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PARTISAN REVIEW
ards, he vulgarizes and debases his work.
Thus, instead of having today artists who
are also public men, as, to some extent,
were Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Goethe, etc.,
combining both personal and social ele–
ments in their own personality, we have
a fissure between the two, on the one
hand our Rilkes,
J
oyces, Eliots, and on
the other our Wellses, Priestleys, Sinclair
Lcwises and the like.
The problem of art, as P.R. so rightly
recognizes, cannot be considered in isola–
tion from the problem of society. More–
over, we do not need a change in art,
which would be suicide, but a change in
society. This is, of course, in process of
occurring. While it is doing so, it is the
job of the artist to stick to his guns, not
to compromise with society. My own be–
lief is that eventually the outer structure
of society will be brought into subordina–
tion to the human community, human
values will everywhere permeate all liv–
ing, the fissure between private and pub–
lic, personal and social, will be healed to
some extent. This is more, however, than
a literary matter. Meanwhile, perhaps
Henry Miller's contribution to your sym–
posium is the most relevant!
D.
s.
SAVAGE
DRV DRAYTON, ENGLAND
MYSTICISM AND YOGI-BOGEY
Sirs:
I find in Richard V. Chase's review of
Aldous Huxley's
Grey Eminence,
in your
recent number, this astonishing phrase:
... "Some of the current aberrations of
the bourgeois mind, such as religious
mysticism, for instance."
The book is open to criticism, but no
book can be properly examined without
a better knowledge of its subject-matter
than is indicated by this quotation and
other comments in the article.
When I was young it was not unusual
in the United States to hear "cultivated"
people laugh at the arts. I have lived to
see a change in this respect. For exam–
pie substitute
musical experience
for
re–
ligious mysticism
in the above quotation
and its absurdity is evident, but 40 years
ago I assure you that to many people
such would not have been the case. Yet
religious mysticism has lived ·· longer in
human records than music, and has cer–
tainly been dignified by as serious study.
Perhaps 40 years hence PARTISAN REVIEW
will hesitate, whatever its bias, to print
as unscholarly and uninformed an article
as that which calls itself Yogi-Bogey.
LENOX, MASS.
LETTER FROM A PRIEST
Sirs:
E_
SPACKMAN
As a fairly regular English reader of
your paper during the past two or three
years I should have liked to answer the
Questionnaire you issued a while back.
But I was afraid that my reply would not
reach you in time to be of any use to
you. And in any case what I should have
wanted to say could not appropriately
have been 'Procrustinated' into the nar–
row bed of a tabulated question-sheet. But
at least it would have assured you that
there was more than one priest, in Eng–
land at any rate, to be counted among
your readers. Indeed not only does my
copy go round to several others; but you
arr. the subject of fairly frequent (usual–
ly quarterly) discussion in a 'Comment
on Literary Periodicals' which appears in
the Anglican monthly journal
'Theology'
(obtainable also from S.P.C.K. in New
York).
Speaking for such theologically-minded
readers I should have said that we wel–
come your literary and critical articles
and reviews (such as the papers on Haw–
thorne and MacLeish) in their insistence
on quality and integrity above political
or other bias. We find the political arti–
cles (editorials, etc.) sometimes bafllingly
unrealistic, but at least the rather des–
perate Trotskyism is an attempt to
be
honest.
But I should also have asked whether
you could not sometimes find room to
give some indication how deeply- or
otherwise- the work of theological phil–
osophers and sociologists has impressed
the American mind. I can remember one
article on l\faritain which dealt ably
enough with superficial inconsistencies;
and one review of Eliot (Trilling on the
'Idea of a Christian Society') which did
brilliantly reveal the American reaction.
But such occasions are rare, in spite of
the number of books that have appeared
in recent years from such minds as Rein–
hold Niebuhr (whose Gifford Lectures
you are perhaps going to review), Paul
