BOO KS
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ultimate effect is that of the negation of time-a negation implying an
effort for the recovery of that inwardness for which we long in the
midst of our chaotic modernity.
Mr. Hauser evaluates writers and painters almost entirely by indirec–
tion, through a phenomenological description and analysis of the
worlds they wrested from chaos. He does not share the predilection of
contemporary Anglo-American criticism for the outright "ranking" of
artists in a strictly graded hierarchy of achievement. I have sometimes
wondered whether this passion for "ranking," for establishing with an
almost obsessive conscientiousness the exact degree of one writer's al–
leged superiority to another and his precise place in the hierarchy, does
not actually mask an inner uncertainty and even skepticism as to the
value of art altogether? A skepticism so threatening would naturally
seek compensation in ideas and procedures of a diametrically opposite
order, such as the fetishism of art and the urge to control the imaginative
process by setting up fixed and conclusive standards that are good for
all time and thus serve as a barrier to the nihilism of the age, which
affects everything and everybody, including the hierophants of
art
and
culture. Mr. Hauser's historicism enables him to resist the temptation
to idolize the art-object and to overestimate its saving power. But his
approach is not immune to the relativization of value inherent in his–
toricism. The peril is real, and his endeavor is to save himself by
plunging into the reality of history as into a restorative medium. While
not going so far as Ortega y Gasset, who has put forth the claim
that man has no nature but only a history, nevertheless his practice
throughout is to grasp all ideas and ideals by disclosing their historical
import, which thus becomes the main guaranty of their actuality.
The expository mode he adopts is that of the polyphonic organiza–
tion of historical themes, enormously varied in their bearing and sig–
nificance, dealt with not summarily but with extraordinary informedness
and wide-ranging scholarship, taking in all major art-movements and
coming to rest in the extended consideration of single figures who
might be said to sum up their time or to initiate the transition to a
new epoch. And at all points he is concerned with determining the
public status of the artist in any given period, the social value at–
tached to the phenomenon of art, the meaning of the idea of artistic
freedom and autonomy, and the evolution of the concept of genius. This
latter concept is so familiar to us that we tend to project it backward
into past ages, ascribing a permanence to it which it wholly lacks, since
it is thoroughly imbued with historical motives.
It
was foreign to the
Middle Ages, whose superpersonal, objective, and authoritarian culture
