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confuse the functions is tragic. The tragic character of thought-as any
perspective will show-is that it takes a rigid mold too soon; chooses
destiny like a Calvinist, in infancy, instead of waiting slowly for old
age." Any perspective thus becomes tragic when, instead of being used
to illuminate some particular area of experience, it is clung to des–
perately as an absolute and literal truth.
This observation on the tragic character of thought is only an inci–
dental remark in
Language as Gesture.
But in
The Lion and the Honey–
comb
this idea, or rather a remarkable efflorescence of this idea, moves
into the center of Mr. Blackmur's critical preoccupations; and in essays
like those on Henry Adams, T . E. Lawrence and Irving Babbitt, we can
see how Mr. Blackmur has magnified this critical working principle
into a metaphysical dialectic. "To think straight,'' Mr. Blackmur writes,
"you must overshoot your mark"-which means that you must take
your doctrine literally for the whole truth while, at best, it can never
be more than a partial version of the truth. Every perspective is then
necessarily tragic when pushed to its limits, for at these limits "reason
falters and becomes abstract, or faith fails and pretends to be absolute."
Each perspective is thus like the hero in Hegel's theory of tragedy (to
which Mr. Blackmur's dialectic bears an intriguing resemblance), as–
serting its partial truth as absolute and being destroyed in the very act
of taking itself as omnipotent.
Under various guises, and with constantly shifting terms, this di–
alectic now provides the deepest driving force of Mr. Blackmur's cogita–
tions. Adams, as Mr. Blackmur depicts him, had the rare value of
pursuing his quest for an ultimate perspective on experience and know–
ing the necessity for its final failure. Irving Babbitt imposed and asserted
an abstract intellectual perspective whose blindness and inflexible dog–
matism was its own refutation. T. E. Lawrence, the most complex case
of all, did not assert any perspective as absolute but rather, as Mr. Black–
mur sees him, the absence of
all
perspective; and he forced himself to
the limits of degradation in an effort to achieve some sort of affirma–
tion through denial and self-nullification. In each case the dialectic be–
tween unity and chaos, or order and disorder, or orthodoxy and heresy,
controls the framework of Mr. Blackmur's reflections. And the sharp
edge of his criticism is inserted at the point where he senses an im–
balance between his two terms-a failure of orthodoxy to make room
for and absorb heresy, or a failure of chaos to keep alive some positive
ideal of order.
Once we have grasped the nature of Mr. Blackmur's dialectic, the
function and the value that he attributes to the symbolic imagination
