PARTISAN REVIEW
143
tive Gross assumes toward his subject comes somewhere out of a middle
whose existence, one inescapably infers, is urgently important. It values
the "ordinary reader," though it remains wiser than he. It is full of
sympathy with rigor; equally so with casualness. The disappearance of
the ordinary reader (and writer) is necessarily seen as a loss. Who else
could be expected to read literature with no vested interest, with no
professional bias, but simply because literature is fun or personally,
humanly, valuable? Who, in particular, more needs the sagacity of the
man
of letters to guide, to lead, to erect standards or to let them down?
As I have already suggested, however, the existence of 'the ordinary
reader depends on economic structures over which literature itself has no
control. Only aristocrats, in the past, could have afforded to be ordinary
readers. In the nineteenth century, for a few years, many of the middle
class--moving from commercialism in the direction of Mann's sensitive
Hanno in
Buddenbrooks-seemed
to be "ordinary." But as
Buddenbrooks
suggests, the movement toward leisure and sensibility also implies a move–
ment out of the middle world. Hanno is refined out of existence, and
what he stands for is not simply a negation of the life of his fathers, but
a new, aesthetic aristocracy, too sensitive to survive in the world of cap–
italism.
One of Gross's favorites, George Gissing, implies a similar, if only
slightly less aesthetic turn from the center. Again, with typical judicious–
ness, Gross is implicitly critical of Gissing's refusal to entertain the pos–
sibility that education
can
produce "lovers of poetry." They are, on
Gross's reading of Gissing, born, not made. But Gross is nevertheless
sympathetic to Gissing's toughness of standards:
Much of the finest modern criticism, after
all,
says by implication
what Gissing rather tactlessly spells out: that there
can
be no half–
measures or middlebrow compromises, that in literature
Le
mieux est
l'ennemi du bien.
And this is perfectly fair.
A
critic's first duty is
to stick by the standards he believes in, and he must be allowed
the right, on paper, to banish anyone who falls short of them to
outer darkness. But what teacher, faced with the flesh and blood
actualities of the classroom, could afford to do the same, or would
want to.
(Could it be that those flesh and blood actualities are the ordinary
reader resurrected? Gissing eschews the middle and will not imagine liter–
ary standards to be determined by the classroom. His last
work-The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft-represents
an opting out of the battle
to create or impose standards and a retreat from the values of the or–
dinary into an aesthetic aristocracy. By implication, the insistence on an
overriding concern for value in literature will lead to a divorce from
society such as Gissing's or
to
a professionalizing of the literary pursuit
