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had been too big for Rome to fill; and then later-to change the
metaphor, as my wine made it easy to do-when plantations that had
been ploughed under had scattered their seed abroad, and at last there
had been bred all through Europe such a race as had formerly flourished
only on the Mediterranean, a new race to whom Persius could speak as
men of his own education-when this had been achieved, there opened,
as it were in another dimension, a new void, the social void, below
the class of educated people to which Persius and Drummond [Persius'
eighteenth-century editor] belonged, and into that yawning gulf of
illiteracy and mean ambitions, even while Drummond wrote-the book
was dated 1797-Europe heavily and dully sank, not without some loud
crackings of her structure. America, in a sense, was that gulf.
I do not always agree with Mr. Wilson's critical realism, although
I am with him broadly speaking. He shares with a great many lesser
critics a compulsion to require of literature that it should have the
immediate "authenticity" of physical, social or historical actuality (and
that it should be entirely free of "puritanism"). This view tempts the
critic to leave out of consideration or to misconceive all of that inter–
esting literature, some of it American, which has a kinship with the
lyric, the romance, the allegory, and the morality play. Yet Wilson's
love of literature and his fine sensibility usually save him from the doc–
trinaire exclusions of other realists; for example, there is his momentous
defense of Henry James in 1925 against the attack of Van Wyck
Brooks. And whatever one's reservations about realism, one must agree
that the following reflection may be applied to all literature of what–
ever kind: "That was the paradox of literature: provoked only by the
anomalies of reality, by its discord, its chaos, its pain, it attempted,
from poetry to metaphysics, to impose on that chaos some order, to
find some resolution for that discord, to render that pain acceptable–
to strike some permanent mark of the mind on the mysterious flux of
experience which escapes beneath our hand."
It
is regrettable that so many young critics nowadays dismiss or
patronize Wilson's work because it appears to deploy itself too un–
tidily in the world, to lack the certitude of system, to exude no whiff
of the Ultimate, and to have too little of the arduous and demon–
gnawed spiritual look-regrettable too that the younger critics who fol–
low his lead find it hard to do so without either sentimentalizing his
worldliness or losing the demiurgic excitement of his writing in the
process of emulating its rationalism and historicism. Yet all this attests
to Mr. Wilson's pre-eminence, and it ought to remind us that we have
not been going to school to him as regularly as we should.
Richard Chase
