BOOKS
117
England. But where are Whitman, Mark Twain, Dreiser : the Westerners,
the plebeians, the men of the city? To have introduced such writers into
Maille's Curse
would have been to undermine its argument. For although
the New England writers were unquestionably obsessed with problems of
conscience, and do, therefore, lend some credibility to Winters' thesis, the
other writers were all, in varying degree, dissenters from the hegemony of
conscience. These last were looking for something else altogether: for a mod–
ern, a realistic, a social, even a scientific philosophy. .And if, like the New
Englanders, they were also in part "frustrated," then the failures of Amer–
ican literature can only
be
explained by reference to conditions common to
all schools and all periods. Mr. Winters would probably say of the non–
Puritan writers what he says of Poe, that they are not genuine artists; that
their importance as historical J.>henomena is a consideration "anterior to the
poem,
not in the poem," and
IS
therefore irrelevant to criticism. But in that
case we should have to reply as follows: "In your 'Foreword' you announce
Maule's Curse
as a work of historical criticism, but quite abruptly you swing
from the historical perspective to the narrowly esthetic. You
set
uf as a
theorist of the national culture but you turn out to be a sectarian o New
England."
But if we forget the larger ambitions of
Mallie's Curse,
if we overlook
such obscure expressions as "moral illumination," "the nature of moral
truth," etc., if we read the book simply for its specific criticism of individual
writers, we shall find it exceptionally good. The essay on Emily Dickinson
makes a point that very much needed to be made: that "her best poems . ..
can never be isolated certainly and defensibly from her defects"-which are
defects springing from her "countrified eccentricity." There is a study of
Melville which quite transforms our notions of that writer, showing him to
have -been, not, as commonly supposed, a "transcendentalist in oilskins,"
but fundamentally a counter-romantic; and the analysis of
Moby Dick
is
probably the best single item in
Maule's Curse.
Winters is a formidable
analyst of the structural properties of literature ; he is also, on occasion, a
very perceptive literary historian. One hopes that the analyst and the his–
torian in
him
will prevail over the moral sectarian.
F. W.
DUPEE.
WHITEHEAD'S METAPHYSICS
MODES OF THOUGHT.
By
Alfred North Whitehead. Macmillan. $2.50.
Professor Whitehead once defined philosophy as the critique of abstrac–
tions. Many of his readers then understood him to say that the task of
philosophy is the analysis of concepts, especially those employed in the
sciences, in order to exhibit their specific functions, their mode of introduc·
tion, and their relation to the materials of every-day experience. Professor
itehead himself took part in such a critique, and in a notable series of
and articles indicated how abstract terms occurring in theoretical
ysics, such as "dimensionless point" and "durationless instant," were to
· interpreted in terms of familiar procedures. He brought to this task a
