34
PARTISAN REVIEW
even he quite inconsistent with himself and after attacking early
critics for making writers toe the mark of utilitarian morality,
himself go about with a black hook writing down the names of
those who do not do their social duiy. These are, of course, serious
errors; hut what is so critically wrong with Mr. Smith's hook lies
much deeper than they indicate.
Mr. Smith, who likes things to he definite and who scolds
Emerson for not being systematic and orderly enough, gives us, in
his preface and in his conclusion, the assumptions on which he has
proceeded. He believes, he says, in the scientific method generally
and the scientific method in literary history so far as it can he used;
he is antagonistic to mysticism; he believes in realism; he is biased
in favor of the broadest possible democracy. Well, we are aJl biased
in favor of the broadest possible democracy; the question is
whether Mr. Smith's other biases support this one.
That Mr. Smith, in asserting his devotion to science, should
go out of his way to take a swipe at mysticism leads one to suspect
that he is not so much in fear of mysticism itself as he is of a cer–
tain kind of science, which, because it is not the science of the
Nineteenth Century, he believes to he mystical. He is not, for
instance, worried about Plotinus, St. Francis or Mr. Waldo Frank;
he goes out of his way to speak well of such mystical fellows as
Blake and Shelley. When we find him saying, however, that science
is materialistic (p. 92), that science is anti-mystical (p. 93), that
mysticism is the pinnacle of individualism (p. 80) and that there
is a false theory abroad that one man's notion of reality is as good
as another's (p. 186), we begin to suspect that he is making a stand
for a conception of science which is no longer held by scientists
hut which is very useful for political partisans. Mr. Smith, we may
he s11re, like Parrington hut more explicitly, is raising his voice in
a cheer for "reality," solid and irrefutable, and for the kind of
thought which will stand for no nonsense about "mind."
For in no other way can one account for the righteous indig·
nation Mr. Smith exhibits against, for example, the kind of thought
which is contained in Henry James's suggestion that, on the subject
of sex, Maupassant and d'Annunzio become after a while.less·than
interesting and less than important because they stay so close to
the physical fact itself and never come to find any meanings or
values in it. Mr. Smith, resenting this, introduces quite illegiti-
