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PARTISAN REVIEW
Gregory suspects it may be so, and the psychological implications would
be intriguing. But I doubt that it would be possible either to prove or
disprove that interpretation by reference to the fifteen essays to which,
says Mr. Gregory, the Shield of Achilles applies. And that I suppose, is
the fundamental criticism: no unified intensity of attitude throughout
the individual essays interprets the ambiguity.
Presumably, too, the Shield of Achilles
is
somehow connected with
what Mr. Gregory describes as the crux of his position, a "moral attitude
in regard to literature." The word "moral" is notoriously taken in a
variety of senses, some of which are certainly relevant to literature. But
which of them Mr. Gregory has in mind never becomes very clear, either
in the general description or in two essays which are said to be central,
those on Dr. Johnson and on Paul Elmer More. One gathers from the
Johnson essay that it has something to do with a tragic sense of life, and
something to do with religious devotion; but here there seems to be a
forcing of the evidence offered that leaves one wondering what is meant.
Mr. Gregory finds in the adaptation of Juvenal's
Vanity of Human
Wishes
evidence for Johnson's profoundly tragic sense of life, and in
his fine little elegy on Dr. Levet evidence for "the profound depths of
Johnson's piety": in what sense, one wonders, does Mr. Gregory use
"tragic sense" and "piety"? And if the Johnson essay leaves the criterion
a little uncertain, the essay on 1viore seems at pains to disown any
limit–
ing criteria at all. One assumes at the start, judging from the quotation
from the
Shelburne Essays,
that moral criticism has something to do
with absolute and permanent values; yet later Mr. Gregory blames More
for finding Baudelaire "unclean," and excuses him by arguing that he
was ill-equipped to read Symbolist poetry. I should think myself that
an attitude to literature presented as in some way different would need,
to be useful, to prove its bite by making some visible alteration in the
hierarchy of accepted values. Or at least I should like to know with
some precision what standards are operating. One can sympathize with
Mr. Gregory's distrust for dogmatic definition, and still feel that one's
own notion of a moral attitude in regard to literature is dissolving when
More is presented as realizing "the fulfillment of his moral 'truths' only
when he reduced the practices of moral criticism to the dignity and
seriousness of a fine art."
In general I should feel that a certain inflation had overtaken this
book in the course of elevating the day-to-day change of reviews and
commentaries into the dignity of a bank of issue. The communication
of a critical attitude requires either a core of judgment so central as to
make itself felt willy-nilly, or a patient concern with systematic defini–
tion, logic, and application. Neither seems to be the talent of this book;
its genuine virtues are a curiosity always disciplined by taste, and a
taste often sparked by intuitive perception.
ANDREWS WANNING
