440
PARTISAN REVIEW
is the hostility to Whitman which is not diminished very much by
Emerson's brief praise, a hostility which Whitman describes in his
prose; or, on Whitman's part; his blindness to Melville and especially
Moby Dick;
or, the long misunderstanding, like a great wall of China,
which Henry James knew throughout his life not only in America but
from such a one as Turgenev, whom he admired very much, and from
H. G. Wells, whom he befriended, to which should be added James'
own lack of the power of recognition, which made him review
Leaves
of Grass
as he did, misunderstand Flaubert and Tolstoy, and cele·
brate, among the works of those he admlired, chiefly the weakest books,
particularly Edith Wharton's.
To continue, because the cond-ition of lack of recognition is an
important faot and a various one, there is the pathetic isolation of
Emily Dickinson; Henry Adams' view of Henry James as one unable
to write about women because he had not been
~rried
and his declara–
tion that John Hay was superi()r to both James and Howells; and,
when we come near the present, T. S. Eliot's sentences, reprinted in
this volume and not too distant from
Ja~s'
prof()und pages on Haw–
thorne and authorship in America, that James was not "a successful
literary critic," alth()ugh what James says of HaWithorne in America is
part ()f the explanation of Eliot's departure for Europe and his concern
with life in a f()Oming house and in "a rented house," not to speak
of royalism, classicism, and the anglo-cath()licism. Then there, too,
are the shocking remarks of V
ru.,
Wyck Brooks about Joyce and Eliot,
Eliot especially, of whom Brooks says that there is no evidence of
religious feeling in any of his W()rk!
Ag~st
this, the letters of
Sherwood Anderson which Wilson reprints and which expressed grati–
tude for Brooks' friendship seem' not only slight, but ambigu()US at
the end, when a silence ()f thirteen years succeeds a period of warmth
and intimate exchanges. One might mark out as a farcical height of
unrecognition the fact that Van Wyck Brooks attacks Yvor Winters,
unable to see that he is in the same trench with Winters, and not far
from Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, while for farcical and false
recognition we have Brooks' praise of
Cumming~~,
Faulkner, and
Aiken who are marked by the very qualities which make Brooks furi()US
with Joyce and Eliot. And then, for a truly spectacular example, what
was the shock of recognition, how did genius stand hand in hand,
when Gide rejected Proust's novel in 1914_? Where was the shock of
recognition in Eliot and Pound when they first saw
Finnegans Wake?
They had championed Joyce many times, but they felt that this new
work was nothing but self-indulgence.
Yet recognition exists also, however small next to unrecognition;
and of the valuable and indeed necessary part which recognition plays
~his
volUIIlle provides a full testimony. One might wish that Wilson
had als() included Pound's initial review of Eliot's first poems, a token
