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world, but trying to act as individual agents in describing and judging
a human world-a burden they must now assume since the religious
and social structures which earlier framed that world no longer do so.
The book may be said to be about the efforts of individuals to shoulder
the weight of the human situation, and, in Wordsworth's terms, do so
as men speaking to men.
When Booth concludes his scrupulous account of all the means
Abrams has employed in his book he finds that they do not serve to
account for his conviction that the book makes its case. His problem, as
I see it, is that he has not assented to Abrams's personal agency in his
(Booth's) own history as a judging self; he has assented
to
a text. For
many purposes Abrams's book cannot be identified with him; it pays
no taxes and eats no breakfast. But for the purpose at hand, a
compelling account of the romantic movement and its consequences, it
must be identified with Abrams, who has tried to tell a true story about
the past which is continuous not alone with Wordsworth's account of
the human situation but also with Abrams's own consciousness of his
own situation. Abrams finds Wordsworth's account of the powers and
responsibilities of individual human agents part of a history he is led to
accept as antecedent to views he now holds.
If
Booth truly concurs he
must simply announce himself persuaded. (He remains at liberty to
change his mind.) Booth's effort to find good arguments for Abrams's
position is laudable; his failure to reach a demonstrable conclusion is
reassuring. Had he done so he would
be
in effect claiming what an
animal forever making itself cannot have: a godlike certainty.
In his reply
to
Booth, Abrams says that in writing his book he had
relied "on taste, tact, and intuition rather than a controlling method."
The "means" Abrams employs throw the full burden of decision on
the judging self. Booth's analysis, lively and friendly as it is, snaps the
tie between the judging self and the tools it employs in order to
examine the tools. This species of instrumentalism or pragmatism
should by now have become notorious for its incapacity to cope with
encounters between two or more people. We can and must estimate the
value and force of the judgments others make; the hope that an
appraisal of the means used to express these judgments can fully
account for their sources or their persuasive effect amounts to a parodic
scientism.
No' investigation of means, methods, or principles can sum up the
resources of judgment a critic such as Abrams displays. Nor can we
count on such an investigation to enable us to deal with critical
