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same) in his thought. He wants the One man of letters; and accord–
ing to his notion of science and reality he is entitled to ask for him
because, if reality is One, the true perception of reality is also One
and the perceiver too should be One. Indeed, we must begin to sus–
pect that Mr. Smith carries his materialism to the point of Platon–
ism, rejecting the partial, rejecting "mere opinion," demanding
the One, the True and the Good. (He has a chapter against the
Beautiful.) It is to this end that we find him attacking individual–
ism (quite confident that there is such a thing in the intellectual
life) and denying that there are such things as temperamental dif.
ferences; their acceptance, he believes, would permit a departure
from the reality which is perceived by the Advance-guard of
Society.
And so much for the artist and the critic; what about the
citizen? The artist and critic, as we know from having been told
many times, is only the citizen with his awareness intensified and
made professional. Parrington threw out Poe from the main cur·
rents, found that Hawthorne and Henry James had betrayed the
reality of their nation; Mr. Smith finds failure, failure everywhere
-failure because incompleteness, failure because no final formu·
lation, failure because of expressing the time, failure because of
not expressing the time: reality again and everywhere betrayed.
But if reality is One, then has not the citizen, no less than the artist
and critic, betrayed it if he too does not have its perfect picture?
If
we want the One man of letters do we not also want the One
citizen? I am sure that Mr. Smith passionately wants in politics
what he thinks will be best for a great many people; I am not sure,
however, that this will be the broadest possible democracy.
