208
ship) transmuted the scientist's
matter-of-fact prose into the al–
chemy of art. Or one may look
into such concepts as the idea of
progress, primitivism, the relation
of the individual to society, or the
great chain of being itself; if one
studies primitivism, for example,
Melville may be related to Dio–
genes, Shakespeare, Thomas Gray,
Henry Miller, Coleridge, Jung,
and possibly Admiral Byrd. It will
be
seen that these are "philosophi–
cal" approaches, and one effect of
applying Lovejoy's categories is to
give the impression that all crea–
tive writers are really nothing but
frustrated philosophers. A gradu–
ate student of literature at Yale
recently remarked that in his
opinion
if
Melville had only had
the advantage of a university edu–
cation he would have written phi–
losophical treatises instead of nov–
els. As it was, he had to fall back
on literary makeshifts, which, of
course, have nothing to recom–
mend them except that they are
among the most beautiful and ex–
citing symbolic novels of all time.
(Melville is at present being pro–
cessed on a large scale by the
graduate schools.)
In the practice of literary schol–
arship the Lovejoy point of view
has been nearly always lugubrious.
It has inspired an attitude which
ranges from ultrarationalism to
sheer schizophrenia: any idea may
be taken out of any context, iden–
tified by name and date, and com–
pared with any other idea. One
loses all sense of the cultural thick–
et in which an idea actually lives;
one loses all sense of the evane-
PAR T
1
1SAN
R)
EVIEW
scence of ideas as they emerge from
the ground swell of emotion and
motive. "History" is not a matter
of tagging and arranging, nor (for
anyone interested in discussing lit–
erature) are "ideas" isolatable
from art and morality.
Sometimes, because it raises no
immediate moral issues, the His–
tory of Ideas is not actively harm–
ful. But sometimes it attempts to
moralize, and then it is likely to
get vicious. Lovejoy's manifesto in
the first issue of the
]
ournal
was
immediately followed by an essay
of Bertrand Russell's called "Byron
and the Modern World," in which
Byron's ideas are said to be re–
sponsible for Bismarck, the Kaiser,
and probably Hitler. "Ideas are
the most migratory things in 'the
world," says Lovejoy. They cer–
tainly are.
Anyone who understands litera–
ture instinctively regards a poem
as unique, a thing in itself (though
of course he must regard
it
in
other ways too) .
If
he does not
do this, how can it ever occur to
him that art has reality? How, in
the most comprehensive sense of
the word, can he
read
the poem or
teach anyone else to? But the His–
torian of Ideas never allows unique–
ness. A poem is always like some
other poem because they both
mention Plato. Similarly, no age is
unique. As Lovejoy said in trying to
minimize contemporary knowledge
about the unconscious, every age
exaggerates the uniqueness of its dis–
coveries. Some Historians of Ideas
will tell you that there is nothing
in Freud which can't be found in
Robert Burton. This refusal to rec-
