PARTISAN REVIEW
73
at different audiences. He is not interested in justifying the role of the
critic, but in modifying it to bring it more closely into touch with con–
temporary problems and perceptions. The artist has an important role;
literature is a mode of knowing; the critic should know something about
sociology to understand fully the artist's role, his difficulties, his texts.
Much of the book is devoted to analyses of the shifts in the state
of culture in England during the past hundred years, and to the impact
of these shifts on the artist's relation to his society. Although an
im–
pressive range of sociological reading is brought to bear on the subject,
the conclusions are not startlingly fresh. In ways that confirm some of
Frye's arguments, Bradbury sees the writer as having moved increas–
ingly far from the center of his culture. Where the Victorians, even
while protesting loudest, spoke with "a real sense of functioning close to
the centre of society," the moderns have been forced to adopt more
private voices as they move more deeply into isolation, and to question
the nature of their own literary activity - to make of art its own
subject. The details of this discussion are more useful than the common–
place quality of the large conclusions would suggest. But what I find
most interesting is the recurrent feeling of loss at the falling away
from centrality, at the diminution of the tradition of liberal humanism,
of educating and civilizing. Imagining for the artist the possibility of
recapturing this old role, Bradbury tends to admire the struggles of a
good many ordinary writers to sustain the traditions of Victorian real–
ism against the onslaught of modernism.
Without anger, Bradbury laments the loss of rigorous standards;
but he remains too confidently or aspiringly central and Arnoldian to
be
of much use in the present crisis of conscience which Frye more
directly confronts. Bradbury recognizes an "erosion of the centr.ally
human aspect of art, sees mass society as one in which "no one accepts
responsibility for values, and in which genuine cultural bonds are
weakened progressively while nothing worthy and binding is put in their
place." Where Frye rejects Arnoldian centrality because it is in fact
"interested," Bradbury seeks it. His book, in general, feels much closer
to the experience of art than Frye's, partly because it is less theoretical.
At
any
rate, he is willing to accept incoherences. He sees, for example,
that his abstract arguments should suggest that modern literature is
barely possible, but takes pains to pronounce a judgment that the
twentieth century is a great age of literature. The great modern writers
have managed somehow to continue the tradition whose loss he laments,
to
provide something "like a conservative literary perspective on modern
experience," "a vision of their culture." Bradbury is content, in other
