472
PARTISAN REVIEW
was torn between the gods of Love and Force. Out of these ambivalences
(and a thousand others) came the Hero, the man who fused thought
with action, the man beyond good and evil who allied himself with Des–
tiny, who was in himself the resolution of
~
civilization's dilemmas. Mr.
Bentley sees most of the dangers in Hero-worship, and when one of his
authors is wrong, Mr. Bentley usually sees that he is. So much is all to
the good.
There is in this book, however, a certain obtuseness of sensibility,
which I did not fully discern until I reached the section on Shaw. Shaw
is an embarrassment to the book. We are toid first that he is really
not
an H eroic Vitalist, but we do not learn what h e
is,
except that somehow
he is a "militant democrat" and "pragmatist," nearly (so it seems) in–
distinguishable in method from William James. Mr. Bentley is right in
saying that the Heroic Vitalists were forerunners of James because they
tried to cut through dichotomies, to "accept the universe," to deepen
psychology, and to discover the function of the superior individual. But
can we believe that Bentley is possessed of the generous, civilizing spirit
of James' pragmatism when he tells us in effect that Shaw is a pragmatist
because his Joan of Arc "has capability" and an "eye for artillery" and
(apparently ) because Shaw admires Stalin more than he admires Mus–
solini ? (The
pas~age
about Stalin is exceptionally muddled, partly be-
\ cause we do not know which are Shaw's opinions and which Bentley's,
~
and partly because Bentley's styl.z..._degenerates into etubnt
and~steri
ous anathemas
aga_ip~ols"
and ''these lig<;!rals" and Shelley's hatred
of power politics.)
Nor do I think that it is in the spmt of pragmatism to talk
so easily, as Mr. Bentley docs throughout, of the need for men who can
"create new values"-as if values were not involved in the world but only
legislated by superior men . There is, to be sure, a precedent in James'
own praise of Carlyle (in "The Dilemma of Determinism") for Bentley's
insistence that esthetic standards should
b~
kept out of moral problems,
but I think this is a mistaken idea : they can be kept out only by force.
And that Bentley is sometimes at war with esthetic standards is hinted
in his tangential remark that
T.
S. Eliot's essays are "precious" and that
coterie magazines "and the !ike" arc "immodest." The question we ougnt
to raise here is not whether
T.
S. Eliot is precious but whether Mr.
, Bentley is able to distinguish between "precious" and "esthetic."
If
he is
not, then we shall have to suspect that heroic vitality and not the human
mind is making judgments in this book.
A Century of Hero-Worship,
having suggested how to resolve so
many ambivalences, leaves the reader with a new one: his admiration
for the author's intellectual dash and first-rate biographical powers, and
his reservations about the working of the author's moral and esthetic
sensibility.
RICHARD CHASE
