In "Catching Up with the Avant-Garde," a recent essay in the New York Review, Roger Shattuck—after taking up some eight new books that attempt to define "Modernism"—throws in the lexicographer's towel. At present the task of definition seems beyond us: "There is as much disagreement about the dating and the essential features of modernism as about the existence and nature of a fundamental particle in physics." "Modernism," Shattuck concludes, is "no more than an umbrella or bucket word" that has to do its service for movements as diverse as Impressionism, Aestheticism, Bohemianism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Futurism, the Avant-Garde, and so on. His is a problem we all share, for criticism has not yet accomplished an essential task—that of reformulating the chronology and characteristics of Modernism, putting the movement in context, and renaming it (and its successor "Post-Modernism") so as to reserve the term modern for what participates truly in the here and now.

I want here to explore one aspect of the problem of Modernism—the complex relationship between radical aesthetic experimentalism and the conservative cultural ideology that often accompanied it. The paradox of this relationship has been a source of consternation to radical critics from the era of the New Masses to that of the Partisan Review and beyond. Even liberals express dismay at the apparent aversion of the Modernists to the agenda of the Left. I cite merely one instance—from Lionel Trilling's recently published notebooks for 1945:

In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that it itself respects and reads with interest. A list of writers of our time shows that liberal-progressivism was a matter of contempt or indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann (early), Kafka, Yeats, Gide, Shaw—probably there is not a name to be associated with a love of liberal democracy or a hope for it.

In exploring this paradox, my method will be to return us to a decisive moment when these tensions between radical technique and conservative attitude, as a characteristic of Modernism, received their first important expression. That moment occurred in 1931 with the publication of Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of Imaginative Literature, 1870-1930.

Wilson is a useful point of departure because, in Axel's Castle, in the treatment of Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, he brought into focus a wide range of experimental writings that constitute at least some of the central texts of Modernism. So acutely intelligent and instructive was his account of the aims and intentions of these writers that he taught virtually a whole generation how to read their work. At the same time, however, Wilson's virtual repression of his political attitudes while writing Axel's Castle produced a good deal of confusion in readers as to his exact relationship to the movement, with which he is often identified as an unqualified supporter. This view of Wilson as the champion of Modernism needs, I believe, to be reconsidered in the light of the recent publication of his Letters on Literature and Politics and his diaries—The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and The Fifties,

By way of a brief propaedeutic on Wilson's relation to Modernism, it will be useful to keep in mind his education in the classics at the Hill School; his studies in modern French literature at Princeton; his relationship there and thereafter with his mentor Christian Gauss; the shock of recognition when he discovered the Modernists, virtually simultaneously with some of their finest achievements; his editorial work in the 1920s at Vanity Fair and the New Republic, which put him in direct touch with some of them; and his response to the changing domestic political situation in that decade (particularly to the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the stock market crash). All of these experiences—especially Wilson's growing political radicalism—were decisive, I believe, in the composition of Axel's Castle (1931), the first book to make plain to readers interested in the avant-garde the aims, intentions, and methods of the Modernist writers. These experiences were equally decisive in turning him against the Modernists' most cherished beliefs and against some of their most brilliant and representative techniques. All this, in my view, calls into question the relation of Edmund Wilson to the Modernist movement, about which he is widely but wrongly regarded as a major sympathetic spokesman.

Let me begin with Wilson's letter to his Princeton classmate, the poet John Peale Bishop, dated August 1, 1922. Wilson was twenty-seven and the managing editor of Vanity Fair. Bishop had just married and sailed for Europe when Wilson wrote him this letter:

I was much impressed by the furious storm which burst upon the city just at the minute of your sailing and abated as suddenly about half an hour afterwards. Ominous and heroic thunders resounded across the city and one felt in the voice of the elements something fateful and definitive, as if an epoch had been ended, a drama brought to its close—or as if it signaled some august periphery in the ardors of a god.…

Since then, though a brightness be gone from the day, everything has gone on much the same. I discovered the key to the modern movement the other day, but will not disclose it to you here because I am on the point of writing a tremendous article about it.

The young man who had "discovered the key to the modern movement" had been educated at the Hill School and Princeton, two extremely traditional schools. While his mastery of French had prepared him to read Mallarmé, Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, and Rimbaud in the original, I emphasize here Wilson's training in the classics and the early development in him of a combative rationalist temperament. This temperament was manifest in Wilson's hostility to religion, to the supernatural, to mystery, to feeling as a source of value, and to nineteenth-century Romanticism as the corrupting site of expressivist literary phenomena.

The evidence of his letters and diaries suggests that Wilson's love of the classics and of the classical values of reason, order, balance, and lucidity made his discovery of programmatic irrationalism in the French decadents, Symbolists, Surrealists, and Dadaists a problem for rational comprehension. Nothing in his formal education had adequately prepared Wilson for the willed repudiation of the cognitive in these forms of Modernism, which he conceived to be a latter-day manifestation of Romanticism. To a man of Wilson's classical and rationalist temperament, the literature of the Symbolists and Modernists resisted his intelligence, withheld its meaning, cloaked itself in mystifications, seemed a willed obscurantism. Yeats, Valéry, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, and Stein can only be understood, Wilson tells us in Axel's Castle, as having founded their work on a revolution effected in the previous generation in France, a revolution largely unknown to the Anglo-American mind.

The critical method by which Wilson will account for French Symbolism in Axel's Castle is predicated on an analytic procedure defined in his dedication of the book to Christian Gauss. Criticism, in Wilson's view, should provide "a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them." This formulation, by the time Wilson comes to develop it fully, implies a historical-critical method that owes a great deal to the shaping influence of Voltaire, Descartes, Vico, Herder, Renan, Vigny, Anatole France, Hippolyte Taine, Shaw, Wells, Bennett, and Marx, as well as to the scientists Darwin, Einstein, and Freud. All of these influences were either fundamentally oriented toward history as providing the key to interpretation or were rationalist, scientific, and skeptical in temperament. Many were both. In any case, as an amalgam of such influences, Wilson's method leads him to interpret the French Symbolism of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Adam as a second wave of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, indeed as a degeneration of it.

The revolution that preoccupied Wilson in Axel manifested itself in a set of specific characteristics that made literary Symbolism exceptionally difficult for the curious rationalist to read and understand. He stresses Symbolism's destruction of the formal rules of literary art, its synesthesia, or "confusion between the perceptions of the different senses," their attempt "to make the effects of poetry approximate to those of music," and "the confusion between the imaginary and the real, between our sensations and fancies, on the one hand, and what we actually do and see, on the other." Wilson's Symbolists present a further problem to understanding in that they turn away from the objective world of bourgeois men and affairs and make the content of poetry subjective with the effect "of making poetry so much a private concern of the poet's that it turned out to be incommunicable to the reader."

The art of the incommunicable, such as we find in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and the others, is antthetical to the lumen siccum, the luminous intelligence, the precision of order in the classical mind—at least as the handbooks at Hill and Princeton had then defined it. At the very moment when Wilson launches his investigation into the modern movement, he confesses to John Peale Bishop on September 5, 1922, his need for relief from the self-involvement of this kind of subjective art: "My great ambition now is to buy a little house in the country whither I can retreat and derive strength from contact with the classics and the uninterrupted contemplation of my own thoughts." The next year he reports, "I have been reading, as you will readily guess, Virgil and would commend him to your attention. He was really one of the very great poets of Europe but has been spoiled for most people by being taught in school." The Eclogues are praised as the inspiration to Dante; and Wilson celebrates Virgil's classical virtues—his "rigorous artistic conscience, his careful fitting of the manner to the matter, and his lifelong devotion to his craft."

Steeped in the classics, then, Wilson found it difficult to grasp why the French Symbolists were averse to rational, discursive statement and to the non-linguistic, actual world. Their preoccupation with oneiric visions; with altered states of consciousness induced by opium and morphine; and with what Wilson calls (apropos of Rimbaud) the "long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses" struck him as antithetical to common sense. He found the Symbolists' work marked by a desire "to intimate things rather than to state them plainly," an intimation presented in a "complicated association of ideas represented by a medley of metaphors" intended merely "to communicate unique personal feelings."

It is the nature of the rational mind to ask why the French writers should have done this. Wilson accounts for these literary developments by invoking the revolution in scientific thought, as described by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead had presented modern science as having subverted any real dualism between external nature and the mind and feelings, seeing them as "interdependent and developing together in some fashion of which our traditional notions of cause and effect, of dualities of mind and matter or of body and soul, can give us no true idea." To articulate the new understanding of the scientific view of man and nature, the Symbolist poets had thus had "to find, to invent, the special language" that would alone be capable of expressing the personality and feelings of the artist. "Such a language," Wilson wrote, "must make use of symbols: what is so special, so fleeting and so vague cannot be conveyed by direct statement or description, but only by a succession of words, of images which will serve to suggest it to the reader."

Having grasped the nature of diese older French experiments and the conclusions of science on which they were grounded, Wilson then turns in Axel's Castle to his Modernist contemporaries. The intent of the individual chapters on Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Stein is to show how the extension of Symbolist techniques into the work of these writers produced the modern movement. The result is a wonderfully ambivalent act of criticism. Wilson explicates Yeats's interest in the fairies, the motif of seclusion in the tower, the aestheticist influence of Pater's Renaissance, Yeats's experiments with automatic writing, theosophy, clairvoyants, astrology, and magic. Wilson understands that he is in the presence of a lyric master, but he is impatient with Yeats's devised identities, and he is critical of the mystical-metaphysical system of A Vision with its daimons, tinctures, cones, gyres, husks, and passionate bodies. Who can believe in mis nonsense? Even Yeats doesn't believe in it. What right has he then to impose it on us? Wilson is critical of Yeats for "rejecting the methods of modern science" and so cutting "himself off in a curious way from the general enlightened thought of his time."

Wilson contrasts Yeats's visionary style with that of George Bernard Shaw's "Guide to Socialism and Capitalism" in order to show that Shaw's style is admirably figurative without being murky; indeed, all good writing (not just the Symbolist-Modernist style) operates by suggestion. The implication is that Shaw's style in presenting socialist ideology is superior to Yeats's visionary self-indulgence. Yeats is a poet, Wilson tells us, who wants "to stand apart from the common life and live only in the imagination." And Wilson is obliged to warn us of the effects of living for beauty alone, of living only in the imagination: "We shall be thrown fatally out of key with reality—we shall incur penalties which are not to be taken lightly." These penalties, however, are not specified, although his correspondence, to which I shall turn in a moment, makes the danger plain.

In respect to Valéry, Wilson finds it absurd that the poet asserts "that prose deals exclusively in 'sense' as distinguished from suggestion, and that one has no right to expect from poetry, as Valéry says in another passage, 'any definite notion at all.'" Valéry's equation of poetry and mathematics as inapplicable to reality as such, his insistence on form and form alone, is contrasted with the solid sense of Anatole France, a writer who was lucid and voluminous in all genres and who genuinely communicated with his audience on the plane of intelligence and ideas. (Anatole France, even more than Dr. Johnson, is the paradigm of Wilson's whole career in letters.)

Wilson resists vigorously "the real effect of Eliot's as of Valéry's literary criticism," namely: "to impose on us a conception of poetry as some sort of pure and rare aesthetic essence with no relation to any of the practical human uses for which, for some reason never explained, only the technique of prose is appropriate." He finds their position to be "an impossible attempt to make aesthetic values independent of all the other values. Who will agree with Eliot, for example, that a poet cannot be an original thinker and that it is not possible for a poet to be a completely successful artist and yet persuade us to accept his ideas at the same time?"

Wilson treats Proust as the first Modernist exemplar of Symbolist fiction in that he imports into the novel Bergsonian metaphysics—namely, a subjectivization of time. Wilson understands that memory is celebrated in Proust because it nullifies time. The timeless character of memory, transfixed in the novel, transforms art into a transcendental experience itself outside of time. This anti-historical bias in Proust is so defiant to common sense that Wilson seeks an explanation in the medical pathology of his author: Proust's ideas—like his physical and psychological illnesses (such as his asthma, his seclusion in the cork-lined room, his homosexuality)—are so abnormal and distinctive to him that they cannot be of general use to us.

With respect to Joyce's Ulysses, the technical devices that establish the mythic method (which most readers since Eliot have regarded as the chief originality of the book) are criticized in Axel's Castle as an interruption of the story line, interpolations that Wilson finds himself skipping "in order to find out what has happened." Stein's rhythmic experiments with the sentence are "carried to such immoderate lengths as finally to suggest some technique of mesmerism." What she has written in the twenties, Wilson writes, "must apparently remain absolutely unintelligible even to a sympathetic reader. She has outdistanced any of the Symbolists in using words for pure purposes of suggestion—she has gone so far that she no longer even suggests."

Having indicated Wilson's irritation with the Modernists, let us pause here at the curious break that occurs in the process of writing Axel's Castle, a break that has its' source in Wilson's increasing political radicalism in the 1920s. (Malcolm Cowley recognized the break in Exile's Return, but could not adequately account for its causes). Wilson's use of Symbolism shifts in meaning from the deployment of literary techniques, techniques of suggestive implication, to a view of life, a conception of the writer's relation to reality. Symbolism, for Wilson, comes to mean that aversion to reality, that cultivation of the self, that religion of art, that he finds aptly symbolized in Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam's poem "Axel," with its Castle of Art as a refuge from the longueurs of actuality. This poem does indeed give Wilson's book its title and point of departure; but what truly bothers him is the persistence of this aestheticism in his own time.

We ought not to forget that the ultimate manifestation, for Wilson, of this Symbolist and Modernist deficiency—the departure from communication, from lucidity, from intelligibility, from serious engagement with the world of men and affairs—was the work of his contemporary, Tristan Tzara, whose "Memoirs of Dadaism" Wilson had reprinted in Vanity Fair, while he was managing editor there. This bizarre document forms the final appendix to Axel's Castle and was a vade mecum for Village Dadaists like Matthew Josephson and Malcolm Cowley in their zanier moments. Though Wilson reprints it without comment, Tzara's "Memoirs" stands as the ultimate absurdity of degenerate Modernist Romanticism.

Thus far I have isolated those moments in Axel's Castle where Wilson's classical values and rationalist temper recoil in distaste from the values and methods of his Modernist authors. This procedure seems to put Wilson out of all sympathy with his contemporaries. But since he is so widely regarded as the spokesman for Modernism, the method is essential to establish how alienated Wilson indeed was from the characteristic techniques and attitudes of these writers. It is now time to rectify the imbalance this method has produced. This necessary adjustment of the balance is compelled by the example of Wilson himself, for one of the features of what I have called the classical temper of Edmund Wilson is the desire to avoid extremes of critical judgment.

However distasteful his view of the Modernist disavowal of historical time and social responsibility, a Wilsonian sense of justice to his authors lifts him above the plane of any merely tendentious ideologue. If he is critical of Yeats's fairies and automatic writing, he finds a ground to applaud Yeats for entering the Irish Senate and devoting himself to national affairs. Yeats is now "much occupied with politics and society, with general reflections on human life—but with the wisdom of the experience of a lifetime, he is passionate even in age. And he writes poems which charge now with the emotion of a great lyric poet that profound and subtle criticism of life of which I have spoken in connection with his prose."

Eliot is saluted for having left upon English poetry, in a mere ten years, "a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing English." The Waste Land is brilliant in its "new technique, at once laconic, quick, and precise, for representing the transmutations of thought, the interplay of perception and reflection." Eliot is in fact "a complete literary personality." Proust, though regarded as a candidate for psychoanalysis, is recovered for didactic purpose when Wilson locates a passage in which Proust commends "the reality of those obligations, culminating in the obligation of the writer to do his work as it ought to be done, which seems to be derived from some other world, 'based on goodness, scrupulousness, sacrifice.

The very classical demand for balanced judgment, then, obliged Wilson to acknowledge the Modernists' greatness. He explains the ground of his judgment to Maxwell Perkins, in a letter in 1928:

Now I consider three of these writers—Yeats, Proust, and Joyce—among the greatest in modern literature, and even now, not half enough appreciated. And I consider the others—even Gertrude Stein, in her early fiction—very fine. And I believe that there is a good deal of justice in their criticism of the group before them—I believe that such a reaction was inevitable.

He told Perkins that he wanted "to give popular accounts of them which will convince people of their importance and persuade people to read them."

But the balance, with Wilson, fails of equipoise, because his politics overpowered him as writing the book dragged on toward 1931. Even though he acknowledges the Modernists' power, Wilson was really intellectually allied with the previous generation of Renan, Taine, Anatole France, Bennett, Shaw, and Wells, and with a literature more focused upon the social issues of the 1920s. Wilson wrote Perkins that

the difference between these two generations—Shaw and France on the one hand, and Yeats and Valéry on the other—is, as I have suggested, that the earlier group were deeply influenced by the materialistic and mechanistic ideas of science, and that, partly as a consequence of this, they occupied themselves with public affairs in a way that their successors scorn. The generation since the war go in for introspection: they study themselves, not other people: all the treasures, from their point of view, are to be found in solitary contemplation, not in any effort to grapple with the problems of the general life.

However much Wilson appreciated his Romantic and Modernist contemporaries, then, he could not help constructing Axel's Castle in such a way as to bring their work under severe criticism. To Perkins he observes:

In every one of them, the emphasis on contemplation, on the study of the individual soul… has led to a kind of resignationism in regard to the world at large, in fact, to that discouragement of the will of which Yeats is always talking (I mean that he actually advocates discouraging the will in order to cultivate the fruits of lonely meditation). The heroes of these writers never act on their fellows, their thoughts never pass into action.

Instead of resignation, passivity, inaction, Wilson wanted a literature of social engagement, reflecting the will to power, manifest in action and politics. The Modernist aversion to grappling with the problems of the general life was spectacularly illustrated for him by E. E. Cummings, whom he visited in the summer of 1929. To Allen Tate, Wilson wrote:

I have just been up to see Cummings.… He certainly has the most extraordinary point of view. It is 100 percent romantic. The individual is the only thing that matters, and only the gifted individual—in fact, only the poet and artist. The rest of the world is of no importance and has to take the consequences. He keeps protesting his lack of interest in anything outside the world of his own sensations and emotions.… I don't know whether the type of pure romantic can survive much longer, though perhaps I think this merely because the romantic in myself has recently been giving up the ghost.

The Romantic figure—such as Cummings, the visionary Yeats, the hallucinated Eliot, the neurotic Proust—was to be understood as a reaction to the events of World War I that had produced a general disgust with the terms and conditions of the modern world. Their subjective impressionism had political implications, and Wilson promised Max Perkins that he would touch upon this fact.

But in Axel's Castle Wilson's politics are latent and never very obtrusive, although he does preposterously reduce Proust, in A la recherche du temps perdu, to "the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture.… "He wrote to Perkins, in criticism of the Romantic strain of Modernism:

I believe that any literary movement which tends so to paralyze the will, to discourage literature from entering into action, has a very serious weakness; and I think that the time has now come for a reaction against it. The disillusion and resignationism of contemporary European literature is principally the result of the exhaustion which has followed the war; and we in America, in taking from Europe… our literary standards and technique, have taken also… a sea of attitudes and ideas (I mean that the literary people have) which have absolutely nothing to do with the present realities of American life and which are largely inappropriate for us.

Wilson wanted an end to the paralysis of the will in Modernist literature, and he hoped that it would be initiated in the United States. Taking a cue from Van Wyck Brooks's Letters and Leadership (1918), Wilson claimed to detect "certain signs of it: in another generation or two, we may be leading the world intellectually. I feel that Europe is coming now to look to us for leaders while we are still respectfully accepting whatever they send us." But, in fact, Axel's Castle does not explicitly lay out Wilson's radical politics, nor does it so evidently reject the modern masters as reflections of a European mentality no longer of value to American art and its social conditions.

For Wilson, the Modernist era had ended and would soon be replaced by a literature directed outward to the social and political realities of American life. I have called this view a recoil from the subjective impressionism of Modernist literature. When Christian Gauss suggested to him in 1929 that he write the confessions of a child of the century, Wilson replied:

As for a confession d'un enfant du siecle, I fear that I shall never write one. That kind of thing is really repugnant to me, and I expect to become more and more objective instead of more and more personal. Incidentally, the diet of Symbolism, early and recent, which I have lately been consuming, has had the effect in the long run of wearying and almost disgusting me with this kind of subjective literature. I have a feeling that it has about run its course, and hope to see its discoveries in psychology and language taken over by some different tendency.

The different tendency was of course a literature of political engagement. It was already taking shape in his mind. Long before 1931 when Axel's Castle finally appeared, Wilson's interests were shifting to what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class. The Sacco-Vanzetti case, which dragged on between 1920 and 1927, helped to radicalize Wilson's politics, and he and Herbert Croly at the New Republic quarreled over whether or not the case was a manifestation of class conflict. Wilson later remarked to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that "it was from this moment that I realized that [Croly] and I could not really agree about such matters (I had always had at the back of my mind the Fabian Essays and the Russian Revolution) and that I began to gravitate toward the socialist left." By May of 1930, Wilson was telling Allen Tate, "Politically I am going further and further to the left all the time and have moments of trying to become converted to American Communism.…"

Communism, he opined, was theoretically sound and practically right for Russia, but he naturally had trouble figuring out how the theory could be domesticated in America. In the year that Axel's Castle came out, he remarked to R. P. Blackmur: "As for politics, I wish that I knew of some promising movement or program for action, but I don't, and all that we write in The New Republic is still almost as much in the domain of pure literature as the productions of the Symbolist poets." What he wanted was the wedding of literature to political power, in the service of radical socio-economic change. Marxist action was necessary to contain big business (which he detested), to redistribute income, and to repress bourgeois liberalism. The Crash in 1929 seemed to pose the imminent possibility of political revolution.

For the next decade, Wilson's politics were avowedly Marxist, and, for a short while, he found his political program in the Communist party, which he wanted to be seized by native radicals like himself and thoroughly Americanized. Wilson's leftist position was manifest in his call in 1932 for the election of the Communist party candidate for the presidency, William Z. Foster; in signing various appeals and open letters; in joining the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky; in reporting on labor disputes in America and political conditions in the Soviet Union, which he visited in 1935; and in publishing his polemics in such periodicals as the New Masses, the Modern Monthly, and Partisan Review. Wilson's Marxist phase subsides after To the Finland Station (1940), by which time he has had the good sense to become disillusioned with the Soviet Union's totalitarian purges and with American Stalinists at home.

I have leaped ahead from Axel's Castle in order to suggest how Wilson's growing radicalism in the twenties came to separate him from the Modernist movement to which he had at first been sympathetically drawn. Between 1930 and 1950 or thereabouts, left-wing radicals continued to lay claim to the Modernists whom Wilson had celebrated, even though, like him, they could not square their admiration with the cultural conservatism of these writers, whom they came to regard as an "anti-democratic intelligentsia." Wilson's tack was somewhat different. During these decades, much like the youthful radical Van Wyck Brooks, Wilson withdrew from the Modernists because they had proved themselves uncon-genial to the left-wing politics he had developed. Lawrence, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and other conservative writers seemed to Wilson to have swept the field. Hence he retreated into the past. In A Piece of My Mind (1956) Wilson characterized himself as

more or less in the eighteenth century—or, at any rate, not much later than the early nineteenth. I do not want any more to be bothered with the kind of contemporary conflicts that I used to go out to explore. I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers; and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read. Old fogeyism is comfortably closing in.

Of course it would be a mistake to take the last remark at face value, as some of Wilson's critics did. But his aversion to Modernism and his longing for the ordered world and the polished classicism of the ancients are indeed hallmarks of his later work.

The ambivalence in Wilson's view of Modernism, as indicated in his letters and journals, makes it possible now to bring his limitations into clearer focus and to assess his place among the early students of the modern movement. First, Wilson's combative atheism, his naive faith in science, his hostility to religion, and his reduction of the inner life to a question of psychology (if not psycho-pathology) prevented him from fully engaging with the spiritual claims of some of these Modernists, such as Yeats and Eliot. These claims did not follow the direction in which Wilson's own secular rationalism invariably led. The very historical method that Wilson brought to bear upon his subjects could not adequately account for their representations of spiritual experience.

Second, their preoccupation with the inner life in lyric verse seems to have turned Wilson away from poetry itself toward a preoccupation with social novels, which he believed to reflect more directly the outward historical conditions then making a claim upon his attention. Wilson as a critic of poetry has always stirred controversy, but it is in Axel's Castle that he first commits the fatuity that verse is a dying technique and that the iambic line is no longer applicable to modern conditions. For this he was taken sharply to task. As Delmore Schwartz wrote in "The Criticism of Edmund Wilson":

[W]hen it becomes a point of describing the technical working, the craftsmanship and the unique forms, which are an essential part of Symbolism, and the authors who were greatly influenced by the Symbolists, Wilson is impatient and hurried. He is not actually interested in the formal working which delivers the subject-matter to the reader.… It is for him the wrapping-paper which covers the gift; it is necessary to spend some time taking off the wrapping-paper and undoing the difficult knots of the cord tied about it, but the main thing is the gift inside, the subject matter.

Third, Wilson's criticism of subjectivist impressionism assumes—improperly, I think—that this literature has little relevance to external reality. But Wilson's view discounts the alterations in the consciousness of readers that such a literature may effect, with political consequences. His own reaction is exemplary in this respect.

Fourth, Wilson's treatment of Modernism failed of balance by the very inflexibility of his functionalist view of literature. His thought is of course consistent with the classical view of the purpose of literature—that it should please and instruct, and especially instruct by means of the inducement to aesthetic pleasure. But Wilson's position is taken virtually in defiance of that nineteenth-century revolution in aesthetic theory that—serving as a timely corrective to Victorian utilitarianism in art—argued for the relative to absolute autonomy of the artwork itself, a position that grounded in some measure the emerging New Criticism of the twenties, which rationalized the modern movement.

While defending himself in correspondence with Allen Tate, Wilson reformulated, more explicitly, the position that underlay his treatment of the Modernists in Axel's Castle:

The point that I am trying to make when I talk in this vein is that art and science both are merely aids to getting by in the world. They harmonize or explain limited fields of experience and so comfort and reassure us and also, in proportion as they are original and profound, actually make it easier for humanity to live and improve itself. The end is not art or science but the survival and improvement of humanity. So that it seems likely that the time will come eventually when the artistic and scientific masterpiece will be not a theory or a book but human life itself.

Such a view of human perfectability is of course wildly visionary and reflects a Utopian belief in the "New Man" to be created by the advent of Communism. But Wilson—who believed in the false claim of Marxism to be an objective science—could not see that his Utopian view of human nature was a manifestation of the ghost of his own Romanticism. He told Tate that he had dramatized this idea in his novel I Thought of Daisy, where "the hero, seeing science and art as techniques for getting by,… embraces art as a useful trade like carpentry."

In a revealingly coarse redefinition, Wilson told Tate, "Symbolism was the atmospheric or arty side of art and naturalism the factual side," and, the two having become divorced, a reintegration of them needed to take place again. Wilson contrasted himself to Tate by pointing out that he was older enough than Tate

to have been brought up on a literature which did mix these two elements in better proportions than the literature of after the war, which was what you were reading when you were in college and which seems to you the normal thing. It seems abnormal to me and that is the reason I take the point of view I do in Axel's Castle; I'm looking back to Shaw, Wells, Bennett, France, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Renan, et al. You call some of these people propagandists, but I don't see how you could if you had read them—which I bet you haven't—if by propaganda you mean the kind of thing which is put out by governments, political parties, etc. If by propaganda you mean, on the other hand, merely attempts to persuade people of one's point of view or particular way of seeing things, every writer is a propagandist.

Wilson's position here reduces art to the rhetoric of persuasion, defining it functionally as a mere instrument, or technique, like science, for explaining experience, comforting and reassuring us, didactically helping us to survive, and effecting social progress. While this view is founded on the classical function of art as didactic, Wilson's notion that art is persuasive (if generalized) propaganda and the view that it is a "useful trade," like any other, reveal an unfortunate philistinism reminiscent of Shaw, Wells, France, and the other socially oriented anti-Symbolists with whom Wilson so unmistakably allied himself.

Art ultimately does, I believe, reveal a didactic horizon, but this horizon comes into view only after the immediate effect of the work of art—on feeling, on emotion, on sensibility—has been brought into the mind with its capacity for reflective thought. Wilson's chief deficiency as a critic of Modernism is that he had no vocabulary for the effect on sensibility of the ineffable, the mystical, or the transcendental. But this is a vocabulary that we need, for it is the language that poets use—and not always in ways that imply a vulgar religious superstition. As valuable as Wilson's Apollonian perspective may be, there is a Dionysian energy in art, an energy that may be terrible in its revelations, that gives to art a life—inseparably inter-twined with its form—that we find humanly compelling. We see this most clearly in the dance, in music, in styles of painting like abstract expressionism where a direct and unmediated experience of this pre-rational, this primordial energy is sought for or expressed. It is a feature of art that is beyond cognition and rational analysis. Analysis may, in fact, in trying to explain art, end up in explaining art away. Wilson has a momentary intuition of this danger—the danger of transposing the irrational into the rational—in his comment on Valéry in Axel's Castle: "In trying to clear up his meaning, one clears it up too much." On the whole, however, Wilson was unwilling to concede the reality of the inexplicable as such or to admit that the revelation of the tragic and terrible in art may not "help" us in any tidy, cheerful way.

Wilson's was thus an agenda for what Denis Donoghue has called, in another context, The Arts Without Mystery. As Donoghue has observed, the arts do contain a mystery. This mystery, this energy, this life in art that eludes rational explanation, is transcendental, but its ineffability is not to be confused with the religious experience. Art is not religion and can never be a substitute for religion or for an ethics properly founded on religious belief. Donoghue is absolutely on target when he remarks, "If you wanted to neutralise the arts and remove their mystery, the best strategy would be to reduce them to psychology and politics."

In Axel's Castle, Wilson undertook to tame the Modernist writers by invoking the canons of a naturalistic psychology and a left-wing politics. Yeats's claim for a visionary experience, Proust's notation of a timeless dimension of consciousness, Joyce's location of the present within the cycle of the mythic return, Eliot's timeless moments of epiphanic revelation—all of these are neutralized by Wilson's reductionist historicism (in the manner of Taine, Renan, and Marx) to matters of psychology and politics. Yet if Wilson was not the perfect reader, he was, in his grasp of trends, movements, and typologies of literature, of immense value in his time; and his skeptical response to his major contemporaries made him a very lucid (though ultimately reductive) analyst of their work. At the very least, in Axel's Castle he formulated the problem that has continued to vex radical critics in their relation to the great conservative Modernist masters.