The Old Criticism

...Of course Ethan Frome "presents no moral issue, and no moral reverberation...

...But the Wouks, no less than the Whar-tons, are protected as soon as the question of the relation between the moral order and art is reopened...

...She does not save them...

...The idea is this: that moral inertia, the not making of moral decisions, constitutes a very large part of the moral life of humanity...

...I believe them, without confusing their credibility with their moral usefulness...

...Such a provisional morality is too provisional...

...it must not be an end in itself...

...it must have something to do with his own discovery of purpose in the universe...

...The old criticism, in which a work of art was considered somehow to so express, reflect or distort the moral order that it could be measured against that order, has given ground to the new criticism, which contents itself to expose the mechanics of an esthetic argument rather than follow it into life...

...Ethan Frome is "the product of men- will, of the cold hard literary will quite unavailable to any moral discourse...

...Thus Trilling's criticism is substantive: It begins with the implicit proposition that a work of art is good in the degree to which it may be used as the occasion for some positive moral instruction, in defense of one aspect or another of liberal culture...

...Further, the novel indicates something deplorable about its author...

...Her intention in writing the story was not adequate to the dreadful fate she contrives for her characters...

...In the context of morality, there is nothing to say about Ethan Frome...

...It was a theological seminary, and not a department of English at some large university, which invited thirteen men, mostly of letters, to address themselves to moral dilemmas as they are discoverable in various pieces of literary art...

...As a moral critic, Trilling suspects Mrs...

...It has been at least that long since anyone seriously believed, with Ruskin, that men ceased to paint good pictures simply because they ceased to be good men...

...There is in Ethan Frome an image of life-in-death, of hell-on-earth, which is not easily to be forgotten: the crippled Ethan and Zeena, his dreadful wife, and Mattie, the once charming girl he had loved, now bedridden and querulous with pain, all living out their death in the kitchen of the desolate Frome farm—a perpetuity of suffering memorializes a moment of passion...

...Indeed, it is Eliot who has done most for the old criticism, with his proposition, at the head of his essay on "Religion and Literature," that "literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint...

...But that assumption means a great deal...

...Yet this book makes just this unfashionable assumption about the moral function of literature...

...The author of Ethan Frome, it seemed to me, could not lay claim to any such justification...

...Wharton's concentrated, unsupportable vision of life in art on moral grounds: Such vision merely "satisfies the modern snobbishness about tragedy and pain...

...But in the very act of explaining why he could not value Ethan Frome, Trilling found a negative reason for valuing it...

...Ethan Frome, apparently, has an improper effect upon a corrupt audience...

...1 shall quote at length from the introductory section of Trilling's address: "When the characters of a story suffer, they do so at the behest of their author—the author is responsible for their suffering and must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral intention...

...The Johnsonian tradition of moral letters, arguing for and against works of art as if they were mirrors of human conduct, no longer makes sense...

...and rightly, for the esthetic ethic of honesty destroys all competing ethics...

...It must have something to do with his ethical standpoint, his construction of the moral order of the world...

...Nor does he tell us explicitly why the artist must be enjoined to snatch something purposeful, instead of gratuitous, out of the gratuitous universe into which esthetic honesty may induct him...

...She is, as Trilling writes, "content with telling a story about people who do not make moral decisions, whose fate cannot have moral reverberations...

...she permits nothing whatever to be taught...

...But the old criticism is up against its own moral dilemma, for to be true to itself it would have to criticize the corruption of the very order to which it formerly appealed against a corrupt work of art...

...Nothing more unites the contributors—who include Robert Bierstedt (on The Caine Mutiny), Charles Frankel (on Major Barbara), George N. Shuster (on Death in Venice), John E. Smith (on The Wild Duck), Henry Hatfield (on Faust), Richard McKeon (on the Crito)—than their shared assumption that there is in fact a moral order in the world against which literature can be assessed...

...it is no substitute for that sense of order larger than the case at hand that formerly gave the old critic his rank and tenure as a moralist...

...She but indulges herself by what she contrives—she is, as the phrase goes, 'merely literary.' This is not to say that the merely literary intention does not make its very considerable effects...

...In this incredible world, Barney and Mar-jorie are very credible characters...

...The mirror still gives us acute angles of vision, but that what is seen is truly a reflection or expression of reality, and therefore measurable against it, cannot be taken for granted...

...Johnson, Matthew Arnold and their line...

...As a neutral student of the literary craft, however, Trilling might have bridled his suspicions and then discovered that it is as easy to accept Mrs...

...The success of the old criticism is based on the defense of a moral order that no longer exists...

...The volume contains some first-rate exercises in the old criticism...

...Thus Robert Bierstedt spends his shot on Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny...

...It is not merely the purity of Mrs...

...it can moralize against bad literature as well as good...

...it would be another matter to believe in them...

...Wharton's dismal universe as any other—once one is in a mood to accept universes...

...In the old criticism, a work of art is judged by its effect upon its audience...

...The moral order is a far less clearly marked off measuring stick with which to control our judgments of literature than it was in the minds of Dr...

...Of the men of moral letters represented in this volume, Lionel Trilling alone comes near making out a case for the old criticism against the new art...

...Ground rule Number 1 for good art includes "a certain propriety" which "controls the literary representation of human suffering...

...Against this paralyzing vision of moral inertia, the contemporary critic can pit only a provisional morality, one argued to overcome the inertia of the moment...

...It presents no moral issue at all...

...Great Moral Dilemmas records the series of luncheon addresses given at the Jewish Theological Seminary during the winter of 1954-55...

...It follows that Mrs...

...Reviewed by Philip Rieff It is no longer generally taken to be the business of the literary critic to measure art against life...

...Just why the artist ought not to be self-indulgent, and even cruel, Trilling does not explicitly tell us...

...Trilling refuses to rate Mrs...

...Wharton's art cannot be rated highly...

...it is her lack of pedagogic sympathy with her characters...

...The naked act of representing, or contemplating, human suffering is a self-indulgence, and it may be a cruelty...

...Trilling rejects Mrs...

...This withdrawal from literature of its ethical credentials as a mirror of conduct has followed by a century the withdrawal from under it of the old Platonic insistence on the unity of good art and high morals...

...His discussion of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a model exercise in defense of the moral pedagogy that inspired the old criticism...

...Wharton's artistic intention that Trilling rejects...

...Wharton's esthetic honesty...

...It is equally doubtful now that a work of art ceases to be good when it does not teach men, however opaquely, how to be good...

...Such a retraction of critical intent is all too understandable...

...The best Bierstedt might have said, instead of challenging Greenwald's credibility, is that such characters are all too plausible and that Wouk is all too realistic a novelist...

...It is terrible to contemplate, it is unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it...

...It is not Wouk, first of all, but the corrupt reality to which his imagination conforms that should be the object of the moral critic...

...Moral criticism has therefore become in itself a form of fiction, elaborating escapes into a dead moral order from the lessons of dead books...

...she does not give them even a clue or hint of any kind of salvation...

...It is a pity that, with one exception, none of the speakers took time out from exercising their assigned moral dilemmas in literature to exercise the dilemma of moral criticism...

...Wharton's art highly because it is morally uncommitted...

...For the same reason, T. S. Eliot, in his preface to Intimes, downgraded Baudelaire...

...Wouk's characters, Barney Green-wald and Majorie Morningstar, may not be credible to the moral critic (in this instance, Bierstedt), but this is because he demands of them—and of their author—ideal qualities such as consistency and seriousness which he attributes too easily to a too rationally conceived reality...

...Insofar as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive...

...It is this "propriety"—the key term in the canon of the old criticism—which "dictates that the representation of pain may not be, as it were, gratuitous...

...Of course, moral criticism can take any kind of literature as its province...