Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/15

 The New Criterion itself, I have expressed my aversion to stating any programme or erecting any platform. But it might not be amiss to clarify by illustration the notion of a 'tendency'. Here the reader must take warning. Even in indicating a tendency—far from formulating a programme—I must perforce falsify. I cannot help substituting personal tendencies for those which are impersonal and existing in the outside world. But from this dilemma there is no escape, and the reader must make his own reserves and deductions accordingly. I believe that the modern tendency is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism. I use the term with hesitation, for it is hardly more than analogical: we must scrupulously guard ourselves against measuring living art and mind by dead laws of order. Art reflects the transitory as well as the permanent condition of the soul; we cannot wholly measure the present by what the past has been, or by what we think the future ought to be. Yet there is a tendency—discernable even in art—toward a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reason. If this approaches or even suggests the Greek ideal, so much the better: but it must inevitably be very different. I will mention a few books, not all very recent, which to my mind exemplify this tendency:

Réflexions sur la violence, by Georges Sorel; L'Avenir de l'intelligence, by Charles Maurras; Belphégor, by Julien Benda; Speculations, by T. E. Hulme; Réflexions sur l'intelligence, by Jacques Maritain; Democracy and Leadership, by Irving Babbit. Anyone who is acquainted with two or more of these books will understand my use of the word 'tendency', for the theories and points of view are extremely divergent. And against this group of books I will set another group of books, more accidental, it is true, but all recently received, which represent to my mind that part of the present which is already dead: