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language, law, religion, political institutions, etc. Nor is the historicity
of a text to be equated with any given series of historical facts. The
historical fact is as such no more than a neutral datum, whereas his–
toricity is a value created by the power of the historical imagination.
Nietzsche spoke of the historical sense as a new faculty of the mind,
a sixth sense. It is at once an analytic instrument and a bracing re–
source of the modern sensibility. To confuse it with conventional his–
torical studies is an elementary blunder.
It
has led the "new critics,"
particularly the men of the younger academic generation, who appear
to
be
bitten by the spirit of faction and the conceit of up-to-dateness
in method, to reject the historical appreciation of literary art,
replacing it with a narrow textual-formalistic approach which cannot
account for change and movement in literature and which systematically
eliminates ideas from criticism: and without ideas it is impossible to
connect the literary interest with other interests. Nor is an inflated and
abstruse terminology a substitute for ideas.
It
is mainly for the lack of
such connective ideas-which alone enable us to assimilate literature
to the historical world at large whence it comes and whither it longs
to return-that the "new criticism" has lately exposed itself to the
charge of sectarianism and downright tediousness. The complaint is
justified, I think, though it scarcely applies to such older critics as
Tate, Ransom, and Blackmur, whose virtues and faults are primarily
their own; they are intractably their own men, so marked in their in–
dividual character and high critical intelligence as not to fit neatly into
any school.
It
is the epigone-like disciples, coming upon the scene too
late to have absorbed the exhilarating literary spirit of the twenties, who
really make up the school of the "new criticism." And what, at bottom,
is that criticism, considered not in the sense of Ransom's book of that
title but in the sense of its actual practice during the past decade?
It
is
essentially an amalgam of diluted formalism and diluted traditionalism
(Eliot's version of it). I calI it an amalgam because its two elements are
artificially combined,
in
a forced congruity. The diluting results from
the domestication habitualIy enforced by the academy.
Where Mr. Hauser comes in after this digression is that his book,
like Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis,
so patently offers us at least one in–
structive alternative to critical sectarianism. The stimulative effect can
be
gauged by comparing Mr. Hauser's passages on such writers as
Balzac and Flaubert with the treatment of them in
The Novel in France,
a recent work by Mr. Martin TurnelI, who might be said to belong to
the British wing of the "new criticism." Mr. Turnell, attempting to
