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the pattern, while elsewhere in the books under review we have neither. It
is at least suggestive, that had Mr. Wheelwright everywhere mastered his
form, then his pattern would everywhere have been dear. But diagnosis is
not cure; and it may be the other way round. None of us to·day, none even
with the full strength of Christian (or Marxist) belief, can take full ad–
vantage-full nourishment--of our heritage, whether of enlivening form or
enduring pattern, without extraordinary and almost impossible luck-like
that of Thomas Mann in his novels. Without such luck, without that gift,
the struggle is too much to the individual and against the society in which
he lives. Success seems to involve concession to oneself as well as to society..
One is the product as well as the victim of the damage of one's lifetime.
We are in the predicament of the protagonist in Mr. Wheelwright's sonnet
"Sanct" ; protestant to the last drop.
We know the Love the Father bears the Son
is a third Mask and that the Three form One.
We also know, machines and dynamos
-Preservers in motion,- Destroyers in repose–
like visions of wheeled eyes the addict sees
are gods, not fashioned in our images.
Then let us state the unknown in the known :
The mechanism of our friendship, grown
transcendent over us, maintains a being
by seeing us when we grow lax in seeing,
although without o11r sight it could not be.
(One states, one does not solve, a mystery.)
This human Trinity is comprehended
when doubt of its divinity is ended.
Not only protestant, but also heretical.
Turn by an inward act upon the world!
An innocence like our Creator's faith
is yo11nger than my doubt. You give it birth
who, seeing evil leu veiling than clear rain,
see truth in thought as through a lens of air.
That is, both inimical and foreign; trying for the scope of the normal rather
than the closeness of the average. I fear that the reader of this review may
have difficulty with Mr. Wheelwright and none with Dr. Williams; yet I
am certain that when he finds he has understood Mr. Wheelwright, and
enjoyed him, he will understand much better what he m1sses as well as
what he enjoys in Dr. Williams. There is room for both poets.
AMERICANS ACCURSED
MAULE'S CURSE: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscuran·
tism. By Yvor Winters. New Directions.
$3.
Van Wyck Brooks used to tell us that literature in America was the
victim
of a divorce between our general cultural heritage, which wu obso–
lete, derivative, and weakly idealistic, and our daily experience, which was
