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PARTISAN REVIEW
sonal anxiety, has been joined the peculiarly contemporary fear of
'mere' personal expressiveness. In our day, the real princelings of cri–
ticism have been those who can manage,
in
some way or other, to
sound like impersonal experts, and for whom the work before them
is always an occasion for technical analysis or some sovereign redefinition
of our lot."
These remarks are an expression of "the inmost leaf," the "inner–
most point of view," which Mr. Kazin himself brings to the study and
interpretation of literature. His "personal attitude" is suffused with
the subdued colors of a "humanistic, moral passion" and a quiet yearning
for the romantic democratic heritage of our culture. This means he is
not an academician; i.e., his criticism is not the type of scholarship in
which insights are buried under a debris of learnedness. He is not a
formalist, the oracular expert
par excellence,
whose pretense of scientific
objectivity and personal detachment is so frequently but an excuse for
reactionary prejudices or a threadbare cloak for religious obscurantism.
He is not a grass-roots populist or jingoist, nor is he obsessed with psy–
chological analysis
in
depth as the simple and sole key to the merit
and meaning of a work of art. Finally, he is not so enamored by the
critical enterprise, as some prominent liberal critics seem to be, that
he forgets that the primary function of criticism is to serve, rather than
supersede, the work of art.
Thus, in the division between the hard-headed and tender-hearted,
Mr. Kazin belongs to the latter. His criticism-as his style of writing–
is soft and mellow, humane and humanistic. It is "liberal" both in the
liberality of judgment and in the liberal concern for the free expression
of the imagination caught in art. It is faithful to the "creative function
of naturalism," to the memory of Spinoza, Darwin, Marx, Freud and
Dewey rather than to latter-day philosophical apostles and religious high
priests; but this naturalism is "moral," too, in its respect for the in–
tegrity and intrinsic worth of the artists' vision, in its sensitivity to the
complexity and ambiguity of human experience translated into the sym–
bols of art. Mr. Kazin's favorite expressions, and critical criteria, refer
to "experience" and "imagination" as the core of the artistic process,
to "moral passion" as against the "duplicity of the intellect," to "under–
standing" as something more than "ideas" and causal analysis, to the
"individual vision" of each writer as something which transcends per–
sonal background, social significance, and the clash of ideologies.
This "point of view" is very
sympathique,
perhaps precisely be–
cause it is an approach to literature which is rather old-fashioned,
