600
PARTISAN REVIEW
whiteness, when the latter
is
taken together
with
grayness. Actual
colors
are not much in evidence, except for lurid yellow and various shades
or red ; "The Masque of the Red Death" is the polychromatic exception
that proves the rule.
The pedantic innocence of these remarks is rather touching. Mr. Levin's
solemn assumption of significance, the total absence from his prose of
any hint of irony about the fragility, the tentativeness, the dubious and
peripheral importance of evidence of this order, his very use of the term
"statistical investigation," disclose his failure to conceive of literature
in any essentially critical, discriminating way. Writing about
Typee,
for example, he stops to remark that the narrator is welcomed by Poly–
nesian women "with jet-black tresses," as if this had some special
meaning, as if there might be blond Polynesians hiding in the coconut
trees, or something exceptional about dark haired ones. Or, referring
to Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea,
Mr. Levin portentouslyex–
tracts a passage in which the old man speaks of how the sun's reflecting
off the sea hurts his eyes and how he welcomes the relief of dusk–
as if literature never came near the naked irreducible facts of exper–
ience and there were nothing in it that should not be assimilated to
this chromatic metaphysics. With perfect seriousness he finds this to
say about Hawthorne: "Why should this blackness, which lifted for
the philosopher, have settled again so heavily on the romancer? The
year he spent measuring coal in the port of Boston will not suffice to
explain it." In short, Mr. Levin appears to have practically no sense
of what
is
relevant or irrelevant. Had Hawthorne ever shoveled snow
in a blizzard, measured flour in a grocery or dieted on black-eyed
peas
or black-strap molasses we would have been informed of that too. For
to Mr. Levin all things are of equal, indistinguishable weight and co–
gency. Like Polonius's cloud, which was humped like a camel, backed
like a weasel, and very like a whale, the blackness he discovers is
amiably protean; a black horse, a black night, a head of black hair, all
or any of them, regardless of the context in which they appear, have
a uniformly powerful authority of value. There is no surer way of re–
ducing a thesis to absurdity.
But one more example ought to
be
enough:
The symbolism of terror is universal. Otherwise, Death would not ride
a pale horse in Scripture, and the Ancient Mariner would never have
been bedeviled by an albatross. The glitter of Antarctic snow and ice
... was the single mystery that Poe had left unresolved. W. H. Hudson
would explain it
as
animism, "the mind's projection of itself into nature,"
our predisposition to be terrified by the exceptional. This may account
fDr
the
stinJ.\~lu~
it
lepds
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or
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