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study literature.
How does the modern world look
through graduate school windows?
We have at least one answer in
"The Downfall of Oratory," an
essay by the influential Shakespeare
scholar E. E. Stoll, of the Univer–
sity of Minnesota
(Journal of the
History of Ideas,
January 1946).
The argument is a familiar one in
graduate schools. Milton thought
that poetry was public speech;
Wordsworth said that a poet was
a man speaking to men; poetry is
therefore oratory. In other ages,
oratory has flourished; these were
good ages. In our age oratory does
not flourish; this is a bad age. We
discern so far two propositions,
but the relation between them is
never explained. Why was there
once a widely supported first-rate
literature? "Because," says Profes–
sor Stoll, "there was an audience."
This is the crucial fact and one
would expect an educator to ask,
How can we create a modern au–
dience through education?-the
great and desperate
task.
But this
question ·does not occur to Mr.
Stoll. He proceeds to blame the
disintegration of Western Society
on the fatal tendency of democracy
to produce anarchic cliques of ex–
clusive and- anti-oratorical aristo–
crats, such as the Junior League
and the readers of advanced mag–
azines, a situation which was hap–
pily though temporarily avoided
by the salubrious uniformity im–
posed by fascism in Germany and
Italy. "The gap is widening!" pro–
claims Mr. Stoll. The highbrow is
ever farther divorced from the
"ordinary public," and it
is
all the
PARTISAN REVIEW
fault of the Vanguard, who are
radicals, proletarians, sans-culottes,
rowdies, and outlaws guilty' of
anarchy, impudicity, and brutal–
ity. The Vanguard are those who
entertain the "superficial and im–
mature conception that a thinker
is an original, a rebel, or icono–
clast" ("thinker" is graduate–
schoolese for "artist" or "writer") .
Who are these Vanguardists? Well,
there are Joyce, Gertrude Stein,
MacLeish, Ransom, and poets
"such as Messrs. Crane, Cummings,
and Crosby." Possibly Ibsen was
the first thinker to be "deliberately
baffling." At any rate he belongs
to the Vanguard, as we ·see by
comparing him with Cicero, Chat–
ham, and Bossuet (anyone may
be compared with anyone).
Mter attacking the "highbrow
weeklies" and pointing out that
Ulysses
has no beginning and no
end and may be read backwards,
Mr. Stoll vilifies the Vanguard for
excluding the "common, ordinarily
educated man." He assumes here,
of course, that there
is
a modern
audience for "oratory." He was
right the first time: there is no
more than a desperately small au–
dience, either ·for Wordsworth or
Joyce, though our culture seems to
go on wistfully making citadels of
privilege out of our graduate
schools in the hope that they will
do something about it.
Stoll's essay betrays a nearly
complete ignorance of modern, and
indeed all, cultural problems; it
shows not the slightest conception
of the methods which the prob–
lems call for. It is written by a
man who (in this essay at least)
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