THE ANATOMY OF LIBERALISM
Wallace Phelps
THE ANATOMY OF CRlTICISI\(* is hardly a major contribution to critical
tradition. Genuine contributions have always been connected with new
and forceful movements in literary history. This, indirectly, accounts for
the far greater perspicuity of the criticism of, let us say, Dryden or Cole–
ridge or T. S. Eliot. In America, the dominant bourgeois theories of
criticism and the art practices allied to them stern from T. S.. Eliot,
I.
A.
Richards, Croce (Spingarn in America); the French Surrealists (the
transition
group in America); a group, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, R .
P. Blackmur, etc., who have fused Eliot with Imagism and region–
alism; and the sociological critics, like Van '\Tyck Broolcs or Lewis Mum–
ford. Each of these schools grows out of an art movement ,and helps,
in turn, to deepen it.
Hazlitt's method of cor.trasting extremes and finding the truth some–
where between, does more to illustrate a principle of balance than to strike
a new and more vital vein in criticism and art. vVhen Hazlitt tells us
that "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 is justified," he is
presenting a method which mllst be grounded in social and literary realities,
and which must synthesize properly selected forces or opinions. Otherwise,
one can not avoid, on the one hand, the sterility of professorial discussion
of art, and on the other, the pitf;lils of Hegel. Hazlitt has chosen con–
flicting opinions, but not always dialectically antithetical ones. On Haz–
litt's theory truth would always lie between the Scylla of one error and the
Charybdis of another.
Through the body of the book Hazlitt present four major points:
Theory of the Social Mind, The Meaninglessness of Pure Art, The Corre–
lation of Tradition and Rebellion, The Wholeness of Criticism.
"TIlt Anatomy
0/
Criticism
by Henry Hazl itt. Simon and Schuster, New York, $2.50
47
