IS LITERARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE?
549
ment"-came before or after some other poem, play, or critical
"document," or was written when something else was happening, like
Alexander's invasion of India or the defeat of the Armada. When
these .and other correlations are perceived, the result is understand–
ing. But the result of correlation is merely the possibility of further
correlation. Our modest capacity for true understanding is frustrated.
For the true rationale of humanistic study is now what it has always
been, even though now it is not only in decay, but dead. I allude to
the arts of rhetoric.
By rhetoric I mean the study and the use of the figurative lan–
guage of experience as the discipline by means of which men govern
their relations with one another in the light of truth. Rhetoric pre–
supposes the study of two prior disciplines, grammar and logic,
neither of which is much pursued today, except by specialists.
These disciplines are no longer prerequisite even to the study
of philosophy. An Eastern university offers a grandiose course in
Greek philosophical ideas to sophomores who will never know a
syllogism from a handsaw. A graduate student who, I was told, was
very brilliant in nuclear physics, decided that he wanted to take
a course in
The Divine Comedy.
(Why he wanted to study Dante
I do not know, but his humility was impressive.) I was assured by
the academic grapevine that he understood difficult mathematical
formulae, but one day in class he revealed the fact that he · could
neither define nor recognize a past participle. At the end of the
term he confessed that nobody had ever told him that the strategies
of language, or the arts of rhetoric, could be as important and exact–
ing a discipline as the theory of equations. He had thought courses
in English a little sissified; he had not been told that it might be pos–
sible, after severe application, to learn how to read. He had learned
to talk without effort in infancy, in a decadent democracy, and no
doubt supposed that grammar came of conditioning, and that he
would get it free.
Back of this homely exemplum stands a formidable specter
whose name is Cultural Decay-at a time when men are more
conscious of cultures than ever before, and stock their universities
and museums with lumps of cultures, like inert geological specimens
in a glass case. I am far from believing that a revival of the trivium,
or the three primary liberal arts, would bring the dead bodies to life:
revivals have a fatal incapacity to revive anything. But unless we
