SOURCE: "Notes on the Novel: 1936," in The Expense of Greatness, Peter Smith, 1958, 176-98.

In the following excerpt, Blackmur criticizes Myers for expounding rather than dramatizing his themes in The Root and the Flower.

[L. H. Myers' trilogy, The Root and the Flower,] addressed avowedly to readers in the modern predicament, states its theme of the moral sensibility on the spiritual plane, and the twin theme of character-discrimination on the social plane—in terms conscientiously removed as far as possible from the social, economic, political, and religious predicament of his audience. The action takes place in sixteenth-century India and its movement is governed by various intrigues concerning the succession to the throne of Akbar, the great emperor, with the intention that the significance of the work will be all the more clearly felt in the Western twentieth century because divorced from false issues and local spiritual vulgarity.

I do...