In Krutch's autobiography [More Lives Than One], there is a strong sense of crisis, insight and redirection at two points in his career; the result in both instances was a book that seemed to write itself, rapidly, out of a fullness of conviction and intensity of feeling. The first was The Modern Temper; and to the extent that it entailed a deliberate embracing of human values sanctioned by art, history and tradition, it may better be termed a reversion than a conversion. Apparently it saved him from the later Marxist conversion of his contemporaries, as he became in both literary and social criticism a spokesman for a conservative humanism. Experience and Art (1932) developed an aesthetic consonant with the cosmic pessimism of The Modern Temper; in it, he argued for the value of the arts in maintaining an imaginative environment hospitable to human nature, a kind of sanctuary within...