50
PARTISAN REVIEW
a sensuous symbolic vision of the object of satire-and don't they, there–
fore, despite their extravagances, their "exploitation of the mysteries of
technique" (which Mr. Wilson is right in deploring) , best represent the
complete James? In the case of John Jay Chapman, Mr. Wilson has done
a remarkable job of literary anthropology, but here again one quarrels
with some of his conclusions. He has unearthed a new and complex
specimen of the frustrated American genius to stand beside Henry
Adams. Chapman, it seems, had something of Rimbaud's talent for suf–
fering and for symbolic action; but he was a Promethean who never
quite delivered the fire. And quoting from his highly varied and uni–
formly forgotten writings, Mr. Wilson makes out a good case for him
as a letter-writer, and above all as a character. But one cannot so easily
accept Chapman as a literary critic. For the same bristling individualism
and anti-theoretical bent that crippled his career in politics, seem to
have been at work in his criticism, which, though sensitive and informed
in the item, rests in bulk on the crude and paralyzing assumption that
art is simply a form of magic.
For the rest, the ten essays in
The Triple Thinkers
are the first
mature body of criticism to come out of the social movement
in
America. I have stressed Mr. Wilson's relation to the Eliot movement
because, after some ten years of left-wing sniping, it is still strong-not
vital, perhaps, but tenacious, awaiting the
coup de grace)'
and Mr. Wil–
son, with his enormous sympathy for writers and writing, his liveliness,
his charm, his uncanny talent for communicating, and his ability to
uncover, not only the social factor but the element of ambiguity, the
play of contradictions, in the esthetic process, is the first critic of the left
to have achieved on any scale a new approach. How has he managed
it? Perhaps through taking a broad and flexible view of his job in a
period when critics, preoccupied with defining their terms and functions,
are mostly bogged down in programmatic controversies. Such is the
positive value of an intelligent empiricism in an age of sterile formulas.
His debt to Marxism, at any rate, is slighter than it might appear;
it consists mainly in the general historical emphasis he gives his work.
And his essay, "Marxism and Literature," which complements the article
on poetry and shows his work to be directed as much against the cruder
forms of ideological criticism as
agai~st
the metaphysical school, proves
a somewhat enervated product of the post-Stalinist scepticism-a little
abstract and apologetic, exhibiting in the formulation of principles a
tentativeness which may be native to the critic but which the period has
certainly encouraged. Essentially a political philosophy, a form of "social
engineering," Marxism, according to Mr. Wilson, can only throw light
on "the origins and social significance of works of art"; by itself it can
teach us "nothing whatever about the goodness or badness of a work of
art." So, unless he is content to remain a sociologist in the arts, the Marx–
ist critic must, when it is a question of standards and sensibility, become
something
other
than a Marxist. One wonders whether such a dual lif!!!
is really possible. For what is criticism if it is not a method of literary
analysis organized around a set of coherent values? And where is the
