PARTISAN REVIEW
ship between English society and its literature. For all its excesses, per–
haps even to some extent because of them, it was a far more exciting
book than this present one.
It
is passion that we are lacking here (and of course not in Daiches
alone)-the passion of commitment, of what is now called engagement;
the passion which can never be a surrogate for criticism but without
which criticism is almost always a dead duck. Somewhere in his con–
sciousness Daiches is disturbed by this lack, for he occasionally writes a
sentence that repudiates his whole approach. "Literary criticism," he
says, "is always exaggerated, always metaphorical, always an oversimpli–
fication"-and, he might have added, often polemical. But to exag–
gerate, to oversimplify, to polemize one must have some pressing and
uncontainable idea or feeling about the relationship between literature
and experience, an idea or feeling that far transcends the mere recogni–
tion that there
is
such a relationship; and this Daiches, seemingly wary of
repeating the sociological excesses of his youthful criticism, now lacks.
Daiches repeatedly warns us that critical judgment must rest on
aesthetic grounds alone, which is beyond dispute. But what I should
have wished him to add, and to add without hesitation, is that the
engaged critic can never content himself, is in fact never able to content
himself with only a literary judgement. The act of criticism is always,
necessarily "impure," for the best critics, addressing themselves to their
peers rather than to students, must write out of a pressing tension be–
tween their judgment of the work of art and their "larger interest," be
it politics, religion, the writing of poetry or what have you. Such a
situation, no doubt, always involves the danger that the extra-literary
concern will be surreptitiously substituted for the critical judgment, but
the price one usually pays for avoiding that danger is sterility. In any
case, it is a danger that hardly seems prevalent today. Ten years ago
it was considered necessary, and with some justice, to insist that the
critic learn how to "get into" the work of art, but today, I think, it is
necessary for the critic, once having gotten into it, to learn how to
"get out" of a work of art, so that he may simultaneously be in and out
of it, his vision focused, at whatever peril, on both the work of art and
the world.
In these terms, Daiches' "middle path" hardly seems inviting at the
moment. Perhaps I have been unfair in making his little book the oc–
casion for these general remarks, but perhaps too it is a significant com–
ment on his book that it leads one away from itself and towards .such
larger considerations.
Irving Howe
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