140
GEORGE LEVINE
The impressiveness of Gross's having read all that stuff and having en–
capsulated it so reasonably begins to wear, and it becomes necessary to
consider where all this material is going or - perhaps more precisely–
where it is coming from. Why this preoccupation with fairness and
justice to second-line talents?
The clues have been there in the very judiciousness of the writing
from the earliest pages and in the implicit melancholy of the terse fore–
word, which notes the diminishing of value implicit in the phrase "man
of letters" since the early nineteenth century, and the "disintegration" of
nineteenth-century literary culture. The judiciousness is sustained by a
fragile sense of loss which pervades the whole book. The discussions of
writers seem to get more and more gossipy and increasingly like capsules
with some exceptions to
be
noted) as we approach our own time.
This
is partly, I suppose, because so many of the later writers are less interest–
ing than Jeffrey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Arnold. Which either justifies
the melancholy or suggests a false principle of selection.
Gross's judicious manner is a cross between Arnoldian urbanity
(with all the complications implicit in Arnold's profound and unequivocal
feelings about his own culture) and the pseudo-scientism of the academic
dissertation (a quality which Gross implicitly rejects with some energy).
He has a subject which might have made an ambitious dissertation and
he brings to it a range of reading which very few Ph.D. candidates are
likely to be able to match. But he writes in a voice which is almost a
self-conscious rejection of the academic world and of its almost inevitable
barbarisms: no footnotes (or, at least, no pedantic ones), no pompous
circumlocutions or objectivities. However it equivocates about the values
of the academy, this book is undeniably antiacademic. For the academic
study of literature makes it a professional, specialist activity and with–
draws it from the world of humane generalities and cornmon culture and
ordinary readers in which it seemed to live-in however qualified the
mode-in the days when the
Edinburgh Review
gained its popularity.
(The dust jacket reminds us that Gross is not affiliated
with
any
academy.)
But it is also antiantiacademic. In the world as it is now constructed,
the academy is the only place in which literary traditions are institu–
tionally protected. The academy is a refuge, not only for the study of
literature but for poets and men of letters, for writers whose activities
the world no longer seems particularly interested in supporting. And there
is an implicit and largely reasonable argument that it is absurd for
people within the academies to be taking antiacademic stands while being
paid by the academies for doing so. The sane liberal tradition, which it
is increasingly evident that Gross stands for, finds that kind of activity
neither sane nor liberal.
