Chapter II

It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits and closing now in disillusion and pathos. Three representative players have been Mr. Joel Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L. Mencken: a study of their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of contemporary American criticism. The influence of the first of these is a most curious phenomenon in our recent history.

In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the leisured gentleman and scholar who adorns all too rarely our national society. His interests are wide: for a number of years he was in politics and he has distinguished himself by his generous efforts in behalf of the Negro: he has been an army officer and has, one fancies, a spark of the old-time gallantry of the military man. For us, however, he is the wealthy amateur of the arts and philosophy; but what, one may still ask, are his claims to critical leadership?

Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a number of years teaching in an academic environment. He specialised in the history of literary criticism, producing the three-volume compilation, _Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_ (1909) and the volume, _Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (1899), which pleased certain Italian thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than the usual competent product of academic industry and research: Mr. Spingarn himself revolted against the type of sterile scholarship they represent. In 1910 he delivered his famous lecture, _The New Criticism_. He declaimed it at the climax of a spree, for he had intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory of Benedetto Croce: he was in full cry against academic dry rot. Consequently his statements at the time were more extreme than those he would probably make on the same theme to-day.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of a record, we must write down such pronunciamentos in this lecture, in the addenda to it in _Creative Criticism_ (1917), in his article, _The Seven Arts and the Seven Confusions_, and in his contribution to _Civilization in the United States_ (1921) as bear on the following topics: the essence of art, the function of the artist, the duty of the critic.

Literature, he said, pointing to the trend of nineteenth-century criticism, “is an expression of something, of experience or emotion, of the external or internal, of the man himself or something outside the man; yet it is always conceived of as an art of expression.” As for the artist, he bade him know that “madness and courage are the very life of art.... For the madness of poets is nothing more or less than unhampered freedom of self-expression.... To let one’s self go--that is what art is always aiming at, and American art needs most of all.” The duty of the critic? To ask and answer these questions: “What has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his intention? What is he striving to express and how has he expressed it? What impression does his work make on me, and how can I best express this impression?” With the flourishes of a platform speaker who knows instinctively that it is not straight hard thinking which sways an audience so much as the verve with which possibly dubious generalities are pronounced, Mr. Spingarn exclaimed vehemently that the new critics have done with the whole question of standards, including genres, hierarchies, and moral judgments.

This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement of romantic æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s essential response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always withheld what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or judgment. (It _is_ hard to make concrete statements about the so-called æsthetic emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the “æsthetic response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn had written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers. This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just at the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality in the documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing to the Crocean doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing in it. He did not even apply it, abstaining, then and since, from concrete criticism of individual works. He merely proclaimed it. And a widespread revolt against standards followed in American criticism. So hearty, and eventually so wilful and silly, was the revolt that in 1922 its opponents were entertained by the issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a restraining manifesto entitled _The Younger Generation_. This time, recoiling from the destructiveness of the young men, Mr. Spingarn would herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to “discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often before, romantic expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a soberer Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.”

It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained scholar, man of feeling, who can detain us, for there is literally nothing in his writing for the mind to work on: as a thinker, he is thoroughly derivative and weak on definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn stands for, the theory of self-expression, still needs a scotching.

“Self-expression” is simply a magical catchword of the black variety. It is a good catchword in that it emphasises the self, but it is pernicious to the best interests of the self. For to express one’s self means no more than just to manifest oneself, and if we say self-manifestation instead of self-expression, we see at once how paralysing the latter term has been. It has placed the emphasis, one sees, on the artist _as he is_ and not on his possibilities of growth: thus it has a static effect. Think now: impulses, people say, arise in them or occur to them; no one claims to create his own impulses, to self-induce his inclinations; in a manner of speaking, our impulses come to us from the outside. Therefore, advice to be spontaneous, to let oneself go without check, to follow one’s impulses is necessarily advice--to do what?--_to live as unconsciously and mechanically as possible_. The romantic may just as well hand himself over to the Behaviourist psychologist, saying, “Here am I, a creature of whim and impulse, the living proof of your thesis of automatism.” But the romantic is not sternly logical. He has been proof against the question as to the value of the self that is being expressed, and not only proof against it: self-expression as a theory has encouraged his conceit and sometimes fostered megalomania, thus pitching him deeper into bondage to _external_ conditions, for conceit makes one exaggeratedly sensitive to the environment.

To identify one’s self with the mechanical temperamental flux of one’s existence and call that freedom is surely strange, and it is no wonder that it is a strange “science” which has risen to support this identification. I am of course referring to psycho-analysis, spoken of respectfully by Mr. Spingarn, utilised as a probing instrument in biography by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and championed by Mr. Mencken. It does not seem necessary here to make a serious attempt to discredit psycho-analysis, for that is being done rapidly enough by such critics of it as Dr. Trigant Burrow, by the Behaviourists, by the academic psychologists themselves. The facts have never been other than these: that psycho-analysis is admittedly experimental (and therefore speculative in its procedures, unsure of itself), that its central conception, the unconscious, not to speak of its many little metaphors like the “censor,” has never been objectively established, and that it has no ideal of psychological health toward which to guide its adherents (in lieu of such an ideal, the analyst has either gone in for an excessive relativity or he has taken the “reality” of the statistical average to be the norm). These are the undeniable facts and one who would like to take pride in the sturdy commonsense of the literary profession must regret that they were not kept in mind. Literary men to-day, one must conclude, are no less gullible than any other group. Naively, they welcomed the psycho-analytical dramatising of inhibitions as the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought was a sublimation of sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate function of man, they wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul, the unconscious. Ah, my highly suggestible writers, it is easy come, easy go with your ideas: within a decade you will be sneering at psycho-analysis as now you sneer at Christian Science.

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and biographical interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is not the sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but shy of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to use the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions, temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness.

Who would dispute Mr. Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an acquisitive society provides unfavourable conditions for the development of the artistic life? Of course it does. It badly nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost obsessed with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure, as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions in the history of America which had hampered and throttled their predecessors: he showed how frontier life had made the machinery of existence, the actual getting of a living, paramount and from this necessity had originated the contempt for the arts of enjoying existence, and how this split had perpetuated itself in the divorce between the world of practice (“lowbrow”) and the world of theory (“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his pleading. For struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe that the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is precisely the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though he casually said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through the development of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation.” But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent on this theme. He seems rather to have the sweet wistfulness and yearning of one pledged to a lost cause. This mood of wistfulness and yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast, lonely and eager, has not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the American writer.

Was it fortuitous, as in the example of Mr. Spingarn, that Mr. Van Wyck Brooks should have held a certain leadership, should have put far more than most of his generation his impress upon American taste and thought in literary matters? It would seem that he has been a leader _faute de mieux_, for although a charming minor critic, he has never managed to awake an indomitable desire among his followers to master the odds. He voiced the sentiments of a wistfully rebellious generation but shed no light on the object of their rebellion, the achievement in a democracy of real individuality.

That is the problem Mr. H. L. Mencken has at least perceived, and his bold tone better fits a leader in our present straits than Mr. Brooks’s gentle accents, but alas! He “solved” the problem of being an individual in a “democratic” nation simply by striking an attitude of swagger, and like Midas he is cursed with a touch that changes all objects into some one thing else. It is easy--and this is the secret of his influence--to adopt Mr. Mencken’s attitude toward the current affairs of men. Let me quote his _Catechism_ and you will have it in one simple lesson. “_Q._ If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? _A._ Why do men go to zoos?” But let us observe the man in the zoo, traipsing open-mouthed and superciliously from cage to cage, grinning in silly patronage at the imprisoned beasts who at least are true to the laws of their being, and shall we not mock at man’s cheap sense of superiority based not on what he (poor lunatic!) has done for himself but only on what Nature has made of him? No, no, it is not by contempt for the inferior that man will grow but by dissatisfaction with himself. The net effect of Mr. Mencken’s writings, however, is to produce self-satisfaction and a feeling of false superiority, and this naturally enough makes for personal passivity.

As for the Mencken touch! It turns everything to horse sense (not to be confused with the hard-won virtue of commonsense) and it is admirable when it is applied to current cant, as this: “Law Enforcement becomes the new state religion. A law is something that A wants and can hornswoggle B, C, D, E and F into giving him--by bribery, by lying, by bluff and bluster, by making faces. G and H are therefore bound to yield it respect--nay, to worship it. It is something sacred. To question it is to sin against the Holy Ghost.”

But shrewdness is not enough when one is trying to cope with master-ideas, and in their realm Mr. Mencken is, as he might say, a clodhopper. One of the master-ideas in æsthetics and psychology, one that has engaged great minds and been pondered upon each century since the _Poetics_ was introduced into European thought, is the Aristotelian conception of _katharsis_. Hear Mr. Mencken after the sages and the learned have spoken. He is saying that capital punishment affords _katharsis_ to modern societies. “_Katharsis_, so used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off of steam. A schoolboy, disliking his teacher, deposits a tack upon the pedagogical chair; the teacher jumps and the boy laughs. This is _katharsis_. A bootlegger, paying off a Prohibition agent, gives him a counterfeit $10 bill; the agent, dropping it in the collection plate on Sunday, is arrested and jailed. This is also _katharsis_. A subscriber to a newspaper, observing his name spelled incorrectly in the report of a lodge meeting, spreads a report that the editor of the paper did not buy Liberty bonds. This again is _katharsis_.”[68] And this again is cheap intellectual vaudeville or--it is clodhopperism. Something like this always happens when Mr. Mencken fingers the diamond ideas of the world; the process of degrading intellectual grandeur to horse sense began when he grossly misunderstood Nietzsche years ago.

By way of a last word on this idol of the emancipated Rotarian, do not forget that Mr. Mencken, destructive critic that he is, is also given to fulsome and extravagant praise of certain transient artists. Mr. Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_, he says, is “the most eloquent, the most profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published in America since _Leaves of Grass_.” Conceivably, it may be the third, but is it eloquent, is it profound? Such judgments are not uncommon when Mr. Mencken feels a praising mood come on.