Jeff Rubard
2010-01-29 18:23:11 UTC
An American *francophonisté* Speaks:
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
H. L. Mencken
Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors
falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a
somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects
of their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticizing
criticism. What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated
in legal terms? How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its
normal effect upon the artist and the work of art?
Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for several years
past, and the critics of various countries have contributed theories
of more or less lucidity and plausibility to the discussion. Their
views of their own art, it appears, are quite as divergent as their
views of the arts they more commonly deal with. One group argues,
partly by directly statement and partly by attacking all other groups,
that the one defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the
virtuous and oppose the sinful --- in brief, to police the fine arts
and so hold them in tune with the moral order of the world. Another
group, repudiating this constabulary function, argues hotly that the
arts have nothing to do with morality whatsoever ---- that their
concern is solely with pure beauty. A third group holds that the chief
aspect of a work of art, particularly in the field of literature, is
its aspect as psychological document ---- that if it doesn't help men
to know themselves it is nothing. A forth group reduces the thing to
an exact science, and sets up standards that resemble algebraic
formulæ ---- this is the group of metrists, of contrapuntists and of
those who gabble of light-waves. And so, in order, follow groups five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten, each with its theory and its proofs.
Against the whole corps, moral and æsthetic, psychological and
algebraic, stands Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A. Major Spingarn lately
served formal notice upon me that he had abandoned the life of the
academic grove for that of the armed array, and so I give him his
military title, but at the time he wrote his Creative Criticism he was
a professor in Columbia University, and I still find myself thinking
of him, not as a soldier extraordinarily literate, but as a professor
in rebellion. For his notions, whatever one may say in opposition to
them, are at least magnificently unprofessorial --- they fly violently
in the face of the principles that distinguish the largest and most
influential group of campus critics. As witness: ``To say that poetry
is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral
triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral.'' Or, worse: ``It
is only conceivable in a world in which dinner-table conversation runs
after this fashion: `This cauliflower would be good if it had only
been prepared in accordance with international law.' '' One imagines,
on hearing such atheism flying about, the amazed indignation of Prof.
Dr. William Lyon Phelps, with his discovery that Joseph Conrad
preaches ``the axiom of the moral law''; the ``Hey, what's that!'' of
Prof. Dr. W. C. Brownell, the Amherst Aristotle, with his eloquent
plea for standards as iron-clad as the Westminster Confession; the
loud, patriotic alarm of the gifted Prof. Dr. Stuart P. Sherman, of
Iowa, with his maxim that Puritanism is the official philosophy of
America, and that all who dispute it are enemy aliens and should be
deported. Major Spingarn, in truth, here performs a treason most
horrible upon the reverend order he once adorned, and having achieved
it, he straightway performs another and then another. That is to say,
he tackles all the antagonistic groups of orthodox critics seriatim,
and knocks them about unanimously --- first the aforesaid agents of
the sweet and pious; then the advocates of unities, meters, all rigid
formulæ; then the experts in imaginary psychology; then the historical
comparers, pigeonholers and makers of categories; finally, the
professors of pure æsthetic. One and all, they take their places upon
his operating table, and one and all they are stripped and anatomized.
But what is the anarchistic ex-professor's own theory? ---- for a
professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. In brief, what
he offers is a doctrine borrowed from the Italian, Benedetto Croce,
and by Croce filched from Goethe --- a doctrine anything but new in
the world, even in Goethe's time, but nevertheless long buried in
forgetfulness --- to wit, the doctrine that it is the critic's first
and only duty, as Carlyle once put it, to find out ``what the poet's
aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his
eye, and how far, with such materials as were afforded him, he has
fulfilled it.'' For poet, read artist, or, if literature is in
question, substitute the Germanic word Dichter --- that is, the artist
in words, the creator of beautiful letters, whether in verse or in
prose. Ibsen always called himself a Digter, not a Drammatiker or
Skuespiller. So, I daresay, did Shakespeare. ... Well, what is this
generalized poet trying to do? asks Major Spingarn, and how has he
done it? That, and no more, is the critic's quest. The morality of the
work does not concern him. It is not his business to determine whether
it heeds Aristotle or flouts Aristotle. He passes no judgement on its
rhyme scheme, its length and breadth, its iambics, its politics, its
patriotism, its piety, its psychological exactness, its good taste. He
may note these things, but he may not protest about them --- he may
not complain if the thing criticized fails to fit into a pigeonhole.
Every sonnet, every drama, every novel is sui generis; it must stand
on its own bottom; it must be judged by its own inherent intentions.
``Poets,'' says Major Spingarn, ``do not really write epics,
pastorals, lyrics, however much they may be deceived by these false
abstractions; they express themselves, and this expression is their
only form. There are not, therefore, only three or ten or a hundred
literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are individual
poets.'' Nor is there any valid appeal ad hominem. The character and
background of the poet are beside the mark; the poem itself is the
thing. Oscar Wilde, weak and swine-like, yet wrote beautiful prose. To
reject that prose on the grounds that Wilde had filthy habits is as
absurd as to reject ``What Is Man?'' on the ground that its theology
is beyond the intelligence of the editor of the New York Times.
This Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, of course, throws a heavy
burden upon the critic. It presupposes that he is a civilized and
tolerant man, hospitable to all intelligible ideas and capable of
reading them as he runs. This is a demand that at once rules out nine-
tenths of the grown-up sophomores who carry on the business of
criticism in America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the
intellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas, and
particularly new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is by
transforming it into the nearest related formula ---- usually a harsh
and devastating operation. This fact accounts for their chronic
inability to understand all that is most personal and original and
hence most forceful and significant in the emerging literature of the
country. They can get down what has been digested and re-digested, and
so brought into forms that they know, and carefully labelled by
predecessors of their own sort --- but they exhibit alarm immediately
they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here we have an
explanation of Brownell's loud appeal for a tightening of standards
--- i.e., a larger respect for precedents, patterns, rubber stamps ---
and here we have an explanation of Phelp's inability to comprehend the
colossal phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton's childish nonsense
about realism, and of Sherman's efforts to apply the Espionage Act to
the arts, and of More's querulous enmity to romanticism, and of all
the fatuous pigeonholing that passes for criticism in the more solemn
literary periodicals.
As practiced by all such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant
and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of
homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and
sincerity, not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the
technical virtuosity of the artist, not by his originality and
artistic courage, but simply and solely by his orthodoxy. If he is
what is called a ``right thinker,'' if he devotes himself to
advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner, then he is
worthy of respect. But if he lets fall the slightest hint that he is
in doubt about any of them, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by
their theory, a bad artist. Such pious piffle is horribly familiar
among us. I do not exaggerate its terms. You will find it running
through the critical writings of practically all the dull fellows who
combine criticism with tutoring; in the words of many of them it is
stated in the plainest way and defended with much heat, theological
and pedagogical. In its baldest form it shows itself in the doctrine
that it is scandalous for an artist --- say a dramatist or a novelist
--- to depict vice as attractive. The fact that vice, more often than
not, undoubtedly is attractive --- else, why should it ever gobble any
of us? --- is disposed of with a lofty gesture. What of it? say these
birchmen. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not
his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble headway. We
are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes
himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by
force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. Thus the moral
Privatdozenten have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to
shake their authority; even the vicious are still in favor of crying
vice down. ``Here is a novel,'' says the artist. ``Why didn't you
write a tract?'' roars the professor --- and down the chute go novel
and novelist. ``This girl is pretty,'' says the painter. ``But she has
left off her undershirt,'' protests the head-master --- and off goes
the poor dauber's head. At its mildest, this balderdash takes the form
of the late Hamilton Wright Mabie's ``White List of Books''; at its
worst, it is comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine
criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure
men as music is to a man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret
his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into
the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure
of the creative passion; as Major Spingarn says, ``æsthetic judgement
and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life.'' This is
why all the best criticism of the world has been written by men who
have had within them, not only the reflective and analytical faculty
of critics, but also the gusto of artists --- Goethe, Carlyle,
Lessing, Schlegel, Saint-Beueve, and, to drop a story or two, Hazlitt,
Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling Also
sprach Zarathustra, revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But
tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull student's
exercise, ill-naturedly corrected. ...
So much for the theory of Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A., late
professor of modern languages and literature in Columbia University.
Obviously, it is a far sounder and more stimulating theory than any of
those cherished by the other professors. It demands that the critic be
a man of intelligence, of toleration, of wide information, of genuine
hospitality to ideas, whereas the others only demand that he have
learning, and accept anything as learning that has been said before.
But one he has stated his doctrine, the ingenious ex-professor,
professor-like, immediately begins to corrupt it by claiming too much
for it. Having laid and hatched, so to speak, his somewhat stale by
still highly nourishing egg, he begins to argue fatuously that the
resultant flamingo is the whole mustering of the critical Aves. But
the fact is, of course, that criticism, as humanly practiced, must
needs fall a good deal short of this intuitive recreation of beauty,
and what is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it
must be interpretation in terms that are not only exact but also
comprehensible to the reader, else it will leave the original mystery
as dark as before --- and once interpretation comes in, paraphrase and
transliteration come in. What is recondite must be made plainer; the
transcendental, to some extent at least, must be done into common
modes of thinking. Well, what are morality, trochaics, hexameters,
movements, historical principles, psychological maxims, the dramatic
unities --- what are all these save common modes of thinking, short
cuts, rubber stamps, words of one syllable? Moreover, beauty as we
know it in this world is by no means the apparition in vacuo that Dr.
Spingarn seems to see. It has its social, its political, even its
moral implications. The finale of Beethoven's C minor symphony is not
only colossal as music; it is also colossal as revolt; it says
something against something. Yet more, the springs of beauty are not
within itself alone, nor even in genius alone, but often in things
without. Brahms wrote his Deutsches Requiem, not only because he was a
great artist, but also because he was a good German. And in Nietzsche
there are times when the divine afflatus takes a back seat, and the
spirochaetae have the floor.
Major Spingarn himself seems to harbor some sense of this limitation
on his doctrine. He gives warning that ``the poet's intention must be
judged at the moment of the creative act'' --- which opens the door
enough for many an ancient to creep in. But limited or not, he at
least clears off a lot of moldy rubbish, and gets further toward the
truth than any of his former colleagues. They waste themselves upon
theories that only conceal the poet's achievement the more, the more
diligently they are applied; he, at all events, grounds himself upon
the sound notion that there should be free speech in art, and no
protective tariffs, and no a priori assumptions, and no testing of
ideas by mere words. The safe ground probably lies between the
contestants, but nearer Spingarn. The critic who really illuminates
starts off much as he starts off, but with a due regard for the
prejudices and imbecilities of the world. I think the best feasible
practice is to be found in certain chapters of Huneker, a critic of
vastly more solid influence and infinitely more value to the arts than
all the prating pedagogues since Rufus Griswold. Here, as in the case
of Poe, a sensitive and intelligent artist recreates the work of other
artists, but there also comes to the ceremony a man of the world, and
the things he has to say are apposite and instructive too. To denounce
moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgement. To dispute
the categories is to set up a new anti-categorical category. And to
admire the work of Shakespeare is to be interested in his handling of
blank verse, his social aspirations, his shot-gun marriage and his
frequent concessions to the bombastic frenzy of his actors, and to
have some curiosity about Mr. W. H. The really competent critic must
be an empiricist. He must conduct his exploration with whatever means
lie within the bounds of his personal limitations. He must produce his
effects with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his
saw. If the saw won't cut, he seizes a club. ...
Perhaps, after all, the chief burden that lies upon Major Spingarn's
theory is to be found in its label. The word ``creative'' is a bit too
flamboyant; it says what he wants to say, but it probably says a good
deal more. In this emergency, I propose getting rid of the misleading
label by pasting another over it. That is, I propose the substitution
of ``catalytic'' for ``creative,'' despite the fact that ``catalytic''
is an unfamiliar word, and suggests the dog-Latin of the seminaries. I
borrow it from chemistry, and its meaning is really quite simple. A
catalyzer, in chemistry, is a substance that helps too other
substances to react. For example, consider the case of ordinary cane
sugar and water. Dissolve the sugar in water and nothing happens. But
add a few drops of acid and the sugar changes to glucose and fructose.
Meanwhile, the acid itself is absolutely unchanged. All it does is to
stir up the reaction between the water and the sugar. The process is
called catalysis. The acid is a catalyzer.
Well, this is almost exactly the function of a genuine critic of the
arts. It is his business to provoke the reaction between the work of
art and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he
sees the work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression
on him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no
need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He
makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator
live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding,
appreciation, intelligent enjoyment --- and that is precisely what the
artist tried to produce.
From Prejudices: First Series ; text taken from Prejudices: A
Selection Made by James T. Farrell, and with an Introduction by Him
(NY: Vintage), pp. 3--11.
Typed 16 March 1996 [CRS]
----
Otherwise, your faith [SANSPHRASE! SANSPHRASE!] in Al Neuwirth may
vary.
http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html
Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
H. L. Mencken
Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors
falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a
somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects
of their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticizing
criticism. What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated
in legal terms? How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its
normal effect upon the artist and the work of art?
Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for several years
past, and the critics of various countries have contributed theories
of more or less lucidity and plausibility to the discussion. Their
views of their own art, it appears, are quite as divergent as their
views of the arts they more commonly deal with. One group argues,
partly by directly statement and partly by attacking all other groups,
that the one defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the
virtuous and oppose the sinful --- in brief, to police the fine arts
and so hold them in tune with the moral order of the world. Another
group, repudiating this constabulary function, argues hotly that the
arts have nothing to do with morality whatsoever ---- that their
concern is solely with pure beauty. A third group holds that the chief
aspect of a work of art, particularly in the field of literature, is
its aspect as psychological document ---- that if it doesn't help men
to know themselves it is nothing. A forth group reduces the thing to
an exact science, and sets up standards that resemble algebraic
formulæ ---- this is the group of metrists, of contrapuntists and of
those who gabble of light-waves. And so, in order, follow groups five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten, each with its theory and its proofs.
Against the whole corps, moral and æsthetic, psychological and
algebraic, stands Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A. Major Spingarn lately
served formal notice upon me that he had abandoned the life of the
academic grove for that of the armed array, and so I give him his
military title, but at the time he wrote his Creative Criticism he was
a professor in Columbia University, and I still find myself thinking
of him, not as a soldier extraordinarily literate, but as a professor
in rebellion. For his notions, whatever one may say in opposition to
them, are at least magnificently unprofessorial --- they fly violently
in the face of the principles that distinguish the largest and most
influential group of campus critics. As witness: ``To say that poetry
is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral
triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral.'' Or, worse: ``It
is only conceivable in a world in which dinner-table conversation runs
after this fashion: `This cauliflower would be good if it had only
been prepared in accordance with international law.' '' One imagines,
on hearing such atheism flying about, the amazed indignation of Prof.
Dr. William Lyon Phelps, with his discovery that Joseph Conrad
preaches ``the axiom of the moral law''; the ``Hey, what's that!'' of
Prof. Dr. W. C. Brownell, the Amherst Aristotle, with his eloquent
plea for standards as iron-clad as the Westminster Confession; the
loud, patriotic alarm of the gifted Prof. Dr. Stuart P. Sherman, of
Iowa, with his maxim that Puritanism is the official philosophy of
America, and that all who dispute it are enemy aliens and should be
deported. Major Spingarn, in truth, here performs a treason most
horrible upon the reverend order he once adorned, and having achieved
it, he straightway performs another and then another. That is to say,
he tackles all the antagonistic groups of orthodox critics seriatim,
and knocks them about unanimously --- first the aforesaid agents of
the sweet and pious; then the advocates of unities, meters, all rigid
formulæ; then the experts in imaginary psychology; then the historical
comparers, pigeonholers and makers of categories; finally, the
professors of pure æsthetic. One and all, they take their places upon
his operating table, and one and all they are stripped and anatomized.
But what is the anarchistic ex-professor's own theory? ---- for a
professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. In brief, what
he offers is a doctrine borrowed from the Italian, Benedetto Croce,
and by Croce filched from Goethe --- a doctrine anything but new in
the world, even in Goethe's time, but nevertheless long buried in
forgetfulness --- to wit, the doctrine that it is the critic's first
and only duty, as Carlyle once put it, to find out ``what the poet's
aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his
eye, and how far, with such materials as were afforded him, he has
fulfilled it.'' For poet, read artist, or, if literature is in
question, substitute the Germanic word Dichter --- that is, the artist
in words, the creator of beautiful letters, whether in verse or in
prose. Ibsen always called himself a Digter, not a Drammatiker or
Skuespiller. So, I daresay, did Shakespeare. ... Well, what is this
generalized poet trying to do? asks Major Spingarn, and how has he
done it? That, and no more, is the critic's quest. The morality of the
work does not concern him. It is not his business to determine whether
it heeds Aristotle or flouts Aristotle. He passes no judgement on its
rhyme scheme, its length and breadth, its iambics, its politics, its
patriotism, its piety, its psychological exactness, its good taste. He
may note these things, but he may not protest about them --- he may
not complain if the thing criticized fails to fit into a pigeonhole.
Every sonnet, every drama, every novel is sui generis; it must stand
on its own bottom; it must be judged by its own inherent intentions.
``Poets,'' says Major Spingarn, ``do not really write epics,
pastorals, lyrics, however much they may be deceived by these false
abstractions; they express themselves, and this expression is their
only form. There are not, therefore, only three or ten or a hundred
literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are individual
poets.'' Nor is there any valid appeal ad hominem. The character and
background of the poet are beside the mark; the poem itself is the
thing. Oscar Wilde, weak and swine-like, yet wrote beautiful prose. To
reject that prose on the grounds that Wilde had filthy habits is as
absurd as to reject ``What Is Man?'' on the ground that its theology
is beyond the intelligence of the editor of the New York Times.
This Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, of course, throws a heavy
burden upon the critic. It presupposes that he is a civilized and
tolerant man, hospitable to all intelligible ideas and capable of
reading them as he runs. This is a demand that at once rules out nine-
tenths of the grown-up sophomores who carry on the business of
criticism in America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the
intellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas, and
particularly new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is by
transforming it into the nearest related formula ---- usually a harsh
and devastating operation. This fact accounts for their chronic
inability to understand all that is most personal and original and
hence most forceful and significant in the emerging literature of the
country. They can get down what has been digested and re-digested, and
so brought into forms that they know, and carefully labelled by
predecessors of their own sort --- but they exhibit alarm immediately
they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here we have an
explanation of Brownell's loud appeal for a tightening of standards
--- i.e., a larger respect for precedents, patterns, rubber stamps ---
and here we have an explanation of Phelp's inability to comprehend the
colossal phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton's childish nonsense
about realism, and of Sherman's efforts to apply the Espionage Act to
the arts, and of More's querulous enmity to romanticism, and of all
the fatuous pigeonholing that passes for criticism in the more solemn
literary periodicals.
As practiced by all such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant
and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of
homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and
sincerity, not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the
technical virtuosity of the artist, not by his originality and
artistic courage, but simply and solely by his orthodoxy. If he is
what is called a ``right thinker,'' if he devotes himself to
advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner, then he is
worthy of respect. But if he lets fall the slightest hint that he is
in doubt about any of them, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by
their theory, a bad artist. Such pious piffle is horribly familiar
among us. I do not exaggerate its terms. You will find it running
through the critical writings of practically all the dull fellows who
combine criticism with tutoring; in the words of many of them it is
stated in the plainest way and defended with much heat, theological
and pedagogical. In its baldest form it shows itself in the doctrine
that it is scandalous for an artist --- say a dramatist or a novelist
--- to depict vice as attractive. The fact that vice, more often than
not, undoubtedly is attractive --- else, why should it ever gobble any
of us? --- is disposed of with a lofty gesture. What of it? say these
birchmen. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not
his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble headway. We
are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes
himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by
force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. Thus the moral
Privatdozenten have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to
shake their authority; even the vicious are still in favor of crying
vice down. ``Here is a novel,'' says the artist. ``Why didn't you
write a tract?'' roars the professor --- and down the chute go novel
and novelist. ``This girl is pretty,'' says the painter. ``But she has
left off her undershirt,'' protests the head-master --- and off goes
the poor dauber's head. At its mildest, this balderdash takes the form
of the late Hamilton Wright Mabie's ``White List of Books''; at its
worst, it is comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine
criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure
men as music is to a man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret
his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into
the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure
of the creative passion; as Major Spingarn says, ``æsthetic judgement
and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life.'' This is
why all the best criticism of the world has been written by men who
have had within them, not only the reflective and analytical faculty
of critics, but also the gusto of artists --- Goethe, Carlyle,
Lessing, Schlegel, Saint-Beueve, and, to drop a story or two, Hazlitt,
Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling Also
sprach Zarathustra, revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But
tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull student's
exercise, ill-naturedly corrected. ...
So much for the theory of Major J. E. Spingarn, U. S. A., late
professor of modern languages and literature in Columbia University.
Obviously, it is a far sounder and more stimulating theory than any of
those cherished by the other professors. It demands that the critic be
a man of intelligence, of toleration, of wide information, of genuine
hospitality to ideas, whereas the others only demand that he have
learning, and accept anything as learning that has been said before.
But one he has stated his doctrine, the ingenious ex-professor,
professor-like, immediately begins to corrupt it by claiming too much
for it. Having laid and hatched, so to speak, his somewhat stale by
still highly nourishing egg, he begins to argue fatuously that the
resultant flamingo is the whole mustering of the critical Aves. But
the fact is, of course, that criticism, as humanly practiced, must
needs fall a good deal short of this intuitive recreation of beauty,
and what is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it
must be interpretation in terms that are not only exact but also
comprehensible to the reader, else it will leave the original mystery
as dark as before --- and once interpretation comes in, paraphrase and
transliteration come in. What is recondite must be made plainer; the
transcendental, to some extent at least, must be done into common
modes of thinking. Well, what are morality, trochaics, hexameters,
movements, historical principles, psychological maxims, the dramatic
unities --- what are all these save common modes of thinking, short
cuts, rubber stamps, words of one syllable? Moreover, beauty as we
know it in this world is by no means the apparition in vacuo that Dr.
Spingarn seems to see. It has its social, its political, even its
moral implications. The finale of Beethoven's C minor symphony is not
only colossal as music; it is also colossal as revolt; it says
something against something. Yet more, the springs of beauty are not
within itself alone, nor even in genius alone, but often in things
without. Brahms wrote his Deutsches Requiem, not only because he was a
great artist, but also because he was a good German. And in Nietzsche
there are times when the divine afflatus takes a back seat, and the
spirochaetae have the floor.
Major Spingarn himself seems to harbor some sense of this limitation
on his doctrine. He gives warning that ``the poet's intention must be
judged at the moment of the creative act'' --- which opens the door
enough for many an ancient to creep in. But limited or not, he at
least clears off a lot of moldy rubbish, and gets further toward the
truth than any of his former colleagues. They waste themselves upon
theories that only conceal the poet's achievement the more, the more
diligently they are applied; he, at all events, grounds himself upon
the sound notion that there should be free speech in art, and no
protective tariffs, and no a priori assumptions, and no testing of
ideas by mere words. The safe ground probably lies between the
contestants, but nearer Spingarn. The critic who really illuminates
starts off much as he starts off, but with a due regard for the
prejudices and imbecilities of the world. I think the best feasible
practice is to be found in certain chapters of Huneker, a critic of
vastly more solid influence and infinitely more value to the arts than
all the prating pedagogues since Rufus Griswold. Here, as in the case
of Poe, a sensitive and intelligent artist recreates the work of other
artists, but there also comes to the ceremony a man of the world, and
the things he has to say are apposite and instructive too. To denounce
moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgement. To dispute
the categories is to set up a new anti-categorical category. And to
admire the work of Shakespeare is to be interested in his handling of
blank verse, his social aspirations, his shot-gun marriage and his
frequent concessions to the bombastic frenzy of his actors, and to
have some curiosity about Mr. W. H. The really competent critic must
be an empiricist. He must conduct his exploration with whatever means
lie within the bounds of his personal limitations. He must produce his
effects with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his
saw. If the saw won't cut, he seizes a club. ...
Perhaps, after all, the chief burden that lies upon Major Spingarn's
theory is to be found in its label. The word ``creative'' is a bit too
flamboyant; it says what he wants to say, but it probably says a good
deal more. In this emergency, I propose getting rid of the misleading
label by pasting another over it. That is, I propose the substitution
of ``catalytic'' for ``creative,'' despite the fact that ``catalytic''
is an unfamiliar word, and suggests the dog-Latin of the seminaries. I
borrow it from chemistry, and its meaning is really quite simple. A
catalyzer, in chemistry, is a substance that helps too other
substances to react. For example, consider the case of ordinary cane
sugar and water. Dissolve the sugar in water and nothing happens. But
add a few drops of acid and the sugar changes to glucose and fructose.
Meanwhile, the acid itself is absolutely unchanged. All it does is to
stir up the reaction between the water and the sugar. The process is
called catalysis. The acid is a catalyzer.
Well, this is almost exactly the function of a genuine critic of the
arts. It is his business to provoke the reaction between the work of
art and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he
sees the work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression
on him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no
need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He
makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator
live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding,
appreciation, intelligent enjoyment --- and that is precisely what the
artist tried to produce.
From Prejudices: First Series ; text taken from Prejudices: A
Selection Made by James T. Farrell, and with an Introduction by Him
(NY: Vintage), pp. 3--11.
Typed 16 March 1996 [CRS]
----
Otherwise, your faith [SANSPHRASE! SANSPHRASE!] in Al Neuwirth may
vary.
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