REVIEW LOVEJOYS ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OP IDEAS By Theodore Spencer ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS By Arthur O. Lovejoy.

The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1948. 359 +xvii pp. 1 This volume contains sixteen articles, most of them published in periodicals during the last twenty years; they include about a fifth of the articles listed in the appended bibliography of Mr. Lovejoys writings. The occasion of their publication is the twentyfifth anniversary of the founding of the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins University, a club which Mr. Lovejoy originated, and which, through a committee consisting of Professors D. C. Allen, George Boas and Ludwig Edelstein, thus appropriately honors him by giving renewed emphasis to the important aspect of scholarly concern with which his name is chiefly associated. The volume is both a unit in itself and a series of expansions of themes and theories which Mr. Lovejoy has developed elsewhere. Most of the articles are concerned with the eighteenth century-attitudes towards nature, primitivism and romanticism; there is an introductory general article on the Historiography of Ideas, and the volume concludes with articles on Milton, St. Ambrose and Tertullian, the last two being sections from the uncompleted and unpublished second volume of A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, by Mr. Lovejoy and Mr. George Boas. Mr. Lovejoys main interest, in these essays as elsewhere, is to see that we have as clear as possible a picture of our intellectual past and as full as possible an understanding of the thinkers and writers who expressed it. He has given us, as Professor Allen points out in a foreword, a new insight into our intellectual heritage; he has made us aware of past schematizations, discriminations and conflicts so that not only are we directly fascinated and illumined by the analytical pictures of the past which he has drawn with such clarity, we are also indirectly influenced as we reflect on our present situations in the light of the past he has revealed. With each generation our intellectual heritage changes; fresh analysis carves new facets, new intellectual tools reveal new articulations in its structure. Mr. Lovejoy has been for our generation one of the most adroit and penetrating of analysts, and his intellectual tools have been among the sharpest of those which have helped us to visualize the features of our intellectual ancestors. First among them has been his gift for discriminating between different meanings of crucial words; the sixty-odd definitions of Nature in the present essay on Nature as an Aesthetic Norm form a useful parallel to the 439 440 THEODORE SPENCER

list of different meanings of the same word which is appended to the first volume of the History of Primitivism. A tool of a similar kind is that which enables Mr. Lovejoy to take apart the large vague complexesromanticism, primitivism, etc.which we have been accustomed to use so loosely, and to clarify our concepts of them by determining their unitideas; it is hardly necessary to mention at this date that no student of intellectual history can have read Mr. Lovejoys major works without having his own views permanently sharpened. In the present volume this analytical tool of Mr. Lovejoys is to be seen (at least by the student of literature) most clearly and excitingly at work in the essay On the Discrimination of Romanticisms, where the author, after pointing out how confused is our present use of the word Romantic, suggests that we may be able to clear the confusion by thinking not of one Romanticism but of several. He describes his analytical ideal as follows: Each of these Romanticisms-after they are first . . . roughly discriminated with respect to their representatives or their dates-should be resolved, by a more thorough and discerning analysis than is yet customary, into its elements-into the several ideas aiid aesthetic susceptibilities of which it is composed. Only after these fundamental thought-factors or emotive strains in it are clearly discriminated and fairly exhaustively enumerated, shall we be in a position to judge of the degree of its affinity with other complexes to which the same name has been applied, to see what tacit preconceptions or controlling motives or explicit contentions were common to any two or more of them, and wherein they manifested distinct and divergent tendencies. The remainder of the essay brilliantly illustrates this ideal by showing, among other things, that a Romanticism such as that of Joseph Wartons Enthusiast is a very different thing from the Romanticism of the German aesthetic theorists : Between the assertion of the superiority of nature over conscious art and that of the superiority of conscious art over mere nature ; between a way of thinking of which primitivism is of the essence and one of which the idea of perpetual self-transcendence is of the essence; between a fundamental preference for simplicity-even though a wild simplicity-and a fundamental preference for diversity and complexity ; between the sort of ingenuous naivet characteristic of The Enthusiast and the sophisticated subtlety of the conception of romantic irony; between these the antithesis is one of the most radical that modern taste and thought have to show. . . . One of the widest and deepest-reaching lines of cleavage in modern thought has been more or less effectively concealed by a word. Mr. Lovejoy ends the essay with one of his several definitions of the function of the historian of ideas; for the purpose of the present discussion it is important to notice the following points; they are throughout basic to his interpretation of recorded human expression. 1) The categories, such as Romantic, which have previously been used to distinguish and classify LOVEJOYS Essays in the History of Ideas 441

movements in literature are far too rough, crude, and undiscriminating. 2) Hence the historian should attend, not to such large complexes of ideas, but to their simpler, diversely combinable, intellectual and emotional components . . . that are the true elemental and dynamic factors in the history of thought and of art. 3) Such an acquaintance is necessary as a preliminary to any judgment of value, to any decision we make as to whether the preponderant effect of the diverse and often conflicting strains on, say, a given romanticism is morally or aesthetically good or bad. In fact, 4) When the preliminary task of analysis and detailed comparison has been made, it is doubtful whether the larger question [the question of value] will seem to have much importance or meaning. 2 In discussing this definition, its aim and its illustration in the present collectioii of essays, I write from the standpoint of the student of literature, and any apologies which Mr. Lovejoy, as a philosopher, may make for trespassing beyond his field must be doubly echoed by me. But Mr. Lovejoys work, to the literary student, is of such great interest and importance, both in theory and practice, that it demands a serious examination and evaluation. Hence on the present occasion I should like to discuss, however briefly: a) just how it illuminates our understanding of literature; b) where it seems either inadequate or over-emphatic on a particular side; and c) certain general questions which it raises concerning our response to literary art and literary aims. In one of the essays in this volume Mr. Lovejoy politely suggests that the conventional discipline of literary study has to a great extent lost its validity and vitality; the suggestion has frequently been made by others with more vehemence elsewhere. The editing of texts, the study of merely literary sources, the tracing of the transmission of merely literary themes, themes of mere entertainment-all these scholarly games have seemed to have less and less importance in a world of decreasing leisure and growing individual responsibility. Furthermore the material has been giving out. The study of literature has needed new subject matter, new methods, new depth and new vitality. Most of all it has needed a recognition, on the part of its practitioners, of its relationships, especially of its relation to the history of thought. Literature has too often been studied in a vacuum, and the main relationship that has appeared to be relevant has been the dubiously important one between the work of art and the private life of its creator. Mr. Lovejoys approach, his emphasis on the importance of ideas, the persuasiveness of his learned analyses, have helped to put that sort of thing in its place. He has opened new avenues for investigation and new possibilities of understanding. An example, on a small scale, is the present essay on Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall, in which a pas442 THEODORE SPENCER

sage in the twelfth book of Paradise Lost depicting the fall of Adam as the necessary preliminary to the redemption by Christ and hence as a fortunate rather than an unfortunate occurrence, is related to a long tradition of Christian thought which goes back at least to St. Ambrose. This sort of investigation is obviously much more relevant to

Miltons own conscious intention than one which attempts to trace merely verbal parallels or other mnemonic phenomena. Even more important for the student of literature are such essays as those on the Schlegels and on Coleridge and Rant, for here the subject of discussion is not a single passage and the tracing of parallels, but the clarification of a central issue in the thought of the author. But though the study of the history of ideas can give, and has given, renewed vigor to the study of literature, though it offers a wider and wiser training than a discipline that is mainly philological, it cannot do everything, and when it tries to do too much, as it sometimes does in hands less skilled than Mr. Lovejoys, it can produce as dry a harm as philology. There are certain authors, and they are usually authors who catch experience at its liveliest, for the understanding and appreciation of whom the study of the history of ideas is irrelevant. That study does little to help us to read Chaucer correctly, for his only dealings with ideas are when he rather childishly and ineptly steals the platitudes of Boethius about fate and fortune, and it is of primary importance for only one kind of novelist, a rather rare kind. Defoe, Smollett and Dickens it leaves relatively untouched. It is useful chiefly when we are dealing with didactic and critical authors; much lyrical poetry, though not all by any means, has little to do with it. Furthermore too much emphasis on it tends to obscure, if not to obliterate, aesthetic values. The common complaint against the historian of ideas is that he does not care whether an author is first-rate or fifth-rate so long as his work expresses characteristic or significant views. The answer to this complaint is, of course, that the historian is right not to care, since an inferior writer is valuable because he is likely to illustrate the standard opinions of his time uncontaminated by the originality of genius. But though this answer is quite valid, as far as the historians goal is concerned, it leaves the seeker for a total view of literature dissatisfied; such a person is bound to be a little troubled, for example, by the attention which Mr. Lovejoy gives to a poem like Wartons Enthusiast. Important though it may be as a means for illustrating the feelings and opinions that compose one strand in the thought of its age, a poem like this seems, to the student seeking the total view, to receive more attention than its intrinsic merit as a work of art justifies, and he asks himself whether there is not an opportunity here for misconception-realizing, as he does so, that he is looking at an irreconcilable split between himself and the historian. Mr. Lovejoy himself, of course, is thoroughly aware of these potential LOVEJOYS Essays in the History of Ideas 443

limitations. In his introductory essay he makes it quite clear, by describing the sort of scholarly project he has in mind as a present requirement an edition of Paradise Lost annotated to reveal its intellectual background, a history of the development of the idea of evolution before Darwin-that aesthetic concerns and evaluations are not his goal, and, indirectly, that the study of the history of ideas is not an infallible or universal remedy for the difficulties facing the student anxious to achieve a total view of literature. Nevertheless the implication, unquestionably present throughout these essays, that the understanding and analysis of unit-ideas is the major task of the student of literature tends to underestimate the importance of other elements in a work of art; the same implication is likely to give a misleading impression of how the mind of the imaginative writer

works. The danger of the method is its rigidity, its coldness. The unit-ideas can sometimes be too clearly separated from each other by analysis; there are times when one is led to see them, unrealistically, as independent puppets, clashing and mingling on the stage of an authors mind, moved by invisible hands not his own. And, like so much that is said about the nature of a work of art, an emphasis on the history of ideas can make the artistic process seem a much more deliberate and self-conscious matter than it often is. However revealing the sixty-odd definitions of the word Nature may be to a later student, their enumeration, as far as an understanding of the minds of the authors who used the word are concerned, makes their use seem too cut and dried; it suggests an assortment, like different sizes of nail in a hardware store, from which the writer deliberately chose. Actually, of course, he did nothing of the sort. The creative act is more supple than that; conception and the emotion that goes with it, tend to melt, or rather to fuse, intellectual definition into something that analysis cannot completely account for. 3 In a passage I have quoted above Mr. Lovejoy suggests that when we are dealing with the history of ideas as expressed in literature the task of analysis and detailed comparison is not only the most important but in the long run the only task it is worth while to perform; once it is performed, it is doubtful whether the larger question of the aesthetic or moral value of a given complex of ideas will seem to have much importance or meaning.* The Present reviewer, trained in the school of Irving Babbitt, is unwilling to let such a statement pass unchallenged. Mr. Lovejoy convincingly corrects Babbitts interpretation of Rousseau in one of the most penetrating of the essays in this volume, but to set Babbitt right in the reading of a text is not to prove, in the opinion of the present reviewer, that Babbitts judgment of the effects of Romanticism, of the several Romanticisms he was dealing with, was wrong, or that he was wrong to include moral * See Editors Note on p. 446 below. 444 THEODORE SPENCER

effect as one of the things to be looked for in the behavior of literature. Is the historian of ideas to say that all complexes of unit-ideas are of equal value for expressing the truth about human experience in artistic form? Two of the great unit-ideas which Mr. Lovejoy has so brilliantly described and differentiated-the Great Chain of Being and the theory of evolution have had to find, so opposite are they, very different artistic forms for their expression, and it could be shown (though it would need considerable space) that the different forms have a different aesthetic effect and therefore a different aesthetic value; the authors who have interpreted the human situation from one point of view or the other have interpreted it, morally as well as formally, in quite different ways. The Great Chain of Being, a root concept in the consciousness of both Shakespeare and Pope, could give each a basis for a vision of evil ; Shakespeares portrayal of the individual villainy of Iago and Popes general condemnation of pride, are among the results. The theory of evolution, so dramatically opposed, as Mr. Lovejoy has shown, to the concept of the

Great Chain, by removing or seeming to remove a permanent standard of value and a permanent pattern of relationships from the cosmos, has helped to destroy any basis for a vision of evil, and the moral thinness of contemporary literature is one of the consequences. In saying this I greatly oversimplify, of course, a most complicated matter. Let us take a more concrete example from one of Mr. Lovejoys key authors, Milton. Partly under Mr. Lovejoys influence, and certainly stimulated by his example, several scholars have recently described more completely and accurately than before the cosmological picture in Paradise Lost. We can see as clearly as Milton allows us to see, in terms of the cosmological ideas available at the time, what his picture of the universe was. But this admirable, and admirably performed, exercise in the history of ideas (and now I return to the point of view of our hypothetical student seeking the total view of a work of art) is not enough. It does not explain the central fact of Miltons cosmology: the fact that it is, at bottom, an imaginative failure. The universe of Dante is an imaginative success partly because its shape was for him inevitable; his use of it involved no doubts; his age supplied him with nothing else but the Ptolemaic image he so vividly portrayed. But Milton had to make a choice between three universes: the Ptolemaic, the Copernican and the Tychonian; he chose the one that was theologically most convenient and apparently most easy to visualize; unfortunately, it was scientifically out of date and the choice, combined with his own peculiarities of imagination, nearly wrecked his poem. The inconsistency between the relatively sharp picture of the universe given by Milton himself in the earlier books and the ambiguity in such matters recommended in book eight by Raphael, is a serious flaw, and the attempt Milton requires of his reader to visualize certain details-the sphere of fire and the nature of chaos for example-can result only in images that are vague and blurred, LOVEJOYS Essays in the History of Ideas 445

the sort of thing that never results from Dantes descriptions, just as Dante spares us Miltons embarrassing anthropomorphism. It would seem, in other words, that our awareness of the back-ground of a unit-idea (the state of cosmological knowledge in Miltons day) here leads us inevitably to a judgment of value; or rather, what we make as a judgment of value (the clumsiness of Miltons picture) is explained by our awareness of the unit-idea. Knowledge of fact and judgment of effect are part of the same complex, arid the total view should include both. We know that Milton had a choice to make ; in terms of contemporary science he made it wrong. If we are not, perhaps, justified in assuming that a consequent sense of intellectual guilt made him fumble, we at least can see the unlucky results in his poem, and can have an aesthetic opinion accordingly. We are also led by his relations with science to some interesting speculations concerning the r81e of choice in the creation of a work of art. Is the artist more likely to write a successful poem when his basic unit-ideas are those which every serious thinker in his time unquestioningly accepts, so that his cosmology, say, is everyones cosmology, and his general view of mans place in the scheme of things that which everyone believes in? The comparison between Dante and Milton, if we make the violent omission of any

consideration of the difference in their characters and the quality of their imaginations, would seem to make us assume so. Are we then to conclude that the greater the freedom of intellectual choice given to the artist by his age, the less likely he is to produce a major work of art P Is the spirit of unlimited enquiry, apparently so encouraging to artistic endeavor, really fatal to it ? Is the final weapon of science against art the two-edged words Be free? The study of the history of ideas raises (among others) a further question of a quite different kind. Why and how does our appreciation and understanding of a work of art change when we learn that one of its central ideas was an intellectual commonplace at the time it was written? When Mr. Lovejoy shows us, for example, that Miltons account of the fortunateness of Adams fall was something that had been in the minds of theologians for centuries, why are we so interested, why does our own mind feel an extra satisfaction? Miltons meaning Tvas clear enough already; does our knowledge that he was saying nothing new change the meaning or merely change our attitude towards it? If the latter, what does the change amount to? Mr. Lovejoy, in discussing another of Miltons ideas (p. 5), suggests that when we know that it was one of the most influential and widely-ramifying ideas in Western thought, in this larger historical vista Miltons expression of the idea gains a great enrichment of interest-an increase, so to say, of voluminosity. But what does this really mean? Why is voluminosity more interesting and satisfying than its opposite? There are several revealing layers in the human psyche to be laid bare before we call arrive at an adequate answer to questions like these. 446 THEODORE SPENCER

Such speculations may seem to be irrelevant to Mr. Lovejoys subject matter, but if we think about that subject matter as something that concerns the present, the potentially creative present, as well as the past, the irrelevance disappears. It is one of the many great merits of Mr. Lovejoys work, as I suggested at the beginning, that, though it is almost exclusively historical, the issues it raises are so fundamental and of such permanent significance, they are presented so cogently and so accurately analyzed, it is impossible for the reader who values the continuing life of art not to reflect on them in relation to immediate problems. There are times when one wishes that Mr. Lovejoy himself would do so; in the introductory essay, as in the conclusion of the Great Chain of Being, one would be grateful (one thinks at first) for a further kind of analysis than that which has already been given; an analysis not of past fact, but of contemporary resulting implications. But Mr. Lovejoy might reply that it is not the business of the historian of ideas to be concerned directly with the present; his concern should be wider and deeper, since its aim, like all scientific aims, is to create foundations of understanding that will make the past as permanently available as possible, unobscured by the myopia of local peering. Today we study the day before yesterday, says F. W. Maitland, in order that yesterday may not paralyze today and today may not paralyze tomorrow. Harvard University.

[Editors Note: Mr. Lovejoy has written a comment (which will appear in our Jan. 1949 issue) on the above review, dealing particularly with the criticism expressed in the opening paragraph of part 3 (pp. 443 ff. above). Mr. Lovejoy wishes to clear up a misunderstanding of what he meant by the larger question. It was not the question of value put by Mr. Spencer, but (to quote a part of Mr. Lovejoys comment) It was the question of value applied to large, unanalyzed, undiscriminated, historic complexes of ideas, as distinct from their simpler diversely combinable, intellectual and emotional components. It is with respect to these latter and to them only (I observed), that the question of value has much meaning or importance. 1