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PARTISAN REVIEW
telligence can bring about a planned economy which "operates under
plural forms of participation and control." This is again merely pious
hope; and it is as abstract as the dictum that what is necessary for edu–
cation is a good theory of education and good teachers. Hook is precise,
concrete, and illuminating when he deals with the problems of educa–
tion as such. Here, where the problem is the very basis of education, his
only answer is that we must move toward a democratic society which
provides security for all; we must be intelligent, critical, and aware that
our choices and our actions may or may not modify the social process.
Undeniable as this recommendation is, it is also undeniable, as Hook
himself says, that in 1929 "the permanent crisis of American economy
began," which is to say that we remain faced with the irreducible fact
that education cannot be separated from the economy which supports it:
to preach democracy is not enough, although it is wrong not to preach
democracy. All the invocations of democracy, scientific method, courage,
and intelligence, all the piety and good will in the world, cannot get past
that permanent crisis in which, as Hook shows, the actuality of educa–
tion is involved. The extraordinary critical intelligence made manifest
in this book exists in the shadow of that permanent crisis.
At the same time, it must be said that this is one of the most im–
portant books on education in recent years.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
BAD THESIS, GOOD BOOK
THE PoET IN THE THEATRE.
By Ronald Peacock. Harcourt Brace.
$2.50.
I
T
SEEMS
that Mr. Peacock has written this book largely to deplore the
rise of naturalistic drama and to argue that the dramatic theory and
practice of T. S. Eliot afford a basis for something superior. Although
this thesis is widespread among literary people-something like it seems
to be implied in
Understanding Drama
by Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Heilman, for instance-it has never before been so boldly and explicitly
championed. Mr. Peacock really tries to make us feel more confidence
in
Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion,
and
(!)
The Trial of
a Judge,"
the three important English tragedies of the last twenty years,"
than we do in Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, Schnitzler, Wedekind,
Hauptmann, Gorky, and Becque. Of course one might say that the
naturalistic drama was all right in its way but that now it is finished and
must give place to poetic drama. That is roughly what John Palmer
said thirty years ago in his
The Future of the Theatre.
But it is not what
Mr. Peacock says. He finds naturalism bad in itself. In the naturalistic
