Word: grossness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...RISE AND FALL OF THE MAN OF LETTERS by John Gross. 322 pages. Macmillan...
...Pigsbrook" was the way Victorian Critic F. J. Furnivall referred to Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poet wrote of Furnivall as "Brothelsdyke." Vituperation, however, has gone out of style in literary controversy, and it is the thesis of British Critic John Gross that this is a pity. If men don't lose their tempers over literature (as once they did over theology), it means that literature doesn't matter much any more...
...Gross has had the excellent idea of passing in review a long file of "men of letters" from Francis Jeffrey and Thomas Carlyle to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis who agreed on nothing but shared a belief that their literary squabbles were deadly serious engagements in a battle for the keys to the kingdom of the mind. Scientists, today's high priests, may regard their theories as the most important thing on earth; after all, there is the conquered moon to prove it. But once Carlyle could say, and be believed, that the man of letters...
Literary Thunderheads. For Gross's purposes, "men of letters" are critics and journalists-as distinguished from novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative persons, though countless creators served as men of letters too. His well-read line of English literary men should really be traced back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets began the great industry of literary criticism and gossip. But what began with a bang (Johnson was capable of no lesser noise) is clearly ending in a whisper. Between Johnson and Eliot lay the great age of the literary thunderheads, roughly dated between...
...Coleridge and the rest will be no more intelligible than hippopotamus snorting and snuffling in jungle muck? Are we on the verge of a new Dark Age of universal literacy in which the mind, and the longing for the pleasures of literature, will drown in a plethora of print? Gross quotes the new attitude as described by a Kingsley Amis character: "If there was one thing which Roger never felt like, it was a good read." Have science and the new near disciplines like sociology-not to mention the sheer accumulation of modern knowledge that he cannot hope to assimilate...