Delmore Schwartz
THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
Good manners are very pleasant and literary criticism is
often very inneresting, to be colloquial. When, however, manners be–
come a major concept in literary criticism, that is something else
again: it is an inneruption, to be colloquial again.
Just before manners came to the fore, the big word in literary
criticism was myth: everything was myth; at the drop of a hat,
or
if
anyone dropped a hat, that was a myth or at least had a
mythical significance. And
in
a way it was true, of course, since
any particular thing belongs to a general class of things which is
part of the universe and the universal order of things; and by rapid
generalizations, going from a particular hat to all hats, hatness and
all hats as forms of dress, dress as a form of decoration, and decor–
ation as a form of illusion, one soon arrives at the distinction be–
tween appearance and reality and is in the very heartland of myth.
For everything in its very nature does have or can have or can be
made to have a mythical meaning. The only trouble is this: the
more lofty the generality, the more inclusive the myth, the more sym–
bolic the symbol, the less attention one gives to the concreteness and
particularity of things and literary works; and these qualities tend
to be fairly important. Of this fact I was reminded recently while
reading an essay by a Swiss critic on F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which
the doctrines of Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, St. Augustine and
Pascal were all made to apply to the life and work of Fitzgerald; and
their doctrines did apply, since as philosophers they dealt with all men.
The only thing wrong was that Fitzgerald might have lived all his
life in Bulgaria, and it would not have made any difference or in–
terfered with the Swiss critic's disquisitions.
The same or a like process of thought-broad, broader, and
