BOOKS
Science gratifies a rational or practical impulse and exhibits the
minimum of perception. Art gratifies a perceptual impulse and
exhibits the minimum of reason .
129
But Ransom meant only to distinguish two attitudes to life, and it
matters little that he called them Science and Art. He could have
found other names just as readily. The letters also have his sense of
art as aesthetic distance; his notion of the literary form, in each genre,
as providing a code of manners, on the analogy of the code by which
a gentleman courts a lady. The code is not given in the letters as
elaborately as in the essay "Forms and Citizens" - it is in
The World's
Body
(1938) and again in the splendid selection of Ransom's essays
issued a year or so ago! - but it is sufficiently there in the counsel of
delay and indirectness which he advocated in letters to Tate. The
gist of it is contained in a letter of April 15, 1924. I assume that Ran–
som wanted to heal the breach with Tate and to say that
The Waste
Land
should not keep them forever apart. Cultivating "the real
epistolary amenities," he defended his dualistic theory of poetry, the
distinction we know between structure and texture, or between a
sturdy argument and the locally enriching details that stop short of
hobbling it. As in
The Fugitive,
Tate argued about free verse, and
Ransom replied that "the poet must (a)make sense and (b)with the
same words make meter ."
It
is an exhilarating exchange, culminating in a splendid letter
of September 5,1926 which the editors rightly choose to emphasize.
Tate elicited from Ransom tones and vivacities far beyond the civic
norm of his letters to other friends. In later years, Ransom had a few
spirited exchanges with other critics - with Arthur Mizener on Shake–
speare's sonnets - but Tate had a particular capacity to provoke him
and to drive him beyond his guarded self. When he deprecated
Howard Nemerov's laudatory review of
Lolita,
it was to Tate he ex–
pressed displeasure - "Nabokov's naughty novel that I had found
pretty pointless." To Tate, again, Ransom confided his opinion that
Frost had done very useful service by keeping the lower orders di–
verted:
I felt very sad about Frost, though I didn't go to the funeral. I
generally had the curious feeling about him of being indebted to
1.
Selected Essays
of
John Crowe Ransom,
edited by Thomas Daniel Young and John
Hindle. Louisiana State University Press. 1984.
