Chapter V: I append The Prayer of a Young Critic

But we have heard rumour of the Mistral.
It is a cold wind that blows from the heights,
Day after day it sweeps steadily down,
Cold and from above, changing the air
In the lowlands.
We are dwellers in lowlands
And our air has been breathed before. It is
A sultry air: men talk to each other
In haze and their words are close and fevered.
A warm breeze crosses our little hillocks,
And then the dust settles down again.
Not near the Alps do we live.
Great Genius,
Grant us an electric climate! Touch us
With snowy fire, send the Mistral to sweep
Bare our plain and proclaim the gaiety
Of altitudes, the glory of clear stars,
The exaltation of the sun burning
The rare air. Great Genius, send the Mistral!

FOOTNOTES

[63] From _Points of View_, 1924, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.

[64] From _Americans_, 1922, Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher.

[65] The rest of the sentence is “and he sees the common weal as the mighty rock in the shadow of which his little life and personality are to be surrendered, if need be, as things negligible and transitory.”

[66] Also he could have mastered the philosophy of Mr. John Dewey and made his “religion of democracy” more respectable.

[67] A perusal of the _Life and Letters of Stuart P. Sherman_, published after this essay was written, increases my confidence in the diagnosis above of Sherman’s weaknesses. Mr. P. E. More wondered many years ago whether his young reviewer did not have “an inclination to avoid the central problem.” Later, he warned Sherman: “I do not like to see a man of your ability and insight deliberately taking up the job of whitewasher” for democracy. And finally Mr. More said: “Yours is but a sickly sort of democracy at bottom, and needs a doctor.”

[68] From _Prejudices: Fourth Series_, Alfred A. Knopf, publisher.

[69] From _The Modern Temper_, Harcourt, Brace & Co., publisher.

[70] Mr. Lippmann is not a literary critic but his views are pertinent to this discussion.

[71] The Macmillan Company, publisher.

[72] Even in a footnote I mention Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn with some reluctance, and only because there are so few critics among us who have any interest in trying to plot a direction for the future. Pauline Christianity (grossly libelled by him as akin to the degenerate puritanism of our day) must be destroyed, he preaches. Salvation lies in a fusion of Hellenism (Science) and Judaism (which he interprets selectively and sentimentally). He is a suggestive writer: he is also a prig, a special pleader, and embarrassing in his frequent intervals of self-pity and in his intrusions of hearth-side intimacies (proper for telling only to his closest friends) into the public medium of print. One cannot take this muddled romanticist seriously.

[73] In _Style and Form in American Prose_ (1929).

_Behaviour and Continuity_

BERNARD BANDLER II