PARTISAN REVIEW
139
THE SOFT MIDDLE
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MAN OF LETTERS. By
John Gross.
Macmillan. $8.95.
What could be more satisfying to writers than writing about
writers who write about writers? And John Gross's book, which traces
the fate of "the man of letters" from the days of the
Edinburgh Review
down close to our own time, has, not surprisingly, evoked some excep–
tionally long and most delighted reviews. Despite Gross's liberal con–
cessions that the man of letters occupies a rapidly shrinking space in the
intellectual world, both he and his reviewers seem to assume that the
shrinking is an extremely important and unhappy phenomenon. Yet to
anyone but the professional writer about writers it's probably much too
late
to
take his fate very seriously. It's difficult to escape the inference
that writing about writing about writing is little more than an act of
self-justification by indirection.
Gross, however, carefully adopts a voice and a strategy that osten–
sibly keeps him out of the trap of self-preoccupation and indulgence.
If
there is one word which Gross would like most to have used to describe
his
book, it is probably "judicious," a word freely used by the reviewers
to define Gross's virtues as the historian of his profession. His is the
voice of liberal sanity, indulging no enthusiasms and rejecting intolerance
of anything but intolerance itself. And his book is, therefore, one which
makes very few explicit cl,aims. Its characteristic movement is
to
set up
a balance sheet of virtues and defects in the writers it treats and to
weigh both sides of every problem it touches upon. Early on Gross says,
"It is hard for the reader not to feel in two minds about the reviews."
And the book remains consistently two-minded. But two-minded at the
expense of complexity; two-minded
in
a prose of apparently exemplary
clarity and assuredness.
And yet there is something askew in the narrative. The voice of
lucid, patient objectivity is nonetheless a
voice
-
with energies of its
own, responding to pressures that come from somewhere off the balance
sheets, and occasionally threatening to become imbalanced. After a
while - after Carlyle is revalued, Frederic Harrison redeemed from the
counterassaults of Matthew Arnold (himself impressively though judi–
ciously valued and undiminished) , after Saintsbury and Chesterton are
resurrected
in
a carefully qualified way
~
after all this and more, the
balance sheets - despite their clarity - become a bit irksome. The un–
relenting brief summaries of careers and qualities, turning always on
some sort of "but," which indicates that the virtues are diminished by
vices, the vices redeemed by virtues, become a little too much like ritual.
