The Anatomy of Criticism

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM c__^¿c K__J ria¿oigue BY HENRY HAZLITT NEW YORK SIMON AND SCHUSTER 1933 COPYRIGHT, 1933, BY HENRY HAZLITT PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC 386 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY J. J. LITTLE & IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK DESIGNED BY ROBERT JOSEPHY ••••••••••••I PREFACE SOMEHOW I feel that I ought to apologize for having cast the present volume in dialogue. I do not know precisely why one should feel obliged to offer excuses for employing a form that goes back at least to Plato, that has been used by Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Landor, and, in our own day, by Lowes Dickinson and Santayana. But the fact remains that a large number of readers have a tendency to shy off from a modern dialogue as they would from a modern tragedy in blank verse. Such an aversion is not without grounds. Most dialogue presents at least two obstacles to the reader, one superficial, the other more deep-seated. The superficial obstacle is the curious survival of the convention of endowing the speakers with Greek names—names which, for most present-day readers, are either annoyingly anachronistic, too long, too perilous to pronounce, too hard to keep in mind, or completely without meaning. Certainly it would not add to the popu- larity of the modern drama if the same convention had been retained there also. The deeper obstacle THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM is the practice, in most dialogues, of confronting a too sapient speaker, obviously the author's mouthpiece, with a straw-man who is always raising the wrong objections and stating them in the feeblest or most vulnerable manner, while the author's mouthpiece keeps triumphantly knocking this dummy down until the latter can say nothing but "quite right" to propositions which are, in fact, quite dubious. In the present dialogue I have tried to spare the reader with a sense of sportsmanship from the spec- tacle of so uneven a combat. The dialogue form, it seems to me, is not to be adopted for its own sake, or out of mere whim, but only for special reasons in each case. In the present instance I can say that if I had not written this book in dialogue I should not have written it at all. Some of my reasons for choos- ing the form will be apparent on the surface, and others are indicated by the speakers themselves in their concluding remarks. But I might supplement these with one additional hint. The dialogue drama- tizes an approach to the persistent problems of criticism by a particular logical method. Had Elder been named Thesis, Youngy Antithesis, and `Mìddleton> Synthesis, the reader would not have needed any acquaintance with the Hegelian dialectic to appre- ciate one of my chief aims. The names that the speakers actually bear will, I hope, make it easy for the reader to distinguish them; but I do not wish him to assume that I myself suppose from the acci- PREFACE dent of these names that older men are necessarily apostles of tradition or younger men of subjectivism and revolt. As a matter of fact, the position repre- sented in the present dialogue by Young is nearer to that of the middle generation of present American critics than it is to that of the youngest group. But it seems to me that the nomenclature as it stands corresponds best with the relative logical positions of the speakers, and therefore allows the reader to follow the argument with the least possibility of confusion. In a subject that has been so long thrashed over by so many minds, it is not wise to credit oneself with much originality. But I hope that some illumi- nation will be found in the present method of approach itself. In all fields of thought the traditional dilemmas, on which thinkers have for a long time taken opposite stands, generally rest, as Morris R. Cohen has pointed out in his "Reason and Nature", on difficulties rather than on real contradictions, and positive gains are to be made not by simply trying to prove that one side or the other is the truth, but by trying to get at the difficulty and determining in what respect and to what extent each side is justified. The present book might be regarded from one aspect as the continuous application of that principle to the problems of literary criticism. The method is par- ticularly fruitful, it seems to me, in dealing with a long-standing controversy like that between the im- pressionistic critics and their "objective" opponents. iii THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM So far as I am aware, the present book contains the first attempt to reconcile these two schools of thought by the consistent use of the concept of the Social Mind. My speakers quote a large number—it may even seem an excessive number—of writers. They do this for several reasons. First, where they have derived an idea from a special source, and agree with it, they wish to give credit for it. Secondly, even when they might already have held a given idea anyway, they are glad to have that added feeling of con- firmation which the same idea in another nearly always tends to give, and they like to cite those who have stated the idea well. Again, where their atti- tude is neutral, they are still interested in compre- hensiveness, in tracing the history of an idea and of its various forms. Finally, even where they are op- posed to an idea, and think it rubbish, they are determined to show that they are not knocking down a man of straw, that someone has actually held this belief, and they want also, in fairness (or mali- ciousness), often to state that belief in the precise words of its votaries. Sometimes they are obliged to refresh their memories by reading the remarks they quote. More often they cite them without such help. Their verbal memories will be found to be rather remarkable, though to avoid too great artifi- ciality quotation marks are omitted wherever the context itself makes reasonably plain just where the quotation begins and ends. iv PREFACE The reader will be mistaken if he assumes that any one of the speakers is consistently the mouthpiece of the author. Some readers may find this very lack of an official spokesman confusing and unfortu- nate, for it means that all of the speakers are more stubborn than imaginary dialogue speakers usually are in clinging to opinions after those opinions have been pretty thoroughly discredited. Their stubborn- ness may sometimes make the book seem repetitious, and it will sometimes compel the reader to decide for himself which speaker, if any, has run off with the victory. But it has also a not unimportant advan- tage: it compels every idea to run the gauntlet, to submit to a sustained critical barrage. My indebtedness is to too many writers to make possible any special acknowledgments here; I ¾ope that specific debts are sufficiently indicated in the progress of the dialogue itself. The essays on Liter- ature and the Class War, and Marxism or Tolstoy- ism, originally published in The Nation, appear here as appendices written directly in the first person. There seemed little point in casting these in dialogue, and it would have been in any case impossible for any one of my three critics to assume, with any consistency, the Communist role. A Communist could not have been a subjectivist on the one hand, or a traditionalist on the other, and certainly he would never have been a reconciler. H.H. June, 1933. PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUES Elder, a professor of English literature, 50. Youngs book reviewer for the Daily Press, 25. Middleton, editor of The Hour-Glass, a monthly philosophical and literary journal, 35. Arthur, a popular novelist, 30. The scene throughout is the library of Elder's subur- ban home. CONTENTS Preface DIALOGUES i Criticism's Right to Exist 7 II The Critic's Function 35 in Objectivity or Subjectivity? 77 iv The Social Mind 97 v Posterity's Verdict 128 vi Tradition and Rebellion i54 VII Standards 169 VIII Vivisecting Signor Croce 186 ix Sincerity, Style, and Pure Art 2II x Realism Versus Romance *33 APPENDICES A—Literature and the Class War 273 B—Marxism or Tolstoyism? 287 Index of Names 297 THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM I CRITICISM'S RIGHT TO EXIST Elder. I am delighted, Arthur, that you were able to drive over for dinner. Young and Middleton here are spending the week-end with me, and I have been wanting for a long time to have you three meet each other. Arthur. It was more than kind of you to ask me. Frankly, though, I feel as if I had fallen into the enemy's hands. Young, here, is not only a profes- sional book-reviewer, which would make him an object of suspicion in any case, but he derided my last novel shamelessly. You yourself, while you occa- sionally write delightful essays on Goethe and Em- erson, have not deigned to notice my work at all. And since Middleton here has become so immersed in philosophical problems in the pages of his high- brow magazine, I am beginning to suspect that he considers himself above mere literature altogether j yet he of course is a critic too. One author among three critics! Daniel in the lion's den was compara- tively well off. Elder.

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