The Gold Standard

Some critics hope to revive beauty, others high culture, but it is a curious thing that any hopes to revive both. Beauty is immediately accessible, and thus, from the perspective of high culture, heretical. Like the orthodoxies of high modernism—serialism in music, Bauhaus in architecture, abstraction in painting, free verse in poetry—high culture demands discipline, hard work, and self-denial. An ascetic as well as an aesthetic discipline, it inures the audience to the cheap grace of pleasant images.

Though the 20th-century priests of high culture—T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Dwight Macdonald—preached modernism, they believed an ancient religion. Like Plato, they feared that their flock might confuse mere representations with the real thing. Like Plato, they were forthrightly elitist, which explains the otherwise puzzling affinity of the would-be Trotskyite vanguard of Partisan Review contributors for the reactionary boot straparistocrat T. S. Eliot. Unlike Plato, however, they unwittingly succeeded—at least if one judges by the near-total irrelevance today of new poetry, painting, and music—in banning the poets from the city.

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Austin W. Bramwell

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Some critics hope to revive beauty, others high culture, but it is a curious thing that any hopes to revive both. Beauty is immediately accessible, and thus, from the perspective of high culture, heretical. Like the orthodoxies of high modernism—serialism in music, Bauhaus in architecture, abstraction in painting, free verse in poetry—high culture demands discipline, hard work, and self-denial. An ascetic as well as an aesthetic discipline, it inures the audience to the cheap grace of pleasant images.

Though the 20th-century priests of high culture—T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Dwight Macdonald—preached modernism, they believed an ancient religion. Like Plato, they feared that their flock might confuse mere representations with the real thing. Like Plato, they were forthrightly elitist, which explains the otherwise puzzling affinity of the would-be Trotskyite vanguard of Partisan Review contributors for the reactionary boot straparistocrat T. S. Eliot. Unlike Plato, however, they unwittingly succeeded—at least if one judges by the near-total irrelevance today of new poetry, painting, and music—in banning the poets from the city.