IS LITERARY CRITICISM POSSIBLE?
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supposing that his gift of elucidation is correspondingly impressive or
no good.
If
absolutely just elucidation were possible, it would also
be philosophically sound, even though the critic might elsewhere an–
nounce his adherence to a philosophy that we should want to question.
VIII.
If
the implicated judgment is made overt, is there not
in it an invitation to the reader to dismiss or to accept the work before
he has read it? Even though he "read" the work first? (Part of
this
question is dealt with in Thesis V . ) Is
a priori
judgment in the
long run inevitable? What unformulated assumption lurks, as in a
thicket, back of T. S. Eliot's unfavorable comparison of "Ripeness is
all" with
«E la sua voluntade
e
nostra pace»?
Is Shakespeare's sum–
mation of life naturalistic, pagan, and immature?
J.
V. Cunningham
has shown that "Ripeness is all" is a statement within the natural
law, quite as Christian as Dante's statement within the divine law. The
beacon of conceptual thought as end rather than means in criticism
is a standing menace to critical order because it is inevitable, human
nature being what it is. One thing that human nature is, is "fallen."
IX. In certain past ages there was no distinct activity of the
mind conscious of itself as literary criticism; for example, the age
of Sophocles and the age of Dante. In the age of Dante the
schoolmen held that poetry differed from scriptural revelation in
its
historia,
or fable, at which, in poetry, the literal event could be
part or even all fiction. But the other, higher meanings of poetry
might well be true, in spite of the fictional plot, if the poet had the
gift of anagogical, or spiritual, insight. Who was capable of knowing
when the poet had achieved this insight? Is literary criticism possible
without a criterion of absolute truth? Would a criterion of absolute
truth make literary criticism as we know it unnecessary? Can it have
a relevant criterion of truth without acknowledging an emergent
order of truth in its great subject matter, literature itself?
X . Literary criticism, like the Kingdom of God on earth, is
perpetually necessary and, in the very nature of its middle position
between imagination and philosophy, perpetually impossible. Like
man, literary criticism is nothing in itself; criticism, like man, em–
braces pure experience or exalts pure rationality at the price of ab–
dication from its dual nature. It is of the nature of man and of
criticism to occupy the intolerable position. Like man's, the intolerable
position of criticism has its own glory. I t is the only position that
it is ever likely to have.
