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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Melville." I am glad that they have done so, for it saves me the
trouble of defending myself from those to whom it will seem that
I recommend an elaborate prostitution of the literary mind to trivi–
alitie;, to whom it will seem that I have suppressed and betrayed
art
by my emphasis on the local particularities of culture, and, if
not
art,
which I expressly exempted from consideration, then those
larger and finer and more transcendent matters to which the most
gifted intellectuals are naturally drawn. The recollection of Thoreau
and Melville will sustain me in my certitude that the kind of crit–
ical interest I am asking the intellectual to take in the life around
him
is a proper intere;t of the literary mind, and that it is the right
ground on which to approach transcendent things. More: it is
the right ground for art to grow in- for satire, for humor, for
irony, for despair, for tragedy, for the personal vision affirming it–
self against the institutional with the peculiar passionateness of
art.
Art, strange and sad as it may be to have to say it again, really is
the criticism of life.
