IS LITERARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE?
547
of giving the answer. Without this answer, we cannot hope to under–
stand the practical question: What is the place of criticism in the
humanities program; on what grounds should it be there (if
it
should be there at all), given the kind of education that the present
teachers of the humanities bring to their work?
The two questions, the theoretical and the practical, together
constitute the formal question; that is to say, whatever criticism and
the humanities may be, we should have to discuss their relation in
some such terms as I am suggesting. But before we follow this clue
we must address ourselves more candidly to the fact of our almost
total ignorance.
The three grand divisions of higher education in the United
States are, I believe, the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and
the Humanities. Of the first, I am entirely too ignorant to speak. Of
the social sciences I know little, and I am not entitled to suspect
that they do not really exist; I believe this in the long run because
I want to believe it, the actuality of a science of human societies be–
ing repellent to me, apart from its dubious scientific credentials. Of
the humanities, the division with which as poet and critic I am
presumably most concerned, one must speak with melancholy as well
as in ignorance. For into the humanistic bag we throw everything
that cannot qualify as a science, natural or social. This discrete
mixture of hot and cold, moist and dry, creates in the bag a vortex,
which emits a powerful wind of ineffectual heroics, somewhat as
follows: We humanists bring within the scope of the humanities all
the great records- sometimes we call them the remains: poetry,
drama, pre-scientific history (Herodotus,
J
oinville, Bede) --of the
experience of man
as
man; we are not concerned with him as verte–
brate, biped, mathematician, or priest. Precisely, reply the social
scientists; that is just what is wrong with you; you don't see that
man is not man, that he is merely a
junction;
and your records (or
remains) are so full of error that we are glad to relegate them to
professors of English, poets, and other dilettanti, those "former
people" who live in the Past. The Past, which we can neither smell,
see, taste, nor touch, was well labeled by our apostle, Mr. Carl Sand–
burg, as a bucket of ashes . . . No first-rate scientific mind is
guilty of this vulgarity. Yet as academic statesmen, the humanists
must also be practical politicians who know that they cannot stay
