336
PARTISAN REVIEW
This is a difficult passage-Mr. Feidelson often writes on a level of ab–
straction which seems to indicate that he is reasoning from
a priori.
premises rather than describing his reactions to literature. It is hard,
for example, to imagine how anyone attending to the poem itself could
say that a work achieves "the immediate reality of symbol" by the
mere choice of a theme. What the poet does with this theme is the
crucial question; the choice by itself means little and can never consti–
tute an "acknowledgment" about language or anything else.
In any case, Mr. Feidelson appears to be saying that a symbolic
work is imperfect insofar as it deals with an object other than itself.
For he takes the aim of the early French Symbolists very seriously
in–
deed; literature must approach as nearly as possible to the condition of
music. But why should it? According to Mr. Feidelson, there were two
types of mind in the nineteenth century, the "romantic" and the "natur–
alistic." The one conceived of literature as "self-expression," the other
as "description." In time both of these "methods" were played out,
since both presupposed a dualistic universe (Blake? Coleridge? Words–
worth?) ; but new developments in philosophy showed dualism to be un–
tenable as well as ruinous. Symbolism bridges the Cartesian gap, pro–
ceeding on the premise that language is the "medium" in which subject
and object fuse. Thus it follows that the artist approaches reality by ex–
ploiting his medium, by worrying about the resources of language rather
than what he has to say. These are all notions made familiar by Eliot,
Blackmur, Ransom, Tate. Mr. Feidelson, however, seems to carry them
about as far as they can go, and by doing so exposes a few interesting
implications of the theory. I am thinking particularly of his admission
that the symbolic method itself is the characteristic theme of symbolic
art.
I cannot see how his claim that subject and object fuse
in
the
"medium" is
in
the least justified by this observation. Taken literally,
it would seem to damn the whole movement as sterile. For what on
earth ever happened to the object in this picture? Is it
really
hidden
in
the language? I agree that the fusion of subject and object is an
admissible way of describing one of the
things
achieved by a successful
poem, but in my opinion this is the product of an experience which
has been understood as coherent (form) and contemplated through the
detachment of the artist's vision.
Unlike Winters, then, who sees in symbolism another technique to
be
put into the service of an effort to understand our experience of the
world, Mr. Feidelson is the committed champion of a movement, re–
garding symbolism as an end in itself. Why all this faith in the healing
power of one narrowly defined literary school? Because Mr. Feidelson-
