A Theme That Runs Loosely

No Voice Is Wholly Lost by Harry Slochower. Creative Age. $3.75.

There is no better index of the quality of one’s emotions than prose style. One naturally distrusts a critic who can speak without irony, as Mr. Slochower does, of nature as an “aleatory process,” or of Nietzsche as representing “The Hindenburg Line of Individualism.” Mr. Slochower’s forte as a critic is not criticism but exegesis. His concern with literature is mainly intellectual, or ideological; he subordinates art to history and as a result traduces both. But it is in any case a question whether cultural history isn’t a contradiction in terms. For culture, precisely to the extent that it merits study, or at any rate admiration, is a succession of disparate moments, incommensurable with one another and with their determinants, insofar as these can be ascertained.