Approached from this angle, Krutch’s doubts as to the play’s statistical value (its actuarial truth as a survey of the bourgeoisie) may seem less relevant. If a poet happens to have the sort of imagination that revivifies an old heresy in modern details, how would he go about it to put this imaginative pattern into objective, dramatic form? At other times, he might have externalized the pattern as a struggle between angels and demons, or between Indians and settlers, or between patriot and foe, or in the “war of the sexes,” etc. At present, in keeping with current emphasis, he may symbolize it with relation to an interpretation of historic trends, where its “prophetic” truth is enough. Incidentally, the subjective origin of the pattern need not impair the objective validity of the symbols used. If the bourgeoisie is oppressed by loss of certainty, one may have many good objective reasons for externalizing the pattern of his imagination in this form, particularly as the pattern itself may have been established in the individual poet precisely by the effects of the same frustrating process.
Our approach also may have bearing upon the comments of Stanley Burnshaw, who observed in The New Masses that the play erred as political strategy. Inasmuch as the proletariat must expect the petty bourgeoisie to become its allies, he asks, how could people so decayed have the vitality to assist in the tremendous work of establishing a new order? This objection is justified only if one does not believe in the Odets formula for redemption, remembering only the ash and not the Phoenix that arises from the ash. But if one follows the Odets ritual to the end, the objection is weakened. By the Marxist formula, the complete “proletarian” would require no process of rebirth. He would grow up with his morality. He and it would be one. But the bourgeois would have to “come over,” dropping the morality that made him and taking another in its place. Converting the situation into drama, we should require rebirth, the ritualistic changing of identity, rather than merely a superficial matter of climbing off one band-wagon and climbing on another. And we should require the dramatist to deepen and broaden the process as greatly as possible.
Thus, I question whether we can appreciate the play by a simple “scientific” test of its truth, as in Farrell’s naturalistic bias, Krutch’s census-taking requirements or Burnshaw’s question of united-front tactics. A more integral test is to be found, I submit, in a consideration of the play as ritual. And those who respond to its ritual will be enabled to entertain drastic developments, without drawing simply upon a masochistic desire to be punished.
Criticism of Poetry
Once when I was analyzing the symbolism of sun and moon in Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ a student raised this objection: ‘I’m tired of hearing about the symbolic sun in poems, I want a poem that has the real sun in it.’
Answer: If anybody ever turns up with a poem that has the real sun in it, you’d better be about ninety-three million miles away. We were having a hot summer as it was, and I certainly didn’t want anyone bringing the real sun into the classroom.
—The Rhetoric of Religion (9)
Van Wyck Brooks in Transition?
Emerson and Others by Van Wyck Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Company
The Dial, January 1928, 56–59
Mr. Brooks’s recent volume comprises eight essays, six monographs on Emerson, John Butler Yeats, Randolph Bourne, Bierce, Melville, and Upton Sinclair, and two general essays on the “soil” of art. All of them bear more or less directly on a matter which has always been a primary concern with this author: the causal relationship between artist and environment. The issue, when one attempts to schematize Mr. Brooks’s exhortations and conclusions, appears to have been variously met. At times he would seem to be asking that artists be accorded greater categorical respect than they now receive; but again, as in his Amor Fati, he suggests that too much opportunity to improve one’s standard of living may be disastrous to art, that the artist should in his devotion to art become somewhat of a pariah, “that the ancient tag about ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot’ really states the first principle of the conservation of energy in the literary life.” Or again, he seems on some occasions to be employing the psychoanalytic technique to account for failure and at others to disclose failure where we had assumed success.
On the whole, I doubt whether Mr. Brooks ever found for his key problem any consistent solution, though in the course of his preoccupation with it he has put forth many very suggestive alternatives. The core of this attitude seems to have centered in the concept of the artist’s “muse.” If the inspirational aspect of art is stressed in an irreligious era—as it was in the “Seven Arts tradition”—the afflatus which was once infused into the artist from on high must now be derived from a secular source, in this case the environment. Whereupon, a good line redounds to the credit of the nation and a bad line is the fault of one’s neighbors—and since the lines are preponderantly bad, the critic has much cause to accuse his countrymen. But strangely enough, in stressing the intimate connection between the artist and the race, the tendency to brand the race as unworthy coexists with the vox populi vox dei attitude, so that the artist seems at times to be judged a victim through expressing his environment, and at others through failing to do so. The whole antinomy being investigated along psychoanalytic lines.
In the “Emerson: Six Episodes” which opens the present work, and which was obviously the last written of all the essays published here, Mr. Brooks has advanced into a less doctrinaire territory. Indeed, the author has, to my knowledge, here given us the first “stream-of-consciousness” biography. By skilfully culling and arranging the entries in Emerson’s journals, he has produced a subjective record corresponding to those workings of the busy tentative brain which we find exemplified in such writers as Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, where the intelligence is brought to bear upon the processes of perception rather than upon those of ratiocination. Here we see not the transcendentalist (an aspect of Emerson which concerns us little at the present time) but the experimental mind, reasoning on a basis of bodily sensation, and respectful of its excursions. Emerson certainly does not gain in dignity by such treatment, but he is made familiar, and thus contemporary. To the “sensitive plant,” which is at once the symbol and reduction to absurdity of nineteenth-century romanticism, there is here added a prompt matching of sensation with ideation. With each veering of mood, another code struggles to develop. It is a mode of thinking implicit in the change from the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum to the post-Kantian volo, ergo sum as a proof of existence.
In the “Notes on Herman Melville,” though they deal with a case which Mr. Brooks defines as “the suffocation of a mighty genius in a social vacuum,” we frequently and gratifyingly lose track of this theme through the obtrusion of another: the spirited admiration which the author feels for Moby Dick. In this essay Mr. Brooks is at his best in depicting the “trials” of the artist. And we feel for once, though perhaps the author may not have expressly wished it, that the artist’s work can claim a certain priority over his environmental difficulties, that his art is the reflection of the temper by which his practical problems will be determined and met. One feels, that is, not that Moby Dick was written by Melville’s contemporaries, but that the man who could (a) write Moby Dick would (b) conduct his life as he did. Such an attitude would be “non-psychoanalytic.” At least, it would cancel psychoanalytic causality by stressing the consistency between character, art, and practical activities, so that both art and “life” are seen as parallel modes (each within its own terms) of the same mentality. In any case, Moby Dick is certainly not explained here as a “social result,” but seems rather to be admired as the adequate and uncompromising expression of Melville’s faculties.
In a brief prefatory note, Mr. Brooks says of The Literary Life in America that it contains “many statements that are certainly less true now than they were when they were written.” But on the whole, the contention of the chapter (that American society is more bent upon the development of practical utility than of aesthetic receptivity) seems to be as “true” now as it ever was. At least, we fervently hope so.
The only reason I could imagine for failing to choose utility at the expense of aesthetic receptivity would be the belief that they