BOOKS
CRITICISM AND PSEUDO-CRITICISM
LITERARY OPINION IN AMERICA:
A Book of Modern eritical
Essays. Edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. Harper's. $2.50.
This large volume consists of fifty-three articles, dated since the end
of the War, by thirty-one American writers, together with a Foreword
and a long Introduction by the editor. The material has not been assem–
bled from the point of view of any coherent and significant principle
of organization ; and the selection of contents must therefore be under–
stood as dictated largely by Mr. Zabel's personal taste. Mr. Zabel partly
recognizes this, though sometimes he tries in his Introduction to state
an organizing principle: "In choosing and arranging these fifty critical
essays; it has been the purpose to show what such literary standards
count for in America today, how they emerge from the past or develop
in
the present, and how the recognition of them can come only through
responsibility toward criticism as a craft in itself, unconfused by the
techniques, sciences, forms of belief, or personal and popularizing motives
which are today largely pre-empting its authority."
Since Mr. Zabel nowhere even approximately defines "criticism as
a craft in itself," and since a criticism "unconfused" by techniques,
sciences, beliefs and motives is- if we stop to think what we are saying–
altogether inconceivable, we must conclude that Mr. Zabel here fails
in his attempt to find a principle. His taste has led him to exclude
from his collection "popular book reviewing and academic scholarship,"
two activities which, he says, "are usually hostile to an active tradition
of criticism in America" (though why these are more hostile than, ·say,
Malcolm Cowley, Stark Young, or Robert Morss Lovett, who are all
included, is not made clear). He has, secondly, taken an unusually large
percentage of his contents from the ' "little magazines" of the period.
Thirdly, he seems to have ·a preference for writers who somewhere use
phrases like "purely iiterary values."
Mr. Zabel's failure to integrate his collection in terms of an organ–
izing principle is not a special defect. He shares in the general lack of
agreement about the 'nature and function of criticism, which is no doubt
a derivative of the lack of agreement about the nature of the world,
He has, nevertheless, brought together in one book (and there is no other
comparable to it) so large a number of writers and essays, that even as
random sampling it ·is no doubt sufficiently representative of what we
call
American literary criticism. I propose, therefore, accepting these
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