An Answer to C. P. Snow

...If we go back to the Renaissance idea of the tri-partite division of world history and think of the modern as beginning in the Renaissance and extending into our own day, I think we can then see the complete curve of the era and our own place on it...

...it is centered in the poetic genius...

...As much as Spender is to be praised for his effort to reaffirm the relevance of literature to a technologically obsessed society, it seems to me that he falls into the error of meeting Snow's crude oversimplifications and distortions by exaggerations of his own...

...he comes, that is, to a vision of the inner psyche and outer environment in harmony both with the subterranean forces which so strongly flow through him as an individual and with the great cosmic forces outside of him, but of which he is an integral part...

...It is a world in which man, through the act of artistic creation and participation, is restored to his sense of the unity of visible and invisible creation...

...The Romantic theory of creation through inspiration is in effect a secularized version of the Platonic-Christian doctrine of poetry as divine inspiration...

...At the moment, the forms of expression which are most closely allied with the bourgeoisie—easel painting, composition, liction—reflect both in their form and content the crisis of competing nationalisms at the cross-roads, and it is therefore not surprising that the great terminal novel of our time, Mann's Dr...

...Spender sees Shaw, Wells and Arnold Bennett as the modern movement's arch-opposites, and feels their tradition is carried on in our day by Kingsely Amis, John Wain, C. P. Snow, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson and William Plomer...

...Not only does such a maneuver play into the opponent's hands, but it does violence to its own point of view by arbitrarily cutting down the range, scope and variety of literature— precisely the qualities which enable it to compete, and to compete successfully, with other modes, including science, of comprehending, molding and expressing the flux of experience...

...and second, the political argument that since the individual artist is unpredictable, and therefore uncontrollable, he must either be banished from the state or allowed to remain only on the condition that he produce propaganda for it...

...From Sir Philip Sidney onward, the critics' reply has been either that literature docs teach the truth and more pleasingly and effectively than history or—and, ironically, this counter-reply is also derived from Plato—that the poetic inspiration depends on and is akin to the divine inspiration itself, for though the words are the words of the poet, the spirit behind them is the spirit of God...

...According to Spender: "The reinstating of imagination as primary, central, the verb, was the attitude responsible for the greatest modern achievements: works like the last novels of Henry James (particularly The Golden Bowl, Finnegans Wake, Yeats' Byzantium poems, and the Duineser Elegien, put these writers in the God-like position of being isolated within their own creations, of having to reinvent the world and all its values within their art...

...Spender is obviously trying to rescue the literary culture, or at least that part of it which concerns him most, from the charge that it is incapable of meeting the challenge of modern life, and especially the challenge of the machine, because of its ignorance of science, its reactionary social and political views, and its indifference to the needs and aspirations which so agitate men in our time...

...To put it in Renaissance terms, the microcosm and the macrocosm are in perfect correspondence and accord with each other...

...He has looked into the work of a large cast of modern (as distinct from contemporary) writers and attempted to analyze the common elements in their work...

...Precisely, just as it seems to me that Cage, Robbe-Grillet and Mathieu have also found themselves, though far more by the accident of time, at the very edge of the very end of the road...

...The values and ideals which motivate and inform men at and away from bench and book are derived from an area of experience greater and more complex than that of science or art alone, and if the humanities do not necessarily humanize it does not follow that science must therefore necessarily democratize...

...The choice of values and ideals, the stance and style of a man, are his own responsibility...

...And it appears to me that the modern in art is the expression of the mingled despair and hope of an era coming to its end...

...It is wryly amusing to notice that Snow has depicted the artist as the Romantic hero—that is, above and beyond it all—just as Spender has perpetuated the poet as the Romantic hero—equally above and beyond it all...

...The result is that just as the narrowness of Snow's view forces him into the absurd distinction between good science and bad art (the confusion between technique and morality is a characteristic Snowerror), so Spender's insistence on the Romantic theory of creation forces him to divide literature into the right kind (or that kind which fits his theory) and the wrong kind (or that kind with which his theory cannot cope...

...and its American exponents are Whitman, Faulkner, Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell...

...its Continental counterparts are Rilke, Benn, Baudelaire...

...There are just too many different kinds of works of art made under too many different conditions and for too many different purposes for which Romantic theory cannot account...

...Faustus, should have as its theme a composer's inter-related crisis of conscience and art...

...Rimbaud and Proust...

...Science and art, politics and economics, philosophy, faith, myth, brute experience, accident, and other men, each in its own way, may help (or hinder) him...

...For him, the modern movement attains its peak in Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot and Pound...

...But I cannot sec that anything is gained by opposing Snow's extreme—and therefore incomplete —position with an equally extreme and therefore equally incomplete position of one's own...

...It seems to me that The Struggle of the Modern can best be understood if it is taken as yet one more reply to C. P. Snow's Two Cultures thesis...

...In a recent review of Eliot's Collected Poems, Donald Davie writes: "In an important sense we, the poets of now, have nothing to learn from Mr...

...Not only does organic poetry bring into itself a vision of the wholeness of the outside world but it includes equally within itself "another universality, that of subconscious life, childhood, personal history, sleep, dream, the subjective ego which moves into pasts and depths beyond individuality, where it is pure existence and no longer knows its name...

...Centennial Review" In this book Stephen Spender tries to isolate the specific quality in literature known as "the modern...

...But for the Romantics the imagination is the independent and sovereign activity of man...

...It is important to recall at this point that Snow's chief villains are Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound, with sideswipes at James, Joyce and Yeats, as pre-fascistic, proto-fascistic, crypto-fascistic, or just plain fascistic...

...The difficulty with the religioRomantic-aesthetic theory is, however, that it's simply not comprehensive enough to encompass the total artistic experience, either as creation or as product...

...Francis Bacon, Alban Berg and Stravinsky...

...but, for good or ill, the decision is his, for in the end he bears the consequences of his choice...

...English criticism has always been haunted by Plato's double attack on literature in the Republic: first, the epistemological argument that since literature must be a copy of a copy of the idea or truth, it can produce only falsehood...

...In this perspective, then, one does not condemn, one understands...

...By organic poetry Spender means an identity of the poet's experience of nature with the words used without a sense of intermediary between them...

...In the other arts its adherents are Picasso, Henry Moore...

...It is within the framework of this concept of organic poetry that Spender discusses both the poets who exemplify it and those who belong to the opposing tradition, which in this context can only mean social realism...

...One realizes that neither art nor science is, as both Snow and Spender mistakenly assume, a way of life but a way of making a living...

...Eliot...

...art translates, so to speak, the divine harmony of the spheres beyond the perception of man into mortal sounds he can hear...

...We accept as natural and inevitable, Spender argues, the idea of the irreconcilable opposition between the autonomous, outside world of science, inventions, and powers operating according to their own laws, and the individual consciousness embracing these aspects of experience as part of a larger whole...

...At bottom, what holds the seemingly diverse elements of the modern movement together is the effort to retain, to utilize, and to reinvigorate the Romantic idea of the organic relation of man, society, nature, and spirit in the face of the dehumanized, depersonalized, technological character of modern society...

...Sensibility is sensuous, and idea too is experienced sensuously...

...In a quixotic sense, the concept of the aesthetic self-containedness of the art object of recent criticism is but a bowdlerized version of the Romantic secularized version of the ur-theory of divine inspiration...

...Science, on the other hand, simply "realizes the true nature of the object" and merely releases discoveries and inventions which, whatever their ultimate purposes, do not incorporate within them the subjective vision of either the discoverer or the inventor...

...Perhaps more important, they have become an ever-dragging brake on the emergence of new forms of relationship which are capable of coping with these problems...

...Another limitation of Spender's is his failure to consider the problem of the modern within a conceptual framework large enough to accommodate the perspective of history...

...Spender argues that by deliberately turning his back on the immediate, the temporal, and the mundane, the modern (in his sense of the term) artist creates a consistent world of the imagination...

...There is no following him down the roads he has taken because he has been right to the end of them himself, once and for all...

...and it owes allegiance to no superior intellectual authority...

...The characteristic contributions of the Renaissance to our civilization, once so necessary and so revolutionary in their effects, are no longer capable of coming to grips with the problems of a mass society in its present international and technological context...