphs, then deflected, finally dissipated.
One can only hope that the talent which executed "The Petrified Man"
and "Why I Live at the P.O." will awaken from this stumbling sleep.

JEAN STAFFORD

=== Page 118 ===
Variety

Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a
Master of Prose

I have just been reading Mis-
sion to Moscow, Mr. Joseph E.
Davies' book, after seeing the film
of the same title. The picture, I
find, coincides with the book in
almost no respect. The real Mr.
Joseph Davies, for example, is a
shrewd corporation lawyer who
contributed to the Roosevelt cam-
paign fund and was appropriately
rewarded with an ambassadorship.
The Davies of the Warner Bro-
thers picture is a plain rugged
American business man, played by
Mr. Walter Huston rather like a
more elderly version of Sinclair
Lewis' Dodsworth, who demurs
with a touching humility when the
President asks him to go to Russia,
and protests that he is really not
qualified because he has had no
diplomatic training. The real Mr.
Davies was sent specifically to talk
about a trade agreement and to
arrange for the settlement of debts
contracted by the Kerensky gov-
ernment. The Hollywood Mr.
Davies is simply entrusted with a
solemn mission of reporting on the
state of the Soviet Union. The
real Mr. Davies was troubled by
the tyrannies of the Stalinist police
state. "No physical betterment of
living standards," he wrote, "could
possibly compensate for the utter
destruction of liberty of thought or
speech, and the sanctity of the in-
dividual. . . . The government is a
dictatorship not 'of the proletariat,'
as professed, but 'over the prole-
tariat.' It is completely dominated
by one man." One could go on like
this at length.

There is one point, however, in
which the picture is quite faithful
to the real Mr. Davies. When the
Davies of Walter Huston is made
to attend the Moscow trials, he
enunciates the following statement:
"Based on twenty years of trial
practice, I'd be inclined to believe
these men's testimony." The trials
themselves, it is true, are repre-
sented falsely, and this is not
precisely the kind of thing that Mr.
Davies was saying about them at
the time; but the undependable
syntax of the Warner Brothers'
Davies is absolutely true to life. I
should say, indeed, from reading
the book, that the author of Mis-
sion to Moscow is, so far as my ex-
perience goes, the greatest master
of bad official English since the late
President Harding.

The prose style of President
Harding has been analyzed by H.
L. Mencken in his admirable little
paper, "A Short View of Gamalie-
lese"; and this piece, which I have
lately been reading, has stimulated
me to try to do some justice to the
beauties of the writing of Davies.
Let me begin with one of the
cultural notes with which Davies
the connoisseur and man of taste
diversifies his record of affairs of
state, a passage which illustrates
brilliantly his skill in producing
the effect of surprise:

For weeks there have been ce-
lebrations of the centenary of

116

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VARIETY 117
Pushkin's death all over the
country. He is a combination of
Byron and Shakespeare for the
Russian people. He was a liberal
in thought and married to a
noblewoman who, it is alleged,
was a mistress of the tsar. He
was killed in a duel, which, as
the story goes, was a frame-up.
Both the opera and the ballet
were based on Pushkin's works
and the music was by the great
Tchaikovsky. The opera was
“Eugen Onegin," a romantic
story of two young men of posi-
tion whose friendship was
broken up over a misunder-
standing and lovers' quarrel
which resulted in a duel in
which the poet was killed. It
was significant of Pushkin's own
end and oddly enough was writ-
ten by him.

The sequence of relative pro-
nouns here in the sentence before
the last, each one depending on
the one before, is a very fine bit
of writing, but it only prepares for
the climax. It drags us by a series
of hitches up an incline like the
hump on a roller-coaster, from the
top of which we suddenly dip into
a dizzying and breath-depriving
excitement. What is it that makes
the next sentence so startling? Not
syntax, for the syntax is normal.
Not logic: no mere fallacy is in-
volved. We cannot assign the
manoeuvre to any of the familiar
categories of rhetorical or logical
errors. The device is original and
daring; it takes us a moment to
grasp it; but then we become aware
that the trick consists of first ex-
plaining that the opera which Mr.
Davies calls Eugen Onegin (though
this is neither its Russian nor its
English form) is based on Push-
kin's poem; then of indicating a
striking parallel between the cir-
cumstances of Pushkin's death and
the poem; and then of suddenly
making the point that, by some
scarcely believable coincidence, the
poem was written by Pushkin. But
to paraphrase the passage thus is
to rob it of all its thrill. The whole
effect depends on the quickness of
the shift in the sense and on the
simple phrase, oddly enough at
once arresting and casual. Only
a bad writer of genius could
have hit upon and placed this
phrase. It is as if a long red carpet
on which we had been walking on
our way to some ceremony of state
had suddenly been pulled out from
under us.

Yet there is at least one example
even bolder of Mr. Davies' ability
to baffle and to dazzle:

The peace of Europe, if main-
tained, is in imminent danger of
being a peace imposed by the
dictators, under conditions where
all of the smaller countries will
speedily rush in to get under
the shield of the German aegis,
and under conditions where,
even though there be a concert
of power, as I have predicted
to you two years ago, with "Hit-
ler leading the band."

Here the opening is weighty and
portentous: a veteran man of af-
fairs with a large experience of
Europe is about to deliver a con-
sidered opinion. The first indica-
tion of anything queer comes with
the shield of the German aegis;
but although this gives us pause
for a moment, we immediately re-

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118 PARTISAN REVIEW
assure ourselves by concluding that thought. We find it very hard to
Mr. Davies surely knows that a believe that a man who can use
shield is an aegis, and has allowed the subjunctive in this noble tradi-
himself the little tautology, in the tional way would be capable of
exuberance of his enjoyment of his leaving his sentence with one end
official position, as a mere rhetoric- sticking out in the air, like the rope
al flourish. But then we come to in the Indian rope trick. And yet
the as I have predicted to you two Mr. Davies has left it so, and we
years ago. The tense here is incor- can only accept and wonder, just
rect: it should be as I predicted to as we can only accept and wonder
you two years ago. We conclude at his giving the public his word
that Mr. Davies does not know for the authenticity of all the
this, but that, even though he does testimony quoted from the trials in
not know it, the instinct of his his film, which contained a con-
genius has guided him to hit upon fession by Tukhachevsky imagined
the perfect deviation which, by and written by Hollywood, at his
adding to the solemnity of the tone flying back from Moscow on his
at the same time as to the absurdity second mission with the advertise-
of the writing, will lead the way ment Mission to Moscow painted
to the final effect. And what an in large yellow letters in English
effect it is! The sentence never and Russian on his plane, and at
comes to a conclusion. It is a new his watching with gratification in
sort of aposiopesis-an aposiopesis the company of Stalin and his
with a full-stop at the end. Yet the retinue, while this film was shown
grammatical impossibility has with in the Kremlin.
wonderful art been half-concealed. Let me finally quote a passage
He has first given us one adverbial less distinguished by brilliance of
clause beginning with under con- language than by the felicity with
ditions where, which completes it- which it mirrors the qualities of
self in the logical way, and he now the man himself. Mr. Davies is re-
starts another clause like it: and porting an interview with a re-
under conditions where. Having presentative of the Soviet Foreign
just seen the preceding one Office, at which the trade agree-
brought off, the mind is prepared ment and the debts were discussed:
to supply the necessary fulfilment He stated that they were hav-
of the second. But this second ing difficulty, in connection with
clause is never completed. Mr. guaranteeing $40,000,000 of
Davies, by a rare stroke of art, purchases in the United States.
starts another subordinate clause, I stated quite frankly, how-
even though there be, etc., and at ever, that while, personally, I
the end of the clause he stops. For made these admissions to him
a moment we cannot believe it. "and against interest," that [sic]
The use of the subjunctive here, quite as frankly I had absolute-
even though there be, is another of ly no tolerance for a position
his fine manipulations to give us that would haggle over an in-
confidence in the structure of his

=== Page 121 ===
VARIETY 119
crease of $10,000,000 in pur-
chases (from $30,000,000 to
$40,000,000) in view of both
the equities and the practical-
ities of this situation; that in my
opinion it was not an evidence
of approaching the matter in a
broadminded and appreciative
attitude of the position which
Secretary Hull had taken so
fairly and in such a large-
minded way on this particular
problem.
The style here, of course, is re-
markable as Mr. Davies' style al-
ways is. The superfluous that is
good. The broad-minded and large-
minded are like the flourish of per-
suasive hands brushing doubts and
inhibitions aside; and in the next
sentence but one we already see
the spell that is cast by the verbal
incantation, taking effect on the
Soviet department head:

Mr. Neymann manifested a
very fair-minded attitude in
reply and stated in conclusion
that he would not be disposed
to quarrel with that point of
view. . .

But there glints through in this
passage, when the figures are
named, the relentless fortiter in
rebus which-to resort to a kind
of ornament much relished by Mr.
Davies-always lurks behind the
sauviter in modo. Mr. Davies is of
Welsh blood, he tells us, and, like
a Welshman, he knows how to
combine an elevated and shimmer-
ing eloquence with a certain
subtlety of practical shrewdness.
The glint is half lost in the mist;
the purpose is half obscured by the
>shower of flattering words that,
meaningless though most of them

are, rather soothe us and please us
as we read. These words may per-
haps have made it easier for Mr.
Davies, at the time of his embassy,
to further the interests of the
United States; but there are mo-
ments when the steely gleam that
pierces from time to time the shift-
ing lights of Mr. Davies' language,
has the look of an eye fixed intent-
ly on opportunities for conspicuous
self-dramatization.

EDMUND WILSON

Portrait of the Artist
As a Middle Aged Man

When the "literary situation"
has to be discussed, it must surely
be pretty far gone. The truth is
that in the last years those who
have not allowed themselves to
became complacent have taken to
complaining about it, but rarely
has the subject been aired in
print; and Malcolm Cowley's
recent piece in The New Republic
on "American Literature in War-
time" is one of the very few com-
ments on the low state of writing
today. Cowley points to such ty-
pical signs of deterioration as the
enormous output — and prestige
— of potboilers, and the dearth
of any writing — or political think-
ing—that bares the more crucial
experiences of the time. He attri-
butes this decline of the creative
spirit to the frustrations of the
liberal mind and the eventual loss
of its political faith as it became
disillusioned through the Moscow
Trials, the Spanish defeat, Mun-
ich, and the Stalin-Hitler Pact.
And having been deprived of the
enthusiasms of some enveloping

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120 PARTISAN REVIEW

cause, writers have withdrawn
into the private imagination,
which cannot but lag behind the
pace of events.

With some of Cowley's diagnosis
one is bound to agree. But it seems
to me that both the causes and the
effects of the present crisis go
much deeper. What we observe
today is not so much a lull in the
literary life as an utter breakdown
of values and distinctions and a
failure of the will to independent,
radical expression. Nor can one ac-
count for this cultural degenera-
tion, as Cowley tends to, simply
by the political disappointments of
the last decade, for in the past
the vitality of art has never been
known to depend on the realiza-
tions of any radical hopes. On the
contrary, the measure of vitality
has been the ability of intellectuals
to maintain their identity and their
traditions regardless of the politi-
cal situation.

In the last few years, however,
most American writers have done
nothing so much as display their
capacity to conform, by draping
themselves in the official doctrines
of All-American anti-fascism and
knuckling under to the chest-
thumping nationalism now ram-
pant. There is, perhaps, as much
native talent at work today as in
the past, but apparently it has
been drained off by the pieties of
the war spirit, leaving any against-
the-stream creative effort to a few
lonely figures content to remain
outside the sway of literary opinion.

The rediscovery of America has
become practically an occupational
disease not only of popular writers
and reviewers but also of people

who once had at least one foot in
the movements of literary revolt.
The phenomenon is actually too
widespread to cite, but the effects
are evident even in a number of
ostensibly serious studies, such as
Ferner Nuhn's The Wind Blows
from the East and Maxwell Geis-
mar's Writers in Transition, in
which the worth of American
authors is tested largely by their
devotion to the native land. And
this impulse to boost our national
stock has been accompanied by a
wave of anti-intellectualism that
threatens to destroy the still re-
maining traces of the radical and
modernist spirit that developed
after the last war. True enough, a
guilt feeling on the part of writers
who strayed too far from the pop-
ular mind and a tendency to retire
into the security of the American
past have been ever present in our
culture. But today this intellectual
masochism has become almost the
norm of the literary man, so that
the traditional gap between of-
ficial and disaffected thinking, be-
tween kitsch and literature, is
closing up. Only in such a debased
atmosphere can cash-and-carry
writers like Saroyan and Steinbeck,
for example, be treated with the
respect and attention ordinarily
reserved for figures of genuine dis-
tinction.

Perhaps even more remarkable
is the absence of a younger gene-
ration of writers, sharing more or
less a common dissidence and a
common direction. By definition,
the artist who sets out to advance
the medium or to express new
ideas is a young man at war with
the existing gods and disposed to

=== Page 123 ===
VARIETY 121
nurse his disaffection and sense of
alienation - a zealot, we might
say, of the advance guard. Thus
have new literary movements come
to the fore. Of late, however, the
new talents that have appeared
have mostly presented themselves
in the image of middle-aged lite-
rary men, not too eager to diffe-
rentiate themselves from the al-
ready succesful models, and ripe
for the standard literary markets.
Where in the past most gifted
writers had to suffer their growing
pains in the "little magazines" be-
fore the commercial publications
would come to terms with them,
if at all, today the young writer
is quite ready to skip the interme-
diate stage. As a result, the young-
er talent, instead of reaching for
some new forms of the imagina-
tion to generalize its experience -
the experience of a generation
caught between the political shocks
of the thirties and the uprootings
of the war - has taken to match-
ing skills with the more popular
authors. No wonder that immemo-
rial genre, the slice of life, which
proceeds by simple addition of
events to characters, has become
the standard recipe for literary
composition. And as every maga-
zine editor knows, even the pre-
sumably more advanced specimens
of writing are for the most part
but the trophies of modernism,
handed down from the twenties.
There are, to be sure, some notable
exceptions - offhand one might
mention Karl Schapiro, Randall
Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth
Bishop, Saul Bellow, H. J. Kaplan,
Isaac Rosenfeld- but these are iso-
lated figures, lacking the élan and
confidence of a movement.
These are some of the more tel-
ling symptoms - all obviously of
a piece - of intellectual disrup-
tion. And while no cultural situa-
tion can be defined in purely poli-
tical terms, it is clear that Amer-
ican writing has been thrown off
balance by the events of the last
decade. Thus there was the poli-
tical fling of the thirties when so
many established as well as young
writers leaped to the cause of com-
munism and proletarian art, out-
doing each other in the extrava-
ganzas of political writing. Hence
it was almost inevitable that they
should soon find themselves in the
position of a truly "lost genera-
tion", unable to adjust to a new
climate, once the Stalinists, who
sponsored the new literary move-
ment, removed its revolutionary
props. Some gifted figures simply
lost their bearings, retiring from
both literature and politics, while
those faithfuls who veered left and
right with the Stalinists were tran-
sformed into political automata
who found it just as gratifying to
underwrite the democratic myth
as to agitate for the socialist revo-
lution. And the liberal mind,
which had sustained itself through
the faith and energy of the Stali-
nists, even when it kept its dis-
tance from their more extreme
policies, found itself betrayed at
every turn and crushed between
the failures of the radical cause
and the false hopes of the new
gospel of compromise.
With the coming of the war, it
was of course to be expected that
some of the earlier radicalism
should be supplanted by a patrio-

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122
PARTISAN REVIEW
tic and socially empty anti-fascism,
absorbing practically all the intel-
lectuals who formerly had leaned
to the left. And it is clear that this
transition was smoothed by the
Communist Party when it pro-
vided left-wing sanctions for the
scrapping of any political aims
beyond the winning of the war.
Nor has any other radical move-
ment been able to gain sufficient
stature to challenge the memory
or the political conscience of
American intellectuals and to
place restraints on their tendency
to make their peace with the social
order and all its works. Not con-
tent to support the war simply on
the grounds of expediency, they
have gone the whole hog in vir-
tually accepting the political inte-
rests of the Allied powers. Cultu-
rally and politically they have fal-
len in with the official jargon of
the times.

How long can this last? In the
modern period, literature has
thrived on those contradictions in
society that permit writers to ex-
press a detached and critical at-
titude. And it is altogether likely
that the defeat of Hitler will re-
lease new forces and conflicts that
are bound to shake the literary
mind out of its present servility.
There is some hope, too, that a
generation of young writers will
return from the war with a fresh
image of its realities. Judging by
their record, American writers can
be counted on to move quickly
once the social mood shifts. But
even if writers change their opin-
ions quickly, the literary process,
unfortunately, moves slowly.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS

Virgil and War

In connection with a certain
project I am re-studying Latin. I
once knew a little of the language;
but it has since disappeared, de-
cisions, conjugations, rules, ex-
ceptions and all, into the limbo of
unused erudition. I doubt that at
present I could even read at sight
that beginner's classic, "Cornelia's
Jewels." So I have had to start
with the very first sentence in the
grammar, the one which reads:
"The Latin alphabet is the same
as the English, except that Latin
has no 'w'."

There have evidently been many
recent developments in the teach-
ing of Latin. In the bookstores are
volumes incorporating "improved
techniques for study" and various
novelty features designed to cap-
ture a pupil's interest. Unfortunate-
ly the newer editions show little
advance in esthetic quality. I am
studying Latin out of a modern
school Aeneid which still prints
reproductions of such musty works
as "The Trojan Horse" by Henri
Paul Motte and "Roman Ladies at
the Tombs of Their Ancestors" by
Hector Le Roux. But in other ways
there are great improvements. My
Aeneid is known as "The Visible
Vocabulary Edition." Its attrac-
tion consists in its printing all to-
gether on the same page text,
glossary, and notes on construc-
tions. The advantages of this plan
are obvious. The vocabularies at
the foot of each page give the Eng-
lish equivalent for every single
Latin word on that page, no mat-
ter how many times the word may
have been given before. No penalty
for forgetting! As someone said to

=== Page 125 ===
VARIETY 123

me of this edition, "Such magnan-
imity from editors is only possible
in the case of a study which is com-
pletely dead." The "visible voca-
bulary" idea is, I suppose, pat-
ented.

With such a helpful text and
with Mackail's translation also at
hand, deciphering the Aeneid is
not unpleasant. You are free to
enjoy the verse and to speculate
about the poet, and Virgil is an in-
triguing poet. I wonder in par-
ticular how this temperamental
writer ever came to serve the neo-
classic centuries as a model of
literary decorum. It is true that
elements of the "classical" formula
are present in him: religious and
political orthodoxy, literary tradi-
tionalism. Yet what chiefly comes
through to a modern reader is the
frank riotousness of his sensibility
and the urgent nature of his un-
conscious life. In understanding
Virgil the categories of romantic-
ism and classicism, obsolete in any
case, are of no help. Nor does the
modern composite term, "meta-
physical," serve here either.

The Aeneid is a highly emotional
and emotive poem. In contrast to
the slow-paced Iliad it unwinds at
a speed which is almost hysterical.
And while Homer has his apoca-
lyptic passages, as Achilles' combat
with the River Xanthus, Virgil
seems positively to exult in images
of panic and destruction: storms,
shipwrecks, meteors, people shriek-
ing and sweating and swooning,
Troy burning, women running
mad. But Virgil is equally attracted
by visions of things immobile and
paradaisaical. Besides the imagery
of terror and flight there is in the

Aeneid a complementary imagery
of repose, a world of groves and
caverns and forest-fringed waters
and subterranean fastnesses, with
the primeval Tiber flowing benign-
ly through it all. Strongly nostal-
gic, this image-stream is the fruit
of reverie as the other is of night-
mare and it is compensatory in ef-
fect. It calls up sentiments of peace
-a peace not only pre-historical
but pre-natal.

Moreover, Virgil seems to be tor-
mented by, on the one hand, bad
conscience, and on the other a sense
of the cruelty of the world. Guilt
and malignity are everywhere in
the Aeneid. Juno is a far more
melodramatic agent of persecution
than any in Homer. As for the
virtuous Aeneas, he seems to stag-
ger under the weight of a con-
science as oppressive as the body of
his aged father, whom he carries
on his shoulders out of fallen Troy.
Aeneas knows guilt over Creusa
and Dido; the poem expresses guilt
for the devastation of Carthage
and for Roman militarism general-
ly.

In his Study of History (vol. V)
A. J. Toynbee discusses Virgil as
an example of the conscience-
stricken Roman elite of the Augus-
tan period. Toynbee quotes the
amazing passage in the Georgics
which begins, Ergo intersese pari-
bus concurrere telis. In Mackail's
translation the passage reads as
follows:

Therefore a second time Phi-
lippi saw Roman lines meet in
shock of equal arms, and our
lord forbade that Emathia
and the broad plains of Haemus
should twice be fattened with

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124
PARTISAN REVIEW
our blood. Surely a time too
shall come when in those bor-
ders the husbandman, as his
crooked plow labors the soil, will
find spears eaten away with scal-
ing rust, or strike on helms his
heavy mattock, and marvel at
mighty bones dug up from their
tombs. Gods of our fathers, of
our country, and thou Romulus,
and Vesta, mother who keepest
Tuscan Tiber and the Roman
Palatine, forbid not at least that
this our prince may succour a
ruined world! Long enough al-
ready has our life-blood recom-
pensed Laomedon's perjury at
Troy; long already the heavenly
palace, O Caesar, grudges thee
to us, and murmurs that thou
shouldst care for human tri-
umphs, where right and wrong
are confounded, where all these
wrongs cover the world, where
wickedness is manifold and the
plow's meed of honour is gone;
the fields thicken with weeds, for
the tillers are marched away,
and bent sickles are forged into
the stiff swordblade: here the
Euprates, there Germany
heaves with war; neighboring
cities rush into arms one against
another over broken laws: the
merciless War-God rages
through all the world: even as
when chariots bursting from
their barriers swerve out of the
course, and, vainly tugging at
the curb, the driver is swept on
by his horses, and the car
hearkens not to the rein.
This passage, says Toynbee, is "a
prayer for delivery from a tortur-
ing sense of drift which is con-
veyed in the last three lines by one
of the most vivid strokes of Virgil's
art. The prayer takes the form of
a confession of sin; and, though
the sin from which the poet im-
plores heaven for release is
nominally an 'original sin' inherited
from Laomedon [king of Troy and
Priam's father, a notorious per-
jurer] . . . the tremendous ergo
which is the first word of the first
line and the key word of the whole
passage tells the reader that the sin
which the Romans were expiating
in Virgil's day was really the sin
which they themselves had been
committing during the two-cen-
turies-long rake's progress upon
which they entered when they
plunged into the Hannibalic
War . . ."
But Virgil had hopes that good
would come of all this evil. Just as
modern philosophers of national-
ism or of class struggle pretend that
their nation or their class has a
benevolent "mission" to perform in
connection with its proposed do-
mination of the world, so Virgil
argues that through universal war
Rome will establish universal peace.
I am thinking of the well-known
passage in the Aeneid in which
Jupiter prophesies the Pax Ro-
mana. "The dreadful steel-clenched
gates of War shall be shut fast; in-
human fury, his hands bound
behind him with an hundred rivets
of brass, shall sit within on mur-
derous weapons, shrieking with
ghastly blood-stained lips." Such
was Virgil's theory, but considering
his calamity-haunted imagination,
one wonders to what extent he be-
lieved in it.
F. W. DUPEE

=== Page 127 ===
VARIETY 125
The Rukeyser Imbroglio

It is a symptom of the current
collapse of decency that a maga-
zine as meaningful, on the whole,
as the PARTISAN REVIEW could
print in its fall issue the piece en-
titled "Grandeur and Misery of a
Poster Girl." In the very same is-
sue, apropos of the school of rude-
ness, these words appeared: "The
exquisite aristocratic tact which
subtly specified the circumstances
under which things could be called
by their right names is today some-
thing we know about largely from
books, not from anybody's public
behavior." I am grateful for the
assurance that we can now call a
spade a spade; for while I do not
claim to be endowed with exquisite
aristocratic tact, I do not ordinarily
like to refer to the verbal efforts
of my fellow-writers as "incredible
vulgarity," or "vicious distortion,"
or "stupid malice." But in this case
the performance in question has al-
ready specified, and none too
subtly, the circumstances under
which it can be called by these
very names.

The "incredible vulgarity" with
which this comment on Muriel
Rukeyser is drenched is of course
a direct outgrowth of its "vicious
distortion." And this, I am forced
to conclude, was dictated by
"stupid malice." For if there were
any real truth, or consistent critical
justice, in this outburst, one could
forgive the tone. And it is hard to
see, in the light of the actual facts,
how anyone who was not animated
by "stupid malice" could fail to
treat Muriel Rukeyser's work with
some real seriousness, regard for
truth, and critical justice-even

though he might disagree with her
viewpoint, and perhaps find it im-
perfectly articulate. But it seems
that the author (or authors?) of
this outburst had some grace-
some remaining capacity to blush;
for the piece is the only thing in
the magazine which is unsigned.
(It is hard to believe that R.P.S.
could refer to the editors of so
responsible a publication, and I do
not believe it.)

I am not primarily concerned to
defend Miss Rukeyser's work. She
is young, vital, and an indubitable
talent-a formidable talent. Yet it
is necessary to point out that this
attack is not directed against her
work so much as it is against her
motives, her intellectual and so-
cial integrity; the implication
throughout is that she is a shifty
opportunist. True-like scores of
other artists and intellectuals, she
has sympathized with the left, and
used social material and working-
class themes in some of her works;
true-she has likewise groped for
symbols for the buried life; true
also-her more ambitious pieces
have often failed to achieve that
unity of thought, image, and pas-
sion which is the mark of the very
greatest poetry; true-she has been
very much interested in the "time-
ly" as well as the timeless. It is
also true that she has lectured and
written about the creative spirit;
that she has seen that there are
relationships of the most exciting
sort between poetry, science, and-
yes-even mysticism; and that as a
responsible intellectual as well as
poet she has always been concerned
with "meanings." It is even true-
believe it or not-that a person

=== Page 128 ===
126 PARTISAN REVIEW
like this was sought out by the
OWI for a responsible post, which
she soon resigned, sick at heart be-
cause the war was increasingly
"unconscious," and because our
business and political leaders were
more concerned with stifling the
meanings and values involved than
they were with educating the
American people to the real issues
of the struggle. And finally—it is
true that she has received two
awards and a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship.

In these acknowledgments of
truth I have patiently summarized,
one by one, the very points which
this unspeakable attack has used to
slur Miss Ruekyser—indicating by
way of tone and sneering innuen-
do, misleading quotations and un-
supported "critical" descriptions of
her style, that she is intellectually
dishonest, opportunistically looking
for a "band-wagon" to jump onto,
and waiting for the post of Libra-
rian of Congress. It is astonishing,
and in fact sickening, that a maga-
zine devoted to politics and cul-
ture, the social and the spiritual,
freedom from party tyranny and
political action that is meaningful
in human terms (do I distort your
policy?) should permit this vicious
distortion of a poet's aim and work
to appear in its columns. I should
understand the scurrilous nature of
the attack much better if PARTISAN
REVIEW were still a Trotskyist pub-
lication; but in a matter of fact,
politically, Miss Ruekyser's position
on the war is not too far from that
of Sidney Hook, whom you so
esteem. Nor has she disregarded her
"previous commitments," as the
piece puts it, any more than many
another honest intellectual who has
changed his mind more than once
in the last ten years. What commit-
ments does a poet have, indeed,
except to the principle of creative
growth?

It is unquestionably true that an
attitude so complex and inclusive
as the one Muriel Ruekyser has
consistently tried to express is an
attitude which requires the greatest
discipline, poetic and intellectual,
to express clearly. No one who be-
lieves in the value of her work—
least of all the poet herself—would
claim that she has succeeded, as
yet, in integrating her lively energy,
curiosity, and expressive talent into
the disciplined form which alone
would be able to convey this at-
titude completely. But who in this
age of small or fragmentary talents
has succeeded? Certainly Muriel
Ruekyser has not altogether failed.
Men of science, scholars, liberals,
students, men in the armed forces
—even a good many leftists of
several shades—and other intel-
ligent people who do not write for
PARTISAN REVIEW, have been stir-
red by her verse and stimulated by
her prose; for no matter what her
faults are, as a writer, such people
know that they spring from an in-
tuition of the relationships between
orders of intellectual, emotional,
and social experience which have
been kept separate too long. And
this is what people are looking for
—this effort to link—this concern,
precisely, with "meanings."

Neither as a poet nor as a person
does Miss Ruekyser need any im-
passioned defense in these pages.
But PARTISAN REVIEW might well
take itself to task, as a magazine

=== Page 129 ===
VARIETY 127
devoted to serious criticism and in-
tellectual candor, for the gross error
involved in printing this irrespon-
sible attack. If the editors feel that
the time is already ripe for a re-
valuation of Muriel Rukeyser, if
they really feel that she has been
over-rated as a poet, and that she
can be proved imaginatively flawed
and intellectually dishonest—on
the basis of her work, which is of
course the only basis possible—
then a serious critique is in order,
based on the truth, and written
with justice, intelligence, and
honest principles. But not this set
of illogical accusations, this medley
of non-sequiturs, this tearing out
of context; not the nauseating bad
taste and pure venom of the last
paragraph of this "Poster Girl"
piece.
REBECCA PITTS
Comment: Besides the communi-
cation from Miss Pitts, we have re-
ceived letters from Miss Babette
Deutsch and Mr. Thomas D. Ma-
bry sharply protesting the publica-
tion of the article, "Grandeur and
Misery of a Poster Girl." All three
correspondents cover much the
same ground; and if we have cho-
sen to give space only to Miss Pitts,
it is because her statement is the
longest, the most comprehensive
and also the most vehement.
Miss Pitts expresses her indigna-
tion in a tone of innocence and
benevolence. But the fact is that in
the extremity of her innocence and
benevolence she fails to answer
specifically any of the points made
about Miss Rukeyser. Generalities
about Miss Rukeyser's seriousness
and good intentions scarcely per-
suade us of the value of such works
as Willard Gibbs and Wake Island.
In our opinion both works are ob-
vious examples of that neo-Amer-
ican inspirational literature which
is the product not of a healthy na-
tional consciousness but of intellec-
tual demoralization. In Wake Is-
land Miss Rukeyser celebrated the
battle fought by the marines in ex-
actly the same style and seemingly
from the same point of view as that
recorded in her poems about the
Spanish Loyalists. Now we submit
that regardless whether one is "for"
or "against" the present war, there
is still a world of difference be-
tween the anti-fascist struggle of
the Spanish people and the war
now being waged in the Pacific.
To change one's mind is one thing,
but to show oneself unaware of the
historical meaning and tragic im-
plications of certain changes of
mind is something else again. Sure-
ly it is possible to support the mili-
tary war against Hitler for reasons
of political strategy, as Sidney
Hook and many other leftists do,
without succumbing to the coarse
political rhetoric of the "crusade
for democracy." Nor is Miss Pitts
any more plausible in her defense
of Miss Rukeyser's piece, "Words
and Images," a piece about war-
posters all the assumptions of which
prove her adherence to what Ran-
dolph Bourne, writing during the
last war, called the "new orthodox-
ies of propaganda."
Miss Pitts is shocked by the viru-
lence of the satire directed against
Miss Rukeyser. But is not her shock
symptomatic of the gentility by
which American literary life has
been ruled in recent years? For the
more murderous the realities

=== Page 130 ===
128 PARTISAN REVIEW
that surround us, the more timor-
ous our intellectuals become and
the more automatic, almost, their
adjustment to the current formu-
las of consolation. The satire to
which Miss Pitts takes exception
violated the code of “niceness” and
urbanity cultivated in the academic
and liberal magazines. This code is
nothing else than the code of medi-
ocrity, and its prevalence at the
present time is sufficient proof of
the creative debility of the period
we live in.—The Editors.

PARTISAN REVIEW
announces:

> NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITION OF CULTURE
by T. S. ELIOT

> THE WORLD IS A WEDDING, a story
by DELMORE SCHWARTZ

> ISHMAEL: THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED
by PHILIP RAHV

> PRAGMATISM AND THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE
by SIDNEY HOOK

PROPAGANDA OF THE SUBLIME
by HAROLD ROSENBERG

VARIETIES OF FREEDOM
by MARTIN LEBOWITZ

POETRY IN WARTIME, an omnibus review
by ANDREWS WANNING

THE FUTURE OF THE LEFT, a symposium
(contributors to be announced)

PARTISAN REVIEW
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=== Page 131 ===
Complete Your File of P.R.!
SELECTED CONTENTS OF SOME
REMAINING BACK ISSUES

No. 2-March-April, 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . 40c
Jean Malaquais: Marianka (a long story)
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T. S. Eliot: A Letter to the Editors
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No. 4-July-August, 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . 50c
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No. 1-January-February, 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . 60c
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No. 2-March-April, 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . 35c
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=== Page 132 ===
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
announces the
25th Anniversary
Edition

of the
O. HENRY
MEMORIAL
AWARD

PRIZE STORIES
OF 1943

Selected and Edited by
Herschel Brickell

HERE is the cream of shorter fiction
published this year—selected by the
famous critic and former literary edi-
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Fittingly dedicated to the late Stephen
Vincent Benét, this edition contains a
timely introduction by Mr. Brickell
along with pithy biographical sketches
of the authors; and includes a list of
those American magazines which were
consulted in choosing the stories.

Includes Stories by
Kay Boyle
Bessie Breuer
Pearl Buck
Dorothy Canfield
Walter van
Tilburg Clark
Whitefield Cook
William Fifield
Sarah Grinnell
Elmer Grossberg
Nancy Hale
Josephine Johnson
Clara Laidlaw
Ben Hur Lampman
Carson McCullers
William Saroyan
Margarita G. Smith
Austin Strong
Alison Stuart
James Thurber
Peggy von der Goltz
Eudora Welty
William C. White

At your bookseller's
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ideas, a combination found only
in VIEW. Illustrated features
by:

NICOLAS CALAS
RAYMOND ROUSSEL
CLAY PERRY
C. G. WALLIS
JOE MASSEY
and others;

a NEW YORK LETTER, the
fantastic CHILDREN'S PAGE,
and a Complete Index to the
3rd Series, concluded with this
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Cover in full color by
TCHELITCHEL
View
I E. 53 Street
New York 22, N. Y.

Editor:
CHARLES HENRI FORD

Asst. Editor:
PARKER TYLER

This issue: 75c
$2 a year (4 numbers)