Maritain at Princeton
To the Editors:
It is good that the correspondence between the Maritains and the Tates has been published, and I am delighted by George Sim Johnston’s perceptive review (February 1993). I must, however, point out a serious misperception of fact expressed by a quotation from Caroline Gordon (Tate). In support of her accusation that Jacques Maritain was “shamefully treated by Princeton University” she wrote: “He delivered the lectures which were finally published as Creative Intuition to a bunch of housewives.”
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York, 1953) is the definitive version of the A. W. Mellon Lectures that Maritain delivered at the National Gallery of Art. In his acknowledgments, the author says: “I am greatly indebted to Mr. Francis Fergusson, who, as director of the seminars of literary criticism at Princeton University, gave me the opportunity for an indispensable preparatory phase of research.” Those seminars, which continue today as the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, enabled prominent men of letters and other thinkers to present work in progress to a small invited audience of critics, scholars, philosophers, and creative artists. While there may have been some housewives among the few women present (very few, in accordance with the make-up of the University at that time), it was hardly in that capacity that they had received invitations.
Of the seminars I can speak from personal experience, since I was fortunate enough to be able to attend.
Of the seminars I can