BOOKS
515
advised to leave them out altogether. In fact, a narrower concentration on
the cultural salient, with even most of the historical background material
omitted, would have given the book a sharper thrust and would have
allowed also a more complete coverage within the more restricted field.
It would
be
plea!!!ant to hope that some of those whose names are now
decorating the new Stalin letterheads, or will tomorrow, might learn from
The Red Decade.
Experience seems to show that they will not, that knowl·
edge here i.s won, if at all, only through something of more direct personal
impact than argument and evidence. The disease is too deep for merely
verbal treatment. What Lyons is in truth writing about, this ludicrous
and horrible suicide of a whole intellectual generation, is not the vagary
of individuals, but a phase in the death of a culture.
.
JAMES BURNHAM
WHOSE REVOLUTION? A STU,DY OF THE FUTURE COURSE OF
LIBERALISM IN THE UNITED STATES. By Roger Baldwin, Alfred
Bingham, /ames Burnham, John Cluzmberlain, Lewis Corey, Malcolm
Cowley, Granville Hicks, Hans Kohn, Eugene Lyons, Bertram D. Wolfe.
Edited by Irving DeWitt Talmadge. Hoswell, Soskin.
296
pp.
$2.50.
It is impossible to do justice to this volume in a single review. I have
therefore written three, as follows:
(1) What, no Horace M. Kallen?
(2) The characters are unreal and self·contradictory, the plot con·
fused, there is too much talk, not enough action, and practically no
suspense.
(3) This is where I came in six years ago. But the cast looks
different.
D.M.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM-STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC
ACTION. By Kenneth Burke. Louisiana State University Press.
455
pages.
$3.00.
Kenneth Burke's critical writings stimulate, provoke and unsettle me
-at least while I actually read them-but they leave too little impression.
A short time after putting Burke down, I shall have lost sight of exactly
what it was that caused the excitement. My memory is no better nor worse
than average, so I feel the fault must be his. Is it not because Burke fails
to deal enough with the work of literature, the object itself, and deals
instead with the modes, not of apprehending it, but of thinking about it?
(Has he given us many really fresh insights into literature? Even his
analysis of "The Ancient Mariner" seems to me a restatement in Freudian
terms of so much already well recognized in the poem.) And is it not that,
instead of discussing the processes by which we think about works of
literature, he discusses the terminology of these processes? I believe that
what Burke really does-and this is what excites us while we read-is
make articulate the more or less unconscious assumptions we generally
