A Literary Crisis
Literary Scholarship : Its Aims and Methods. By Norman Foerster, John C. McGalliard, Rend Wellek, Austin Warren and Wilbur L. Schramm. (University of North Carolina Press. $3.00.)
IN 1927, the constitution of the Modern Language Association in America was changed ; the purpose of the association was no longer said to be " the advancement of the study of modern languages and their literatures, but rather " the advancement of research in modern languages, &c." As Professor Livingstone Lowes pointed out to the Association, the change from the wider to the narrower term was characteristic. By aping the methods of the special sciences, academic criticism was producing scholar- ship more acutely analytical than that of Dr. Johnson, and more consistently exact than that of •Ezra Pound, but in so doing it was losing something of its vigour and enthusiasm, something of its concern for the subject-matter of great literature, and something of its sympathy for the imaginative writer of its own time. This petrifaction of literary study, at the very moment when it was achieving a large place in university curricula, was no less marked in England than in America, though American critics, from Irving Babbitt to R. P. Blackmur, have made the more vigorous and effective protests. The present book, with its extensive bibliography, is primarily a handy guide to these protests, but it is also a guide (and here it is necessarily less adequate) to all the varied developments of literary scholarship from Jespersen to Yvor Winters, and from Dilthey to I. A. Richards.
The authors begin with the statement that " within and with- out our graduate schools, there is a widespread belief that the present state of American literary scholarship is by no means satisfactory " ; and the main weaknesses which they detect, are (a) the heavy burden of teaching, (2) the common dependence of academic preferment upon the sheer quantity of research pub- lished ; (3) the less and less liberal education offered by the secondary school and college ; (4) the low morale of the graduate students of letters, who, too, rarely possess a genuine calling to scholarship. Mr. Norman Foerster, in the opening essay of this symposium, maintains that at present academic discipline is intended to inculcate habits of scientific accuracy, to give the pupil a general understanding of the historical development of a literature, and to cultivate his capacity for specialised research. In contrast to all this—or as a complement to it—he and his fellow-contributors wish to encourage a common intellectual life among students of letters, to "restore the full meaning of literary scholarship," and to build up "a vital relationship" between scholarship and letters by giving the poet, both as student and as lecturer, a recognised place in the university.
So far, so good. Even in war-time we must admit the force of some of Mr. Foerster's arguments. But just as one begins to hope for details, for answers to some obvious difficulties, and for descriptions of some recent American experiments, Mr. Foerster's assistants appear and snatch the reader off in quite a different direction. Mr. McGalliard, for example, having taken the reader for a quick drink in each of the dives run by the various theorisers about language, announces sententiously : " A good knowledge of the history of a language as a whole is necessary for the adequate interpretation of any considerable portion or period of its literature "—and promptly hands the reader over to Mr. Wellek on Literary History. If the reader is anything like the reviewer, however, he is left wondering whether it is quite true to say that " in order to read literature (the student) must first master the language in which it is written." Can anything except wide reading ever give us the feeling of a language, and teach us the colour and texture —as well as the brute significance—of each phrase?
But we must not sit down to argue. Mr. Austin Warren, in spite of a weakness for polysyllables, writes tidily and clearly on literary criticism ; Mr. Wilbur Schramm, in an earnest and sensible but somewhat immature and ungrammatical essay, discusses the place of the poet in the university, and the possibility of teaching imaginative writing. It seems almost un- gracious, in face of so much obvious and laborious good will, to remind Mr. Schramm and Mr. Wellek that a writer needs to have something to say, and that literature is something more than the product of " social forces " and " literary technique." Litera- ture is losing some of its prestige—in the universities as, else- where—because natural philosophy, metaphysics, history, anthropology, have one by one set up house on their own. The " imaginative writer " is expected to make literature out of empty air ; " the savant " is no longer reminded that clarity, precision, wit and elegance are civilities he owes his reader. Perhaps if we look in that direction we may find some remedy for the condition of affairs so ably diagnosed by Mr. Foerster, and so deeply
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