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I first met Marcuse in June, 1967, when he came to Berlin for a visit. After arriving at Tempelhof airport he immediately went to the opera, where a student had been murdered a few weeks before by a plain-clothes policeman during demonstrations against the visit by the Shah of Persia. That same evening he met with a small group of people for long discussions at his hotel in Dahlem. Enzensberger, Dutschke and Lefevre were there already when I entered the room. The first sentence I heard him utter was: "Our problem is that the very people who would benefit from the changes we wish to bring about don't want those changes at all." That wasn't exactly what we wanted to hear right then. Much later he told me that this meeting with German radical students on that night especially their strong antifascism meant some sort of a reconciliation with Germany for him. About half a year later we found ourselves at the same university. Marcuse's study was two stories above mine, and so we saw each other almost daily during the last twelve years. The sentence I heard him say most often was: "We must do something about this immediately!" He felt the daily horrors too deeply and intensely and would never shield himself from them. One might almost say that his work, his writing, had to be fought for time and again in the intermissions, in those short stretches between the continual outbursts. Here it is important to stress that nothing was taboo for him. For example, he condemned the US attack on Vietnam, just as much as he criticized the Chinese attack on Vietnam. He declined an invitation to visit China with the remark: "I won't go through a door which has been opened by Kissinger!" Almost all writers and philosophers whom I have met have developed in the course of their lives a skill or a system of excuses protecting their work from the recurring disturbances of their surroundings. This was not the case with Marcuse. What characterized him most was his sensitive reaction to occurrences around him, his capacity to be shocked even when the expected actually happened a daily, painful realization of the context within which he worked. As a youngster, I had always thought a philosopher was a person who was constantly astonished by everything, i.e., someone who took everything seriously. Marcuse fulfilled this youthful notion of mine with his careful

In his delightful 1958 book, The Musical Life, critic Irving Kolodin deliberately torpedoed the cliches of many of his colleagues in describing conductor Leopold Stokowski-no stories about the "glamor boy" of conducting, his womanizing, his supposed musical vulgarity, nor his Hollywood adventures. Instead Kolodin offered several insights about the musician and asked a couple of thoughtful questions, doing so with something like awe of the then seventy-five-year-old maestro. Remarking that one could not in honesty mark him down as either "a charlatan or a poseur"--which was, of course, exactly what a number of critics had done over the years-Kolodin mused that Stokowski was unique among conductors and was difficult to fathom because he combined a boy's sense of wide-eyed wonder with a mature musical sophistication of the highest order, the whole governed by a deep intuitive grasp of things rather than by rational judgment and pragmatic logic. Describing Stokowski's performances as memorable, but often mystifying, Kolodin wrote that he would gladly go to any New York concert that Stokowski gave "fully knowing that what I expected I would not get." Quite unlike, yet fully the equal of, traditionalist Arturo Toscanini, Stokowski seemed to draw his interpretive power and his strength of command from within rather than from musical tradition and accepted concert norms. Like a volcano, continued Kolodin, he tapped his reserve "from some source deep in the nature of things with a capacity ... quite elemental." His performances were musically engrossing and exciting even when they seemed to be wrong-headed, but, mused Kolodin, as though contemplating some profound mystery of nature, how could a gifted musician, age seventy-five, with then almost fifty years experience in the concert hall remain so "willful," so "mercurial" in a "measured" art form so clear cut in its "fundamental sense of order." And with the acknowledgment that Stokowski was and had ever been outside the established order of the concert world, Kolodin moved on to other musical matters.1

A radical critique of modernity crystallized in the German Bildungsbiirgertum at the end of the last century. A broad cross-section of this stratum equated "mass democracy" with anarchy, foresaw a future populated only by "atomized modern men, " and disdained the "vulgarity" of industrial capitalism. The origin and expansion of the intense and persistent configuration of cultural values that constituted German Kulturpessimismus deserves exploratory theoretical examination. The sociology of knowledge analysis suggested here is based on a Weberian framework that examines the cultural values indigenous to several sectors of the public sphere in pre-industrial and nineteenth century Germany and the particular dynamic of interaction between these values and those indigenous to the private sphere in early twentieth century Germany. Comparisons to the American public sphere and its relationship to the American private sphere are noted in order to isolate clearly the German situation. This case study offers an illustration of the manner in which heterogenous cultural values may persist over extended periods of time despite fundamental structural transformation.

To the Editor. —In the recent article by Drs Cummings and Zarit, 1 the reproductions that are supposed to illustrate the progressive intellectual decay of the artist show in fact a progression toward better pictorial quality, if not toward genius. Figure 1 in the article, painted near the time of onset of Alzheimer's disease, is a vulgar, unskilled amateur painting with gross errors in perspective and nauseating colors. Figure 2, painted seven years after the onset of disease, is the work of a genius, recalling the best of Van Gogh. Figure 4, completed at the nadir of his Alzheimer's dementia, could compete with the best attainments of modern art. This leads to one question: Are our contemporary artists collectively suffering from advanced Alzheimer's or from another kind of dementia?

To the Editor. —The article entitled "Probable Alzheimer's Disease in an Artist" by Drs Cummings and Zarit 1 in the Nov 20, 1987, issue of JAMA was one of the funniest articles I have ever read. The humor was all the more hilarious because it was unintentional and it entirely escaped the authors. They show a picture painted by the artist before the onset of Alzheimer's disease (Fig 1) that is a nice little picture, quite photographic in content and worth about $75. Figure 2 in the article shows a stunning painting done after the artist acquired Alzheimer's disease! It looks like a Van Gogh and is typical of Impressionism. I would like to buy it. This would lead one to reason by induction that crazy artists are better than sane ones, and that is often true.

I am indebted to all five commentators for deepening and extending the issues raised in my essay. I express particular appreciation to Professors Diggins and Lears for their willingness to hear me out, then to respond, each in his own thoughtful way. There are only a few matters that require further ink on my part. Jackson Lears possesses a powerful capacity to envelop diverse elements within his own original synthesis. In his article on cultural hegemony, arguments for and against use of that concept are presented in a delicate pas de deux. Perhaps, as he suggests, I stumbled at one point on his fancy footwork. In any case, I think we do share a sense of what the big problems are. He is right, for example, to identify oppositional culture in the twentieth century as a topic that desperately needs further analysis. While not entirely disagreeing with his initial skepticism regarding the potentialities of mass culture, I have wondered (elsewhere) whether part of our problem in the search for "modern" resistance does not arise from a recent tendency among social and cultural historians to overdramatize the traditionalism of earlier protest, thus leaving the modern era denuded of all capacity for radical transformation., The feisty reply ofJohn Patrick Diggins, my favorite pessimist, requires a bit more intervention. In my view his learned, if somewhat dyspeptic, commentary contains two very helpful points. First, those of us who invoke labor republicanism as a category of nineteenth-century analysis must more carefully distinguish it from the more formal tradition of classical, civic republicanism from which it derives. Whether the vulgarity of the laborite version nineteenth-century workers did not, after all, have the advantage of reading Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson, J. G. A. Pocock, or Diggins on the subject -really detracted from their political message is, of course, another question. Second, Diggins's questioning of the assumed ties between individualism and capitalist culture is provocative. No doubt he is right for the long haul, but I would suggest that there are moments, such as the late nineteenth century, where capitalist and individualist logic appear to coincide. In such moments, otherwise disparate brakes on possessive individualism -the nation, the workers, the community, the ethnic group, the family-may be summoned into service by the political opposition. In the case of the Knights of Labor, the family, for example, was heralded less as an inherent "bastion of anticapitalism" than as a

"The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelopes the foreigner... in an auditory film which halts at his ears the alienation of the mother tongue: the regional and social origin of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize. Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am, protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality." (Roland Barthes)

RALPH Waldo Emerson was a poor boy, but in his conmmunity his kind of poverty mattered little. Few of his classmates at Harvard had more money than he did, and they made no such splurge as would cause him to feel inferior or outcast. His name was as good as, if not better than, anybody else's. At reunions of the class of 1821, Emerson and his fellows, without embarrassment, quietly took up a collection for their one insolvent member. In the logic of the situation, Emerson should have received the stamp and have embraced the opinions of this group-self-consciously aristocratic, not because of their wealth but because of their names and heritage, at that moment moving easily from the Federalist to the Whig party. In 1821 there could hardly be found a group of young Americans more numb to the notion that there were any stirring implications in the word "democracy." Actually, Emerson did take their stamp and did imbibe their opinion. We know, or ought to know, that to the end of his days he remained the child of Boston; he might well have lived out his time like Dr. Holmes (whom he admired), secure in his provincial superiority, voting Whig and Republican, associating the idea of the Democratic party with vulgarity, with General Jackson and tobacco-chewing. In great part he did exactly that; for this reason he poses difficult problems for those who would see in him America's classic sage. For reasons which only a sociological investigation might uncover, youths at Harvard College after the War of 1812 began to exhibit a weariness with life such as they fancied might become a Rochefoucauld, which, assuredly, was nothing like what the college in its Puritan days had expected of sons of the prophets. Perhaps this was their way of declaring their inde

Objections to the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf often center about the limited range of their art: typical judgments being E. M. Forster's in Aspects of the Novel, where it is said that "most of human life has to disappear before [James] can do us a novel," and Walter Allen's in The English Novel, where Woolf is seen a "novelist of very narrow limits . . . . [Her characters] tend to think and feel alike, to be the aesthetes of one set of sensations." It is thought that the characters of both novelists do not experience the range of life as it is really lived; moreover, they seem to inhabit worlds in which questions of social strife, of evil and suffering, of religious doubts, of something so necessary to life as work, are ignored. It is felt generally, even by admirers, that in the novels of James and Woolf the aesthetic sensibility has so constricted life as to distort or pervert it, taking into account little of the richness and the vulgarity of ordinary life. It is not my suggestion that James and Woolf are similar in many important respects; surprisingly enough, they seem quite clearly unrelated in matters of form, since James prepares forms quite as rigorous, though not as visible, as the plots of the traditional novel, and Woolf seeks to discover along wtih her characters design in the free flux of life; thematically, James is obsessed with the moral education of pastoral creatures-princesses or Adamic vovagers from America while Woolf is concerned with the necessary though doomed attempt to forge out of daily lif a meaning that will transcend it. They are kin, however, in their creation of subjective worlds that seek to define themselves in relationship to the larger, "real" world, the process often bringing with it annihilation, as in Tho Voyage Out and The Wings of the Dove. They are kin, most clearly, in their use of minute psychological observations, Woolf casting about much more freely than James; and in their deliberate, unhurried, at times relentless faithfulness to these observations. What is most interesting about their art, however, is that it seems dehumanized to the ordinary reader. One cannot abstract from their words characters who are able to survive in an alien environment, as it would seem one might with other novelists-Dickens, Austen, Twain, Joyce. This apparent weakness, however, may be seen as a necessary qualification of their art.

The history of the word jazz is indeed a fascinating one. Variously derived from Africa, Arabia, the Creole, French, Old English, Spanish, the Indians, the names of mythical musicians, old vaudeville practices, associations with sex and vulgarity, onomatopoeia, and other sources, its real origin has been, and may well remain, a mystery. Yet a study of the problems that have been associated with it, and a tracing of the suggestions and viewpoints that have been advanced in the literature from 1917 through 1958, provide a real journey into the background not only of the word, but of jazz itself. A number of summary articles concerning the word have appeared in the past, but for the most part these have added nothing new to the controversy which surrounds the word. Of more importance are the original suggestions which provided the material for such summaries; thus an article by Walter Kingsley in the New York Sun (1917) laid down some of the basic ideas concerning African and minstrel origins of the word which have been copied, either with or without acknowledgment of the source, time and time again. A series of articles in the Etude in August and September, 1924, while rehashing some previous suggestions, led to one of the most extended discussions of the problem which raged through several allied journals. A third set of articles, again stressing the African origin, was set off by an anonymous piece in the New York Times (1934) which led to numerous rejoinders and further suggestions. We have come to a point in the study of the word where it seems wise to review the past theories although even now it is probably impossible to decide surely which will ultimately prove to be correct.

The difficulty in writing about a modern movement in Canadian poetry is that many of its concerns appear to be local and national in a world in which, as Northrop Frye observes, "the nation is rapidly ceasing to be the real defining unit of society."' Obviously, the view that we are now "moving towards a post-national world"2 makes more cultural than political or social sense, though it is for that reason that the contemporary arts seem more closely connected with revolutionary attitudes than with traditional values. It is this revolutionary aspect of the " 'modern' element in the culture of the last century"3 that occupies Frye in The Modern Century. Considered as style, the modern exhibits characteristically anarchic features: deliberate fragmenting of literary form, either through disorder or parody; irrationalism; disruption or inversion of value systems; and disoriented versions of perception. In turn, the radicalism of style connects with radical, anarchic social (or anti-social) attitudes, particularly in what Frye calls a Freudian proletarianism that seeks to overthrow through pornography or sexual assault the repressive anxietystructure of society. What is modern in Canadian poetry, then, we would want to connect with aspects of radicalism in its style and attitude. What, in fact, we appear to be left with, as a sort of national residue, is that which seems impossible to reconcile with radicalism in our poetry: its nostalgia, its longing for history, its impulse to define a Canadian past and to create a useable tradition. On the whole, the sort of criticism which sees poetry as a reflection of environment simply resorts to any one of a number of dualisms to explain this apparent contradiction of the local and international in Canadian writing. Occasionally, we hear of the tension in Canadian life between vulgarity and daintiness. There are other, familiar pairs: American and British influences on Canadian poetry; realism and formalism; colonialism and nationalism; originality and imitativeness. Projected as a genuine rift in Canadian life, dualism becomes the ultimate secret, what Malcolm Ross speaks of as "the broad design of our unique, inevitable, and precarious cultural pattern." "This pattern, by the force of historical and geographical circumstances," Ross goes on to say, "is a pattern of opposites in tension ... the federal-regional tension . . . the American-British tension. . . the French-English tension."4 If Ross's is an extreme version of dualism in Canadian life, it at least has the merit of defining one limit of our discussion: poetry dissolves into the dualities of space and time. But time and space (or history and geography) can be resolved into poetry, perhaps at another extreme limit. Seen as sociology, con

WESTBROOK Pegler, the only man who ever made a living out of the sort of stuff that small boys scrawl on back walls and fences, has recently turned his dirty-name attack against Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, of course, has been dead these sixteen years and so Pegler, with his customary gallantry and courage, feels free to spit at the Justice's memory some of the choicer epithets in his vocabulary of vulgar invective. As Pegler puts it, Holmes was a "cynical and senile brutalitarian"; he was "the God of an evil cult"; he was "a brutal old faker"; and he "had no more morals than a pig." The owner of these lovable traits was responsible, according to the limpid Peglerian logic of guilt-by-association run backwards, for the subsequent sins of Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, and scores of unnamed others who made up the "maze of perfidy which developed in the bureaucracy soon after Roosevelt came to power"-all this by direct pipe-line, through the Harvard Law Review and Felix Frankfurter, straight back to the arch-villain, Holmes. (Does Westbrook, I wonder, lie awake nights wishing Franklin Roosevelt had gone to Harvard Law School instead of Columbia?) Taken by itself, the picture of Pegler trying to "bring Holmes down" (the phrase is Pegler's) is essentially a comic picture. It is as though a worm with delusions of grandeur were to pick on a giant. For Holmes was one of the finest minds and greatest spirits that American civilization has produced. And only a man so bumpkin-ignorant that he thinks he need pretend ignorance in his writings could fail to recognize Holmes' stature and be a little humble before it. Indeed, no one would have laughed more heartily and unmaliciously than Holmes himself at Pegler's temper tantrum in print, despite its distribution to the millions of comic-book lip-readers who make up Pegler's audience and who probably confused his target-for-the-day with an outfielder, also named Holmes, formerly on the Boston Braves. But Pegler's attack on Holmes unfortunately cannot be taken by itself and therefore cannot be laughed off and forgotten. Pegler, who probably never read a word Holmes wrote in his life, got his lead elsewhere. He got his lead from a group of men more responsible and thoughtful than he, most of whom would doubtless deplore Pegler's blast for its vulgarity and its vicious stupidity-but most of whom should recognize in what Pegler wrote a reaffirmation, however offensively phrased, of their own ideas about Holmes and his philosophy of law and life.

what they want to hear, it is refreshing to discover that one of our most famous orators was able to make his reputation by telling the people what they did not want to hear. And in the present era of good feelings, when it is considered unmannerly to bring "personalities" to bear in public controversy, when harsh criticism is associated with vulgarity, and when political leaders cry "smear" at the mildest innuendo, it is instructive to recall the career of a man who felt compelled to make the abuse of public personalities his stock in trade. For at least a quarter of a century, from 1850 to 1875, Wendell Phillips was the commanding figure on the American lecture platform. Not only was he a spectacular success on The Lyceum circuit, but during the critical years surrounding the Civil War, his reputation as a critic of public policy was so great that each of his major addresses became a national event widely reported by the Boston and New York press and copied in papers throughout the northern and western states. Chauncey Depew, who lived to be ninety and claimed to have heard all the great speakers including Webster and Clay, declared that Phillips was "the greatest of all American orators."' Thomas Wentworth Higginson placed Phillips and Webster together as the two most powerful orators in the post-revolutionary period, while Bronson Alcott said that Phillips' speeches "in range of thought, cleverness of statement, keen satire, brilliant wit, personal anecdote, wholesome moral sentiments, patriotism and

W HEN MAXWELL GEISMAR published his lengthy attack on James, Henry James and the Jacobites,1 he fastened with glee upon the negative associations surrounding, for the modern reader, James's use of the word vulgar. After quoting it2 from The Wings of the Dove, he concluded, somewhat savagely: "And isn't a writer so horribly obsessed by the notion of'vulgarity' itself--and to this novelist, perhaps, nothing human was not vulgar-isn't such a writer more than half aware of his own vulgarity ?" I am sure many James scholars feel that the best way to treat Geismar's book is to ignore it.3 In this matter, however, Geismar echoed, and only slightly exceeded, the conclusion of one whom he considers a high priest of the James cult, F. O. Matthiessen, whose Henry James4 has done as much as any critical study to elevate James's literary standing. For Matthiessen wrote, in the manner of a disciple torn between devotion to the master and devotion to the truth: "Another word that shows the drift

A LTHOUGH ROUNDLY ATACKED by Aldous Huxley as the height of "vulgarity" in literature,1 by Yvor Winters as a prime example of of Poe's deliberate obscurantism,2 and by Brooks and Warren as a flagrant example of cheap mystification,3 "Ulalume" is invariably anthologized as one of Poe's best poems-one of his two or three finest. A recent selection of American poetry, Twelve American Poets, ed. Stephen Whicher and Lars Ahnebrink (New York, i96i), includes "Ulalume" as one of three poems to represent Poe.4 Are the anthologists wrong in attaching such importance to this poem? And how should the teacher approach or discuss "Ulalume"? Should he a) regard it as an example of Poe at his second-rate or worst, or b) discreetly dismiss it as "not one of Poe's better poems," or c) teach it as a significant example of Poe's mature artistry and psychological insight? Should one dismiss the poem as second-rate because of its allegedly gross defects of trite diction, heavy meter, overuse of rime and cloying sounds, and general effect of theatricality? Or should one agree with Whicher and Ahnebrink that "all these defects may be easily exaggerated and that in any case they are the defects of qualities necessary to Poe's special hypnotic purpose; that there may be more to his subject-matter than meets the supercilious eye; and that his theory and practice have had such a lasting influence on modern verse that the burden of proof lies on the detractor, not on the defender?" In any event

Herbert Spencer, who carved a mighty empire as a philosopher of science nearly a hundred years ago, discourses upon the philosophy of style in this essay. Often he does it stylishly enough. He begins with a cheerful quotation from Tristram Shandy who says he was struck by the incongruity between his father's great powers in argument and his supreme ignorance of formal logic when he allowed, "It was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society, that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them." And the same point is applied to grammar and illustrated by Dr. Latham's condemning "school drill" in the remark, "Gross vulgarity is a fault to be prevented; but the proper prevention is to be got from habit—not rules." He then