38
PARTISAN REVIEW
peace and, at the same time, ennoble the life from which we neces–
sarily and momentarily turn. Now, none of these three men is a
great critic, but their common view of literature is an old one and
neither ignoble nor undesirable; it does not perhaps carry us very
far in the understanding of letters but as a description it is not
inaccurate, for, as against the life most of us know, even the most
"realistic" work of art is an escape. But in quite violent language
Mr. Smith rejects this formulation on two grounds. The first is that
the critics have not described what great literature does, though
they have indeed, and to deny it is simply to deny the fact; litera–
ture, exactly because it is not life but a made thing, provides, even
when it is most distressing, an escape in that it gives a sense of
order and a sense of control and as such is valuable. And it would
seem to me that the critic's job would be to inquire what kind of
person one is during the escape and what one is after life has cap–
tured one again. The second objection that Mr. Smith makes is that
literature
should not
do what his three critics say it does do. What
literature
should
do we learn from his judgment of Henry James:
"He had no realization that art might lead to action-that by affect–
ing the way men think,
~;trt
affects their acts. His was a theory of
art for the sake of consciousness, and consciousness for its own
sake, which is not quite so antagonistic to the theory of art for art's
sake as he thought it was. Now, too, we can put our finger on the
reason why many people have found no real enlightenment in
James's critical essays. Because there was nothing he wanted to
fight for besides artistry, because he had no purposes or ends, he
did not deal with the ultimate things for which men go to litera–
ture." In his
New Republic
review, Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Smith
would anger the Jacobites (men who, according to Mr. Smith,
think that Henry James is God: their rites are dark); however, let
us not stop to question the truth of the summary and, rather, let us
examine only the last clause: "the ultimate things for which men
go to literature."
Some years ago Max Eastman (a critic whom Mr. Smith men–
tions but does not discuss) set out to explode the pretensions of all
critics and aestheticians by juxtaposing the various contradictory
definitions of art they had offered. He found: education, recrea–
tion, revelation of God, representation of nature, relief from pain,
diffusion of pleasure, compensation for reality, integration of