HAWTHORNE
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archaic human faculties which have been overlaid by civilization and
deeply hidden.
My reference to its belief in the "primitive" nature of literature
will tell us only a little about the very large and very complex intention
of modern criticism. But it may serve to remind us that the critical
movement, in its diverse groups and parties, set itself up in opposition
to what a social psychologist has called the "respect revolution" of our
time. The phrase refers to the culture of democratic-capitalist in–
dustrialism and to that culture's devaluation of certain traditional
ideas, modes of life, personnels, qualities of art, etc. The conception
of art as "primitive," as taking its rise in an older mode of life, may
be thought of as a way of challenging those aspects of the "respect
revolution" which were rationalistic, positivistic, vulgar, and concerned
with superficial and transitory rather than with deep and permanent
things.
The phrase I have borrowed, awkward and jargonistic as it is,
may serve to' propose the thought that cultural impulses stand in the
closest proximity to social impulses and are often scarcely to be
distinguished from them- to speak of the "respect revolution" may
remind us that a strong cultural preference has much in common with
social antagonism.
1
The translation of modes of thought and of
artistic imagination into modes of social antagonism, or the other
way around, is natural and inevitable in our day, and of course it
was practiced by the members of the critical movement itself. Everyone
is aware of how important in his thought about poetry Mr. Eliot's
social and political ideas were; in America many practitioners of the
New Criticism took positions more or less like Mr. Eliot's, and the
instance of Dr. Leavis reminds us that within the movement- which is
by no means to be thought of as wholly defined by the work of the
New Critics- there were sharp antagonisms of social preference, al–
though at this distance in time the differences between one party and
another are perhaps already of less importance than the antagonism
1.
An example which, although it is not drawn from the critical movement, is
relevant to our subject is V. L. Parrington's representation of Hawthorne as
being virtually an enemy of the common people because of the delicacy of his
art, his concern
with
the inner life and the problem of evil, and his coldness
to the enthusiasms of Transcendentalism, which Parrington describes as "the
revolutionary criticism that was eager to pul! down the old temples to make
room for nobler."
