Criticism in Crisis

Abstract

??E SERAIT encore une gloire, dans cette grande confusion de la societe qui commence, d'avoir ete les derniers des delicats. -Soyons les derniers de notre ordre, de notre ordre d'esprits." The confusion has been even greater than Saint-Beuve foresaw when he set down this reflection a hundred years ago, and those of us who are still occupied with the problems of criticism have abandoned any pretensions to his kind of elegant connoisseurship. He and the kindred spirits that he invokes enjoyed the privilege of living more at ease with their time and in closer touch with the past; the influx and reflux of subject matter from both of those continual sources were rich indeed, yet not too overwhelmingly large to be breasted by a nicely discriminating eclecticism. Something like a synthesis could be effected between classical judgment and romantic appreciation, but it was too precarious and personal to outlast the middle years of the nineteenth century. Walter Pater, addressing himself to the next generation, exceeded SainteBeuve in his epicurean sense of the heightened moment and the coming deluge. The flood-by which I mean the uncontrollable flow of undifferentiated reading matter-was destined to sweep away the surviving landmarks, so that, when we take our bearings in this postdiluvian world, it is by means of such dead reckonings as I have been rash enough to venture here. Not only have tastes changed, and changed utterly, but the concept of good taste has lost its validity, since that depended upon its appeal to universal standards. Buen gusto, the faculty of Renaissance man for judging aright, has gradually yielded to the sort of uncritical enthusiasm connoted by "gusto," or to the degustation of literary vintages that has its cellar book in Saintsbury's History of Criticism. Critics, falling back on impressionism, sought their own criteria in the range and perceptiveness of their individual impressions. Some of these were based upon a rounded cultivation which might well have passed for professional erudition among their successors; other instances have been so capricious that today the term "impressionist" has gone the way of "amateur" and "dilettante." Such terms, as long as they had a positive meaning, embodied the natural impulse of every man to be his own critic rather than delegate another job to another expert. Their passing marks a final stage in the dissolution of that ideal which Nietzsche so poignantly and vainly evoked, the whole man. The century had its exemplary