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PARTISAN REVIEW
must be read, and the response can never be guaranteed. Most people
don't so arrange their lives that they "institutionalize" this acceptance
or rejection ; but writers do. I think it is Mrs. Woolf's insatiable desire
for praise which seems shocking : most people won't or can't express it
even if their desire is quite as desperate.
Wanting so much consideration, she was rarely able to say-and
believe
it-"Do Morgan and Tom and Desmond really matter?" In–
stead, "the pack may howl, but it shall never catch me"; and if "the
pack" means "reviewers, friends, and enemies," who else is left? It is
no discredit to Mr. WooIrs opinion, a very fine one indeed, to say
that she thought too much of it, as she did of all the opinions in her
circle. They were rare ones, some of them the very best of literary opin–
ions-who would not have valued "Tom" and "Morgan" on what one
wrote?-but they mattered to her
so much
that she struggled too hard
against them without the advantage of doing it openly, even in the
diary. I t seems a point of no small interest to note the word "d------d"
occurring.
T he wonder is that with this heavy burden of expected censure,
Virginia Woolf was able to write so much, that pearls did come out
of
this
pain . I have said nothing about her passion, her energy, her
persistence, and her extreme devotion to literature: those were extra–
ordinary. Nor have I mentioned her vision, her mysticism, her ideas of
time or reality: these are famous, and anyone who reads this review
will already have seen Miss Bowen's comments, Mr. Auden's, and Miss
Godden's, and should not need further persuasion. The diary enlightens
our ignorance only a little about that vision's springs of action, but
no diary could do more to suggest the private life which was contingent
upon that writing.
Sonya Rudikoff
SYMBOLISMAND /OR LITERATURE
SYMBOLISM AND AMERICAN LITERATURE. By Ch arles Feidelson, Jr.
University of Chi cago Press. $6.50.
Twenty years ago Edmund Wilson observed (in
Axel's
Castle)
that "by the middle of the century, the Romantic writers in the
United States-Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and even Emer–
son-were, for reasons which it would be interesting to determine, de–
veloping in the direction of Symbolism." Yvor Winters'
Maule's Curse–
in my opinion, still the most distinguished book in the field-was the first
noteworthy attempt to determine these interesting reasons. Winters was
wonderfully well equipped to write a study of symbolism in American
