70
PARTISAN REVIEW
"second-best" book, and unable to say openly that
Clarel
is a stuffed
and badly written poem, Mr. Chase tells us that if it were "merci–
lessly compressed, it would sound a great deal like T. S. Eliot's
Waste
Land"-a
judgment that seems to me meaningless, for the poetic
styles of the two works are antithetical, and works are not rendered
alike by being reduced to common size.
Insofar as it exists in action, The New Liberalism is the intellec–
tual wing of the party now in power, and to judge from Mr. Schlesing–
er's
The Vital Center,
sees nothing wrong with that master Con–
fidence Man, F.D.R., admires Theodore Roosevelt, and scorns "uto–
pians and wailers" who protest the abuses of power. But generally, its
approach to life is through literature, for The New Liberal has usually
not made his mind up about religion, knows little philosophy or
science, and (almost always) is loftily superior to politics. Yet he
does not present literature itself as an experience; he reduces the
artist to his myths or ideologies or structural stratagems- that is, he
rewrites the artist in his own favorite personification as Tiresias the
Universal Savant, or the almighty critic, who is a little contemptuous
of King Oedipus the artist for carrying on so, or what Mr. Chase at
one point irritably calls Melville's "clumsy emotions." And
if
need be,
he sacrifices the truth of his own experience, the experience with which
he directly receives the artist's work, to the charms of a moral lesson
or Personification. This is Mr. Chase, when he tells us that
(CClarel
is not a supremely contrived poem, but there is a certain order and
felicity in the symbols." Or that "reading and rereading
Pierre,
we
find that its meanings proliferate and its texture becomes rich."
As
this is put
("and
its texture becomes rich"), one might infer that
the texture of a work grows in proportion to the "meanings" we dis–
engage from it. But obviously "meanings" in a work of
art,
or any
other human experience, can be of different value. And even if they
"proliferate" in the critic's mind, it is still his first responsibility to
show whether, and how, they are actively felt in the developmental
structure and stylistic vision of the book, and how deeply they are
realized in the imagination of the writer and the reader. Art is hardly
the whole of reality, but
it
is a form of love, or perfected communica–
tion, in which everything depends on what is given and received be–
tween one person and another. "Texture" is not a gross total of
"meanings"; it is the intermediate sphere between the final aim of
