The Modern Temper admirably summed up the philosophy of defeatism of the muddled and sadly disillusioned post-war generation. Obviously, the intellectual atmosphere which Mr. Krutch described was the one held in part or as a whole by many of his contemporaries. He gives coherent and reasoned utterance to what many of them felt in a more or less nebulous, uncertain manner. The book, nevertheless, is primarily an effort at self-understanding. It is a personal confession as well as a study of "the modern temper". He can disentangle the nervous complexities and compulsions of modern thought with commendable clarity, but, as he frankly admits, his analysis of the emotional reaction induced by these tendencies, is "of necessity colored by an individual personality". Even though he endeavors to select for analysis only those emotional attitudes which are typical, his choice as well as his treatment was sure to be biased to some degree by his intellectual preconceptions. For he is concerned not with verifiable observations, but with a state of mind, "and in the effort to describe and account for it I am responsible not for Truth, but for the convictions, scientific or otherwise, which I and my contemporaries have been led to hold". What Mr. Krutch evidently means to imply is that he does not have to justify the state of mind of any age; it exists; he is merely recording it. But certainly in recording it—just as if he were tracing a nerve impulse in the laboratory—he is responsible for making veracious observations that can be tested. If his observations are in error, then his conclusions must likewise be wrong. No writer can afford to shirk the responsibility of truth.

Mr. Krutch is decidedly unhappy because he has discovered that the world of today is not the same world that has been pictured by thinkers in the past. Evil and good are not cleancut and diametrically opposed; Nature is supremely indifferent to those intrinsically human values which men cherish. How different, he laments, is the world of experience from the world of the heart's desire! But every intelligent, mature person has to some extent realized the wisdom of curbing his insatiable ego in its demands…. It is therefore an expression of sentimentalism to assume, as Mr. Krutch does, that in winning this knowledge man has forfeited a desirable world for one less desirable to which he must now painfully adapt himself. The truth is otherwise.

Mr. Krutch converts science into the serpent that has crept into the Garden of Eden and led man into sin and unhappiness. Poetry and religion, he declares, satisfied man's inner needs; science, on the other hand, is inexorably objective. The two, he concludes, are irreconcilable. Is this really so? Fundamentally, there need be no conflict between the two realms. Mr. Krutch is emotionally swayed by his nostalgia for the certitudes and absolutes of the traditional past. He speaks with despair of the cold immensities of space and the chaos of nature, unaware that he is employing value-freighted metaphors. He is equally subjective when he declares that Nature's purpose (if she possess one) is not the purpose of man. "Her desire merely to live and to propagate in innumerable forms, her ruthless indifference to his values, and the blindness of her irresistible will strike terror to his soul, and he comes in the fullness of his experience to realize that the ends which he proposes to himself—happiness and order and reason—are ends which he must achieve, if he achieve them at all, in her despite." This is eloquent but fallacious. Nature is neither friend nor foe. Wisely controlled, and science is the best instrument of control human ingenuity has so far advised, she aids man in fulfilling his purpose. Ignorantly opposed, she causes his destruction. Scientific knowledge may not give shelter and protection to our pet ideals and illusions, neither does it conceive of Nature as a sinister, implacable enemy. If science proves the death of many values once held sacred, what does that mean but that those values were not fitted to endure? (pp. 77-9)

Man's illusion of cosmic importance naturally decreases, but is it not assuming too much to say that he is left more and more alone in the universe? He is no more alone now than he was a thousand years ago. Mr. Krutch will reply that human desire is more essential than scientific truth. His indictment of science is primarily on the ground that the knowledge it assembles and works into a pattern has no bearing on human needs. Whatever truth science may discover, he asserts, man must live according to certain established standards of conduct. Since man is an ethical animal, neither he nor society can long exist without reference to some fixed and stable moral order. Science, it seems, has destroyed this, "man's most fundamental myth". Yet even if the universe contains no ethical element, no hint of a categorical imperative, even if that fundamental myth should die out, man can still formulate and abide by a rationally satisfying construction of ethics…. If, as Mr. Krutch puts it, man finds no answer to his questions and no fulfillment of his needs in a world of electrons and complexes, science can justly reply: The function of science is not to provide salvation. It is not a religion but an organized body of knowledge based on experiment and observation. In asking science to supply what is not its proper concern, you wish to make of it a form of mysticism. Science appeals to the intellect, not to the emotions. It aims to achieve truth, not to satisfy man's egocentric wishes.

Nevertheless, Mr. Krutch, like many serious thinkers before him, persists in asking the query: What is to be done? How shall man live? He cannot arrive at any positive and robust affirmation of faith because his mind is untrammeled by theological delusions, because he knows that not every problem humanity posits is necessarily solvable. Having gone thus far, he indulges in dismal speculations on the survival possibilities of human beings…. The picture Mr. Krutch draws of the future is lugubrious and fantastic—a future in which only those who found no lack in nature would reign supreme…. Science is thus convicted of having failed to serve man or reconcile his conflicts. Man is faced with a task of readjustment more stupendous than any made before; if this is not possible, the human spirit, we are told, will face extinction. (pp. 79-81)

Perhaps the most significant chapter in The Modern Temper is the one entitled "The Tragic Fallacy", which attempts to show that we no longer write tragedies in the dramatic or any other form because the human spirit has grown enfeebled. Man has lost, we are told, the ability to impose upon the welter of life a pattern of meaning which would satisfy his metaphysical hunger. Today the soul of man is portrayed as commonplace; whereas, according to Mr. Krutch, the idea of tragedy is invariably associated with the idea of nobility. Tragedy presupposes faith in the importance of man and his life on earth. The tragic writer must believe in humanity, for such a belief reconciles man to his fate. That Mr. Krutch is largely wrong in his premises and conclusions, which rest on a pathetic fallacy, has been demonstrated by Mr. Mark Harris in the book, The Case for Tragedy. Aside from the mental atmosphere, the sociological conditions of an age and place stressed by Mr. Harris as relevant for an interpretation of the tragic spirit in literature, is it true that man must be made to seem great enough to justify the portrayal of tragic suffering? If we do not tell tales of the fall of princes, it is not that we do not believe that they exist, but that we would invest all men, no matter how humble in origin or low in the economic scale, with the inherent human dignity, that quality of nobility which Mr. Krutch finds essential for the creation of tragedy. He feels that tragedy can stalk by only in sceptered pomp and royal robes; the critics with naturalistic leanings know that it can wear the rags of a beggar and the mud-caked jeans of an old degenerate tobacco farmer. Tobacco Road and Beyond the Horizon are fundamentally as tragic in expression, though not derived from the same tradition, as the tragedies by Sophocles and Shakespeare.

A religious yearning, disguised and at times even suspicious of itself, is at the heart of Mr. Krutch's writings. His exacting and skeptical intelligence repudiates the demands made by this channeled mystical libido, but his inner emotional self intensely craves the certitude and consolation, the definite meaning and purpose, however illusory, it imposes on life. Even his system of aesthetics is conditioned by this spiritual conflict. Art, he believes, suggests a realm of peace. It provides a medicine for the sickness of the spirit; it pictures a world which is perfect and entirely acceptable. But art is based on order, while to found life on art is to end in anarchy. Thus art may "furnish a means by which life may be contemplated, but not a means by which it may be lived". Art, in short, is contemplation, not action. Aesthetics can give no answer to the riddle man's questioning intellect propounds. The affirmations of art are ethically and empirically without value—a point of view more elaborately developed in his book, Experience and Art. (pp. 81-2)

Mr. Krutch is among the few critics who, in a period of profound social and political change, have kept their poise and detachment, refusing to be swept along in the turbulent current of sociological criticism. He is also exceptional in that, far from using his criticism as a springboard for political or social propaganda or any special doctrine not implicit in literature itself, he formulated a comprehensive philosophy of literary criticism—a system of aesthetics which, whether right or wrong, has the supreme virtue, at least, of being clearly defined; he is free from besetting dogmas or intellectual preconceptions. His is a remarkably independent intelligence; analytical, dispassionate, rarely, if ever, resorting to worn-out counters of rhetoric.

In Experience and Art, which is concerned primarily with the aesthetics of literature, Mr. Krutch states his fundamental premises. He is not given to extremes, he does not indulge in hard-and-fast generalizations. He notes tendencies, trends; remaining at the same time keenly aware of exceptions, subtle distinctions, important qualifications. He steers clear of the fallacy which assumes that since art is enormously important to the culture of a race, it is therefore to be identified indiscriminately with some social or ethical philosophy. Literature for him is not a record of fact; it has no covenant with literal truth; it is, on the contrary, the expression of everything man is capable of believing. Once a work of art is born, it may awaken experiences similar to those in the realm of nature, but the two types of experience, he feels, are not and cannot be the same. Art is the intellectual and spiritual dwelling-place of man. If this be granted, does it not follow, he argues, that "Literature is not a psychological purge any more than it is a sociological treatise"?

Though he has written a biographical study of Poe in which he employs the psychoanalytical method, he is averse to the confusion of thought involved in making psychoanalysis a substitute for literary criticism. Literary creations have in them, he believes, some elements of the dream or reverie, but what distinguishes the two, as even some of the less fanatical disciples of Freud have conceded, is that the creative process possesses the quality of communicability. It extends beyond the subjective frontiers of the creator. Hence Mr. Krutch derides the crass simplifications of the psychologists who fashion an all-inclusive critical system that at best can explain only psychological or infantile states. Even if one believed that Art is man-made and therefore conditioned by human desires and limitations, it is unjustifiable to conclude that all literature is the product of a day-dream or a neurosis. Art exists to satisfy human needs, and imaginative truth is achieved when these needs are most amply fulfilled. In this way Mr. Krutch exposes the shortcomings of a movement which for a time had a considerable vogue and which threatened to mislead many critics with its pretentious pseudo-scientific jargon about inferiority complexes and incest motives.

Mr. Krutch argues that since Nature has no teleological design—since it is devoid of any discernible intention or purpose—literature provides an admirable substitute for Nature; it exalts man to a plane of freedom; it sets him within the pulsating center of a life that is harmonious and beautifully consistent and organically justified: it elevates him to an ideal realm created and made possible by the exercise of the human imagination. In this ideal realm, whether it be one of comedy or tragedy, not only are events selected but there is a temporary suspension of the laws of ordinary probability. From this Mr. Krutch proceeds to the deduction that as a tradition of art gains in perfection it also gains in artificiality, thus accepting with certain reservations the critical belief of Charles Lamb that Restoration drama was not to be judged by ordinary rules of taste since it inhabited a world of make-believe, a gracious world of glamorous fictions where moral laws were abrogated and necessity knew no bounds. Mr. Krutch here ignores the patent truth that no tradition, no hypothetical construction, could long thrive if it were not rooted in, if it did not grow out of, the social life and needs of a people within a particular milieu and age. Art may confirm a convention; it does not originate it. (pp. 83-5)

Mr. Krutch admits "that the motives and aims behind literary experiment usually correspond with those which are determining the direction of the social evolution contemporary with them". But that is as far as he will consent to go. Yet if literature is not exempt from life, if it is not a pale distant reflection, a remote and idealized entity, it cannot be regarded as the area of calm within the storm but as the storm itself, rendered in all its elemental fury and violence. It may be more "ideal" than Nature but it is not therefore "artificial" or opposed to Nature. If it is vital art, it shares the nature which is common to both Nature and Man. Hence life does not, as Mr. Krutch seems to feel, imitate art anywhere to the same extent that art imitates life. In driving home his thesis that life follows art, that man enjoys experiences, tastes love and faces death in a manner learned from and reminiscent of books, Mr. Krutch concludes that the patterns established by novelists and poets and dramatists profoundly modify "if not the universe in which we live—then at least the emphasis of our attention upon certain parts of it and determine to no small degree both what the universe shall look like and which of our feelings we shall be most keenly aware of". This, however, presents a puzzling problem. For, if a literary work exercises a pronounced ideological and emotional effect at any given time, exactly why does it do so? What are the ascertainable factors which make for the "successful" inoculation of one type of work to the exclusion and failure of another? Why, for example, does a post-war generation welcome a Scott Fitzgerald and a Hemingway and a Faulkner? Why does a certain school of realistic novelists arise within a particular epoch? It would be absurd to argue that "fellow travellers" like Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender in England will make the British public Marxconscious or proletarian-conscious. On the contrary, they are published and given a hearing because they emerge at a psychological and historical juncture when a hunger for social justice is powerfully making itself felt. Society has given birth both to the poet and his audience. (pp. 85-6)

Mr. Krutch is a philosophical idealist. According to him, man cannot know the inherent and ultimate nature of reality; man can but translate the vertiginous flux of phenomena into mental terms—a translation which implies, of course, some degree of distortion. Hence the sense of illusion in life so that even the feeling which Art provides of getting profoundly in touch with the heart of reality is also a pure illusion. For this urbane but remorseless critic, the only way out of this wild ebb and flow of time is contemplation, the arresting of some object or event into a symbol, into art. This philosophy of illusion makes him realize more poignantly the need for convictions of some sort, either creative or critical, if writing is to be fully effective. But for him, the perception of flux and change in life, the perception that there are no final but only relative and provisional truths, prevents the utterance of any passionate belief. He is passionate only in the reiteration of unbelief; he almost achieves an impressive kind of eloquence when he voices a skepticism so absolute that it leads to despair. Whatever convictions he may hold, his central belief is that no enduring convictions are possible. This is without question his salient weakness and handicap as a critic. He lacks passion and force and the power to stimulate and inspire because his libidinal life is under too severe control, because fundamentally he believes in nothing and is capable only of unsparing dissection, rigorous analysis. He can negate persuasively; he has not the gift for making heartening affirmations. He heads no school of thought now; he has no followers; he advocates no cause; he is curiously aloof from the problems and perturbations of the contemporary scene.

His theory of criticism is strikingly in accord with his philosophy of illusion. Criticism, he insists, is at best a highly individual art, which differs from person to person. There are no absolute standards; value is always relative "not only to the individual, but to the stage which he has reached in his individual development". From relativity of judgment there is no escape unless one sets up some arbitrary norm. Yet he demands that the critic acquires the qualities of relative detachment and objectivity. Though judgment of art is influenced by the experiences and temperament of the critic he must strive "for some sort of objectivity, for some degree of detachment"; he must avoid the evils of arbitrary impressionism and plain dogmatism. When criticism deals with a particular work, it should replace general theories with discrimination. Finally, the critic, while retaining his state of detachment, may attempt to judge a work by what Mr. Krutch calls its "functional effectiveness"; that is, to see how well it carries out its aesthetic intention. Even then the critic fails to be wholly impersonal. To avoid the pitfalls and contradictions of a frankly impressionistic criticism such as was practised by Anatole France, Mr. Krutch believes that the critic must sternly endeavor "not to cultivate too extravagantly the idiosyncratic", he must determine to keep "as close as one can to the mind of the author and to concern oneself as far as possible with those associations which appear to be common to a considerable number of persons".

A work of art, however, can never be completely judged for what it is in itself. The critic must steadfastly guard against allowing his political and moral convictions to influence his opinions. That is all he can do. In a sentence which serves as a key to his position as a critic, Mr. Krutch declares: "We can ask only that the critic shall be aware of the personal nature of his reactions as well of the arbitrary character of his standards, and that, just in proportion as he fails to maintain an absolute detachment, he will cultivate that underlying skepticism which softens the dogmatism from which we cannot escape so long as we undertake to say anything at all." Mr. Krutch is so wary of yielding to the personal influence that he hides himself behind a masked exterior of austere and impenetrable reserve. In his struggle to maintain an absolute detachment, he loses that moral appeal, that personal strength, that power to rouse and elevate and lead which is the distinguishing feature of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks' writing. He cultivates his constitutional skepticism with such zeal that in his books on criticism and literature, his weekly reviews of current plays in the Nation, one seems to detect a brain speaking and reasoning; the force of conviction that springs from some sustaining faith is conspicuously absent.

His criticism and his philosophy are both overshadowed by a doubt which he cannot drive away. He is caught in a cruel dilemma: he must seek for faith in an age when faith is impossible, and for unity in a universe that seems alien, meaningless, and disruptive. The multiplicity of knowledge, the discoveries of science, the growth of the analytical spirit, these disturb him acutely if they do not cause him dismay, for they destroy the possibility of creating a harmonious world through art. He thus inherits the sickness and maladjustments of the contemporary world. The times are out of joint! (pp. 87-9)

Modern life, Mr. Krutch admits, has its compensations, but he finds that it is too fragmentary to be fully satisfying…. Mr. Krutch cannot discover the presence of grace and faith in the present; its philosophy is inarticulate, its poetry both unintelligible and uninspiring. This world of speed and steel, of power and profits exists "only upon the periphery of consciousness". It is, he feels, a life of instincts, not contemplation, a world not yet shaped by Art, a world raw and undisciplined, without symbols and without realization. Contemporary literature has failed because it did not carry conviction. Literature without the aid of philosphy and religion is doomed, he declares, and modern literature is, like modern man, "doubtful, divided, eclectic, and experimental … It has given us no self-justifying image because its creators have achieved no self-justifying vision". What he craves is justification as well as full of knowledge, faith as well as science, beauty and unity as well as excitement and variety. That is why in his book, Five Masters: A Study in the Mutation of the Novel, which came out two years before Experience and Art, he is seen at his best. His sensitive critical faculties can test their strength and insight on the major figures of a grand and gracious past that is happily remote from the social confusion and economic distress of the contemporary world. Through five novelists—Boccaccio, Cervantes, Richardson, Stendhal, and Proust—representative of the culture and conditions of their age, he is enabled to draw a portrait of that age as well as to trace the evolution of literary forces in time.

In the book, Was Europe a Success?, Mr. Krutch advanced a number of theories which clearly indicated his position in the battle between the literary radicals and those who wish to eliminate politics and economics from critical discussion. He fears that the destruction of capitalism would also involve the ruin of those cultural values which it had taken centuries to develop. The triumph of the social revolution would threaten the existence of individualism and freedom, and especially that disinterestedness which Matthew Arnold so highly praised. Hence, as an intellectual, Mr. Krutch is inclined to support capitalism. In this age of ranting political passions, he is concerned to salvage those virtues of reason, detachment, and tolerance which dogmatic communism tends to overthrow. In opposition to Marxist critics like Michael Gold and Granville Hicks, he is bent on separating literature and politics, of eliminating extraneous elements from criticism. Was Europe a Success? is a sober declaration of faith by a liberal…. (pp. 90-1)

In a debate, printed in The Forum, between Joseph Wood Krutch and Edmund Wilson on the subject, "Is Politics Ruining Art?" the former patiently undertook to explain his point of view. He announced that though the world was in a sad state of political and economic confusion, he could see no logic in dropping the task for which he was best fitted in order to turn himself into an amateur politician. Skeptical of all dogmas, all appeals which seek to override the voice of reason, he refuses to be intimidated by the tactics of the communist critics. He does not deny that there is injustice in the world, that suffering of all kinds is widespread, that the poor are oppressed, but he does not draw from this the conclusion that the pursuit of poetry and criticism, metaphysics and science is a wasted, shameful form of self-indulgence at this juncture of events. Though the night approaches—indeed, because it is already night—it behooves the critic and the artist to attend to their legitimate affairs, to snatch some good out of the flood of time. "The world has always been unjust as well as uncertain. Society has never encouraged any of the things most worth doing and there has never been a time when a really tender conscience could have permitted itself to bother with abstractions or beauty." It is too bad that such things exist, but the artist does his share in making the world more tolerable, more livable. Detachment, Mr. Krutch repeats, is essential for the critic as well as for the creative worker. Though the world is imperfect and life is transitory, man is justified in devoting himself to the creation of beauty that will endure and to the shaping of thoughts that will delight and enlighten mankind. In reply to Mr. Wilson he maintains that the literary man has a perfect right to occupy himself with politics, but that the writer is also justified in ignoring politics and that his work does not therefore suffer in value.

Mr. Krutch, it can be seen, has been deeply influenced by the philosophy of Vaihinger who holds that external reality is conceivable only in terms of an as if construction. Mr. Krutch finds this philosophy to his purpose, for it seems to prove that science, too, like art, is an aggregation of metaphorical analogies and assumptions. Hence, if literature and civilization as a whole are products shaped by the imagination, "then it is obviously the first duty of contemporary society to rescue itself from the nihilism into which it seems to be drifting by putting its imagination to work and by proclaiming some series of 'as ifs' according to which it will live." Here then is the secret of his inner longing, the withheld affirmation at last. Science is apparently not enough; the imagination must get busy and create a new world myth, a new all-inclusive faith, a world of satisfying values. But the will to believe is not enough either, nor the perception that belief is necessary. The critical work of Mr. Krutch, however valuable in itself, will not aid in that consummation. The question remains: the will to believe in what? What kind of faith? It remains to be seen whether great art cannot arise from convictions stripped of illusion, cannot be born in a world that relies on and is controlled by science. (pp. 92-3)