Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 65

EXERCISES IN UNREALITY

Cardinal Newman, and it could only be schismatic prejudice or
absence of critical faculty which should deny her a place, as a
poet, higher than that of our exquisite master of prose. To find
her exact parallel it is at once her strength and her snare that we
must go back to the middle of the seventeenth century. She is
the sister of George Herbert; she is of the family of Crashaw, of
Vaughan, of Wither." Not one professor of English in a hundred
could write those sentences now. Indeed, the subtlety of taste
and judgment that the sentences exhibit, and the rhetorical balance, mark them out as foreign to our age. But the trouble goes
far beyond style. It is simply not the kind of claim that English
professors would now care to make, or know how to begin to
make. That is because English professors no longer have a clear
sense that art has to do with beauty and truth. They much prefer
to discuss anything but the poetry: sexuality, Victorian politics,
whatever else is easy to declaim about, requires no exercise of
taste and judgment, and can be made to appear sophisticated
and courageous, as they raise the banner in the vanguard of
progress and march on toward tenure and political rectitude
and an easy life.
And what about professors outside the English department? Is
it fair to ask them to make sense of what an intelligent critic of
the prose and poetry of his contemporaries had to say to a general readership of several millions, a majority of whom had not
attended college? The question answers itself. I freely admit that I
suffer my own gaps in knowledge, whereof I am painfully aware.
But reading, not waving banners, is the cure for those.

W

hen you have no case, the lawyers say, you had better shout.
When you have no culture, you shout political slogans. It is
moder nagejour nal .com

65



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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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