THREE: BOOKS

161

I. POE AT LAST

Perhaps the classic figures of American literature should be regarded chiefly as actors in the epos of the American birth. With one or two exceptions, they did not produce great books. Yet all of them were heroes; were characters who in their defeats as in their victories fleshed and fixed features of our nascent world. Their lives—like the careers of the patriarchs of Genesis—may prove more current in our future mind than any of their works.

This certainly will be the case with Poe. Despite his influence abroad, despite the range of his activity, he wrote neither verse nor prose intrinsically great. His significance is not to be extracted from his situation. And the construction of the creative Poe—the true Poe—has lagged, precisely because this situation was misunderstood. Poe paid bitterly for his youthful Byronism. From his neighbors and the Bostonians, it shrouded him in sentimental horror; from us, it has quarantined the man in an equally blinding sentimental glamour. His first biographer, Griswold, was incompetent. And Professor Woodberry inherited this incompetence for all his scholarly good will since crucial features of Poe’s life were hidden and since without them Poe’s work, unlike organic great art, lacked an entire dimension.

There has now been published a sheaf of letters^[7] which will mark the true birth of Poe as an authentic, working figure in our cultural world. For the most part, they are notes written by Poe to his foster father, with brief notations 162or replies by Mr. Allan. They give us at last the young Poe, the crucial Poe, and the world which he went forth to live in and to conquer. The first of them dates from the University of Virginia which the poet entered at seventeen; the last reveals him, seven years later, abandoned for the final time by Mr. Allan who has remarried and is soon to die. The years—from seventeen to twenty-four—are the years of Poe’s confrontation with America. Prior to them, he was a child—what manner of child, nurtured and spoiled in the Richmond mansion of the Allans, his words reveal. And after them, there come the open pages of his books, of his trafficking with editors, of his relations with Mrs. Clemm and with his wife, Virginia. These letters form the link that makes the whole. Their appearance is a major event in American letters.

The career of Poe becomes a scene in a symbolic drama. He is creative will, nakedly let loose upon the American world. Who shall say America did not summon him? He rises like an impulse from this land which cannot act him out. Between America and Poe, as between Poe and his foster father, are the chains of a need unrecognized. Without his adopted son whom he bred to hyperesthesia and left to starve, whom he set high and then cast down, John Allan would be a clod. And without John Allan, Poe would have been altogether disembodied. In the tortuous recriminations of these letters, there is the plea for love as well as bread. Transpose the family quarrel into general terms, and you have the full years of Poe: Poe, the most highly potential intellect of a land whose hour of realization had not struck.

In this failure there is no object lesson, no call for a morality. It is too inevitable and too right. It is true that, with the intellectual range of a Goethe, Poe gave forth but a few shriveled and glittering pages. And yet, in his hour and for his hour, he gave the ultimate, since he gave a Symbol. An imagined Poe, petted to old age in the rich library of 163an adoring foster father, would have been less—far less—than the frail, fierce, frustrate Poe we have.

Unarmed, unguided, he went forth to create in the American desert. His masterful will found no immediate object upon which to work. He had absorbed haphazard the philosophers, the metaphysical poets, the occultists and seers of the Kabala, the chroniclers of exotic journeys. But he did not stay in their world. His constant effort was to refocus and apply this chaos of ideas to some absolute experience of life. Witness his treatment of the values of poetry and music: his making metaphysics out of the relation of facts or out of the forecast of facts: his use of the machine, or airships, of mesmerism, of physiology and mechanical contrivance, to express the widening consciousness of the human soul. Even the wanderings of Arthur Gordon Pym end in a revelation. Of course, Poe failed. Grub Street in Baltimore and New York—this remained the stage for his apocalypse. And the hazard crumbs from the intellectual banquets of Asia and of Europe were but manna, in no wise transfiguring the Wilderness which for forty years he wandered.

Yet the lofty impulse of his work is lodged, forever. Poe’s theory of pure poetry holds the intuition of a great esthetic. His “Eureka” gives the glimpse of a vision deep as that which is imagined in the Kalpa and the Brahma of the Hindus. A half dozen of his tales, “Eleonora,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” etc., are variants of a single theme which envisions the mystery of the Person as close as any prophecy of Blake. Hard, shut, shrunken work it is: and yet it holds a vaster sense of life than do the amplitudes of Whitman or of Emerson. Holds it, however, as a seed the tree. In Whitman and Melville there is life’s blossoming. Poe belongs less with the creators of art than with its prophets.

His creative impulse, first to last, was metaphysical and religious. Behind these horrid trips to Ulalume and Usher, 164these dogmatic repetitions of telltale hearts and reincarnate lovers, is the man’s will for a world timeless and absolute. That his materials were the shoddy “seconds” of the romantic Gothic, we may leave to the pedants to assure us. Poe’s impulse was no more romantic than was Goethe’s. He had a flair for the Real: he lacked the power to establish this reality from the world about him. Hence his defeated flights to other realms. But in his Poetics and in “Eureka,” it stands proved that the glancings-off which constitute his “works” were but his trial flights: that Poe was resolved to found his revelation within the visible, audible, beating world. Unlike the Bostonians, Poe was no transcendentalist by choice or reason. The confrontation of experience and then the act of alchemy upon it, by virtue of his vision, was beyond his powers. And was beyond him not, as seemed manifest, because of his harried and brief life: was beyond him symbolically, inevitably, since it was beyond the America of which he was so high, so near, so unachieved an impulse.

Let us make this Poe ours. Let us not twang semi-sentimental plaints about his failures. Let us not fool ourselves as to his triumphs. Let us not blame the symbolical Mr. Allan for acting so well his ungrateful role in a Scene so vastly without his canny ken. Let us, above all, not split Poe—as is the fashion of the day—into pseudo-scientific fragments of psychologic and sociologic terms. Let us take him whole—the man and his work: Poe the embodied impulse of an Organism which holds not only him, but us; Poe the impulse of America to transfigure the worlds within it into a world more real. And let us proceed to the Adventure.

1925

165

2. FRANCE AND THOREAU

Since Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French literature has come variously to America for materials and forms wherewith to re-create itself. The greatest instance is still perhaps that of Chateaubriand whose impossible Indians may outlast the too-possible Frenchmen of Flaubert. The sustenance which Stendhal won from contemplation of our scene for the esthetic of his novel of the modern will is less widely recognized. We are aware, however, of how the symbolists transfigured Poe; and more recently of the enthusiastic creation by the Dadaists of a romantic America of cowboys, skyscrapers and jazz. Romantic movements in classicist France are ever forages for nurture rather than voyages of discovery. Like Greece, France is omnivorous and egocentric. In every period of influences her writers are like a family consuming beefsteak. That beefsteak will become, let us say, part of a lanky father, a fat mother, a bad pagan boy, and a noble Christian sister. At this moment, we may behold America turn into Louis Aragon, Valéry Larbaud, and Bazalgette....

Bazalgette’s translation and biography of Whitman had a dynamic share in the slow stirring of French letters, away from the Narcissus mood which led to the masterworks of Claudel, Valéry, Proust, toward a new gesture of spiritual excursion whence a good range of fresh romantic stuffs will accrue for the young classicists to work on. His Whitman was a biography that held fairly close to the narrative form, save that a lyrism illumined it and made it speak with emphasis and fervor to the imagination of the French. In “Henry Thoreau,” however, Bazalgette stands revealed more clearly: a poet himself, and a prophet, he employs a certain spiritual experience made manifest in America because less assimilated here than the experience of Rousseau and of Tolstoi in their 166lands; and he makes of it his own spiritual Word for France. This technical analogy between Bazalgette in sophisticated Paris writing of Thoreau, and Chateaubriand in rationalist Paris dreaming of our virgin forests must not be strained too far. Bazalgette is less a poet than Napoleon’s noble hater, but he is more historian and critic. His book has the lilt and passage and effect of a packed personal paean; and yet it is perhaps the best of all pictures of our great New England. There is no phenomenal relation between Chateaubriand’s America—or that of the Dadaists—and ourselves. Their work is, therefore, not negotiable beyond their immediate needs. But clad in the fine English of Van Wyck Brooks, Bazalgette’s “Thoreau” responds to our experience. It becomes an American classic as surely as it is a French one.

The method is not narrative: it is a composite of allusiveness, colloquy, lyrical projection and dramatic scening. A hard method to follow unflagging through three hundred pages; and at first the frail figure of Thoreau seems insufficient for it. The author has sustained his tone with ruthless logic that at times may pall. One would occasionally welcome passages in a more direct, conventional prose. But the consequence of the author’s lack of mercy is an esthetic form the more remarkable when one considers the, after all, comparative slightness of Thoreau’s stuff and the frustrate colors of his milieu. At the end, one realizes that this unsparing method was the inevitable right one for the subject. Thoreau’s greatness did not loom like Whitman’s. It was the consequence of impacts on a small living nucleus, of the organic yet reactive growth of that nucleus within an inchoate social envelope. When he created his Whitman, Bazalgette had but to follow Whitman. Hence his use of narrative was correct. Even the Civil War fell into place as a sort of objective scene for the hero’s progress. Creating Thoreau, Bazalgette creates primarily the New England town, and the woods and the rivers and the 167birds, creates the astringent air of Emerson and Alcott, creates Mr. Greeley and his Tribune, John Brown and his raiders, lyceum audiences and village ne’er-do-wells. A superb massivity of America bounding Thoreau gives him his dimensions by indirection and by the dynamism of the man’s responses. It was a subtle task, and Bazalgette has done it. It required a complete mastery of the American scene; and the extent to which this Frenchman who has never visited our land knows it—its past, its present, and its future—is uncanny. Where did he learn what a New England village feels like, what winter is in a Canadian wood? How did he catch this scent of the Emersonian family, this shuttling rhythm of Broadway, this dark deluvial stain in the Judge’s house in Staten Island? No mere thorough scholarship can explain it. Chateaubriand’s Indians, Baudelaire’s Poe, are alien and exotic. Bazalgette possesses a true intuition of America. Strange as it may seem, he loves us—loves our promise, our struggle to evolve it. But his love is clairvoyant: his mind has stratified his vision of us with analytic understanding. He knows the heartbreaking husk of social and psychic life in which our promise stifles. Bazalgette is a Roussinean romanticist in that he chooses to bring to Paris our Thoreau as a reality for it, from the New England town. But he is no romanticizer of the town. Nor of Thoreau who emerges from the book as a true hero almost by a process of survival. Thoreau is a hero of his age, we gather, because his age was otherwise unheroic.

The book is a new type of novel, if you please, rather than biography in the strict French sense. There is a new novel form—the Proustian—in which the hero is literally “I.” An example of it in our language is Sherwood Anderson’s “Story Teller’s Story.” Here is another kind of novel—a sort of Crocean history—in which a real personage is drawn ruthlessly as regards the facts and yet with Dionysian freedom in spiritual emphasis and in esthetic.

168A work like this dares to contain anything: and there is to be found here a bit of literary criticism so original in form that it must be mentioned. Thoreau and Whitman meet. Their talk is a failure. Walt is distrustful of this highbrow Yankee who has so consciously turned away from Harvard. Bazalgette records the futile dialogue and adds to it, by way of antistrophe, an imagined dialogue consisting of responses gleaned from the two men’s work. The effect is powerful and convincing: a contrapuntal fugue that does more to prove the nuclear energy of the American mind and its unity, in variety, of direction, than a score of essays.

Mr. Brooks’s translation has a tendency toward “toning down.” The original title, as an instance, reads “Henry Thoreau, Sauvage.” This might be faithfully Englished as Henry Thoreau, the Untamed. Mr. Brooks has preferred to substitute Emerson’s “bachelor of Nature.” Perhaps he shares somewhat Emerson’s Apollonian attitude toward this nature-drunk, nature-sweet, neoprimitive neighbor. But the translation is very far, indeed, from a betrayal. It is the process whereby Bazalgette’s book becomes indigenous and takes its place in our American literature between the old and the new. Thoreau stands with Whitman and with Melville for the creative transitional gesture between that new America, inheritor of Old World forms, and our old America, creator of a new world. Of this hazardous long birth-hour in whose travail we persist, there is no lovelier expression than the prose of Van Wyck Brooks.

1927

3. FAIRY TALES FOR THE OLD

Our country was not young from the beginning. It had to achieve youth. From the Old World came old shoots: the 169transplantation as often as not aggravated their antiquity. Ere we could be young, our elements had to rot and to be remingled. This took time. And it may broadly be said that only with the opening of the West and the demise, in civil war, of our old sectional cultures, did America become at last a single sprawling infant.

Even then, the sectional elderships persisted. They took many forms. None more pleasant than the glowing second childhood of New England which stands expressed in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. These are tales mostly of Maine in the later decades of the nineteenth century. And rightly enough the best of them are about old women. The occasional story of a child is sicklied over with an aged cast: for instance, Sylvia of “A White Heron” is an old woman’s child, and lives with an old woman. And when there is a wooing in “The Country of the Pointed Firs” the maid has grown grey in service of her mother; the man—son of the almost centenarian Mrs. Blackett—is a simpleton past fifty. But whether the scene be the Poor Farm or a spruce island home or the tiny palace of Queen Victoria’s Twin, there is ever a single glamorous illusion making the substance and life of these sweet tales. And it is the manner of illusion that dwells in the hearts of folks who have grown sweetly childish, rather than sour, in their senility.

It is not necessary to insist that the farms painted by Miss Jewett are about as “realistic” as the England of “Alice in Wonderland” or of Tennyson’s “Idylls.” Yet these uniformly charming people, so pure of thought, so innocuous in action, so redolent of lavender and lace, are true, although the theatre of their verity is the poetic fancy of Miss Jewett. We may all snatch from our coming decrepit days the nodding wish to turn from the rot of our world into a sweet-scented realm of senile wishes, in order to enjoy Miss Jewett.

The Maine of a mature mind, contemporary with these 170stories, must have revealed men and women more like the persons of Robert Frost, more like those one feels, rather by reaction than by direct creation, in the works of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Melville. And yet these kind and well-groomed vagaries of Miss Jewett’s are no less a result of the crass facts—no less respectable. The spirit of them is a sort of iridescent mist rising from the shut pools of that life.

Of course, stories with substance so wistful and so misty cannot rank high as art: and we must not permit the present mood of American reminiscence to which are due so many biographies, so many re-editions, so many reconstructions, to blind us to their frail value. The fairy tales of youth have greater destiny, because they have harder substance. The child transcends his world: his ebullient vaulting energy despises a mere unmastered round of fact and with parabolic power brings Mystery to earth. But with second childhood, reality is too much and is avoided by a sharp reduction. Energy, exhausted, draws back in catatonic gesture; re-creates smallnesses to dwell in as a comfortable offset to the no longer challengeable world.

Willa Cather, a feeble daughter of Miss Jewett, has had the fondness to compare her tales with “Huckleberry Finn” (a fairy tale of youth) and “The Scarlet Letter”—one of the maturest dreams of American romance. But these perfumed pictures of the land of pointed firs are a gross reduction of the truth. All the primary lines, colors, forms, are missing. Indeed, all life-welling passion, all organic substance, have been mulcted out by the desire for Peace: and what remains is a predigested brew of natural descriptions and carefully balanced converse—a true diet, indeed, for old and toothless gums.

Yet, although their stuff be small, these tales have loveliness. And one rereads them, after all these years, marveling 171at the grace with which their frailties have aged. The scenes of nature are good lyrics. Although Miss Jewett’s sea has become strangely gentle, like a parlor pet, it is still living: it is captured somewhat as life is captured in certain two-dimensional prints from old Japan. The dialect has the mark of absolute perfection; and yet is musically mannered so that none of the conscious stress on veracity is there to irk one. But above all—those women, those adorable, impossible old ladies, brewing tea, gossiping, sewing! They are there, not like our grandmothers, but like our childish vision of them—like what our grandmothers would have liked to be, to our rapt young love. Even this sentimental splendor is reduced to a kind of loophole glimpse. And yet the lens is never blurred and the effect has all the negotiability of art.

There was a strength in old New England which passed maturity without losing all its power. There are wild flowers still in these rock-bound fields that go to seed hardily: they do not scatter or fall with the first turning away of the summer sun; but wraithlike they stand aloft upon their stems and let the autumn air run through them. Something of this prowess is in Miss Jewett’s stories. For all their simplification, for all their romantic refusal of the true stuff of tragedy—finally, hence, for all their subtle denigration of New England which deserves greater and more athletic art, these tales bear well. They may be tales of senescence—of a soul’s twilight: but this is a soul not impotent even in decay.

Most of them appeared in magazines well over forty years ago. As one measures them with what has followed, one is dismayed. For hidden in their glamour is a sinister seed. True enough are tales which spring from a felt illusion. But it is only the lie which has brought forth progeny. The hallucination of Miss Jewett, making her see such paragons of peace and sweetness in the New England farms, causing her in all solemnity to compare the “Bowdoin reunion” with “a company 172of Greeks going to celebrate a victory, or to worship the god of harvest”—this peculiar magic of old age could not be copied and has not been transmitted. Only the trick of reduction, only the simplification, only the falsehood. And the consequence, patented and standard, swarms within our fiction magazines and in our novels.

The fairy tale turned formula—the fairy tale without the motive of youth or of old age—becomes the harsh, cold, mechanical, nugatory art which makes up most of our current “competence” in fiction. It marks the extension into literature of the processes of mass production which belong to an industrial age. It is responsible for the factories and sweatshops whence reading matter is turned out for the million. How it came to be born you can trace in the soft, warm, gradually shallowing and self-repeating art of Sarah Orne Jewett.

1925

4. DUSK AND DAWN

The basis for any criticism of a book by Lewis Mumford must be respect for the author and thankfulness that he is at work in our country. Rare, indeed, are American critics who, like him, venture into the realm of general ideas; and rarer are the men who, with his good will, possess his rounded equipment. For Mr. Mumford tries to be no specialist save in the task of seeing and interpreting life whole. No less than all the works of men shall be his laboratory; no less than the search of values for “the good life” his aim. He can write of archaic Utopias and future city plannings, of modern books and ancient pictures and medieval guilds; he is at home in all subjects since he has gained awareness that all of them are one.

173Mr. Mumford’s “The Golden Day” sustains this sense of him. It is in many ways a beautiful book. It flows easy, brilliant, poetical, from the store of its maker. It has style, it has form. There is no reason to doubt that it will take its place in the sparse critical literature of our uncertain era.

Mr. Mumford has written an essay in interpretation of the American past. With this purpose, he has utilized an analysis of our customs, of our ideals, principally through the medium of our writers. But the standpoint of his study is the present. He has not written history; he has established, as his focus, not alone our day, but as well our need. His retrospect receives its dynamic rhythm, one might almost say its life, from the author’s mastering interest in “What next?”

The general theme, viewed as a series of facts, is plain enough and has been proposed in similar terms, before. Europe’s state since the Middle Ages is regarded as a disintegration. Of this profound breakup America is a conspicuous symptom and expression. America was colonized by forces of Europe’s decomposition; and America itself, determining such states of mind as pioneering, hastened the deliquescence of that spiritual world which man raised up in Europe and whose tearing down had no deeper symbol than the emigrations. Howsoever, before the final breakup of Europe in the American West, new shoots of the transplanted European culture rose on our Eastern seaboard. In the Golden Day of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, they reached a splendor fresh and unparalleled in the contemporary hour of a Europe less swiftly, but as essentially decadent. Thereafter, the American West, in which the disintegrated force of the Old World and the barbarizing condition of the New came to a climax, gradually prevailed. Already, with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, the Golden Day was waning: the good elements of old Europe were rotted by unconscious “new” American factors. The 174“pragmatic acquiescence” marks America’s rationalized slump into the barbaric mood of the industrial pioneer. William James, John Dewey, are good men ennobling the sterile cause. The descent, now, is swift. The muckrakers are social critics themselves submerged in the muck, failing of any principle to catapult them free. Novelists socially and spiritually submerged are Mark Twain, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser—scavengers whose true function is to pick to pieces what still remains of a once noble structure. And not deeply otherwise are the wistful “pillagers of the past” of whom the finest are Henry James and George Santayana; their retreat into Europe or to “philosophy” is motived by as forceless an acceptance of the barbaric day as the rationalization of the pragmatists. Finally, Mr. Mumford brings us to ourselves. After this ebb, we are sunk so low that naught could remain but a new rising. Mr. Mumford is hopeful, one feels, for sheerly tidal reasons.

Of course, to state in a paragraph what the author himself has athletically stripped to but three hundred pages is to leave out much and to denature more. This book, it seems to me, is chiefly a personal essay—a confession by a significant man. You will find, here, excellent pages on the “romanticism” of the pioneer, on the genius of Emerson, on the limitations of Dewey and Santayana. You will find other pages less adequate: as the discussions of Whitman, Melville, Poe and Dreiser. What interests me most in “The Golden Day” is not its assemblage of interpretations, but its focus.

This focus is external. Mr. Mumford is outside his own book. He depicts superbly the Platonic, pagan and mystical glories which in America’s Golden Day were called Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. But they are experientially remote from Mr. Mumford: as remote as Dante and Aquinas. Ideally, of course, we share all greatness and find its recognition in our souls. Yet those medieval worlds were not actually ours: 175their source, their form and their behavior differ. Mr. Mumford depicts, also, and with no less eloquence, the horrors of the American scene: the barbaric frontier, the Protestant decadence, the tyranny of the machine and of the job, the fallacies of materialism, utilitarianism, experimentalism, pragmatism. But he is outside the experience of these also. When he praises the age of Emerson, there is an aloofness of elegy. When he exhorts the young men, his contemporaries: “Allons. The road is before us!” there is an aloofness of rhetoric. What is the matter with Mr. Mumford?

The matter is that he has considered us, rather than experienced us. He has gone deep to behold our past greatness, our present miseries; but not deep enough to establish the vital connection between them, and between them and himself. America is an organic subject. Mr. Mumford, for all his studies in causation, treats as a series of isolate manifestations, “good” or “bad,” “tasteful” or “disgusting,” what are really acts of a single spiritual Organism, yet immature, yet basally “in the making.” The Golden Day whereof the author so wistfully sings was not a day at all: it was not even a dawn: it was, if you insist on solar terms, a dusk of Europe. But only in its ideologies and cultural forms! More accurately, it was a moment in the American childhood when the spirit spoke lyrically, before the whelming demands of body—of nutrition and of growth—plunged America more fully into chaos. The fact that this age was not a Day is plain in its shimmering, surface passage over the American mind: and in the sequence when America transformed the idealism of its transcendentalists and poets into immediate adolescent matters of expansion and of self-indulgence. Mr. Mumford makes Emerson the hero of this “day.” Yet if ever a man was a congeries of lovely echoes, of wistful longings, of fleeting and unfleshed intuitions, Emerson was he! His intimations of immortality were almost literally those which the great Wordsworth beheld 176on the visage of a babe! Emerson was such an intimation on America’s huge child face. He was our first, unfleshed, undifferentiate glimpse of manhood—of a manhood still very far ahead.

In Whitman this intimation is no longer the tremorous glimpse so well symbolized in Emerson’s frail and evanescent prose. It is a roar of adolescence: a true hunger call: no more. Now, note Mr. Mumford’s basic misunderstanding of Poe and Melville. These men were the first to try to flesh what we might style the Emersonian intuition in American life. Mr. Mumford calls them figures of the twilight. And yet, from the standpoint of a study of the American Organism, they are more advanced than such more successful artists as Whitman and Thoreau. Poe’s mystical attitude toward the mechanism and applied science, his marvelous attempt to add a dimensional sense to the inherited experience of life; and Melville’s tragic effort to wed God and whaling—these are the first organic acts after the childhood intimations of the men whom Mr. Mumford esteems as makers of our Noon.^[8] And the author fails to recognize them, because he has no organic experience in America to guide him. He is in love with the gesture, the dream, the childhood faëry of our past: yet he rejects the body—our present interim of the Machine and of the romanticisms of the Machine—whereby alone this promise from our past may be organized into a living future.

Therefore, finally, his book brings the flavor of a plaint: his envoi is wistful and vague, his call to future action has no ring. For American future spiritual action must rise organically from the facts of our hideous present, since these facts are an insuperable sequence from our past ideals. Mr. Mumford, in this book, is a man sincerely, prophetically in 177love with the sweet spirit of childhood; yet turning from the physical, often bestial process whereby alone the child can grow in order to express that spirit. When the child America lisps purities half understood, Mr. Mumford blesses. But when the child America gulps food, wallows in mud, slugs and robs comrades, adventures, bullies, cheats—Mr. Mumford merely scolds.

1926

5. ELEGY FOR ANARCHISM

a.

I hoped to glean from the autobiography of Emma Goldman four experiences, each of them worth while: the intimate life story of a remarkable woman, the history of her ideals and thoughts as an anarchist, a portrait of toiling America during the past four decades, and an account of the years of military communism in the U.S.S.R. I got what I wanted, although in each case the net gain in light is different from what I had supposed it would be—different, I feel certain, from what Emma Goldman herself believes her book has given.

The most enlightening point, for me, in the first volume where the author describes her girlhood, her marriage, her entrance into the anarchist ranks after the Chicago executions, her love affairs, her friendships with Johann Most and Alexander Berkman, is that her narrative is almost bare of experience and ideas. The pages fly with gusto, Emma Goldman holds back nothing. But she has, rather amazingly, almost nothing inward to give! Intimately, for all her good will, she appears to remember little of her own sensations; and if there was a period of doubt and inquiry before she accepted Kropotkin and Bakunin, she takes her own thoughts for granted, giving us the bare conclusion. I had a sense of 178Emma Goldman writing these pages of her youth; but it was a sense of the mature woman the author, not of the young woman the subject. And this very fact: that Emma Goldman describing her loves, her factories and sweatshops, her cities, her encounters with magnates and policemen, gives no direct experience of her feelings and thoughts, helps to reveal the nature of the woman. One must make one’s own deductions, as one might if one were actually speaking with the author. For Emma Goldman is a presence in her book—a deep, hearty presence. She is never the analyst or integrator of her story.

Her chief traits are goodness and energy. There is something abstract in her élan vital, since she is unaware of causes. The Freudians would doubtless call her career a flight from a cruel father (who became symbolized as authority and the state). More obviously, her life was a simple escape from the intolerable pain of inhibitions (personal and social) and a blind rush toward that freedom which the word “anarchism” convincingly evoked. In a life so purely dynamic, there is no pause for thought, hence her book’s total lack of ideology; there is no room for emotional contemplation, hence its author’s want of vivid memory. Emma Goldman cannot be said to remember her girlhood, and its record, pictorial or sensory, is absent from her pages. Which is to say, that her first thirty or forty years were lived not on an intellectual, not even on an emotional, plane; but were instinctive. Instinctive action (if I may use this obsolete term) is automatic, and leaves no memory.

But Miss Goldman’s instinctivism must not be confused with that of others. It is paradoxical, being extremely good and brave. Most women who live on this level are self-indulgent, cowardly, shallow. Miss Goldman, although she seems never to have thought, has a nature both good and profound. At any moment of her youth, it is clear that she was ready to give herself to her Cause. Even her sex life, one 179feels, was the response of a motherly heart rather than of a lusting body. And if she followed the dictates of her body, the wonder is that even selfish impulse moved her to constant sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering.

This paradox convinces me that there are really persons in the world like the “free souls” on whose actual existence Rousseau, Proudhon and the other romantic anarchists based their theories. No wonder Emma Goldman was an anarchist—and without having to think about it. Her innocent nature predicates and incarnates the anarchist creed. Even in her appetites, she is a woman instinctively good and pure: a woman whose blithe spirit only the alien contacts of official law could poison.

The pages are, of course, full of references to anarchist comrades. Directly, she analyzes them no more than herself; but her own vitality imbues with life her portraits of men like Berkman, Reitman, Brady and Most. Like the author, these figures belong to the romantic movement. They are an issue of the same social forces which gave the Atalas, Renés, Adolphes and Werthers. The key to these characters is a deliberate return to “self”—a return which is a reaction from a system, social and intellectual, that was losing its vitality: so that the romantic return to “self” was literally the escape of “life” from the old Western order. In the profounder romantics (Rousseau, Blake, Beethoven, Stendhal, Balzac, Whitman, Nietzsche, etc.), this return to “self” was sufficiently thorough to reveal the self’s cosmic implications and therewith the nucleus of a whole new social fabric. Intellectually weaker romantics did not go so far. They discovered their own yearning ego, and loved it, and regarded the world as a mere bar to its divine trajectory. Their ideas of social justice were rationalizations of their lyric need of freedom. They were the anarchists. They knew nothing of the objective world, save that it got in their way. They knew 180nothing even of each other, since in the last analysis they knew nothing of themselves. They were “pure being,” and since “pure being” is a rationalized fantasy, their own lives have an abstract air, a lack of body and of reason.

This unreality of the anarchists is perfectly revealed by Emma Goldman. It is epitomized in the attentat on Frick by her lifelong comrade Berkman. Young Berkman (a very different man from the mature Berkman of later years) is as good as his girl friend. He knows nothing, either: not how to make a bomb, not how to speak English, not the crucial differences between an American magnate and the lords of Tsarist Russia; not (at the end) how to aim a pistol. His act is a “pure act” in a cruel, complex world that has thrown him off, so that he wills to destroy it. The anarchist is a tangential force from the social center, but in his naïve egoism he conceives himself as the center. Thus, by immediate logic, the legalized social world becomes the centrifugal tangent—and he erects a philosophy or builds a bomb, to wipe it out.

Volume One of Emma Goldman’s story might, then, be called the premise of anarchism: there are really born in the world persons instinctively good, whom the complex tissue of laws tortures and maims. Volume Two is the conclusion of anarchism: the fate of such persons in the real world that persists. In her record of the past ten or fifteen years, the author is closer to the subject. We no longer have a woman of sixty trying to re-create a girl. We know what the young Miss Goldman was, by what she failed to record: we have the contemporary in a more positive record. For this other woman has been forced, by her frustrations, from the instinctive rush of her élan vital to the emotional plane. The natural mother blindly fighting for her children becomes the contemplative mother who can no longer wield arms, who can only suffer. The bud of the young woman’s goodness blooms into a dark flower of pain. Now Emma Goldman has memory. Her last 181pages, in which she gives us a War America and a Russia of her own, are suffused with tragic light.

b.

I do not wish to appear to minimize the intellectual contribution of the great anarchist writers. They established a theory of the state which Marx accepted. Indeed, the bitter war between anarchism and communism is one of methods toward a common goal—the classless and stateless society. As anarchism evolved, however, it became an unrealistic fixation on the end, whereas the Marxists assumed the task of establishing the ideological and technical means that might bring the end into existence. The anarchists (in the contemporary jargon) became a dissociation from the context of life: they represented that extreme of social suffering which touches madness in so far as madness is a dislocation from the whole. And against them, Marx brought his organic rationale to the cause of revolution. He counteracted the instinctive anarchist flight from an unjust world by making reasonable the relation between the rebellious impulse and the capitalist system, and by integrating social revolution as an organic (dialectic) issue of our social order. In this effort, it is natural that all the leading Marxists—Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, etc.—should have made conscious war against the anarchists. But it is a beautiful stroke of fortune which led a leading anarchist, like Emma Goldman, into articulate contact with the first Marxist nation.

Her bitter rejection of bolshevism is well known. She went to Russia in 1920, ready to defend and to collaborate. A year and a half later, she and Berkman left, heartbroken by what she names the betrayal of the Cause for which she has given her life. Her record is full, and is—for reasons unknown to herself—the most significant part of her book. It is the final revelation of the utter unreality of her own kind of revolution. Emma Goldman found in Russia a ruthless state employing 182repression of all kinds—censorship, imprisonment, execution—in the effort to survive both the inherited chaos of the Tsarist regime and the seventeen White armies that were attacking it. This was enough for Miss Goldman: the old hated state at its old methods. She had never stopped, in her assaults on bourgeois society, to understand it; why, now, should she stop to understand the real problems of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia? Contexts are beyond Emma Goldman, whether they be White or Red. The whole activity of relations is beyond her.

Her book, in its finality, becomes the tragedy of good will and a good heart unguided by a sense of the Whole. The impulse that had made her a rebel was generous; her methods of rebellion were brave and pure. But rebellion became the automatic habit of her life; her one positive response to the objective world of men and of values. If she had understood the evils of bourgeois society, she would have understood the inevitability of their survival in the transition period which she witnessed in Russia. Her descriptions of what she saw are factual enough: Emma Goldman is incapable of deliberate falsehood. But she is also incapable of truth, which is the placing of facts in their vital context.

Her failure to understand Russia is the anarchist failure to understand and hence to work upon the world. Her story of a great anarchist (there is something about this woman that is great) becomes the most eloquent defense of communism. If the revolutionary impulse can go so far astray through blind emotion, become so hysterical, so impotent, so unjust, and finally so destructive, the Marxian method is imperative.

But if the lesson of this book went no further, it would scarcely deserve the space that I have given it. Anarchism as a system and method of revolution is dead: communism has killed it. What remains in the revolutionary world is the 183menace of a fixation, different but as deadly as that which in a hundred years turned the fertile beginnings of Godwin and Proudhon into so pitiful an end. Anarchism has died of intellectual dry rot induced by its eccentric emotionalism. There are signs that orthodox communism is threatened by a dogmatic rationalistic creed (by no means discoverable in Marx) whose inadequate depth and breadth would ultimately exclude the creative energies of mankind.

The intelligent communist will not gloat over the tragic story of Emma Goldman. He will bear in mind that a revolutionary cause must be constantly Creative, and that to this end it must be vigilant against mental or emotional habits that exclude the right of fresh discoveries. To bring a new mankind into the world is a long act of birth menaced at every instant by the nearness of death.

1931

6. THE BOOK OF LEO STEIN

The man whose conversations about art have gone into the nurture of most of the important artists of our day in Paris has written a book. For one who knows the author, it will be hard to dissociate these printed pages from the voice of the man who wrote them. To have had acquaintance with this tireless seeker, watched the beautiful curves of his mind moving for hours of uninterrupted discourse upon a mental action, and to have relished his piquant admixture of spiritual humbleness, intellectual passion and ascetic distrust of all passions, is not the sort of experience to be overlooked, just because one of the best talkers of our day has turned to writing. Mr. Stein’s work is, moreover, in the best sense, conversation. From beginning to end, his curt and quiet tone is a manner of speaking. The color of the man stands in his most abstracted 184thought. He has written a volume in which all thinking and all topics are so securely focused to a personal rhythm, that—whatever else—his essay is a work of art.

Mr. Stein has a poor opinion of philosophy, and of what esthetics, at its hand, has suffered. Mr. Stein, moreover, has loved art. He has, in consequence, attempted what might be called a “rescue.” The sentimental mists of philosophic thought must be cut away from his beloved; the basis of the esthetic act must be presented in simple, matter-of-fact, assumptionless terms. This is the program. Actually, what Mr. Stein has achieved is a statement as subjective as Amiel’s journal: a self-portrayal which is both beautiful and significant, since its hero is so archetypical of his time.

With the purely technical part of his examination of esthetics, there can be no quarrel. It is superb. Mr. Stein has studied the picture with a combined sensitivity and intelligence of which I, at least, can name no even approximate equal. To read his discussion of focus, interval, the physiology and analogies of rhythm, distortion, tension, composition, is to be aware of mastery and to know what sentimental perfume most literary art appreciation—from Goethe to Elie Faure—consists of. Mr. Stein’s technique for the practical taste of art seems to me to be perfect. His chapter, for example, on “Pictorial Seeing,” in which he makes clear how the eyes can turn a dish into a picture, how this ideal act is the basis of esthetics and must inevitably determine the distorting, flattening and focalizing, is a masterpiece; and the man who understands it is ready to see pictures. Moreover, the book is filled with apophthegmatic observations on life, the ego, civilization (which, to Mr. Stein, is yet far from dawning), that should make his volume precious to all lovers of delicious talk. Indeed, the work is so complete in its foreground—the physiology of the esthetic object—that its utter lack of background—the matrix, causality and dynamics of art—becomes 185the clearer. Mr. Stein makes plain how in a picture it is upon the depth dimension that esthetic success hinges: how, indeed, much European art has failed because of the failure to throw the focus organically back and to make alive the planes which support and enact the forward action. And in this criticism he has given the measure of himself.

If, having so amply learned from Leo Stein how to transform the dish before our eyes into a picture, one were to ask him: (a) why one should do this; (b) why anyone has ever done this; (c) why and how this act is universally linked with the entire history of man’s spirit; (d) why feeling and value accrue from this act, and (e) what is the nature of this process whereby the self is enhanced, one would receive no answer. As I have said, Mr. Stein is “against” all philosophy and metaphysics. He takes furious pride in telling us that he has never been able to understand the writers on these subjects: and he makes clear that, if you think you have understood them, you are suffering from a delusion. “Philosophy,” he tells us, “is a pseudo-knowledge which attempts to add a dimension to human capacity.” “Mysticism,” he adds, “is sentimentality taken seriously.” The entire effort to establish truth from facts, or the real from our complex of thought and sense and act, being “philosophical” or “mystic,” is inadequate and acrimoniously barred from his discussion of esthetics. “Esthetics gives us fact, not truth,” he tells us. The work of art is a cognitive object, an object by means of which men may know but which they must “stay outside of.”

Mr. Stein sticks about as heroically to his backgroundless thesis as he could, without becoming inarticulate altogether. What value exists in that rhythmic synthesis of ingredients intercepted by self, and called art, unless the unity achieved conveys an experience beyond the matters abstracted? Why should we care to know a Cezanne landscape, if this especial focusing of hills and houses is a mere unification of themselves? 186Mr. Stein, in refusing to ask such questions or to place his facts in a context that inherently transcends them, dislocates every fact, every question he discusses; as assuredly as he would dislocate a dish (in a picture) if he essayed to represent its planes without the planes that intersect them.

To render art intelligible by isolating it from those causes and associations which invade the philosophic realm is just about as wise as it would be to employ a language after abstracting the meaning of the words. (This, by the way, is not far from the method of Mr. Stein’s illustrious and ridiculous sister, Gertrude.) In his fear of unproved assumptions, Leo Stein has made a two-dimensional picture of esthetics. For the expert, his study of the traits of art in analytical cross section is instructive. But for the reader who is really seeking an alphabet of esthetics, the result is arid.

Leo Stein represents, in his attitude, the philosophical defeatism of our day. Because so many little boys have burned their fingers, he will eschew fire and live cold. There is something positively heroic in this spectacle of a man aborting the creative process of his mind, because so many births in the past (as he sees it) have been abortions. Even worse, Leo Stein, having no sympathy with the birth pangs of the world, decides there shall be no more birth at all. To this end, the work of art is reduced to a mere rationally cognitive object, with self as a static co-ordinate of the cognition; and that entire process of dynamic osmosis between self and not-self, which is the history of culture, is put away as sentimental nonsense.

His subject has its revenge upon him. You cannot trace more than a diagram of the means of esthetics, unless you know that the configuration of facts in any work of art establishes for both artist and observer an experienced entity called truth, which as radically differs from these facts as water does from H₂ and O, or as a human body differs from the sum of inorganic chemicals within it. And—unfortunately for Mr. 187Stein—you cannot talk about anything with perseverance, without having to choose between a philosophy of your own (which is at least alive and yours) and a philosophy that is unconscious and not yours and uncontrolled.

This is the fate of the antiphilosophic Leo Stein. He says, for instance: “Some believe there are quite a lot of emotions. Some believe there are only three. I doubt very much that there is more than one, which is just emotion.” This sounds like a brave refusal to “assume.” It is really an assumption based on an atomistic philosophy whose tenet was that you must split up psychic states just as physicists split up matter into atoms. I might respond that there are no emotions—only organic contexts from which the mind may abstract analytic elements which partake solely of the mind process and which it has called emotions. I don’t say my organic philosophy would be truer. The point is that Mr. Stein, in disagreeing with me, is as philosophical as I am.

Throughout his book, such unconscious philosophical assumptions are present: and they are inadmissible because he does not admit them. He says, for instance:

Esthetics gives us fact, not truth. But fact to be interesting to adults in the long run must be true. Only science and practice can judge validity beyond the mere aspect. The world as it is scientifically known is not a whole world, but the nature of that world is such that it can find in science a partial reflection that is true enough to work. Our esthetic perception of the world must not contradict this knowledge.

If this is not philosophy—philosophy of a very classic mold—then Aristotle was a landscape painter.

I have here no space to isolate the assumptions which color the esthetic of Leo Stein; nor to work out the inadequacy of his definition of art as a cognitive object. The task would be the more difficult, in that he forbears from the method of statement of his first principles—a method which 188makes it so easy to attack the systematic thinkers. I detect, under Mr. Stein’s abnegation of first principles about the “real” and the “true” and the “good,” the cowardice of our epoch. Every man who lives should know that his life is an assumed, rationally unproved first principle. The real and the true are categories of our existence and enter as functions into all our acts. Our sole choice is between a creative and a passive attitude toward the first principles thus given. So far as I know, the one honest, if vain, effort to reject first principles is suicide. Much of the brilliant intellectual activity of our day is a comfortable surrogate for self-destruction.

1927

7. REFLECTIONS ON SPENGLER

Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” from 1918 to 1926, sold in Germany almost a hundred thousand copies. It would be inspiriting to believe that a profound historical and philosophical work could have so large a sale in any modern land. But the originality of Spengler does not reside in his erudition; it is poetic. The book’s metaphysics is eclectic rather than sound; its historical research is vast rather than uniformly deep. “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” is an epos, a myth. So, if Germany has not bought a hundred thousand copies of a great philosophic work, it has at least welcomed a personal mythos of deep interest: one whose elements are philosophy, history, esthetics: one whose comprehension requires of the reader a great familiarity with comparative history and comparative religion.

I think at once of “The Outline of History” of H. G. Wells, which had an analogous popular appeal in America and England. Wells, like Spengler, under the guise of writing history, offered a thesis and a myth. Here the analogy stops. The 189story in Wells is a vulgar, obvious narrative of “events”: his thesis is the most illiterate notion of “human progress” and his myth is a mere flatulent, optimistic dream. Spengler’s work is formally beautiful. He builds, not by storytelling, but by the presentation and analysis of analogies. And he concludes on a note as darkly glamorous as it is pessimistic. The Winter is upon us, he declares in doom words that are closer to the note of the prophets than he would care to admit. Our salvation is to perform, nobly and perfectly, the work of Winter: to understand ourselves, to set down as the Seal of our glorious dying life a ruthless scrutiny of what we were.

I shall criticize Spengler harshly enough. Let it be, however, always clear that Spengler has written a work of heroic poetic power. The land that dared to welcome such a volume still possesses culture.

The book’s main thesis seems to be disguised in the title. “The Decline of the West”—is it not a misnomer? Has not Spengler really written a history and a morphology of Cultures? But no. Though the title may mislead—may, indeed, have misled its author and its readers, it is a true self-confession of the poet’s veritable purpose. Spengler has composed this erudite, overpoweringly brilliant thesis on the anatomy and physiology of cultures, in order to prove that his Culture (the Culture of the West) is dying. This is where his heart lies. He has written a swan song. And since he is a citizen of the world whose most valid mythic material is no longer the personal legend, the hero, the war, the romance; is, on the other hand, metaphysics, history, epistemology and science, Spengler has employed these elements to make his tragic tale.

And the value of the book lies not in its thesis and its proof. This decline of the West is obvious enough. Spengler shares his conviction of it with a great measure of good Europeans. For several generations the disaster has been in the 190air. The Great War was but an episode. Rousseau had some ideas on the subject. No sooner had the Germans after Kant invented the notions of Culture, Progress, Spirit, than the critics rose to prove that their culture was moribund and their spirit sleeping. Since Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Europe’s religious decline has been taken for granted. Tolstoi and Nordau from contrary directions met in calling modern art the herald of the fall. Rimbaud, Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman, were the sort of prophets who declared the death of Western Europe, although it was to predict a new spiritual rise. Long past its zenith is the myth that the “modern age” is a height rather than a decline from the medieval. The notion that the Middle Ages were “Dark Ages” is relegated to Chautauqua.

Spengler’s value (and it is very real) lies in his attitude toward this decline of the West and in the method whereby he establishes it. His attitude is poetic. He despises the Superman construction whereby Nietzsche cheated his despair of tomorrow: he is closer to the marvelous poet Rimbaud who accepted the complete negation of all values, without hope of heavens or nirvanas, and who, yet, made of his acceptance a last song. Spengler is in love with winter. So bitter-passionate is his embrace of the death he feels in his own soul that he has written a vast book to prove the inevitability of his love. The romantic “proves” the perfection of his lady by showing how the birds and the trees and the winds sing her praises. Thus has Spengler bent the art and mathematics of the Greeks, the religion of the Jews and Arabs, the cultures of Egypt, India and China to his one loved purpose: he has made them over into ineluctable signs of the winter upon Europe.

Before such thorough passion one must be respectful. This is a song—a death song the Prussian is singing. The work of art is a matter of focus. Here a man with the whole world’s learning in his hand has focused it to make refrain for a great 191downgoing. He has seen mankind whole, in order to make that whole the accomplice of his own particular end. He has warped history, maimed philosophy, chain-ganged science, perverted art. But he is an artist himself. He has written a book which is poor history, worse anthropology, perhaps. So was Dante’s “Divina Commedia.”

Spengler, I have said, is a poet, his metaphysics eclectic rather than sound, his historical research vast rather than uniformly deep. Spengler’s masters, as regards the material with which he works out his conception, are almost legion, nor has he always done them justice. The notion of a culture-organism, independent, impenetrable, yet somehow mirroring the universe within its autonomous self, and moved only by God in the mysterious shape of Destiny, is very close to Leibnitz with his Monads. Spengler, indeed, is an instance, with Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, of the revival of Leibnitz, whose realistic, pluralistic universe was for a time submerged under the idealistic waves of Kant and Hegel. To this Leibnitzian base, Spengler adds a good measure of Hegel. His treatment of mathematics, science, history, all the attributes of culture from geometry to esthetics, as expressions of Spirit and as subjective, is Hegelian or Kantian idealism. On the other hand, his radical differentiation of mathematical time (which is reversible) from the irreversible Time which he calls Destiny brings to mind Bergson who opposed creative Time, the signature of Life, to the false, spatial, materialistic time which he condemns as a constructed figment of the intellect. Spengler’s anti-intellectualism, whereas it is as logical as Hegel, springs from Bergson, as does, likewise, his hostility to the geneticisms of Darwin and of Marx. His treatment, however, of the art-phenomena of any age as physiognomic traits of its people is a brilliant evolution of what Taine and Renan themselves derived from Hegel.

192Spengler avows Goethe as his master. He is forever quoting Goethe, appealing to him as the scientific and philosophic source of his conception. And he is right, in so far as both these men are poets. Spengler is very far from the ideas of Goethe; but in his use of ideas toward an absolute, mythmaking end, he is allied to the creator of Faust.

Goethe’s philosophic master was Spinoza. This manifest fact would be inadmissible to Spengler who regards Goethe as the last master of the Faustian soul and Spinoza as an anomalous survival, out of time and out of place, from the alien Magian or Arabian culture. Spengler’s thesis of intact, autonomous culture-organisms does not allow that a master from one culture can do more than impede the evolution of another. Spinoza, he declares, shows his strangeness from Western (Faustian) Culture in that he lacks the force-element which is that culture’s primary trait. Faust denotes force tending toward the infinite. But why cannot the same be said of the personal nature of any of the Hebrew prophets or of Prometheus? In Spinoza, it is true that this trait of personal force is assimilated—or, rather, it is equated—in that balance of individual wills whose sum is God. The point is that whereas Goethe as artist depicted personal force in Faust, he transcended it as a philosopher precisely in his acceptance of the Spinozistic synthesis of forces. Goethe, maturing as a thinker, transcended the concept of personal will as ultimate. Spengler has taken Goethe’s esthetic creation of the individual, willing Faust, and made of it a philosophic symbol for an entire culture.

Let us take Spengler for a while, as he demands to be taken, critically. My notes of specific disagreements with the Spenglerian presentation of facts and of conclusions would cover many pages. This is no place to print them. Yet I cannot avoid some minimum of analytical discussion.

193The major thesis is the critical issue. Spengler considers the culture as an organism. He discerns in history a number of such cultures. He examines the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Indian (Hindu), the Classical (Greek and Roman), the Magian (Jewish-Persian—early Christian-Arab), and the Western or Faustian (roughly Western Europe since 900 C.E.). He discovers in each of these cultures a regular life span of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. They sum to about one thousand years. The form and length of this course never varies. Each culture has a soul: this it expresses through a chief spiritual attitude, through an individual vision of life and through a specific symbol. The mathematics, science, art, religion, political, financial and economic forms of every culture express its soul, its vision—are symbols of its attitude toward life. These expressions go, with the culture itself, through the seasons to decrepitude from youth. Each epoch in any culture is strictly homogeneous with the “contemporary” epoch of any other culture. In the spring, that is, of Classical culture, you will find manifestations in every activity of man which are analogous to those of the spring of Western or of Chinese culture. Each culture lives out its own destiny, dies its own death. No other culture can do more than impede it, even as one tree may impede another’s sunlight. There is no interpenetration. There is no mutual understanding. It is an illusion on the part of the Western soul to believe it understands the Chinese, the Arabian, the Greek. The inherent growth of each culture is a matter not of geneticisms and material evolutions, but of Destiny. There is no cause and effect; there are monadlike cultural units, mapped through irreversible Time from birth to death.

Now, the trouble with these organisms is that they are placed in vacuo. They are described as evolving their destiny sheerly out of themselves, without relational struggle, drama, reaction, interference. And yet they are also described as 194having the nature of biologic organisms: i. e., they have youth, maturity, old age; they have a specific lifespan. But no organisms known to man exist in this utter isolation. One and all, they arise from other organisms like them, they live in a continuum of interaction with other organisms like them, they give birth before death or in death to other organisms like them. The culture-organisms of Spengler do not seem to be really alive: they are mere synthetic constructions of the author. In order to prove them alive, Spengler has been forced to a progressive and virtuosic deforming of the facts.

When I say that the Spenglerian culture-organism, absolute, monadlike, impenetrable, does not exist, I do not mean that there is no valid view of cultures as organic within their rise and fall. Before I can come to this, I must examine in at least one detail the Spenglerian proof.

Each culture, Spengler undertakes to show, has a soul unique and radically different from that of any other culture. (If this is so, why is there such strict analogy in the forms, seasons and lifespan of all cultures?) This soul’s Weltanschauung is its own. And its prime symbol is its idea of space or of extension. From this symbol each culture-soul constructs its mathematics, its sciences, its religion, its architecture, etc. They are all expressions of the prime symbol. Therefore every mathematics, science system, religion, etc., differs radically from every other. Moreover, there is no one mathematics, no one system of physics, etc. There are as many as there are cultures. Each is true, and true uniquely for its culture.

To prove his thesis of the individual prime symbol of each culture, Spengler bravely ventures to establish that Greek “number” and “space” and “mathematics” differ radically from the Western. The Classical prime symbol is the finite unit, the entity, the here and now. It denies infinitude, past, future. It considers space as the mere emptiness between 195objects. Therefore it looks on number (Pythagoras) as the essence of all things: and by all things it means literally things perceptible to the senses. From this prime symbol has come the Classical esthetic unit—the human body: the Greek tragedy of episode and exterior fate: the political unit, a small city (polis): the coin, etc. But the Western (Faustian) soul has infinity as its prime symbol. Space for it is infinite and comes prior to the objects which have their being within it. Western mathematics is, therefore, one of function, analysis, relation. Its geometry is non-Euclidean. Its State is a cosmic empire. Its money is credit, not the coin. Its signal art is not sculpture but atmospheric painting and contrapuntal music. Its architecture is not the interiorless Greek temple, but the infinitely soaring Gothic church.

To make his thesis absolute instead of merely suggestive, Spengler is forced to explain away the Dionysian (anti-Apollonian) element in Greek culture and the Renaissance in Western Europe: to ignore the mystical in Pythagoras and Plato, together with the Aristotelian elements of medieval thought and modern science. The idea of the infinite and of aspiration toward it existed, indeed, in Greece. It came over, organically, from Egypt. Classic Greece did not lose it, but formed it, rather; and transformed it. Moreover, the modern mathematics is different from the classic and the Newtonian only in so far as it is a growth. Infinity was a problem evaded by the classical geometers: admitted as insoluble by the Cartesians: and eliminated as solved by the non-Euclidean mathematicians of the nineteenth century. The Classical attitude toward ultimate problems was a status of childhood. It admitted only the object and the material. So it evolved materialistic systems like those of Thales, Democritus, Heraclitus; or turned the abstractions of ideas into quasi materials called essences, as in Plato. The Faustian attitude was one of adolescence. It stressed the unsolved and aspirational: the 196concept of infinite space, the autonomy of the personal will. Faust is a growth from Œdipus; even as the Cathedral is a growth from the Temple. To differentiate the prime symbols of cultures which so obviously were interpenetrated, not alone one by the other, but each by still other cultures (such as the Egyptian and the Hebrew), is to do them violence. It is an unnecessary abstraction. Why Spengler wanted to make this abstraction we shall see in the sequel.

Here is a book packed with intricate allusions. To criticize it in detail would take almost page for page. I must confine myself to one more example. One of the cultures discussed by Spengler is the Arabian—the culture of the Magian soul. Its prime space-symbol is the world-cave. It lacks the force element of the Faustian, and the unit-object notion of the Greek. The individual, here, is a mere passive emanation within God, as within an aloof yet immanent and defining Cave. The Arab arch, the mosque-dome, the mosaic painting, are alike expressions of this symbol. As are also algebra (the arithmetic of indefinite number), the arguments of Talmudry, the fatalism of the Moslem. The Magian culture-soul was born about the first year of our era. Precultural to it was the whole pre-Christian history of Judea, Persia, Arabia. Now, as “springtime scriptures,” come the Gospels, come the philosophies of Origen, Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Mani. With Augustine and the Nestorians we are at the summer. Mohammed marks the decline into the autumnal dryness whose strawlike flowers are the Arab and Judaic thinkers of Babylon and Spain.

Perhaps this amazing violence done to such various spirits as ancient Hebrew prophet, Berber mystic, Alexandrian pseudepigraphist, Arab Moslem and Granadan Moor, in the attempt to enclose them all within one organic cultural conception, born at the birth of Christ, reaching summer about 400, drooping in 800 and dead with the rigor mortis of “civilization” 197at the year 1,000, will most briefly prove the dangers of the Spenglerian method.

Of course, there are analogies between St. Augustine and Ibn Gabirol. Are there, then, none between Faust and Job? between the writers of the Upanishads and Whitman? between the sculptors of Egypt and the painters of Spain? If Maimonides is a “Magian Winter man,” why is Aquinas a “Faustian Spring man”? If kinship of “prime symbol” bring Philo, Plotinus, Mohammed, Rabbi Akiba and Jehuda Halevi together as seasonal expressions of a single culture, why not prove for the entire world one spiritual Body, one organic culture—with its systoles and diastoles, of course, its tides, its shifts, and yet as well with its deep unity of purpose, its continuity of form and of method of creation?

Death is a breaking up; a lapse from unity into multiplicity. When a human being dies, only his unity is gone. Disease means dis-wholeness. Spengler breaks up the world into these absolute cultures which are really fragments, because there is the tendency toward death—toward disunity—in his own high Prussian soul. He is breaking and so is his particular portion of the world. Let him, therefore, make conscription of all the wisdom of his world to prove that his experience is the Law.

Nowhere is the man’s will to see crooked plainer than in his virtual ignoring of the Jews. The whole Scriptural era before the Gospels is set aside as “inorganic”—not cultural at all. Now, Spengler’s thesis is that the pure mystical religious ethos is the trait of the birth of a culture. Legalism, materialism, socialism, communism, the various systems of utilitarianism, mark that culture’s end and herald the “state of suspended death” which he calls civilization and which, with all its wintry signs, he declares now to be upon the European and American worlds. But if, hypothetically, he had deigned to 198consider the Hebrews and Jews as a culture, what would he have found? Mosaism (read: materialism, legalism, utilitarianism) came first! “Civilization” or death came before culture or birth. And from this winter a gradual unfolding toward the spring of the prophets. He would have found matter even more disquieting than that. For this “organism” of the Jews is hopelessly irregular: its seasons and states recur and are intermingled. Nor does Spengler’s millennial limit for the entire story tell one-half of its creative tale. He would have found, moreover, that this hypothetic culture interpenetrated with others: revived and created others, was revived by others.

And, looking from the Jews back to his Greeks and Faustians, he would have found a similar intricate story. He would have found, in other words, hope in lieu of his dear despair. Wherefore he looked elsewhere, reasoned otherwise.

The culture-organism is a notion abstracted from human life. It is an abstraction. And abstractions are needed for intellectual work. They are right when they are fruitful. To regard the life of Greece as a strict cultural whole is wrong: yet pragmatically it may be correct to do so, since it enables us to get the results which observation in isolated status alone brings. The danger rises when we forget that abstractions are of use qua abstractions. Take them for real and they turn monsters.

Indeed, the idea of the periodic rise and fall of man is probably a similar abstraction. Yet it is justified so long as we employ it either to criticize the past or to envisage a greater future. Both of these acts require the analytic method: and analysis is abstraction. And now we are at the root of what ails Spengler. His “cultures” are counters of the analyst. And these he has turned into a poet’s bodies. This is why his book, although its impulse is poetic, cannot rank as great poetic art. He tells us a good deal about the cultures which have filled 199the world. And much of what he says is true and is profound. Nowhere, for instance, have I encountered better comment on German music, on the deep significances of Classic and Gothic architecture. Yet the cultures themselves, whereof he speaks as breathing entities, do not become plastically real. We learn much in detail about their traits. They neither breathe for us nor move. They cannot. For they are not persons of a drama: they are tools of an argument.

Human spirit takes forms, of course, and all forms die. But the constant is the human spirit. And it is poor philosophy to take its forms as really abstracted from each other. Even the painter of a group of persons must relate them, one and all, upon his canvas if he aims to achieve esthetic truth.

Among the forms of human spirit are the arts which rise and fall; are social entities like state and city, which are builded and broken. But the Spenglerian assumption that the human spirit has no other life than in the splendor of great buildings, great realms, great arts, is a profanation. To prove that the abstraction called Rome was “decadent” in the year 400 is not to prove that Man, then, was less great than in the days when Caesar strutted. It may require a peculiar conjunction of poetic genius and social readiness to produce a Vergil. But there are other ways to the light. And some of them are always open.

Spengler feels death in his own soul. Wherefore he marshals a whole retrospect of life to funeral him in true Prussian glory. But human history is subtler. Man is a variable constant. He can achieve greatness with the ruins of a world as his sole instruments, as well as with the aid of outward fortune. Here, too, the evidence of the Jew might have saved Spengler—from the writing of his book! Variant circumstance has infinitely varied the expressions of this people. They have been warlike and humble; unphilosophical and, later, abstruse beyond the Greeks and Hindus. They have had 200no drama and flooded the stage: no worldly arts at all, and later supplied such arts for all the world. They have been pastoral, and adverse from the soil. They have been creators, politically, of Greek polis, of Oriental empires, and of invisible, Platonic Zions.

Only in so far as Man remained alive among the Jews was Jewish culture a constant. And this is true of any culture. The undying kernel is humanity: this is the locus of organic growth and of organic permanence which Spengler should have studied. For cultures are never isolate. Cut them off from their immersion in other cultures—in Life, they will die uprooted. They move upon and within each other: they fall to rise, fade to be transfigured.

Above all, the human spirit, in any cultural body, is capable of unprecedented transformation, provided an unprecedented new element of life comes fertilely upon it. This is the destiny of evolution. And evolution is true, however discarded the mechanistic form of it may be which Darwin degraded from Lamarck. And this crucial fact—that the culture, if to be regarded as an organism at all, must be taken as a transforming organism; an organism related to the genus, not to the individual, to the possibly infinite genus, not to the sharply delimited and mortal person—is entirely ignored by Spengler.

Look on cultures, not as biologic bodies with their youth and age, but as indefinite series like those in mathematics, and you have a fertile abstraction in lieu of a dead one. These series have, each, their inner laws, perhaps, but they are intertwined and any figure belonging in one place to one series may differently occupy other series. Paul, then, who in the Spenglerian sense was a “winter man” for the Jews, could be a “spring man” for Western Europe. And Jesus, his strict contemporary in time and race, could have in him all seasons.

Or take America. Spengler would rightly say that America 201was born of the dying of European culture. So he condemns us to the rigor mortis of civilization; to a noisier Egyptian fellahdom. But what of the new mythmakers, the springtime men, those creatures of pure ethos—Whitman, Lincoln, Melville, Thoreau? In an organic body, shut by Destiny, they have no place, and Spengler doubtless would deny them. In a life series, self-contained yet indefinitely progressing, they are in place. For with such a series each integer is at once the conclusion of what came before and the outset of an infinity beyond....

1926

8. THE MODERN DISTEMPER

(A diagnosis through Joseph Wood Krutch and Bertrand Russell)

a.

In the days when all men of a nation shared a view of life—worshiping Jehovah and obeying Torah, dwelling within the cosmos of the Catholic Church, accepting the divine right of their king or of their reason—it was possible for the author and critic to make his individual contribution without explicitly stating the philosophic ground on which he rested. The base of his point of view was common, and was commonly understood. The personal variation was what mattered. This, of course, is the contrary of our modern state. It is precisely the foundations of human vision—hence of human thought and of language—that have shifted. In place of essential harmony in the premises of intellectual action, there is chaos. But the American writer, despite this obvious fact, seldom honors his public with a clear-cut statement of what his philosophy and his religion are. He may even go so far as 202to deny that he possesses any, and make of his lack a virtue.

Yet, however negative and confused, each human being must possess an attitude toward life. Every thought is a judgment, every act is a judgment, the interpretation of every word is a judgment: and judgment implies a standard. If that standard is not stated, it may function contrary to the conscious will of its possessor. But it functions nevertheless. Current literary work is for the most part the expression of a philosophy and a religion that are not stated at all. The essential implications never come to light. The student could, of course, go to the complete works of each writer and discover the traits of his Weltanschauung; but most readers possess neither time nor power for such research. They are therefore constantly taking in, under cover of a stream of articles, biographies, poems, novels, plays, an attitude toward life of which they never become aware. And this hidden attitude works in them; shapes and nourishes, or corrupts them.

Joseph Wood Krutch is a well-known American critic. He is neither more able, nor less so, than a dozen others who write in our liberal magazines. But he has done what all of his fellows should have realized the need of doing; and what most of them have shamefully neglected to do. He has written a book, entitled “The Modern Temper,” in which, with all the clarity and honesty at his command, he has set forth the philosophy behind his judgments—the measure of life that determines his specific critical responses. How far he is justified in calling his mood the modern temper, we shall see. Certainly, his is a modern temper, widespread and hence significant. His book therefore offers an occasion, exceptionally concise, to study the philosophy and spirit of some of the men who write our books and who review them.

In order to take fair advantage of this occasion, I must begin by setting forth in some detail what Mr. Krutch has said. In my summary I shall, without criticism, follow the 203line of the book in its exact progression, using wherever possible the words of the author.

Chapter 1. (a) Freud says that the unborn babe is the happiest of creatures; into his consciousness has entered no conflict, nor is there any limitation upon his desires, (b) As the babe grows up and experience and knowledge make life miserable, he invents myths of all sorts to recapture or protect his infant bliss. The realm of poetry, mythology, religion, represents the world as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world as it is. (c) Connections between parts of life, explanations of life, reasons for life—relations between the parts—are supplied by the imagination. Which means, they are illusions, (d) Only man has rationality; the universe is not rational, (e) Therefore man is an alien in the universe. His rationality, being “unnatural,” is hence an illusion, (f) Our morality and emotional lives are adjusted to a world which no longer exists—because it has been destroyed by reason (science being the reasoning from facts).

Chapter 2. (a) The social virtues of the humanists—serving one’s children and posterity, living for society, etc.—are really animal traits, (b) Don Juan is the real type of human, (c) An individualism that is antagonistic to and destructive of the social virtues is the highest human value, (d) Human individualism, the real human value, is perfect separatism of each soul, (e) Nature reveals no ends only means for its own self-perpetuation, (f) Man in civilization strives for ends, and turns means (sex, thought, etc.) into ends. Therefore man is unnatural, (g) Apotheosis of the ant, as the ideal of nature; since the ant has no individualistic ends, living entirely for the anthill, (h) The antithesis between natural means and human ends is irreconcilable, for when man makes his own thought or sensation or life an end, he neglects the procreation of the species, (i) Therefore, all cultures no sooner ripen than they rot. (j) The alternatives for man are an antlike stable group, or recurrent death at the top. (k) Humanism is riddled with mutually destructive contradictions.

Chapter 3. (a) The generation of Huxley, Tennyson, etc., was sure that science was going to disclose a world in which man is perfectly and regally at home, (b) But science has revealed only a vast emptiness, in which, lost like Milton’s Satan, we wing our way. (c) Scientific mastery of the inner life, the soul, leads 204likewise to no real mastery of it, but only to more confusion. (d) There is no ethics or morals. Anthropology and psychology reveal merely a variety of ethics and morals. (e) Yet man persists in being an ethical, moral creature. (f) There is no royal reason. (g) The reason in which Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, believed is revealed by science to be mere rationalization. (h) Science itself is doubtful. 2,000 years of epistemology have made it dubious if man can know any reality outside himself. (i) Science gives us one table—consisting of nothing but electrons. Our senses give us another table. The former we know as truth; but the second only can be of use to us in our experience. (j) Science gives us the real universe. (k) Huxley, etc., were deluded, thinking we could make this universe ours. (l) There is no relation between the outer world of science and the inner world of man’s needs and emotions.

Chapter 4. (a) Love is defined as the sexuality of the individual separate ego. It is a discontinuous, physical phenomenon with no implications in reality beyond its naked self. (b) Since science and modern freedom have freed love of the old taboos and of the religious and poetic myths, love, as more than naked sexuality, turns out to be illusion. (c) Sex is a mere physical need, and hence has no values whatsoever. Man is simply cursed with this need and must make his peace with it, as he can. (d) We shall have to get used to a loveless as well as to a godless world.

Chapter 5. (a) Tragedy is based on noble action, and noble action is based on the belief (as Sophocles and Shakespeare had it) in the dignity of man’s soul. (b) This dignity is an illusion; for it derives from the notion that man is the center of the universe, or at least that he belongs to the universe, and that his deeds have some universal import. (c) With the going of this illusion has gone man’s dignity, his possibility of noble action—and Tragedy. (d) The art of the present can only distrust its own thoughts, despise its own passions, realize man’s impotent unimportance in the universe, and tell no story except such as makes it more acutely aware of its trivial miseries. (e) Yet with the passing of Tragedy, our need of Tragedy (i.e., of dignity, noble actions, etc.) has not passed.

Chapter 6. (a) To medievalism, life was an exact science. The laws, rules, etc., of that science have broken. (b) Life regarded as a science is now and forevermore intellectually indefensible. 205(c) The modern mind, realizing that there is no Peace unless each life is made into some self-sufficient pattern or order or whole of its own, strives to achieve this. Strives, that is, to make life an art. (d) For in science, there is only one Truth; but in art, there may be many truths. Many men have striven to make their lives an art: e.g., Cellini, St. Francis, the heroes of Henry James’s novels, Anatole France. (e) In art, there is no standard except the artistic perfection of the individual work, according to its own rules. As an artistic creation, Othello is no better than Iago. (f) In art, there is no ethics. (g) To conceive of life as a group of works of art means, therefore, anarchy. (h) No society can five by such a scheme. Life lived as an art is pragmatically impossible, from the standpoint of mankind.

Chapter 7. (a) What progress did philosophy or religion ever make? None. It was only when the thinker discovered how small are the things he can do, that he did anything at all: only when he renounced looking for the key to heaven, that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking. (b) The world grows more comfortable, as man ceases to strive for anything beyond comfort. (c) But now, despite this progress, behold metaphysics is reborn! (d) It is typified by the neo-Catholicism of France, and the neo-Anglicanism of England. (e) Its essence is expressed by T. E. Hulme, who wrote: “One of the main achievements of the nineteenth century was ... the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent necessity of the present.” The premise of the new metaphysicians is therefore dualism, or discontinuity. It says: “There are two worlds: one, the empty spaces of materialism and science, and two, the world of man—spirit, faith, ethic, value, emotion, God. And there is discontinuity between them.” (f) But there is nothing of which we are so sure as of the continuity taught by science. To earlier, naïve men, the important thing about living matter was that it lived: but science can only be sure that it is matter. (g) We believe in matter, accepting its continuity, wiping out the merely hypothetic world of spirit, value, etc.—the world of the modern metaphysicians. (h) Metaphysics is but another petty effort to make life an art: it is a confession of its own despair and failure.

Chapter 8. (a) It is not by thought that men live. The less they think, the better they live. The more they think, the more 206willing they are to die. (b) The very need of thought proves that man’s vitality is ebbing. An animal, a barbarian, has no such need. (c) Civilizations, constructed on thought, reach death; then the naïve barbarians rush in, the man begins anew. (d) The fresh hordes of barbarians destined to renew us are perhaps the Russians. (e) Communism, despite its sophisticated phraseology, is a new barbarism. In communism the individual does not count, only the anthill counts. No religious speculation is allowed. Life is perpetuated, unquestioningly, for its own blind sake. (f) But the inevitable despair of the modern man who, having learned to think, has learned the hopeless abyss between himself and nature, is not so bad after all: since he has physical comfort. Philosophical pessimism is not so hard to bear as cold or hunger. Ours is a lost cause, but we should rather die (in comfort) as men, than live as animals.

b.

Our next step is to examine the various elements of Mr. Krutch’s philosophy of life: to test their quality, their typicality, and to compare them; to measure their cogency as the cause of such desperate conclusions. The references are to the divisions of his argument, as catalogued, omitting repetitions and minor points.

Chapter 1. (a) states with apparent sympathy that a prenatal, vegetable life, bereft of struggle or aspiration, is a possible desideratum. (b) asserts that there is a dualistic conflict between art, which is an illusory world, and science, which is the real world. Here is the author’s doctrine: the relation between the unborn babe and the womb in which it lives is real; but the relation between the born man and the world in which he lives is illusion. Therefore, since life in any individual consists of the relation between it and its environment, and since no man could live an instant without some relation with the air and the world, what Mr. Krutch is really saying is: the life of the unborn babe is real; the life of the born man is an illusion. (c) implies that relations and connections between 207man and the universe, such as imagination supplies, are necessary for his welfare. But they are illusory, since the imagination is delusion. Yet Mr. Krutch has not even attempted to prove that imagination is delusion. This is his premise, so that, of course, this must be his conclusion. (d) and (e) invalidate man’s reason, since the universe has no reason. Yet the author employs his reason to prove his alienness in the universe. Virtually, he says: “My reason is invalid, since the universe is not rational. Yet my reason is, miraculously, valid enough to prove that no relation between me and the universe exists.” What he should have said, logically, from the premises, is this: “I declare my reason to be exclusively mine. Therefore it is not a cogent measure to determine any relation outside myself. To discover if I belong in the universe, I must employ some measure common to both me and it: some measure that I can move from myself to the universe.” Of course, if he had relied on some such measure—a measure of mass, for instance, or of causation—he would have found continuity between man and the universe. Conclusion: the chapter assumes that continuity between man and the universe is desirable, but that absolute discontinuity exists. The assumptions are sustained by means of indefensible logic.

Chapter 2. (a) states that since man’s social virtues are found also in animals, they cannot be human. This is tantamount to asserting absolute discontinuity between animal and man. Darwin, evolution, modern biology, are therefore flouted. The author unconsciously assumes an attitude more close to the early ascetic Christian and neo-Platonic concept of an abyss between man and brute. (b) and (c) lift up an old Spanish myth as the real human type. Don Juan was a “man” who could make love to countless women without ever becoming tired, without ever becoming attached, without ever changing, without ever feeling. Psychologists class him as the archetype of “fixated adolescent” and agree that he 208never existed, outside the realms of pathology. This insulate human “atom,” the “perfect individualist,” with no social relations or connections, this abstract fiction of infantile will, is the human ideal of our author. (e) and (f) carry on the thesis of discontinuity. Nature has no ends and is not moral: man has ends and is persistently a moral creature. The traits of nature are determined by studying the ant, etc.: they are by no means to be determined by studying man. For the ant, by some inscrutable right, belongs to nature, whereas man does not. This is really the premise of the argument: Mr. Krutch makes it the conclusion. His syllogism in its pure form is this: “Man is not part of nature: man has certain traits: hence these traits are not part of nature. Therefore man, possessing these (unnatural) traits, is not part of nature.” However, let us grant the premises that the ant is in nature, man is not. The conclusion must be that man is different from the ant. From this, our author is inspired to conclude that man, to succeed as man, must behave like an ant! Man, to succeed like a man, must build anthills and—nothing else. Conclusion: the chapter declares, in the face of anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, that man is utterly apart from nature and from animals, and that (even as the old ascetics and transcendentalists insisted) he is a separate creation. Here is the syllogism, transposed for clarity: “A tree is made of wood. Apples are not wood. Therefore, apples cannot belong on trees.” But despite the organic difference between man and “natural creatures,” he must behave—if he would succeed—just like the creatures whom he in no way resembles! (Here, the ascetics were more logical. Having posited man as different from the brute, they mapped out for him a totally separate course.) Assuming the organic difference, our author insists that the two relationless entities must go the same way. He builds up the definitions of his humanism upon illogical 209contradictions; and then dismisses “humanism” as full of the contradictions of his own bad thinking.

Chapter 3. (a) and (b) are repetitions. (c) looks for science to “master” the soul—and looks in vain. Pure science attempts merely to measure, from the outside. For instance, it weighs the sun and names its elements. It has no mastery of the sun, in the sense of controlling the sun. To a slight degree, science has similarly tried to “measure” the soul: i.e., to analyze its components. Pure science has never attempted more, leaving the application of its discoveries to education and religion. The modern effort in these fields is unknown to our author. (d) comes down to this: science has found that noses are not alike, in any two parts of the world. Negro, Eskimo, Malay, Nordic, have decidedly different noses. Ergo, science has discovered that noses do not exist!... To prove that morals and ethics do not exist, it would be necessary to prove that the sense of right does not exist or is at least very rare. But anthropology shows that this sense is universal. Its diversity of ethical and moral forms, of course, is due to the fact that morals are a product of the interplay between men and their environment. To say that morals vary is simply to say that men vary. To say that morals do not exist, because they do not agree, is to say that men do not exist because men do not agree. Chapter 1 revealed the genesis of the author’s mood as the result of an exorbitant faith in reason. Now (f) and (g) call reason a bad name, and dismiss it. Chapter 1 illogically employed human reason to establish the preponderance of an external, irrational universe over man. Now the evidence of the mind is declared to be poor: the universe itself may be but the projection of that poor human’s reason which (in another part) has no existence within the universe. Mr. Krutch has said: the table of science is real. The table of his senses, like the neo-Platonist dwelling in Tyre or Batanaea in the year 300, he rejects as unreal. But 210the old Tyrian was logical. He lived where his faith was: he utterly declined to follow his senses. This is too athletic for our modern. With one breath, he gives credence to the table of electrons; with the next, he confesses that the false table is the only one he ever hopes to live with! But the lack here is greater than merely one of logic. Mr. Krutch has the most childish notion of what science means, when it states that the table is a congeries of electrons.... The language of science is mathematics; and mathematics is a logic of forms. Everything that cannot be expressed in symbols of mass and motion is nonexistent within the realm of mathematics. Now, pictured in so far as it exists within the domain of science, i.e., in so far as it is a congeries of mass in motion, a table, of course, can be nothing but a congeries of mass in motion: a chart of electrons. In the precise same way a living body, pictured in terms of anatomy, can be nothing but an anatomical structure. But there are other domains; for instance, human behavior, which has qualities that the language of mathematics does not cover. In this domain, the description of the chair as a group of electrons will not work: but the notion of the child who has never heard of electrons, but who wants to sit down in the chair, works very well, indeed. To say that science is the whole truth, because it prophesies an event like an eclipse, is just as reasonable as to say that the ideas of the child are the whole truth, because the child prophesies that it is going to sit in that chair, and straightway does so. The eclipse takes place in a realm where human quality is largely extracted: so we are right to deal with eclipses in the logic of science. But man’s experience of beauty, for instance, before that eclipse is largely in the realm of human value. Here, the language of poetry is more adequate than that of mathematics. To deny one of these measures in absolute favor of the other is as reasonable as it would be to say that the architect’s blueprint is more real than the 211house. Mathematicians of high order, of course, are aware of the limitations of their language and therefore of the realm which their language expresses. It is only the weakling, desperately in need of an absolute Word, who speaks like Mr. Krutch, of the “certitudes of science.” Not Poincaré, not Einstein. Not the typical Eddington who says: “There is a constant unknowable in science.... Scientific laws are merely truistic measurements of a single physical condition.... So long as the electron is not reacting with the rest of the universe, we cannot be aware of it.... A particle may have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any exact sense have both. An association of exact position with exact momentum can never be discovered by us, because there is no such thing in nature.”... All of which is tantamount to saying, that the mathematical electron is an abstraction, that it is a mere plausible symbol; and that certitude can never exist in a field which is built up on the assumption of discrete, separate parts; since these parts do not exist—cannot exist in a continuum; and could not be observed by man, even if they existed.