The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919-1926

Creative Criticism: An unsigned review of Creative Criticism. Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste, by J. E. Spingarn

London: Humphrey Milford, [1925]. Pp. 138.

Times Literary Supplement, 1280 (12 Aug 1926) 535

Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the author of an excellent informative book on the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance; ¹ he is a scholarly critic who is entitled to be listened to with respect. In this book, however, it would seem that Mr. Spingarn, who at one time was professor of literature in an American university, was determined to assert, even a little boisterously, his emancipation from the scholastic and academic point of view. Dedication to Croce, “the most original of all modern thinkers on Art,” and the motto from Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Who can doubt that Criticism, as well as Poetry, can have wings?” are both significant. ² Mr. Spingarn, after Croce, is also an original “thinker on art”; but “freedom” is not, as Mr. Spingarn seems to think, the one thing needful for criticism. Mr. Spingarn’s criticism has certainly realized the possibility suggested by Barbey d’Aurevilly: it has wings; unfortunately, like the fabulous bird of paradise, it has wings but no feet, and can never settle. Dr. Spingarn’s first essay, on “The New Criticism,” is a recitation of all the distinctions and classifications which art and criticism are now to repudiate. ³ For Mr. Spingarn the phrase “self-expression” appears to be completely adequate.

What has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his intention? What is he striving to express and how has he expressed it? What impression does his work make on me, and how can I best express this impression?

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The dogmas of “The New Criticism” (for dogmas they are) run somewhat as follows, in extracts from Mr. Spingarn’s essay:

We have done with all the old Rules . . .We have done with the genres, or literary kinds . . . there are as many kinds as there are individual poets . . . All art is lyrical . . . We have done with the theory of style, with metaphor, simile, and all the paraphernalia of Graeco-Roman rhetoric . . . We have done with all moral judgment of literature . . . ⁴

Mr. Spingarn has what is called “infectious high spirits.” The test, of course, of any critical programme or platform, such as his, is the sort of criticism which it produces. Unfortunately, all of the essays in this small book are of the same general order, and with some variety of gesture hail the dawn of “creative criticism” without providing any specimens of it. Mr. Spingarn has scholarship and some taste, and this book is by no means a fair representative of his work; it is to be hoped that he will support his theories, or his faiths, by a work of concrete criticism.

We must take exception, however, to his term “The New Criticism,” which seems a misnomer. It implies that this is the creed of the youngest critics of importance, which is far from being the case. The younger critics, or some of them – witness Mr. Ramon Fernandez in France and Mr. Herbert Read in this country – have by no means done with “all moral judgment of literature”; on the contrary, they seem to be resuscitating it to a new and different life. ⁵