Chapter M: H. P.'s remarks in "The Critics' Critic" of the April number of THE

LITTLE REVIEW on Dr. George Burman Foster's paper entitled "The Prophet of a New Culture" in the March issue induced me to give that notable article a third reading. M. H. P. says "... there's ... too much enthusiasm to be borne out by what he actually says," and then asks the author, "Won't you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?" This obviously tired and disturbed "critic" continues: "... I have a feeling that pure enthusiasm, wasting itself in little geysers, is intrinsically ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets--and that can't be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does."

This irrelevant criticism is an intellectually lazy protest of a sensuous, self-styled "healthy" person blundering through an interpretative analysis of hard, serious thought, expecting to find a program or a plan, cut and dried, ready for the seekers of a new culture. Dr. Foster properly avoided making any definite proposals based upon his study of Nietzsche. With a contagious enthusiasm he wrote his own response to Nietzsche's attitude toward the universe. To condemn his animation is barbaric stupidity. He probably was not conscious when he wrote the paper that anybody wanted him to outline in desiccated phrases a scheme to crystallize the Nietzschean philosophy into personal or social action. He was fired by his subject, and his function--I do not say his purpose--was to spread the flame. The depths of feeling must be reached before action can be more than an abortion of the mind. Dr. Foster's serious, almost sad, enthusiasm, makes the spirit of Nietzsche arouse feeling, and feeling underlies every organic social action. It is not what he "actually says" but what Nietzsche says to him that explains and justifies Dr. Foster's enthusiasm.

An incoherent generalization like "pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous" is a part of the typical literary method of veneering ignorance or prejudices. For a critic who asks "what is it that you want us to do?" which is the desperate voice of an imitationist, and then talks glibly of "pure enthusiasm," which is gaseous rhetoric, I have neither respect nor compassion. What is "pure enthusiasm"?