334
LIONEL TRILLING
To which the modern student of Hawthorne will say that his
author is a foxy fellow indeed, and go on to explain what "read"
really means, what is the extent of the necessary "trouble" that the
reader
will
have to give himself, and what constitutes the "proper
mood" in which the book is to be taken up. It is no secret how we
achieved our modern Hawthorne, our dark poet, charged with chthonic
knowledge, whose utterances are as ambiguous as those of any ancient
riddling oracle, multi-levelled and hidden and "capable of endless
extensions of meaning all.d of stimulating repeated analyses and inter–
pretations"-it is plain that the Hawthorne of our day came into being
at the behest of the famous movement of criticism that began some
forty years ago, that movement of criticism which James could know
nothing of, although he was to be one of its preeminent subjects.
And if we undertake to say how the critical movement put us
in
possession of our Hawthorne, we cannot be content to describe the
process only in terms of the good effects of "close reading." The
techniques of investigation and pedagogy which were employed by the
critical movement are of manifest importance, but an understanding of
modern criticism in its historical actuality requires that we be aware
of an intention which is anterior to every technique. That intention
was to give literature a new force and authority. Or perhaps we should
say that the intention was to support the new degree of force and
authority that literature was claiming for itself. The technical methods
of modern criticism are summed up for us in the famous footnote in
which Mr. Eliot told us that the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life.
But by this statement Mr. Eliot said something more than that the
enlightened reader must pay strict attention to the minute details of
literary art, or that criticism is not to be thought of as the adventures
of a soul among masterpieces. He was making a statement about the
nature of literature. We may understand him to have been saying
that literature E of a
primitive
nature. For although the allegiance to
"the letter" which he urged upon us will at first glance suggest
intellectuality, and an intellectuality of a rather haughty sort, and
something like a scientistic glorification of precision, qualities which
the critical movement in general does indeed often seem to claim for
itself, it is actually an expression of belief in the magical force and
authority of words and their arrangement, as in a charm or spell, an
expression of belief that literature characteristically makes its appeal to
