PARTISAN
REVIEW
67
of questions that have led the profession to its crisis of conscience:
"What good did humanism do the oppressed mass of the community?
What use was it when barbarism came? What immortal poem has ever
stopped or mitigated terror - though a number have celebrated it?
And, more searchingly: do those for whom a great poem, a philosophic
design, a theorem, are, in the final reckoning, the supreme value, not
help the throwers of napalm by looking away, by cultivating in them–
selves a stance of 'objective sadness' or historical relativism?" His an–
swer is, in part, that the old terms of high culture were in fact sup–
ported, first by aristocratic, then by bourgeois and bureaucratic power
structures. Because he seems to be taking greater risks, Steiner's lan–
guage flirts with melodrama (where it isn't overpoweringly sophisticat–
ed), and I suppose it is true that had he found a more convincing lan–
guage, his argument would have carried more weight. Yet the intensity
of the English reaction to Steiner's book almost brings me around to
sympathy for it. Who ever thought, the argument goes, that literature
ever had anything to do with goodness? Why is Steiner making such
a fuss when all of us literary sophisticates know that literature has a
checkered moral history? And why should one think that there is any
special or new discontinuity between literature and political action these
days than there has always been? This response, too, however sensi–
ble it may seem with the vision of hindsight, is a reflex of that threat
to the profession we have been discussing. At least Steiner doesn't retreat
from that.
Or not quite. Unfortunately, he crawls out the other end by some
obscure magic and comes to reassert a new high culture.
If
literary
humanism is dead, Steiner returns extraordinarily to a new culture
which will be defined in nonverbal activity - by mastery of music and
mathematics. In the last section of his book, he moves not quite tenta–
tively backwards into the old faith, ignoring all the emotional
am–
bivalences he has played with to that point: "mental inquiry must
move forward." And the book closes with an implicit allegiance to the
ideals of Arnold and the activities of Dr. Frankenstein.
It is not quite fair to suggest that Steiner and Bradbury propose
anything but the most tentative kinds of solutions to the problems.
Only Frye speaks with clerkly confidence of the path the critic must
take. Yet all three write what are in fact, if not in assertion, deeply
personal defenses of poetry, and all three feel themselves attacked by
the same forces - the democratization of culture, the demand for social
relevance, the threat of traditional standards of excellence, the ques–
tionings of the value of high culture.
