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PARTISAN REVIEW
in office unless they have an invigorating awareness of the power,
and of the superior foot-work, of the third-rate mind.
As for literary criticism, we here encounter a stench and murk
not unlike that of a battlefield three days after the fighting is over
and the armies have departed. Yet in this war nobody has sug–
gested that criticism is one of the social sciences, except a few Marx–
ists, who tried fifteen years ago to make it a branch of sociology.
History not long ago became a social science, and saved its life by
losing it; and there
is
no reason why sociology "oriented" toward
literature should not
be
likewise promoted, to the relief of every–
body concerned. And whatever criticism may be, we should perhaps
do well to keep it with the humanities, where it can profit by the
sad example of Hilaire Belloc's Jim, who failed "To keep ahold of
Nurse / For fear of getting something worse."
It may not be necessary to know what criticism is; it may be
quite enough to see that it is now being written, that a great deal
of it was written in the past, that it is concerned with one of the
chief objects of humanistic study: literature. And we therefore study
it either as an "area" in itself- that is, we offer courses in its history;
or as a human interest in some past age---that
is,
we use criticism
as one way of understanding the age of Johnson or the high Renais–
sance. Guided by the happy theory of spontaneous understanding
resulting from the collision of pure intelligence with its object-a
theory injected into American education by Charles W. Eliot-we
expose the student mind to "areas" of humanistic material, in the
confident belief that if it is exposed to enough "areas" it will learn
something.
If
we expose it to enough "areas" in all three grand
divisions, the spontaneous intelligence will automatically become
educated without thought.
The natural sciences have a high-powered rationale of their
daily conquests of nature. The social sciences have a slippery ana–
logical
2
metaphor to sustain their self-confidence. The humanities
modestly offer the vision of the historical lump. This lump is tossed
at the student mind, which is conceived as the miraculous com–
bination of the
tabula rasa
and innate powers of understanding. In
short, the humanities have no rationale. We suppose that it
is
suf–
ficient to show that a given work-a poem, a play, a critical "docu-
2. Analogous to the natural sciences.
