Occasional Essays by Full-time Critics:
LYDENBERG, JOHN
WRITERS and WRITING Occasional Essays by Full-time Critics The Opposing Self. By Lionel Trilling. Viking. 213 pp. $3.50. The Lion and the Honeycomb. By R. P. Blackmur. Harcourt, Brace. 309...
...The matter must instead be considered as one of technique...
...who have a feeling for an older and simpler time, and a guiding awareness of the ordinary life of the people, yet without any touch of the sentimental malice of populism: and a strong feeling for the commonplace...
...He holds himself at a forbidding distance from the people to whom he would carry his gospel, and it is hard to see what there is good about the news he would bring...
...This romantic view, which considers the individual self as being inevitably opposed to his culture...
...Blackmur finds that "the world is on the way to moral suicide . . . for the lack of a continuing and vital sense of the Word: through which only, so far in either Western or Eastern history, has been found a sufficient means to create a modus vivendi...
...Though nineteenth-century writers may all have had such a perception, Trilling scarcely discusses the writers in terms of that perception in all these essays...
...Melville chose the novel, which in essence is a dramatic mode, but he actually preferred the nondramatic modes...
...Melville—and Trilling...
...Melville refused "to resort to the available [literary] conventions of his time as if they were real: he either preferred or was compelled to resort to most of the conventions he used for dramatic purposes not only as if they were unreal but as if they were artificial...
...We are also left to guess, in case we care, what the occasions of the various pieces were...
...from Tarzan books in USIS reading rooms to the Salzburg Seminars in American Studies which...
...Art is an "enterprise in the discovery of life," says Blackmur and the "burden of criticism in our time...
...Instead of this Word, we have a mere babble...
...In his consideration of the problems of authors and critics he sees the problem in analogous terms: that of establishing communications, of building a bridge, of "putting the audience into relation to the work of art...
...and concerned it surely is...
...Trilling's is a public bridge, to which access may not be easy but is at least possible to all who will read and follow the signs with care...
...Irving Babbitt...
...He is never dull and seldom obvious, but he does not seem to be straining for effect...
...To describe his essays as an appeal for common sense and moderation might seem to be damning him with Victorian praise, but it would not be inaccurate...
...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges TWO OF our most distinguished and fashionable literary critics have recently published collections of their critical essays...
...What unity there may be in his essays, published between 1935 and 1954, the reader is left to divine for himself...
...He reminds one—naturally enough—of the characters he most admires: those who had health, sanity, balance and, at the same time, acuteness of vision...
...he asks, did Melville's novels have no influence upon subsequent novelists...
...Toward a Modus Vivendi...
...Trilling demonstrates that the modern critic can be solicitous and can have "powers of indignant perception" without indignantly divorcing himself from the people, that criticism can be learned without being pedantic, suggestive without being dogmatic, and fresh without being indigestible...
...Blackmur says that his "purpose in proposing a heavy burden of criticism...
...He deplores the separation between the common reader and the uncommon author and critic, but he does nothing to narrow it...
...James reacted by demanding of his readers yet greater attention and by writing more and more obscurely...
...Trilling's "is a public mind...
...The result was that he had "to work on the putative level...
...Blackmur's essay on Adams is subtle and very sympathetic...
...In its concentration on matters of form and technique, it clearly highlights some important matters that the more orthodox Melville critics customarily relegate to asides as they concentrate on illuminating Melville's dark visions...
...But, like Huck, we are neither surprised nor shocked...
...The essay goes on to discuss the attendant problems in considerable detail—from McCarthy to Naguib...
...The book contains seventeen essays...
...Trilling sees as first arising significantly early in the nineteenth century and as in large degree defining outmodern condition and informing our literature since 1800...
...Messrs...
...and then, as a rule, stopped short...
...Blackmur would bring the mind, the powers of reasoning, the rational judgment of a whole man into fuller play in all aspects of life: social, political, artistic, critical...
...Blackmur asks, echoing Henry Adams and finding that fifty-year-old question more pertinent and pressing today than ever...
...Six were originally written as introductions to new editions of the books with which they deal (Keats' Letters, Dickens' Little Dorrit, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, James' The Bostonians, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia...
...Neither a romantic hero nor a revolutionary nor a monk, he lived in his world and fought for his ideals without letting his ideals blind him to the conditions in which the embodied spirit lives and without letting the social actualities smother his ideals: "It is hard to find personalities in the contemporary world who are analogous to Orwell...
...George Orwell stands as a symbol of what the sensitive, intelligent, engaged modern man can be...
...and a direct, unabashed sense of the nation, even a conscious love of it...
...But when we translate from Blackmur's impressive vocabulary into more basic English to find out what he is saying, we find that we are left with something relatively elementary...
...5.00...
...Irritated and defiant...
...The opening essay analyzes the plight of the "new intellectual proletariat" faced with "the new illiteracy...
...Why...
...Impressed by the power of his mind and depressed by the vulgarity of the masses...
...This presumably is the essay "in solicitude...
...The modern self," he says, "is characterized by certain powers of indignant perception," by "an intense and adverse imagination of the culture in which it has its being...
...This new illiteracy has bred a new proletariat?the intellectual proletariat...
...The Word that we need is of course not the revealed Word, but the persuasive logic of the intelligent human mind, the force of reason respected by society...
...Blackmur notes this himself when he says that Mr...
...T. S. Eliot...
...He has something in common with one of his favorite novelists: Henry James...
...Failure is "the expense of greatness...
...In a brief prefatory essay, Trilling explains that, occasional as these pieces were, he finds on gathering them for his publisher that they have a unity, that all are concerned with "the romantic image of the self...
...About half deal with specific writers: Henry James...
...But the Melville essay is not representative of this collection (though it is more like the Blackmur criticisms reprinted earlier...
...So Blackmur keeps a wide gap between himself and his readers by employing a style that at times reminds one of the late James, so elusive, metaphorical, and involuted as to discourage all but the most refined readers...
...Trilling, by contrast, still ventures to use "liberal" as something other than a pejorative...
...is evangelical...
...Blackmur frequently confesses to failure...
...Lionel Trilling's volume consists of nine essays...
...T. E. Lawrence...
...The essays on Wordsworth and Howells were first delivered as lectures at Princeton and Harvard respectively...
...is presumably intended to carry Blackmur's general message and point of view...
...He shows that Adams's sense of failure was the realization by a superior man that all human beings are limited and bound to fail to the extent that they strive greatly...
...To use one of Huck Finn's phrases, Trilling stretches it just a bit...
...The great contribution of these essays seems to me to be their rehabilitation of some nineteenth century figures, their demonstration that Keats and Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Dickens and even Howells have something to say to us today...
...In America, the intellectual "is now the only proletarian...
...Their difference lies in the approaches to the bridges they would erect...
...is] to make bridges between the society and the arts...
...His work constantly said what it was doing or going to do...
...Can the American mind "catch up with American energy...
...309 pp...
...He pronounced himself a failure, not hypocritically, but certainly not with humility...
...On this...
...Blackmur and Trilling would agree...
...To Trilling...
...James complained that, under the influence of mass education and mass production of print and pictures, the public had lost "the habit of attention...
...Here again appears the difference between Blackmur and Trilling, which is also, of course, the difference between two schools of contemporary critics...
...The essay on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was written for the Pelican Guide to English Literature...
...This is probably the least pretentious of the essays in the book...
...Blackmur explicitly refrains (in this instance) from anything except technical considerations: Trilling almost always refuses to divorce formal from substantive analyses, and generally insists on relating his subject to the time in which he wrote...
...He gives the impression that he is simply explaining to us what we would have seen and known had we read the work at hand, read it with just a bit more attention and a wider ranging imagination than we usually have...
...Blackmur's critical method is exemplified in "The Craft of Herman Melville: A Putative Statement...
...This essay is explicitly and solely concerned with the age—with the author, critic and intellectual in relation to his time, today...
...The crisis of our culture rises from the false belief that our society requires only enough mind to create and tend the machines together with enough of the new illiteracy for other machines—those of our mass media...
...It is relatively stripped of the cotton batting that wraps many of the others —but it is still not easy going...
...Trilling's essays admirably combine subtlety and lucidity, sharpness and grace...
...But where does this lead Blackmur...
...Henry Adams...
...He makes his points, he gets his greatest effects by assertions, not by dramatization...
...according to Blackmur, are "deliberately reducing the quality of their work to freshman level in a freshwater college...
...Blackmur strikes me as an exemplar not only of the new criticism but also of the new conservatism...
...He summarily dismisses as answer to the second question the common critical view that the times, out of joint, frustrated poor Herman...
...a half-literacy that is worse than the old total illiteracy of the masses...
...He has as much if not more in common with another of his admirations: Henry Adams...
...and why Melville's failure to go on, why his long, lonely silence...
...R. P. Blackmur is more modest, or more assuming, depending on how you take it...
...Blackmur's is a private mind, and the approach to his bridge seems to be through a maze with guideposts written in a private language...
...He contents himself with his esoteric title and exoteric subtitle: "essays in solicitude and critique...
...to exploit...
...The first selection...
...Most of the rest consider more abstractly the "burden" (one of his favorite words) of criticism today...
...as the image variously appeared to these nineteenth-century (except Orwell) writers...
...He "suffered the exorbitant penalty of his great failure . . . because of his radical inability to master a technique—that of the novel—radically foreign to his sensibility...
...Adams drew further and further away from the life of his time...
...Modern mass society brings mass education, and the resultant universal literacy is actually a "new illiteracy...
...We have to look for men who have considerable intellectual power but who are not happy in the institutionalized life of intellectuality...
...in his attempts to do that, I think he illustrates the difficulties better than he illuminates the way to that bridge we all seek...
Vol. 38 • May 1955 • No. 22
