PARTISAN REVIEW
141
Gross is nothing if not practical. He speaks for the tough-minded
rationalist liberal, who understands what the conditions of contemporary
society entail, and who is impatient with radical and "modish" critics of
the movement of Western Culture which has, in some way, been respon–
sible for the "fall" of the man of letters. "There is a bad, false tradition,"
he says early in the book, "which has grown up among literary men, of
assuming that it is permissible to measure a culture in terms of, say,
advertisements but not of anesthetics." Let's not fool ourselves, Gross
seems to be arguing; much of the ugliness of contemporary civilization
(and who would deny that it is ugly) is compensated for by crucial de–
velopments in medicine and technology which make life easier. (Later,
Gross refuses to discuss the Leavis--Snow controversy, centering on this
point, because of the "way in which that particular controversy was
conducted," although he is willing to accept the idea of the existence of
two cultures---not necessarily antagonistic but unrelated.)
The implication of this liberalism is that what is strictly literary,
within institutions or out, tends to be limited and flawed. Gross is quick
to detect and criticize those passages in which his subjects begin talking
about culture as though it were a "flawed work of art." The men of
letters in the early part of the tradition that he records are cultural critics
as well as literary, writers who recognize and dwell on the continuity
between art and culture and society. Carlyle, Arnold, Jeffrey, Harrison,
Leslie Stephen, even Lewes and Bagehot and Hutton, were all writers
who could not be satisfied with explication of texts. Writers need some–
thing more than texts and literary traditions if they are to say important
things. The point is clearly made in a comment on T. S. Eliot's mode
of criticism as juxtaposed against that of an obviously inferior writer like
Augustine Birrell (the book brings us to this). Birrell is seen as a last
feeble gasp of a tradition which insists on reading literature in terms of
social and political movements. At one point Gross quotes
him
as saying
of Marvell that "of all public men then living [he was] the one most
deeply imbued with the spirit of our free constitution-its checks and
balances jumped with his humour." Gross then goes on:
In Eliot, needless to say, there is nothing about free constitutions.
Why should there be, indeed? His purposes are
his
own: he sets out
to define the qualities of Marvell's best poetry more precisely than
any previous commentator had done, and
to
exhibit them as the
product of "European, that is to say,
Latin
culture." The result is a
brilliant essay
in
reinterpretation, one of the classics of modem crit–
icism. But as the hundred-thousandth undergraduate faithfully tran–
scribes the familiar phrases about tough reasonableness and slight
lyric grace, let us at least acknowledge that for the mass of ordinary
readers (I don't mean scholars) there are losses to be set against
the gains; that in supplying a valuable new historical perspective,
Eliot helped to destroy a far from contemptible old one.
