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ending with the emergence of the film as a powerful new medium and
the impact of the democratization of culture in the twentieth century
(p. 958).
Since the vastness of Mr. Hauser's undertaking has imposed a
rigorous selectivity, a reviewer's consideration of it must of necessity
also be highly selective. One can hope to discuss only some aspects of
the work he has produced. The particulars of his approach to painting
I shall leave to the critics in that field, making what I can of his in–
terpretation of literary figures and movements, his general method, and
a few of the leading ideas he has put to use in integrating his material.
For Mr. Hauser the key word is "history" not because he is literally
engaged in writing a history of art but rather because in his view the
modern conception of history is the heuristic principle
par excellence.
This puts him into the camp of the historicists, to be sure, but scarcely
into the camp of the academic practitioners of the "historical method."
Our "new critics" have by now nearly succeeded in discrediting that
method, and one should go along with them insofar as their motive
is to devise a more adequate mode of teaching literature and writing
about it. At the same time, however, one is appalled by the intellectual
naivete manifest
in
their failure to distinguish between creative historical
insight (as you find it in such diverse thinkers as Herder, Goethe,
Marx, Nietzsche and Toynbee, or, for that matter, in
T.
S. Eliot at his
empirical best or a fine scholar-critic like Erich Auerbach) and the
"historical method" of the old-time professors, whose laborious tracing
of sources and mechanical accumulation of historical facts for their
own sake is at its best merely a form of documentation, no matter how
useful, and at its worst a form of antiquarianism.
If
the "purpose of
historical research is to understand the present," as Mr. Hauser main–
tains, then the academic researchers in literature evade that task by
retreating into the sheer facticity of the past. The "new critics," on the
other hand, converge on the literary text, which, after all, regardless
of the age it was composed in, is in a sense a piece of irreducible pre–
sentness. Their attachment to the text is what is appealing about the
"new critics"; what is unappealing is their neglect of context. Only in the
medium of historical time is that context to be apprehended; and there
is a dialectical relation between text and context, which, if ignored in
principle, must eventually lead to the impoverishment of the critical
faculty and a devitalized sense of literary art. Thus in the long run the
neglect of context is paid for by the increasing misuse and misreading of
the text itself. For the historicity of a tcxt is inextricably involved in its
nature and function, just as it is involved in the nature and function of
