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CRITICS AND CRITICS
UNLUCKY J.
I.
M.
EIGHT MODERN WRITERS. By
J .
I.
M. Stewort. Oxford University
Press. $11 .00.
Unlike the literary critic, who deals largely in living opinions,
the literary historian is condemned to facts. But what, other than bio–
graphical and bibliographical data, are the facts of literary history?
Solidified opinions: opinions that have achieved the permanence, definite–
ness, and respectability of marble, but also its ponderousness. The literary
historian of the past runs the risk of too readily accepting the inertness
of his matter and becoming academic, or unduly rebelling against it
and becoming eccentric. Yet these are small hazards compared to those
of the historian of the present, who is obliged to sculpture in flesh, or,
to change the image, build inverted binoculars into his eyes-for there
must be distancing, however artificial.
In writing the concluding volume of the
Oxford History of English
Literature,
J.
I. M. Stewart has tried to lick his problem by refusing
to some extent the role of historian and partly espousing that of critic:
a volume entitled
Eight Modem Writers
obviously departs from what
was originally announced as
Modem Literature.
By the very act of ex–
clusion, Professor Stewart becomes a critic rather than a historian. Or
does he? Let us consider what Stewart's omissions imply-besides, of
course, less work for him.
He tells us, first, that he excluded living writers-hence no Pound,
Eliot, Auden, and none of the great recent dead-an act conformable
neither to good critical judgment nor to sound historical practice.
If
one
is going to worry about Stewart's "mists of near-contemporaneity," one
might as well omit Yeats and Joyce and Lawrence. The inclusion of
writers of "unchallengeable importance" only, though congruous with
certain notions of literary history, is scarcely more commendable than
its opposite, which, alas, also exists: we remember the
normaliens,
Lanson
and Momet, who, considering minor works more representative of a
period than major ones, ended up weltering in mediocrities. Mr. Stewart
contends that what he modestly "attempted is a volume that may serve