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Mr. Blackmur avoids this danger with admirable dexterity; only in the
essay on Babbitt does one feel that the terms of the dialectic never quite
mesh with the intellectual issues of Humanist doctrine.
Mr. Blackmur's dialectic, however, is not used only as a scaffolding
for his studies of individual figures. It also receives a more concrete
aesthetic application in his outline for a theory of literature, as well
as
in
an important essay on the later novels of Henry James where Mr.
Blackmur revises some of his earlier ideas about form in fiction. The
symbolic imagination, we have been told, is at work in literature and
the arts; and Mr. Blackmur, naturally enough, sees the arts as a theoretic
form (he takes the term from Croce) creating "the sort of order which
is responsive to every movement of behavior and every pulse of inspira–
tion: an order which gives room to fresh disorder whenever it occurs."
Mr. Blackmur's theory of literature turns out to be a series of brilliant
verbal variations on this idea, rising to a vision of life itself viewed as
an eternal contest between "the two realities of aspiration and behavior."
As Mr. Blackmur himself remarks, this essay is "a kind of critical poem"
rather than a discursive effort; and one fears that it will suffer the fre–
quent fate of such hybrids by not being entirely satisfactory either to
lovers of poetry or of the intellect.
Far more fruitful is Mr. Blackmur's use of his dialectic in the
James essay. Having defined the dialectic as "the form of life itself,"
or the underlying classic form of life, Mr. Blackmur goes on to argue
that individual novels each depict "a particular struggle between man–
ners and behavior, between the ideal insight and the actual momentum
in which the form of life is found." And just as Mr. Blackmur has re–
jected the pretension of any one perspective on reality to be absolute,
so now he rejects the same claim for any one method of objectifying
this underlying classic form and giving it artistic shape. No one tech–
nique or executive form is an absolute standard for the novel; and the
interest of this assertion is heightened by other essays in the present
book in which we can trace the course of Mr. Blackmur's thought on
this key question. For Mr. Blackmur's masterly study of James's Prefaces,
written in 1934, did more than any single work except Percy Lubbock's
The Craft of Fiction
to canonize the Jamesian conception of dramatic
form in the novel-a conception derived, as James himself was never
tired of explaining, from the drama and the plastic arts. This criterion
of dramatic form is the one that the New Criticism advocated when
it paid attention to the novel at all; and Mr. Blackmur has been one
of its most zealous defenders.
But already in 1938,
in
a study of the craft of Melville, the canker
of doubt had begun to fester. Mr. Blackmur here puzzles over the prob-
