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PARTISAN REVIEW
weakness for the flashy and vulgar simplifications of journalism that he
should call the Nazis "Greenwich Village politicians." The bohemia of
putsches and freebootery in which the Nazis learned their politics was no
artist's quarter, in spite of the fact that its plots were hatched in cafes.
There are other things that make this book suspect. Thomas Mann is
found to be one of Germany's "most courageous ... thinkers." (Mann did
not break publicly with Hitler until two or three years after the Nazis
took power.) In referring to the writers there who have more or less
assented to Hitler, such entities as Fallada, Paul Ernst, Binding, Carossa,
Kolbenheyer and Hesse are called "distinctly major figures."
If
they are,
then Thornton Wilder, the Benets, John Marquand and Robinson Jeffers
are major figures in American writing. It is somehow characteristic that
Gottfried Benn, actually the most important German poet after Haupt·
mann to come to terms with the Nazis, is not mentioned.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
THE DISCUSSION WAS LIVELY
THE INTENT OF THE CRITIC. By Edmund Wilson, Norman Foerster,
John Crowe Ransom, W. H. Auden. Edited, with an introduction,
by
Donald A. Stauffer. Princeton University Press.
$2.50.
This book is made up of lectures on criticism delivered serially at
Princeton, and it is better than such books usually are. Four important
critical positions are defended by four resourceful critics in papers which
on the whole are freshly conceived. Only Mr. Foerster's lecture on Neo·
Humanism has the taste of a warmed-over dish.
The principal disagreement occurs in connection not with methods of
criticism but with the question of its function in the community; and from
this point of view the alignments are curious. Auden, the modernist poet,
and Foerster, the academic conservative, both conceive the Good Critic as
a sort of cultural hero. To Auden, preoccupied as always with the teacher–
student relationship, the Critic is a Promethean tutor, an individual who
protects the liberties of the masses by broadcasting knowledge; whereas
Mr. Foerster's Critic is more of a sage, concerned with keeping alive the
quintessential wisdom of the ages. Both views clearly derive from a 19th
century prepossession according to which the man of letters substitutes
for the priest in· the non-religious modern world. Indeed the priest is still
in the background in Foerster's plan: you can have him
if
you want him:
Mr. Foerster as man of letters will abdicate at any minute. But apart from
having a common origin, Auden's and Foerster's programs differ pro–
foundly. Towards science and the systematic use of the intellect in gen–
eral, Auden is warmly receptive where Foerster is at best suspicious.
If
the neo-humanist has any advantage over the poet it is in the formal
coherence of his views: Foerster works in a tradition, or at any rate a suh·
tradition. But Auden's declarations have a loudly improvised and emer-
