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pendence. Whether romantic or symbolistic, they wrote no masterpieces;
the relative immaturity of the American literary tradition cannot be
denied. But as symbolists they look forward to one of the most sophisti–
cated movements in literary history; however inexpert, they broaden the
possibilities of literature.
This, in the teeth of
The Scarlet Letter,
Moby
Dick,
"When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd," etc. etc. (And why does Mr. Feidelson take
no notice of Emily Dickinson?) For the paradox is that the relatively
immature literary tradition of nineteenth-century America
did
contain
individual masterpieces which can stand on their own feet without justi–
fication from later developments in twentieth-century literature. That is
the "problem" of American literature with which the critic must begin.
Because Mr. Feidelson fails to see this, he continually makes too much
of insignificant works and too little of great ones. Because he fails to
feel it, his analyses rarely seem to take off from the effect of the novel
or poem on the reader. He provides insight and illumination as a phi–
losopher (particularly in the brilliant section on the relation between
Puritanism and language). But as a practical critic, he is abstract and
conventional, often to the point of reading the texts as though they were
tentative experiments which have by now been superseded and which
are chiefly interesting for the picture they provide of minds desperately
struggling with epistemological problems that a more fortunate age has
solved.
Norman Podhoretz
HUMANIST EXISTENTIALISM
THE ORIGIN AND GOAL OF HISTORY. By Kerl Jespers. Yele Univer–
sity Press. $4.00.
The role of Karl Jaspers in the existentialist movement has
been primarily one of interpretation and mediation. As with other ex–
istentialists, his most conspicuous initial motivation is a sense of horror
at the disappearance of human autonomy and responsibility in the mass
society produced by the industrial revolution; but his writing displays
little of that acutely personal sense of loneliness and anxiety which per–
vades the work of his masters, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He has set
out instead to evaluate and modify their insights by linking them with
the previous tradition of Western thought.
Existentialist metaphysics starts from the proposition that since the
dualism of subject and object in the knowing process is unsurmountable,
man cannot regard either his own being or the totality of the universe
