traditions of cultural history

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Trustees of Boston University Traditions of Cultural History Poetry and Society by Bruno Snell Review by: Frederic Will Arion, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1962), pp. 108-117 Published by: Trustees of Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162770 . Accessed: 17/06/2014 08:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.208 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:05:48 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Traditions of Cultural History

Trustees of Boston University

Traditions of Cultural HistoryPoetry and Society by Bruno SnellReview by: Frederic WillArion, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1962), pp. 108-117Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162770 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 08:05

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.208 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:05:48 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Traditions of Cultural History

TRADITIONS OF CULTURAL HISTORY1

Frederic Will

Bruno Snell's new book is full of good insights, it was

originally presented in lecture form at the University of Indiana: we find much that must have struck the intelligent ear as vital

and experienced. But these lectures, as a book, raise general ques

tions about the writing of the cultural history of ancient Greece. The book is too ambitious. It proposes to consider the notion of

society or community as it appears in ancient Greek literature from Homer to Herondas. 'Society' is taken, here, in the broadest sense, to mean any 'voluntary being-together.' This meaning

nat

urally applies to very different matters in the book's course: at one time focus will be on domestic love, at another on civic virtue, or on the epic sense of noblesse oblige. Widely different states of

mind, from Sappho's passion to Heracles' anguish, are taken into the argument of 111 pages. As though the subject were not suf

ficiently broadened, in this way, the standard periods of Greek

literature?epic, lyric, tragic, comic?are run quickly through,

at

best serving as a background co-ordinate to the main theme, but more often as an indefinitely generalizing factor, drawing atten tion away from detail. From the detail which fails, as it had not in Snell's earlier work, to pin down and illuminate the main theme.

Precise examples of wit (in Ibycus), of sense of beauty (in Sappho), and of introspection (in Euripides) are studied; but

they do not add up to a single argument. Examples from Greek are used, too. The prefix syn in Homer; Homeric nouns like ihy

mos, echthros, or homophrosynai; the words philos, psyche, and arete in tragedy: all are used and briefly analyzed. But such de tails seem too weak to bear their heavy superstructure of generali zation. One wonders if Snell has not here worked in from gen eralities, rather than out toward them, as he usually has.

By now Kulturgeschichte Griechenlands has become a sea soned discipline; it has been in progress of writing since the mid dle of the last century, when Fustel de Coulanges, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt broke through into a new language of Hellenic schol

arship. Their language, as we now know, comprised

a vocabulary

of awarenesses of geistige Tatsachen, of ways of talking about the

1 Bruno Snell, Poetry and Society ( Bloomington, 1961). Other books discussed here are also available in recent editions: Fustel de Cou

langes, The Ancient City (New York, 1956); Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ( New York, 1960 ) ; Adkins, Merit and Responsibility ( Oxford, 1960 ) ; Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens ( London, 1941 ) ; Finley, The

World of Odysseus (New York, 1959); Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston, 1957); Stokes, Greek Culture and the Ego (London, 1958 ). A translated and available edition of Burckhardt's history would

be valuable.

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Page 3: Traditions of Cultural History

Frederic Will 109

'spiritual life' of the ancient Greeks. All this was new; it was neither history of philosophy nor liistory of ideas,' as we use those terms today. History of philosophy existed at the time of La Cit?

Antique; it had in fact been vigorously written since early in the

century, when it had battened on the romantic movement's in

terest in the organic development of ideas. But such history tended then, and still tends, to be arid and academic. It dealt

with abstractions, without concerning itself with either the color

ing of those abstractions, their verbal clothing, or the 'situation' of the thinker in the world of his time.

'History of ideas,' in our terminology, is a product of our cen

tury. It has come to mean any persistent tracking of single ideas or

attitudes, as they reveal themselves in different cultures. No pri ority is given, here, to ideas of great speculative consequence. The 'idea' that the Chinese garden is a fine disposition of one's back

yard, or that woman should be educated, is quite as fair game as the idea that all of reality is essentially one. The decisive rule of this study is that the single idea or concern should be studied in its evolution through different cultures. Here, as in the history of philosophy, the life-destroying element is the concern with the

past uniquely as development and change. Of course this con cern is necessary to understand the past; the best cultural history has also insisted on historical evolution. But the ideas of a culture, at a certain time, are in part only intelligible in terms of the whole constellation of views, crises, and feelings dominant in that cul ture at that time. Ideas, whether speculative or just 'routinely' life-regulating?like the 'ideas' that children should be obedient or that alcohol is hateful?are only intelligible in terms of their im

mediate context. That context is the mass of signs which sym bolize and in turn are symbolized by specific ideas. The idea that children should be strictly disciplined points to,' say, the concur rent assumption that man is inherently evil, and is 'pointed to' by that assumption. The horizontal time-section of a society is thus of huge importance to the historian. Well read, it provides him with a unique lexicon, in terms of which to interpret the life of the past. This lexicon opened itself to the founders of Hellenic

Kulturgeschichte, with the result that they began to write with new authenticity about the life of ancient Greek civilization and with a kind of insight which was absent from other contemporary forms of history.

The distinctive insight which emerges in Fustel, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt is hard to characterize. All three men combined the faculties of the poet with those of the sociologist. If poets can do

anything, it is to see and feel wholes, and to be able to express them. If sociologists?at least in the older, humanistic sense?can do anything, it is to eye and classify the telling details of social

behavior?revelatory gestures, manners of speech, patterns of dis

cipline?and to see how these details are related to one another.

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110 TRADITIONS of cultural history

Unfortunately for the study of antiquity, these two capabilities have seldom been joined in classicists. Fustel shows how valuable the joining can be. La Cit? Antique is wonderfully faithful to social detail. It is based only on original texts, for Fustel felt that only such an analysis could penetrate another culture. Only this was alive. This conviction trained his eye for close observation; he was not

tempted by the generalities of other scholars, or by others' texture less id?es recues. At the same time, though, he had organic vision.

One feels this at every point. Patiently Fustel collects the avail able ancient information about religion and its relation both to

family and state. Patiently he helps those fragments to interpret one another, to

explain one another in the most fertile way, on

the basic linguistic level. But pervasive through all bis explana tions is a sense of the broadest implications of the details; of their

implications both for the character of Greek society at specific periods, and for the understanding of the human adventure in

general. Such implications are won from the text, not foisted on the reader from a stockpile of readied prejudices. The vision is seen through, and not just as an addition to, the particular things seen.

Nietzsche and Burckhardt knew and absorbed Fustel's achieve ment, and in carrying it farther into their own domains managed to

strengthen and legitimize

the new 'science.' Burckhardt's Kul

turgeschichte Griechenlands is an immense compendium of

knowledge. Fustel had forced himself to read and judge every scrap of ancient evidence which was relevant to his work. But his

work had set him a limited task; its theme had been definite. Burckhardt had taken all of Greek culture for his subject, defining it only arbitrarily. He addressed himself to certain tendencies of

Greek culture: its agonal, or competitive, side; its myth-making side; its compulsion toward the fife of the pofis. Under each of these headings, though, he had virtually taken up all of Greek culture again, in great detail, as though to shift that whole experi ence from one lens to another of a vast

thinking eye. Burckhardt's

study seemed to make possible, or to show the eventual possi bility of, synthetic discourse about all of Greek culture. Burck hardt was pioneering for the work of men like Jaeger. Nietzsche

pushed Fustel's effort in a different direction, of course, but did as much as Burckhardt to make that effort stick, and take root in a new tradition. Briefly, Nietzsche brought speculative dignity to Fustel's argument, drawing out explicitly and arguing through the principles which were operative in the relation of ancient so

ciety to ancient religion. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche simpli fied away details to the point where a general distinction between

early fifth and late fifth century Greek cultures was apparent. This

general distinction was worth emphasizing. Something in Greek culture prior to Socrates and Euripides had been more aestheti

cally whole, more ritually distant, more vigorous, than much that

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Page 5: Traditions of Cultural History

Frederic Will 111

was to be thought and felt in the later fifth century. Logic, rea

soning, and self-examination were to have some deep relation to the decline in morale which is noticeable in late fifth-century

Athens. Nietzsche forced his point, overlooked too many factors, and argued from prejudices. But he did show a kind of permanent speculative possibility which emerged from cultural history and

only from such history. The poetic-sociological insight for which we are indebted to

Fustel has been carried much farther. The cultural history of

ancient Greece has become a recognized part of the dialogue be tween scholarship and antiquity, has absorbed the attention of some of the best classicists, and has drawn a great many surround

ing disciplines at least temporarily into its orbit.

Jaeger's Paideia is representative of the earlier forms of this effort at its best. Following in Burckhardt's direction, embracing all of ancient Greek culture under a single heading, he amasses an enormous document of learning and insight. Greek literature from Homer through Theophrastus is opened out, unfolded from the inside, in a way that makes it seem previously undiscovered.

One is amazed by the simplicity of the method which, as in Burck hardt and Fustel, consists in fidelity to the text, and refusal to

consider literature outside of the living context of culture. Here, as in Burckhardt, there is real inquiry of the text, which is allowed to speak for itself, rather than to conform itself to the author's

opinions. Through a slightly narrower aperture Hermann Fr?nkel, in Dichtung und Philosophie des fr?hen Griechentums, surveyed

Greek culture in its horizontal entirety, seeing Homer, Hesiod, the pre-Socratics and the early lyric poets as creators working in a set of specific social circumstances, out of which with difficulty they formed both the material and shape of their expressions.

With Fr?nkel we become newly aware of the texture of the early Greek achievement, in fact of the labor pains of early Greek cul ture as a whole. He has made himself full master of an insight

which is a precious and hard-won asset of Hellenic cultural his

tory. He refuses to treat the poetry and philosophy of early Greece as something to be won by us without conquest, as a set of lin

guistic events penetrable simply by language. Because he has his eye on the cultural ramifications of early Greek poetry and

thought, he treats those expressions as

though they had once not

existed, as essentially gratuitous from the overall social stand

point, and thus as artifacts which men living in society had at one time been able to establish. In Fr?nkel's discussions we meet an

cient language at the point where it is being converted from authentic experience into artistic form, and the result is that early

Greece relives for us.

From Fustel through Fr?nkel a tradition of Hellenic cultural

history was forming itself. No canons were laid down, but certain

exempla of poetic-sociological insight had been proposed, and an

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112 TRADITIONS OF CULTURAL HISTORY

aristocracy of scholars had formed itself, against whom appeal would be difficult. The achievement had been decidedly German ?as on the whole it has continued to be?and it is no wonder that a German, Bruno Snell, was to be one of the significant workers in cultural history. Die Entdeckung des Geistes is a complex set of essays, offering a bewildering variety of insights into all periods of Greek culture, especially as that culture appears through the

semi-diaphanous clothing of literature. But the title and the first

essay of the book are immediate indications of the way in which the earlier Snell completes Fr?nkel. The 'discovery of the mind'

means the growing self-preparation, by a culture, of the means for being aware of its own spirit. The chief hindrance to such awareness is 'deficient' language, lack of vocabulary, on the basic

level, to name 'soul,' 'spirit,' or

'personality,' and, on a more gen eral level, the overall lack of linguistic implements for self-descrip tion by a culture. Snell attacks this problem at its roots, in his first essay. Basic linguistic argument remains central throughout Die Entdeckung des Geistes: language is everywhere probed there for evidence of just what a culture was able to think and

experience at a given time. Literary texts are made to open out in

continuity with the culture from which they were written. Some

times, actually, that continuity seems too easily assumed. Not

enough allowance is made for the distortion of real experience in literature?an artificial distillation of spoken language. Nor is there

enough allowance for the extent to which 'thought' and experience can exist independent of language. The speculative problem here is complex. But in any case ancient experience is so frighteningly distant from us that we can ask for no better index to it than ancient language: words are at least more meaningful than things.

II

Snell's recent book is a disappointment, in view of what we

expect both from him and from the tradition of Hellenic cultural

history. It fails those two standards of achievement; but it also makes us think. It makes us wonder where the grand tradition is

going, and whether it has not used itself up. From the outset, the good writer of Hellenic Kulturgeschichte

had to face his subject as a whole man, to confront it from his

being with unique directness. The epigrapher, the numismatist, the paleographer, also may confront the past with such a stance;

nothing prevents it. But the fact is that none of those disciplines requires the wholeness of encounter required by cultural history.

This situation may seem to be advantageous, as far as the writing of such history is concerned. Men?not pedants?have been con

sistently invited into the writing of cultural history; in fact the

coming into being of such history may even have done something for the creation of new men in the classical family. Fustel re

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Page 7: Traditions of Cultural History

Frederic Will 113

leased, among students of antiquity, new

energies, gave a new

vocabulary to suppressed or unclarified thoughts. Oddly enough, though, the cult of personality in Kultur

geschichte, that science's dependence upon the great, whole en

counterer, was to carry its own penalty. As knowledge about

antiquity grew, and as knowledge about the world?philosophical, psychological, and sociological?grew, the grand tradition of Hel lenic cultural history stayed behind. Of course, such fine works as those of Jaeger, Reinhardt, or Fr?nkel have been written

throughout our century. But even they, as we look back on them, seem to lack density, to lack a certain new knowledge and per ception which has gone into making the contemporary scholarly

mind at its best. Above all, these 'grand' works fall easily into the substitution of private and personal constructions for valid hu

mility before the increased complexity of knowledge, and in

creasingly complex means of stating that knowledge. A new hybris ?the kind felt charmingly but conspicuously in Snell's latest book ?comes into being there.

Reading Snell's little book helps one to realize that the science of Kulturgeschichte is at a crossroads. The grand tradition?which was genuinely grand?is breaking down.. There is something sub

stantially?even irremediably?disturbing about what goes on in this book. Dilettantism, susceptibility to sententiae about the character of ancient culture, seems to be in style here. Cul

tured, perceptive mind rambles on. Simonides and Herondas are drawn too easily into focus. Ancient Greece has here become too

accessible, or rather accessible in too facile a way?it has become accessible merely to personal confrontation. Mere addition of de tail could help to remedy this, but it would not be enough. We feel impatient for a new stance toward antiquity, for a more

up-to date vocabulary, in which a more authentically modern' argu ment could embody itself. We feel the need of a new tradition,

using the old one with proper respect, but with proper sense of difference.

Ill

Contemporary to, and following, Snell's early work there has been a spate of books on Greek culture from more

oblique angles: from the directions of contemporary sociology, philosophy, intel lectual history, and psychoanalysis. Much of this work has been of

high quality, reflecting the now general habit by which Greek culture attracts the most capable students of Hellenism. All of this work contains within itself the promise of a future synthesis

which will be as encompassing

as Jaeger

s but more accurate, more faithful to the infinitely graded contours of ancient experi ence, more 'modern,' in a sense to be suggested here. A new tra

dition is in the making.

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114 TRADITIONS OF CULTURAL HISTORY

Some of this new work has openly affiliated itself with Snell; work such as A. W. Adkins' Merit and Responsibilty, which none

theless represents an

original move into a domain intermediate

between pure ethical speculation and the general tradition of cul tural history. He asks himself persistently whether various Greek authors evaluated men on external or on

internal?'spiritual'?

grounds. From the beginning he searches for what he believes is

fundamentally Christian and non-Greek; the conviction that a man's status?his time?is less important than what he is, than his

psyche in the later sense of the word. Through the lens of this

perverse argument he sees aspects of Hellenic culture with unique clarity. For instance, the conflict in Homer between the old mo

rality centered in time and arete, and a new, more probing moral

ity opens out of the text. Passages are made to yield entirely un

suspected fruit. The funeral games for Patroclus bring into contest men of good family but mediocre athletic ability, with men who are great athletes, but of undistinguished family. Two forms of culture are balanced, and temporarily held in tension. Such ten sions are delicately sought out through this book, which fol lows up its theme tenaciously, so as to bring out the gradual 'spiritualization' of Greek culture. Always the modern contrast forms a background. Always the particular angle of vision of the book provokes unusual questions and excludes the customary replies.

Considerable work concerned with Greek society from a view

point informed by contemporary trends in sociology has also been

produced. 'Sociology,' here, is to be taken in a more academic, or technical sense than in the earlier works of Hellenic cultural his

tory. Yet here, too, we are dealing with Kulturgeschichte, and at a point where it seems destined to establish a valuable new lan

guage for discussing antiquity. George Thomson, in a work like

Aeschylus and Athens, or in his other work on early Mediter ranean society, brings in Marxism. Whatever we think of that po sition, or however we evaluate its contribution to his argument, as far as truth goes, we feel excitement here. Simply the feeling of involvement is exciting: Thomson confronts ancient society

with the attentiveness of a man for whom it matters greatly what the character of that society was. He sees a great deal, and opens

many windows. But it is not the involvement which excites; it is also the intellectual perceptiveness, which grows partly from the effort to understand in a new way. The

releasing of new

energies, as

they bear on Greek culture, is no small consequence of the con

viction he brings to his argument. Nothing partisan, but much that springs from the trained and

sensitive eye for social detail, comes from M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus, a work which sees the social relevance of the details of the Odyssey with a clarity which makes us wonder how

we had missed it. What Snell had achieved in some of his earliest

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Page 9: Traditions of Cultural History

Frederic Will 115

writing about Homeric language is here reaccomplished through a close look at the structure of Homeric society. Remarks on the structure of kinship, on the words available to describe personal relations, on the levels of responsibility within the Homeric fam

ily, open forth into a vision of the whole social world of Homeric times. Again, the working out from detail is successful, and we are reminded how much room remains simply for clear, and yet professionally trained, rereading of ancient texts.

The importance of social science for Kulturgeschichte is also reflected in a group of books which push toward social psychol ogy, the psychology of groups of men. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational makes a serious effort to integrate new learning into the overall picture of the ancient Greek mind, and presents us, at the least, with the possibility of new ways of getting under the surface. By the time of Dodds' writing it was generally agreed that Greek culture was not the marmoreal, 'classical' world of forms which the schoolbooks had so long portrayed. It was the

right moment to understand better in what stages and ways the Greeks were not so marmoreal. Ideas that are also operative

in

Adkins' book appear here, in another context. Change from a shame to a guilt culture is seen as the crucial transformation in the Greek world, between Homeric and fifth-century culture.

Shame, to the Homeric man, had been the most painful emotion, while to the 'fifth-century man' guilt had been most painful. With wonderful substantiation Dodds brings out the implications of this

change in the psychology of a society, and suggests, like Adkins, the way in which this change was part of an overall internaliza

tion of values and motives. Findings of modern anthropology are made here to

play an

organic role, and to convince us of the pos sibilities of such application.

Psychoanalysis plays just as organic, and more complex, a part in Greek Culture and the Ego, by Adrian Stokes, a brief book

of such unmistakable intuitive power that I wish it would be

widely digested and reworked into clearer syntheses. Following Freud, and particularly Melanie Klein, Stokes examines the rela tion of the self to the object?of personality to other?in fifth

century Greek culture. The argument is dense and technical, and the conclusion?that self's relation to object in that culture was

extremely unneurotic, untroubled?is probably too general

to do more than whet the mind's appetite. But the terms of the argu ment are

exemplary, and establish one more model of vigorous entrance into the character of Greek culture. Detail and thematic

thrust interweave, and leave us even surer that ancient texts have

only begun to talk about the men who wrote them.

IV

Progress is possible in the writing of cultural history, and, odd as it may seem, there lie before us awarenesses and syntheses yet

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Il6 TRADITIONS OF CULTURAL HISTORY

unsuspected. This may be said to seem 'odd' for just one reason; that in rereading the classics of Kulturgeschichte?Fustel, Burck

hardt, Jaeger and others?we seem to be confronting giants of

Hellenism, and feel awe before them. Certainly those men were

giants of Hellenism. But they lacked something we bring to the

job now. At this point we can only obliquely describe that lack; we are

feeling our way.

Of one thing we are sure: that the men of the earlier tradition of cultural history were not us, were not of our age; and though

we must pardon them for this, we may at least be impatient with it. We are working toward our own image of the character of ancient Greek culture, and in our own mode. The mid-twentieth

century scholar, looking to ancient culture as a whole, sees it

through certain exigencies of our time. Something leisured in the work of a Burckhardt, Jaeger, or even Fustel will trouble him; some comfortable savoring of the details of a culture. Books will become and are becoming shorter; but this is only a negative indi cation. As far as cultural history is concerned, a sense of troubled

personal immediacy is entering the cognitive situation now, and from this sense, at its most disciplined and informed, are springing increasingly significant encounters. Immediacy there was, in the encounters of the founders; no one would deny it to Nietzsche or Fustel. But it was not 'troubled' in the sense such immediacy is in Adkins, Thomson, or Stokes. The latter men write out of a con

temporary sense, of the crucial importance of classical antiquity, even to our survival, of the degree to which we are classical an

tiquity. In this sense, their writing is full of a troubled awareness. But not only in this sense: these writers are not simply or mainly specialist-dramatizers of the much discussed Angst of our age.

There is in them also a distinctive sense of the insolidity of knowl

edge. In Burckhardt, and even in Jaeger, knowledge seems sub stantial, a body of data to be assembled and understood as though they were firm factual *building-blocks.' In many of the later cul tural historians, such confidence in the fact has been disturbed.

Data of history seem less unambiguously significant than they once did. Textual criticism and awareness of the

mythical in his

tory?two very different weapons of knowledge?have converged to project a powerful ray of light into the obscurity of the past. In that light the historical fact breaks up into its elements, one of

which is often the motive of propaganda. Literary?or generally artistic?facts, too, have become more

problematic and trouble some. In Adkins and Stokes, allowance is made for the distortion, in a culture's literature, of the truth about the culture's life. The

notion of literature as a document is being submitted to salutary and troublesome inspection.

Along with this troubled sense of immediacy?a sense to which we owe much of the reality and virility of these recent works social science has added to our powers of writing cultural history.

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Page 11: Traditions of Cultural History

Here I mean the disciplines of sociology and psychology, and their varied combinations, which have first been released for

major cultural inquiries during the last few decades. I have al luded already to the sense in which Burckhardt and Fustel were

'sociologists,' and to the meaning of the word in that case. The

point now is different. Adkins, Thomson, Finley, and Stokes are still sociologists, in that sense: they have the same poetic eye for social detail. But they exercise that eye in accordance with princi ples of observation, analogy, and synthesis which have been sanc tioned by fifty years of effort toward a genuine science of society.

Admittedly these 'principles' sometimes verge toward mere theory, even toward dogma which has lost touch with the complexity of life. Thomson's Marxism sometimes seems just that; a device for

simplifying away the complexity of the past. So does Stokes' re liance on the antithesis between ego and object. But on the whole, even with those two men, theory seems to be functioning organic ally with native intelligence, functioning to penetrate the modes of another culture's life. What happens, when we realize the work that 'principles' are doing in this writing, is that we lose our aca

demic maidenheads once more. The natural, thinking encounter

of the great cultural historian with the past can no longer seem

enough. We are forced to realize that the age of techniques and systems for awareness is with us, and is necessary. Just

as man

himself now appears, in the perspective of depth psychology, by no means perspicuous to untrained observation; and as society appears governed by inner laws which change and repeat them selves, and the understanding of which is truly a science; so we

agree that the culture of the past is properly the study of cumu lative technical effort, put to use by men of native intelligence.

Technique and accumulated principles impose themselves here, help us to see why we find something great but old-fashioned in Burckhardt and Jaeger, dilettantish in Poetry and Society, and at least pioneering in the recent works mentioned above.

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