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Wilson's best work. The book is both commanding and ingratiating,
and marvelously benefits by depending on his particular kind of narra–
tive criticism-a criticism valuable not only for its judgments and the
solid learning behind it but for its power of evoking the character and
setting of a writer, a literary work, or a whole culture, and of giving
at the same time a sense of their fate in history. The book reinforces
one's feeling that Mr. Wilson has always been at his best as an occasional
writer, a
causeur
of the most pleasing and exciting but also of the
weightiest and most enduring kind.
It
is not true, as it has become
the custom among some critics to say, that Wilson's work comes in the
end to nothing definable or formidable.
It
does-it is the best and fullest
expression of the American school of critical realism, which distantly be–
gins
in
the work of Walt Whitman and which in Wilson's essays achieves
an intellectual discipline and cosmopolitanism and broadens out into a
definitive statement of the liberal, experimental, receptive, curious, skep–
tical, language-loving democratic mind. (I am not convinced by the
argument, sometimes suggested by Mr. Wilson himself, that he has a
close affinity with Taine, except as he rivals Taine's power of narrative
representation- for example, Wilson has never set out to apprehend a
whole national literature as Taine did in his history of English letters.
Nor does he very much resemble Saintsbury, whom he has sometimes
wished to emulate in mediating among world literatures.)
Even though made up of occasional pieces,
The Shores of Light
is
more unified than a book like
The Triple Thinkers,
at the same time
that it is less hampered by that laboring after dubious abstract historical
and philosophical formulations which makes
To the Finland Station
and
Axel's Castle-excellent
books as these are-somewhat creak at
the joints. Mr. Wilson's historical method serves him brilliantly as a
device of narrative criticism and as a device for understanding the con–
texts of literature, but he has been a little mistaken in feeling a duty
to go in for systematic historical speculation, the results having often
been commonplace. I do not mean that Mr. Wilson has no power of
historical generalization; he has. Yet it seems to me that this power
is most valuably employed when it moves, not toward the bodiless and
gratuitous abstractions of "academic" or Marxist thought, but toward
an elegiac or Virgilian view of man's fate in history. Nor is this a late
development in Mr. Wilson's work. Let me cite (partly for the pleasure
of the language) his admirable essay called "A Preface to Persius,"
written in 1927:
The discord and chaos of reality! From the point of view of civilization,
the whole of the West had caved in. The geographical void of Europe
