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PARTISAN REVIEW
those years, it will he remembered, redeemers came in crops. Every
other month brought to the shores of America some new dispensa–
tion or messianic light.
If
it wasn't Coue it was Count Keyserling;
if it wasn't Conan Doyle it was Jiddu Krishnamurti; and home
growths like J. B. Watson, Amy Semple Macpherson, and the
Technocrats faced a stiff competition. But Mr. MacLeish, then in
an earlier phase of his ordeal of discovering that it is a strange
thing to he an American, produced a Messiah of his own. In May
1923, in
The North American Review,
he and a Yale friend, Law–
rence Mason, announced "The Next Philosophy" to the world.
63
One reads it today with blinking eyes, yet it was no product of
boyish credulity: Mr. MacLeish had passed the celebrated thir–
tieth year of his age when he published his discovery in words
that put the ancient prophets to shame:
The great philosopher of our generation will be an East–
European, a Czech, and his name will be Peter Sczornik. For one
who has read his first book,
The
Lyric
Tense,
no other verdict is
thinkable. Here at last is a student of life, a creator of thought,
a brain than which no intelligence of history is more acute, more
luminous, more inevitable. Upon this one slight volume of eight
hundred-odd pages, his glory rests forever secure. Beneath this
one magnificent title his imperishable name will be written across
the tablets of ten thousand libraries. He is one with the immor-
tals. He is beyond our pens to praise or injure him. He is already
great.
We learn that
It is the glory of this great modern that he, and he alone,
has found inherent in these phenomena [of life] themselves the
laws that explain them.... It is his contention that the facts of
life have written their own philosophy, which needs only recog–
nition, not interpretation. That philosophy is the Philosophy of
Grammar. Not only do the words and sentences occur and recur
in obedience to the rules of' grammar, but man himself and the
ideas and purposes of man fulfill the ambit of those laws, hear
the relations of those principles, are understood only in the light
of those commands.
We are told that "the scope of Sczornik's project is indicated in
the titles of his chapters, innumerable chapters in the Slavic
fashion, bursting from silence with an epigram, ebbing hack to
