criticism he would let himself give vent to more of the
energies in a remarkable temperament 'than he often does.
Imagination,
anger, the subtle sense of form, the historical
fancy and plenty of other things have as legitimate a role
in criticism as the practical will or the discursive intelli-
gence has; and some of these things are really at work in
Cowley's review of Paul Engle's book (which had to be
brief and slight),
in abed Brooks's essay on MacLeish
(which is still imperfectly clarified) and especially in Bur-
gum's essay on the English radical poets.
One final point! All proletarian writers I take it are
under a solemn obligation to fight tooth :nd nail a~ainst
philistinism in all its nauseating forms; to rise above par-
ochialism both of place and time; and to save from the
black night of fascism all of the past that is really humane
and of good report. Particularly the literary critics-if
one
can
say "particularly" of any group-are bound by this
obligation, whether they will or no. Particularly American
critics are bound by the obligation to keep alive all that was
creative and hopeful in their national past, and to reassert
it to the everlasting and irredeemable discredit of all that
was, and is, destructive and damnable. For this reason, I am
sorry to see Bernard Smith, in an excellent essay on Huneker,
which puts a whole group of writers straight in the place
where they belong-I
am sorry to see him remarking that
"There were only respectable critics until the 1890's. 'Cul-
ture'
was a possession of the provincial aristocracy." With
the friendliest feeling in the world, I have to say that, in the
words of Artemus Ward,
these sentences are of the bosh
boshy. To dispose of Channing or Margaret
Fuller or
Henry Clapp as "respectable" critics merely, is not to see
things in their true light or as they really are. And if there
were any more truly "cultured" men in mid-cenrury Amer-
ica than the farmer's son, Theodore Parker,
or the car-
penter's son, Walt Whitman,
I'd like to know who they
were. Bernard Smith will forgive me for plain and perhaps
over-emphatic speaking; but since the point has come up I
must take issue also with his other phrase, "such national
holy ones as Emerson and Longfellow." Longfellow was a
really fine poet in a valid though far from a major mode;
Baudelaire and Freiligrath would hardly have bothered to
translate so much of him if he hadn't been; and he wrote
both a fine anti-war poem and a stirring poem against
slavery. But to speak of him in the same breath with Emer-
son as a national holy one is only to darken counsel. As well
speak of Goethe and Tieck in the same breath! or Ruskin
and Clough! or Renan and Sully-Prudhomme!
I wish Ber-
nard Smith would draw as sharp and as just a line between
them as he draws between Huneker and Brooks.
But I must bring this far too long letter, this substitute
for a real review, to an end. I'm sure there are plenty of
questions-both of the strictly literary, even technic~l order
and of the sochJ.1or political-which more formal reviewers
I hope will discuss. But meanwhile I'm particularly glad to
have had an opportunity to say how unmistakably the
anthology demonstrates that
the new literary age of
which Cowley has spoken is a plain and unavoidable reality.
The journalistic and academic reviewers may seem to be
avoiding it successfully, but that outfit could
seem
to avoid
the crack of doom.
14
The Writer's Part
•
Communism
tn
WALDO FRANK
[An address to the International
Congress of Writers for
the Defense of Culture, held at Paris, June
21-25, 1935.]
WE ARE all here, not as Frenchmen, Germans, Americans,
but as men of letters who conceive their art as an articulation
of the human spirit. Each of us bespeaks his class and his
country only insofar as he voices deeply his self, and thereby
voices mankind. This is the irreducible character of the art-
ist. Whether he knows it or not (and in our day, most do not
know it, whence the fragmentary and corrupted nature of
their works and of themselves as men), the artist is one who
acts on the premise that the universal lives in the particular;
that cosmos lives in th,:: person. This is the meaning of the
mysterious words "beauty" and "truth" applied to art. As
we share the universal in a particular form-a painting of a
tree, a story of a beggar-we call it the experience of beauty.
We feel the unity between self and some other object, a unity
which (far from destroying) heightens and
makes true
the
particularity of both the self and the object. And whether
we know it or not, we value this experience of truth and
beauty; we love it as somehow good. This is another irreduc-
ible trait, beneath our differences, of us all. The conflicts of
our actual existence may so weary and confuse us that we
believe we long for death; may fill us with distrust and
despair; it is love of life, none the less because wounded and
twisted, that writes the darkest of our pages. Insofar as a
man seeks beauty, he knows that life
is
value; for recognition
of beauty is nothing but the joyous acceptance of our part
and our participation in the body of living.
In periods of normal cultural rhythm, when the social
body moves moderately well in all its organs, this act of
conscious participation in life as a whole, the essential act
of the artist, can remain implicit in the quiet body of his story
or song or picture. Such times see no Congress of Writers
such as this one. But today the forms and modes of "human
existence, unevenly evolved, have broken the equilibrium
which is life itself. Today, the active and aggressive faith in
life, the revelation of its intricate harmony, which is the sale
science of the artist, is so at variance with the actual world,
that we feel the need of a direct action, transcending the
solid, quiet, slow certainty of art, to reenforce our love and
our vision in the experience of the people.
All this may seem to you irrelevant esthetics. But you must
pardon me, for the application I wish to draw from it (my
brief message to this Congress) is relevant.
We differ, of course, even as in our arts, in our methods
of exteriorising our vision and devotion, at this time of crisis,
into immediate deeds. My course has been a common one; but
FEBRUARY,
1936
