THE UNRECONSTRUCTED ALLEN TATE
rigor is unusual enough when it keeps firm against the obvious beckons
of money, jobs, and public applause. It is even rarer when, in surplus,
it does not yield to the shifting fads and formulas that can so persuasively
be substituted for the genuine article of independent criticism. Small
wonder, then,
if
this stiff attitude is braced here and there with pig–
headedness.
There is little "development" in these essays; if the year of first
publication were not printed, it would be difficult to date them. In this
also Tate contrasts with most of his contemporaries, whose critical life
divides into easily recognizable "periods": Eliotism, Stalinism, Existen–
tialism, Organicism, Americanism, Journalism, and the others. Tate,
a generation ago, got hold of a car that seemed to
him
good for his
purposes; and he decided, evidently, to keep it repaired and going
rather than to make the customary trade-ins. Ironically enough, Tate's
resolute unfashionableness has not altogether prevented fashion, on
one of its fronts at least, from overtaking him. The academic world,
from universities to the Modern Language Association, began several
years ago to appoint Tate, and others (like Brooks, Ransom, Warren)
who
may loosely be grouped with him, as Professors, Heads of Depart–
ments, and featured speakers. This twist of the cycle holds some em–
barrassment for prophets who have been so harsh to the Philistines.
"I am told," Tate remarks in his present preface, "that the 'school' of
critics of which I have been said somewhat perplexingly to be a member
is
no longer a minority.
If
this be true, I am not sure that it is good for
me or for other members of the school, whoever they are; but I think it
scarcely true."
Like a good captain, Tate early chose his enemy. He defines, or
rather names him, as "positivism." The term is not used in the special
and narrow sense which is given to it by technical philosophy, but more
loosely, to refer to a rather mixed corps: pragmatism, empiricism, natural–
ism,
mechanism, technologism, scientism, historicism-in sum perhaps we
should say, "the modern spirit." Positivism, Mr. Tate's positivism, he judges
to
be
a heretical demi-religion which is essentially characterized, in all of
its
varied manifestations, by its reduction of reality and experience to
the service of the practical will. Implicit in this reduction is a denial of
objective "cognition," and an inability to justify the existence of poetry.
In the history of poetry and of poetic criticism, the inner spirit of posi–
tivism is latent in the Spenserian kind of allegorizing or in Tennyson's
"crude optimism" or in Arnold's moral criterion, as well as overt in
I.
A.
Richards' instruction to poetry to order our impulses. By an inver–
sion, positivism dominates the romantic movement. "The pure scientific
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