BOO KS
707
of such great modem
"elegies"
as Frost's "Acquainted
with
the
Night"
has been as emphatic as Mr. Winters', the difference being that where
Mr.
Winters
invokes a tradition, Mr. Jarrell invokes a mystery, calling
in the Goethean daemon to confirm it.
In other words, Mr. Jarrell is one step further than Eliot and
Winters inside the Age of Criticism which he wants to, but can't quite
honestly, deplore. It would be callow, I suppose, to claim the '50s as
a potentially great critical era. On the other hand, it does offer oppor–
tunities for the kind of universality which results in an Aristotle or
Longinus. Criticism has a popular support and an
esprit de corps
which
somehow makes it immune from the ravages of summer conferences on
the State of Letters. It is just this Alexandrian state of affairs, this pos–
sibility of an Alexandria of the spirit surviving in the stately tumult of
a Roman world, which Mr. Jarrell's criticism reflects so clearly and
which makes him so uneasy. One of
his
daemon's names is surely Orig–
inal Creativity, that needful legacy of the romantics. The critic, he
pleads, is
really
as likable as that boy who died last year from unrequited
creativity. And so he is, as Mr. Jarrell proves. "Critics," he writes, "have
a wonderfully imposing look ... and the reader surely has his favorites
too, writers to whom he goes for style and wit and sermons, informal
essays, aesthetics, purple passages, confessions, aphorisms, wisdom-a
thousand things." "One occasionally encounters intellectual couples for
whom some critic has taken the place of the minister
they
no longer
have." But what does he imply? That we should acknowledge all this
and still despise ourselves? His remedy, after all, is a bit lame: "Around
the throne of God, where all angels read perfectly, there are no critics–
there is no need for them." Surely the critics will all be there, sending
their quarterly bulletins to Purgatory!
There seem to me at least two ways out of this dilemma; either,
like
Joyce,
to merge criticism and "creativity" into a grand melange of
F.
scon
FITZGERALD, The Man
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