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The Pelican Guide To English Literature - The Modern Age
The Pelican Guide To English Literature - The Modern Age
The Pelican Guide To English Literature - The Modern Age
to
English Literature
Edited by
BORIS FORD
A Pelican Book
t S/ ^
j^f
THE EDITOR
Cambridge before the
war.
He then
Army Education
command of
a residential
down at
its
its
Chief Editor
Director.
New
list
of books available
title
page
PELICAN BOOKS
A 465.
2011
http://www.archive.org/details/pelicanguidetoen07ford
7
OF THE PELICAN GUIDE TO ENGLISH LITERATU1
PENGUIN BOOKS
e. S. A.
Copyright
Penguin Books,
1961
Made and
This book
that
it
is
shall not,
published
Md
CONTENTS
General Introduction:
borisford
Part
13
Introduction:
The
The
writer's predicament
Part II
john hollow ay
scene - New influences in
Literary Scene:
The opening
and experiment
infliction
closing years
poetry
in
in fiction
51
fiction
Tradition
- The
crisis
- Developments
in literary criticism
- The
of an age
Part
III
From
An
Approach
to
DOUGLAS BROWN
Hardy, de
la
IIQ
coombes
138
The
Irish
Contribution:
graham martin
R.
Mr
Forster's
Good
Virginia Woolf:
Churchill
tomlin
d. klingopulos
e.
w.
f.
Influence: G.
196
209
Drama
221
231
245
FRANK W. BRADBROOK
257
bantock
D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love :w.w.robson
L.
170
barnes
154
grattan freyer
103
Conrad:
270
280
CONTENTS
The Consistency of James Joyce: Arnold kettle
Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley :donald
T.
S. Eliot:
301
da vie
315
andorgomme
r. g.
C. P. Snow:
330
350
cox
Waugh, Graham
377
Greene,
graham martin
F.
394
DAVID HOLBROOK
415
furbank
Mass Communications in Britain: richard hoggart
Poetry Today: charles tomlinson
429
473
The Twentieth-Century
Best-Seller: p. n.
442
458
Part IV
COMPILED BY JOY SAMUEL
Appendix:
For Further Reading and Reference
497
511
Acknowledgements
547
Index of Names
548
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
This
the final
comment made
an age which
is
(if only
meant to
is
not
of themselves
of the
lies at
H. Myers's phrase. Other ages have no doubt suffered from thenkinds of grossness and vulgarity, which (and it would be a
legitimate criticism) the earlier volumes of the Guide have not
in L.
own
The
reason for
this,
perhaps,
was
the
other
arts, literature
has the
power to enrich
Not that one is
for
life. Its
satisfactions are
factions intimately
of their
own
kind,
life
their bearing
though they
are satis-
on
would be concerned,
would have
tory
spirit.
of
work
Of all
last
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
time and yet they are just sufficiently in the past for it to have become
fashionable to find some of them unfashionable; and at the same time,
the profusion of lesser writers have a certain inescapable currency
that
logical indulgence.
not that
it
gives too
much
it tries
to
by concocting an unconscionable number of masterThough this volume of the Guide has not uncovered any new
masterpieces or master-writers,
a
contour-map of the
predecessors,
it
offers its
its
erial:
An
(i)
'Why
of problem?', 'What
this
as
'What
is
the
(ii)
literary
its tastes
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
'Which authors matter most?', 'Where does the
in this period?',
Detailed studies of
this period.
Coming
section
convey
to
is
after the
such
as authors'
and so on.
this
The
and willing to
meant
fit
has
common
based on
assumptions; for
They
rightly,
it
reveals disagreements
nesses
agree
of our contemporary
In conclusion
literature.
my personal
thanks to three
Mr G. D.
Mr L. G.
who
Salingar,
given
me
since then.
Boris Ford
PART
I
BACKGROUND
G. H.
Reader
Introduction:
The
BANTOCK
of Leicester
writer's predicament
case,
at a
two
basic
themes of modern
literature
finest awarenesses.
If,
then,
'isola-
preferred the
'associational
recently
is
at the
process'
shown
life
which
of the
artist.
The
fact that, in
peripheral occupation
literature has
become
strangely
on many
Yet
it is
by the mid
become aware of a
clear that
PART ONE
of Adams's intimation of moral
the final triumph of the Dynamo over the Virgin. Two world wars and an accelerated degree of
social change have produced profound alterations from even the
nineteenth-century ethos, which we now know to have been less
a translation into journalese
'crisis',
confusion, ushered
stable
and
free
serious artist
to
in, as
he saw
it,
by
when
'background'
foreground.
For
more
all
the
committed
of
which
to social, political,
less
and
less
felt
able to
of fecundity
as
pressures
Economic and
social
change
The later years of the nineteenth century saw the almost final breakdown,
pre-industrial
hit particularly
agricultural labourer;
and
it
times
was then
denoted the end of rural England on any significant scale; as Lawrence noted, even the countryman became a 'town bird' at heart. Of
the 45 million inhabitants of the United
Kingdom
crease
17
14
some
place the
numbers
creasing urbanization
it
good
left
our
certainly
this century's
nature
Dr Holloway, towards
The profound human implications
of its
loss
Jefferies,
shadier side to
it
Commissions on the
state
home for
a Christian family in
a civilized
of
rural values
is
important because
many
this
writers have
accepted
in their
The
is
that
alterations necessitated
15
PART ONE
remorseless enclosure of the
commons
after 1861, a
phase which in
...
the
common [was],
as it
home
industries. It
Cobbett, in his
little
(Change
in the Village,
1912)
common, 'the once self-supporting cotof money'. The implications of this struck
at the very heart of his human relationships; what emerged was a new
ethic, familiar enough by then in the towns but less known in the
country, the ethic of competition. The effect of this had been to reduce man to the level of economic man, one whose community
relationships were at the mercy of the cash-nexus, and whose psychological motivations were thought of mostly in terms of selfinterest. (There had been protests, of course, but not on a socially
significant scale.) In such circumstances, "the Poor" was regarded not
as a term descriptive of a condition of society but of the character of
a group of people' (Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship). Darwinian
notions, interpreted by Herbert Spencer and others, helped to afford
a set of fortuitous economic arrangements with the force of an
apparent natural law. The chance interaction of economic atomic
particles pursuing their rational self-interest was regarded as the inevitable and exclusive model of social behaviour. Notions of a public
morality in terms of a diffused public good hardly existed among
ordinary people- as C. F. G. Masterman's Condition oj England (1909)
makes clear.
Private morality, at least on the face which it turned towards the
world, was authoritarian and taboo-ridden. Serious personal oddity
was dismissed as a sign of degeneracy, not diagnosed as neurosis.
The bringing-up of children, as Samuel Butler bore witness, was strict;
and the overt decencies of family life and relationship were maintained, whatever went on under the surface. The 'great ladies of the
day' sent for Lord Templecombe when the question of diyorce
With
'
arose, in
my
'Noblesse oblige,
like us
do not exhibit
seen the
familiar
similar type of
later
By way of
social
at
least
of that individual atomization inherent in Victorian economic arrangements, and of that sense of individual self-responsibility which
characterized the morally earnest Victorian ethos.
As
Mr Noel Annan
Nothing marks the break with Victorian thought more decisively than modern sociology - that revolution at the beginning of this century which we associate with the names of
Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto. They no longer started with
the individual as the central concept in terms of which society
must be explained. They saw society as a nexus of groups; and
the pattern of behaviour which these groups unwittingly
established primarily determined
men's
actions.
Thought', 1959)
Mr
may be
that, in
sociological notions
still
17
PART ONE
he
lives
our age.
Moral
perplexities
political
then. In
its
a large part
and helped
in the dissolution
of science played
spirit
of old
social acceptances
The
belief of the
ties
and
that
all
most
original
eighties that
it
scientific
approach affected
investigations.
From
of economics and
social
facts
more
reality.
No
social
Booth, whose Life and Labour oj the People of London (1891-1903) was
one of the first great social surveys, stated clearly in a Memoir of her
husband's
life:
The
a priori reasoning of political economy, orthodox and unorthodox alike, fails from want of reality. At -its base are a
series of assumptions very imperfectly connected with the
observed facts of life. We need to begin with a true picture of
the
modern
industrial organism.
[is]
to
aspects
of
facts,'
social life
urged the
were
similarly
affected.
the world of
men
as constituting
simply a part of the natural world and hence offering precisely similar
opportunities for scientific investigation
is
nowhere
better illustrated
the
framework of nine-
At
the
also features
Rooted
in a theory
of biological
instincts,
rationalizations
word introduced by
teleology
on the
hedonism; but
by forces of
which he might know nothing introduced a probable irrationality
into human behaviour which was profoundly disturbing. This 'entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the constitution of human nature',
as William James not quite accurately called it, meant that a new
dimension in the assessment of human behaviour had to be taken
into account. The 'normal' scale of events demanded a new measuring
rod, for analysis might reveal a profound significance in the apparently
trivial. The firm line which nineteenth-century psychiatrists had drawn
between the normal and the abnormal, the latter of which they explained largely in terms of degeneracy, disappeared; dreams and
slips of the tongue, if nothing else, showed that we all displayed
neurotic symptoms. Above all, the implied criticism of the traditional
model in terms of which reason ruled the will in the interests of moral
the discovery that man's actions could be 'motivated'
our therapy
we
work
to
moderate
its
Rationalist
is,
Thus a blow seemed to be struck at men's sense of self-responsiand at the ordered emphases of behaviour on which he had
bility
of her
affiliations
PART ONE
...
the accent
falls
differently
...
it
for
granted that
The
life
exists
longer appeared
real. Interest in
Osmond no
The
relation
the 'new
feminity in
Man
wonder
that D. H. Lawrence, writing in 191 3,between man and woman 'the problem of
today, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment
of the old one...'; and that, where parents and children were
concerned, there was a break-up of the old authoritarian pattern.
For Ronald Knox's sister, Lady Peck, parents had been 'a race
apart'. To Robert Graves, during the twenties, his children were
found
in the relations
'close friends
of friendship'.
The
1914-18.
The
conflicts
was the
it
First
did not
initiate,
World War of
to fight
and
the generation of the trenches did a great deal to re-shape the old
authoritarian pattern. Those in authority - the politicians and generals
- had, many of them, been wasteful and incompetent. Nor did their
mutual recriminations help to preserve the facade of authority.
20
much
politicians as
as it
veal:
in 191 5 the old world ended. In the winter 191 5-16 the
of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way,
perished, perished from being the heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and
horrors. The integrity of London collapsed and the genuine
debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and
the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull
It
was
spirit
...
The
passive resisters.
They
on the whole
It is
the business
(Kangaroo)
The
all
manifestations of authority.
against signs
of the
The
was
twenties
was the
era
of
'revolt'
M.
21
PART ONE
in
case,
suspect through
its
war
effort;
it
was, in any
Wordsworth's 'wise
passiveness'.
But there
is
an increasing tendency,
on
life
someone who
be a person to
whom
life
of action
is
itself (except,
of course,
in defence
F6
of
poses the
relativistic standpoint.
objectivity
Bough
(i
theme
that
all
Annan
puts
it,
'runs the
as
so religion
a large variety
22
sophisticated
modern temper
a doctrine of despair.
It
has
its
incongruity with
of autonomy.
(Patterns of Culture, 1934)
Behind
lies
all
a deeper
To
but
still
Marxists he
is
the out-
product of an evolutionary
varying rational
desires,
liberal,
which,
when not
view is derived,
from the optimism of the Enlightenment. A pessimistic
scientific humanism sees man's aspirations and hopes as 'but the out-
pre-established harmonies to be
found
in nature; this
in part,
come of chance
ian notion
of man
of sin,
as
The Christ-
belonging
at
once
and owing his possibilities of salvation to the Grace of God, a man whose essence is free
self-determination and whose sin is the wrong use of his freedom,
retains only an echo of its former vitality. Though Christianity,
especially in its more extreme Catholic forms, underwent spasmodic revivals of influence - witness Chesterbelloc, Mr T. S. Eliot,
Graham Greene - or was sometimes condescended to by sociologists
as fulfilling a social 'function' - religious controversy no longer vitally
to the natural
and
tional despair
of our times.
Nor are these uncertainties removed or lessened by current theorizing in philosophy or ethics, where the tendencies, on the whole, have
PART ONE
become linguistic and analytical.
become more conscious of a professional expertise
way
in
From
On the way,
J.
Ayer's
in the Philo-
any desire to reveal the essential funcand seeks to investigate how language is used in daily
existence. Most recently there has been a revived interest in metaphysics. But, in general, the tendency of the dominant school of
tion of language
last
not to increase
. .
Mind).
This changed focus of philosophical discussion has been accompanied
by
positions.
do not
whatsoever
. . .
of feeling and
as
such do not
many moral
philosophers,
M.
became
'the logical
on
rational,
and
are,
nor
false,
job
is
to tell us
24
ethical philosopher
what we ought
to do:
still
men
as
are psychologically
is
and biologically
similar
... it is
spirit
Harold Laski, have continued to disimply the function of the state. But, after the generation of
Hobhouse, Lindsay, and Ernest Barker, academic political theorists
like the British Marxist, the late
cuss or
have
either,
like
of attempting to discover
the ideal
purpose of the
state
and assigned to
The Vocabulary of
(
Collingwood have not been
Though
Politics, 1953).
totally neglected
empiricists
writers such as
unknown,
existentialists
the
scene, bringing
'in science
there
The Open
twentieth-century physical
is
no "knowledge"
in the sense in
Society). Certainly,
have abandoned
scientists
something indepen-
of interpretation. In any
of the
rather than esoteric and hierarchic; for facts are publicly inspectable
are not.
human
They
too, then,
up of existing systems by
have played
similar means.
of
At
strikes the
1883,
full in
when
the hearing of
Seeley's
Expan-
sion of England
when Empire
25
Commonwealth,
represents
PART ONE
a time of remarkable political transformation concerning notions
of Imperial hegemony and white superiority. By 1900 the Empire
had reached nearly 13,000,000 square miles and 370,000,000 people;
the colonies were being used as sources of raw materials, markets, and
incomes, and outlets for emigration. But the Boer War went a long
way
Imperial relations
is
More
recently,
we
Africa.
The
Political
George Orwell, in
like
Mr
E.
M.
Forster,
was repugnant
subjection
whom
who
it
power among
to
writers
those,
guilt,
by
and
like
and
says:
One
regret
and the
British
Empire a
different institution.
comment on
whole
one
far trans-
relations.
It
was a
social
protest
and
of the
political subjection
ethos,
which,
as
us,
'is
the worst'.
scandalously, that:
26
Mr Forster proclaimed,
('What
For the world, he believed,
'is
a globe of men
believe', 1939)
who
one another ... by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence'
- a remark which betrays a true English insularity in the era of Freud
(homo homini lupus) and Hitler; though
it is
to
Mr
Forster's credit
that
monic depths he receives intimations from the dread goblins who, for
;
The new
It
social ethic
managed
of human be-
a level
provoked
a fairly
wide-
creed.
Marxism combines
comforting
The
political absolutism.
all
nature of
it
simply pro-
more visible
of Europe.
safety
(Russia, in
any
analysis
...
all
New Society.
analysis,
And
as society
has hitherto
class
moved
in
morality.
(Engels, Anti-Duhring)
Marxism filled an uncomfortable vacuum which liberalmovement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting
Positively,
ism -
'a
point', as
Mr
Eliot observed
- had
27
left.
of absolutism,
PART ONE
many hastened to abet the new manifestation of Neces-
sity,
who
who live
would
The new
hell
is
to
man'
suspects a
'imprisonment in brotherhood'.
Indeed, there would be reasons for thinking that
awareness.
The
tradition
social
had
ness
all,
with a variety of stresses, pointed to the human unsatisfactoritrends. At the end of the century, a number of
of the dominant
tion of a
heavy
from
certain
vis-a-vis
certain foreign
and an increase in
Though
came
still
strongly authori-
tarian,
it
to
28
much
state
of the upper
class in
What was
demoralizing
because it bred a poisonous cynicism about human relations, was the making and breaking of
personal friendships according to temporary and accidental
.
circumstances in
when
failure
(Webb, op.
cit.)
This diagnosis was confirmed from the early years of the century
by
. . .
29
PART ONE
with the public school outlook. Such analyses should perhaps warn
of values
of the
values, so to speak,
is
as in itself a virtue.
The
value
also in question.
gether with
some
significant
remarks
at the
claims of the
new
social
Meritocracy
as
first generation of memhad passed, a public school education at Haileybury or Winchester proved no bar to advancement; and though Lloyd George
had proclaimed 'the day of the cottage-bred man', the personnel of
the House of Commons remains obstinately middle class. Nevertheless, there has been an immense increase in social mobility; and the
mid-century phenomenon.
no conception of 'general
of the public good'. The new ethic of
which she herself was symptomatic was to be much concerned with
'public good'; state action was to replace the 'freedom of the market'
Beatrice Webb's father, she recalled, had
principles
...
no
clear vision
rationalistic
basis
as
new communal
30
spirit: at
this
level,
relationship
is
result
not to deny
of a genuine
it
'organic'
a strong positive
value.
demanded change
The
its
M. Hyndman
influence
was not
the
pro-
great.
Socialist
slight.
ary terms,
social
democracy, of gradualism,
its
Wedded to
fact-
'applied the
of factual
data.
to questions hitherto
left
to the realm
itself in a spate
of
social legislation
at the
and royal
hands of
The
stage
was
its
dominant religion and hope,' as Arthur Koestler says, 'and "Socialism" in a vague and undefined sense was the hope of the early twentieth century.' The changing attitude was reinforced by developments
in social psychology - notably in the American Charles Cooley's
Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) - which, in Dewey's phrase,
conceived 'individual mind as a function of social life'. Even Freud,
who started from a firmly rooted theory of biological instinct, came
latterly to see the importance of the social environment.
But not all were satisfied with the Fabian purview or the Fabian
rate of progress. H. G. Wells, who so interestingly represents a facet
of modern rationalistic political thinking, was struck by the wastefulness of contemporary conditions, the Victorian formlessness, and
welcomed the forces tending to 'rationalize' and systematize, those
which tend
31
PART ONE
to
promote
necessitate
The
of
effects
this,
of immediate personal
in terms
approvingly defines
Wells
relations,
as a
proportion of
my
them in order
me
as
my
effort that
'
had to
ask:
Why
on
the spot
where they
are.
forth
. . .
The
world
tration
was
as
the
on
social and economic problems. Alfred Marshall, in his Prinhad already urged that there was 'no moral justification for
extreme poverty side by side with great wealth'. Maynard Keynes, in
the twenties, resisted the hereditary 'lethargy' of the orthodox view
tion
ciples,
o laisser-faire:
It is
liberty' in their
economic
activities.
on
who
not so
Acquire.
private
and
The world
social interest
(J.
M.
is
those
There
is
no 'compact'
who Have
or on those
always coincide .
Keynes, End of Laisser-faire, 1926)
.
in
virtues :
A New Civilization.
but
as
it
in action,
his
33
PART ONE
born out of the despair of world war and civil war, of
social unrest and economic chaos, the desire for a complete
break with the past, for starting human history from scratch,
was deep and genuine. In this apocalyptic climate dadaism,
futurism, surrealism and the Five-year-plan-mystique came
together in a curious amalgam. Moved by a perhaps similar
mood of despair, John Donne had begged: 'Moist with a
drop of Thy blood my dry soule.' The mystic of the nineteen-thirties yearned, as a sign of Grace, for a look at the
Dnieper Dam and a three per cent increase in the Soviet pig. . .
iron production.
of a simplifying formula or of a closed system, like Marxism, providing all the answers. R. H. S. Crossman refers in his introduction
to
The God
of an 'unquestioned purpose',
many
communists have turned to the Catholic church. Marxism as a serious force amongst intellectuals did not survive the postwar political behaviour of Russia; disillusionment had already been
expressed before the war by writers like Orwell and Gide, though
disillusioned
Ignorance,
Beveridge
even
were the
giants against
which
The
section
'Social
man
all
lies
the
most important,
if
The
which
Conscience
The attempted
as
this
appears
is
headed,
symptomatically,
Driving Force'.
34
community
in a
number of
other
been paralleled
fields,
work:
a socio-political egalitarianism
contradictory-
principles
have been
scientistic
at
and a
by
psycho-therapy, are
isolate.
methods involving
the
men
it
plays
social
intermingling in
as fulfilling a social as
as
wickedness, have for long been blamed for increased delinquency and
crime;
as
it
modern
social science,
away
social
of Industry, 1954).
Though
the
movement
in
England
is
it
and
has earned in
him from
thinking
PART ONE
democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which
a democratic social condition is favourable; so that, after
having broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or
by men, the human mind would be closely fettered to the
general will of the greatest number.
(Democracy in America)
At the same
state interference have grown apace since 1945. There has been 1984
and The Yogi and the Commissar. Karl Popper's The Open Society
and its Enemies reasserted liberal values, and his Poverty of Historicism
protests against notions of historical inevitability. F. A. Hayek's
Road
to
Serfdom
is
anti-Left in attitude;
so long associated
with
at
socialist
Marxist.
The situation,
as
they
The problem de Tocqueville saw has not, contrary to some exbeen assuaged by the new literacy of the masses and thenconsequent political and social emancipation. The commercial de-
pectations,
this will
no longer
matter'
... as
a direct result
. . .
this has
been
The result has been an intellectual revoluLearning has been put in circulation .
Stimuli of an
it
intellectual sort
. . .
. .
pour in upon us
in
all
kinds of ways.
36
Dewey seemed
sance
seems to
diagnosis
to be expecting.
be that implicit in
as if society, in so
'It is
And
F.
the
more
relevant
R. Leavis's remark:
purpose.'
tional
Where
has destroyed.
the secondary
which industrialism
modern curriculum
has been
more
common
core curriculum
satisfactorily.
Where
literacy
a decline in quality. 3 Certainly, popular reading matter of the twentieth century has
tive life
represented
by
sort
of
cultural
of ways. What is almost worse than the vuland sensationalism implicit in the sort of emphases
the news receives and in the methods of exploitation and presentation,
is the standard of human relationship tacitly accepted in the journareveals itself in a variety
garity, triviality,
list's
modern
what
publicity entails:
- a merciless and determined race you enter the big doors of the Courts, begging
you to pose
They run in front of you as you approach the
The notion that you have some right to privacy either
bus
does not enter their minds, or is mercilessly thrust on one side
...
the photographers
await
you
as
. . .
. .
37
is
the basis
PART ONE
of business enterprise with its consequent emphasis
on material consumption are accepted, advertising has a necessaryIf the ethics
place in the
economy
yet
its
human behaviour
more
subtle responses.
The
expecta-
work of
with
their ability to
base the
medium of
Again, there
and television
is
good
foster a
of evidence to show
that the
cinema
is
likely
38
made
in diagnosing
more
though
specifically since
I.
little
A. Richards wrote in
At
present
bad
fluence of the
bad art, the cinema, etc., are an inimportance in fixing immature and actually
literature,
first
inapplicable attitudes to
what
most
things.
influence
is
largely
on matters of personal
dress,
make-up, and house furnishing, as well as on the intimacies of love-making, is well documented. The implication is that
hair styles,
many
at a time, too,
when
lives
work
per-
it is,
she
writes,
... as
though individual
the over-all
life
life
still
to
of behaviour
It is
quite con-
modern age - which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity - may
ceivable that the
end in the
known.
deadliest,
most
sterile passivity
(The
Human
Condition, 1958)
when
volved
its
its
modern audience
is
involved. There
'idea':
for entertairLis
a positive
PART ONE
who is going to fall in love knows all about it beforeshe knows exactly how
hand from books and the movies
The
girl
. . .
when
she feels
age of eighteen.
Growth,
lar
then,
when he
is
(D.
fixated.
notes that so
Mr Hoggart is
much
strictly
hearer a
known
H. Lawrence)
to present to the
is
creations in their
own
right as structures
much
of conventional
dynamic
personality.
century that
it is
has seemed to
many
critics
To
use
death of the
of the twentieth
growth, to break
speak out for
It
down
such stereotypes: in
Dr
Leavis's view, to
'life'.
exploited:
ment and
a consequent superficiaHzing
old
as
become
political reasons
rootlessness
is
. . .
. . .
the Third
more widely
indicate a
experiment in the
trial
design
fields
diffused seriousness
cited as evidence
is
of
interest.
Vigorous
of
vitality,
rather than a
symptom of break-down of
Snow's
Two
Culture theory.
Mr Raymond
- C. P.
misuse of the notion of the masses' and notes signs of cultural vitality
The
of a
graduates.
concern about
The
new
The
material.
is
said
There
amongst under-
And
so on.
civilization are so
immense
that
it is
movements of a whole
my indictment has
PART ONE
made -
some
might
reply, the
is
work
this
one can
new complais
based, that
we
can
as
it
no
now
use,
is.'
It
may
be that
this
is
lives
is
a price
and
that
it is
it is
Today, there
is
future.
be regarded
as
symptomatic of
would be
field
all
alone,
as
subdivides,
proliferates,
and
disagrees.
Bloomsbury's
wide range of
42
of
tradition
learning against a
few of
is
not exactly a
new phenom-
first
book and
the
The
unhappy
all
its
too
own
portents.
and
in
from what
itself in
does
it
in, say,
in effect,
is
Thus he pursues
as a result
his sense
by
more
is
and
intellect,
them
to rational
Lawrence, indeed,
in the
name of
all
true
human
positivist
where the
attempts to employ a
at his best,
He
it-
the centre of
rationalist,
'real'
He
of the
of the
former,
analysis.
whose
as a prerequisite to
tradition.
is
What
of spon-
untouchable naivety
at
43
PART ONE
of the liberal tradition and the increasing socialization of his
times. His triumph was to see them as joint manifestations of the
same basic outlook, involving the elevation of the 'ego or spurious
self the conscious entity with which every individual is saddled' ality'
the conceptualizing
this
was
self,
of the
abstraction
intellect,
quately the sheer flux and flow of experience, there has been a
counter-assertion of the need to
moment, a subjective insistence on the force of inwhat Dr Holloway, in his Survey, describes as the
ner feeling,
Romantic preoccupation.
T. S. Eliot's notion of the
may indicate
'dissociation
of sensibility', whatever
it
split
summing-up of Donne's
sensibility:
the
artist,
the
drama of
ideas, as that
of those
who
life,
at all,
of hurried journeys by rail' and this 'death of language, this subof phrases as nearly impersonal as algebra for words and
rhythms varying from man to man, is but a part of the tyranny of
;
stitution
mind
for
it
ever to be violated
by an
idea.
we
are
still
in a
its
various hues
44
may
be called irrationa-
vitalism,
Santayana diagnoses
Immediate
only fact
pure experience,
feeling,
is
Mr
Truth, according to
...
all
of which
as
Bergson,
is
given only
in intuitions
exigencies.
The
It is
ideal
- what
is
the ideal?
figment.
An
abstraction.
It is
aspiration,
finished. It
is
. .
a crystallized
set,
of finished things.
We
the
(Preface to Poems)
self.
Lawrence
in bits
... It is
nothing jointed;
talking of
it
by which
it is
consciousness, or of subjective
flows.
it
most naturally
it
chopped up
'river*
or 'stream'
described. In
life.
(Principles of Psychology)
challenged
by
'gestalt' theories.
William James,
as
The
we see,
its
relationship
'transaction' in
implications
of
discreteness.
To
45
PART ONE
(It
is
relevant to
remember
that
Henry James,
irrevocably
his assertions
artist
Where
its
the use of
words is concerned,
The
is
stir
us
The Freudian unconscious, too, represents a continuum unmodiby the abstracting power of logical thought; and in an illguided moment, Freud referred to the unconscious as 'the true
psychic reality'. The dream reveals its functioning as nearly as the
'censor' will allow; and the dream displays a curious blending and
fied
46
named
which implies
into operation
life
folklore'.
number of efforts
to
function of which
and what
extreme
is
is
of the
my
basic
'Who am
the nature of
varieties
experience?'
attempt to probe below 'the old stable ego of the character', noted in
writer and the scientist both agree at least to the extent that both see
47
PART ONE
life as
in the handling
The
of 'experience'.
other point
is
that
one
sees in
at the heart
It is
rift
which
lies
forms - surrealism, surrender to the passing emotion - are as lifedestroying as the disease they seek to cure. In a 'much-divided
civilization', one,
where
emotion and emotion controlled by intelligence, points a way to 'unity of being' - or, as the modern idiom
has it, psychic wholeness and health. In such a fusion, intuitive insight and moral control coalesce. Obviously, it is necessary to insist
(I quote Dr Leavis), 'a real literary interest is an interest in man,
coming
intellect
society,
suffused with
and
civilization'.
NOTES
Cp. W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870.
Cp. The rationalization of the coal mines by Gerald Crich in Women in
Love. It may be that what Lawrence was getting at was 'Taylorism' or 'scientific management', which was a near-contemporary industrial manifestation.
On the whole question of modern industrialism and its implications for work
satisfaction and human relationships, the reader is strongly recommended to
read Georges Friedmann's Industrial Society.
3. Professor Webb's article in the sixth volume of the Guide warns against
over-emphasis on the homogeneity or seriousness of the Victorian reading
public. Yet Miss Dalziel, in her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (1957), considers
that there are grounds to support Mrs Leavis 's contention, made in Fiction and
the Reading Public (1932), that there has been a deterioration in the quality
of popular literature over the last hundred years, though those grounds are
1.
2.
PART
II
Introductory
There
throughout
last
this
which,
in
mind
The
fields,
first is
of developments
as a result
econo-
lost faith in
which began
in 1900.
This
been discussed
mental
is
would be important
at
for a survey
beyond
literature,
It is
but
it
concerns the
by
As
Mr
a fundamental
Bantock.
It
of modern
has
meant
life, this
that literature
and
serious literary
standards have had to survive in, and in one sense adapt themselves to,
a world
ment
Ruskin, and
noticed
it
Matthew Arnold -
as a
to
name only
this
Wordsworth,
three of
life
and
develop-
many
in their time.
all
But
the changes that they noticed have proceeded further; and serious
writers,
with those
who most
and the
PART
TWO
literary
judgement,
the best-seller, and the polite verse anthology, but which had forgotten
that literature could
both
touch
life at
ideas.
They have
its
deepest,
and
its
most ex-
hilarating.
some of
more
the
notable
critical
by
it,
facts
one
especially
little
influenced
work
is,
by
non-literary interests.
written in the
difficult.
last
and
in
made
that
work
unfamiliar
point clearer. Poets like Tennyson and Rossetti, prose writers like
Arnold, novelists
like
George
Eliot
But
their interests
and
last
insights,
two
is
in
which
contrast
may be
over-simplified;
it is
this
On the other hand, in seeing the period of this survey as one of major
influence
from abroad, we
see in
it
More
Europe;
by
a period of
this has
literature has
temporarily become
(to anticipate the
this
The opening
scene
With
details
if
they did
have forgotten.
But the literary scene of the nineties spread far wider than the Rhymers' Club (their intentions, if not their achievement, being more
down to earth than is usually realized) 2 and the 'Nineties Poets'. It
spreads out to the whole opulent plutocratic social world of the time.
This means the great country houses (James was an habitue) with
their fashionable
in
The Wings
oj the
life,
where Leyland
and
artistic
gent were
Room );
all
near neighbours.
It
means
of the 'actor-
Lyceum. Beerbohm
Tree at His Majesty's giving Easter Shakespeare seasons - A Midsummer Night's Dream with real woods, bluebells, rabbits, Macbeth
with witches that flew on wires and real guardsmen from Chelsea
Barracks for the battle scenes) of the Leicester Square Alhambra,
with its Moorish dreamland architecture and lavish shows, and the
adjoining Empire with its notorious promenade, and the 'Gaiety
;
53
at the
TWO
PART
who
Girls'
The
bell.
first
it
Dilke, Parnell,
all
its
of them
new preoccupations of
and certainly supplied the scene for
Hardy's Jude
named An
ground, and
of
(1895).
as in a reaJ sense
world,
this
Mrs Tanqueray
Husband
Idea!
its
It is
critic
The
is
seen.
between what Arnold would have called the 'Barbarian' aspect of this
plutocracy, and the 'Aesthetic' one: first the vulgarizing, Edwardianizing Mona Brigstock, with her aspirations to transform the house of
priceless art treasures
as
makes
Poynton
in
aristocracy,
the
James called
to
work of
sense; the
full, satiric
traditions
at
its 'Spoils'.
They
(it is
that
are spoils in
the end
as a descriptive writer) is
enough
clear
it
The
fire
closing move-
By
refers
as a
Awkward Age
whole which
is
integrity
is
and the
an upper
is
not a
heroine.
which
title
It is
the age
awkward: the
nates, aristo-bureaucrats,
(1899)
womanhood of its
liaison) in
more important
is
studied
writer
woman
house
writer
who,
and the
visits
demands of the
rest,
of a
lives as lovers. In
literary hostess
The Death
upon her
oj the
'lion' are
life
man and
of country-
their best
work
ultimately those of
The Coxon Fund (1894) shows the other side of the coin:
literary patronage issues from a world without grasp or standards
('fancy constituting an endowment without establishing a tribunal a homicide.
a bench of
ing but
two
competent people - ofjudges') and can therefore do nothlargely bogus talent and then corrupt it. These
first select a
a fact
period:
its
grasped
full
him
as well.
This survey
is
is
body of
origin;
of the century,
which
in part
as
he used
it
in his later
effect,
so. James's
which unremittingly controls his work; in the clarity and nobility of his moral
vision; and in his great sense of the richness and beauty of what at
least is potential in human life. These qualities of intelligence, integrity, and idealism, this sense of what life can offer, are forcibly
reminiscent of what was best in the culture of New England, Boston,
Harvard, and New York in which James grew up. James's earlier
distinction
lies in
55
PART
work
is
TWO
and in
it
ojaLady
(1881).
light.
As his world
becomes more multitudinously self-reflecting and variegated, a doubt
more and more preoccupies the reader. The doubt is, whether James's
many-dimensional kaleidoscope of surfaces is after all a true revelation of deeper life in the characters, or only a wonderful simulacrum of deeper life. Nor can that doubt but be strengthened by
James's growing tendency to invest his interplaying surfaces with all
the grandiosity of Edwardian opulence; his growing dependence on
words for his characters and their doings like 'fine', 'lovely', 'beautiful', 'tremendous', 'large', 'grand' ('they insisted enough that "stupendous" was the word': The Wings oj the Dove, 1902, chapter 34);
and this not as part of a total view, admire-but-judge, but rather of
characters whom he endorses out and out. In the end, one is inclined
to conclude that James and Sargent were not near neighbours .quite
for nothing. Nor is to perceive this to deny James's exhilaration and
indeed his greatness; but to recognize that he was of his time.
Conrad has, as his strongest link with James in literary terms, his
sense of life as a sustained struggle in moral terms: an issue between"
good and evil, in the fullest sense of these words, which individual
men find they cannot evade. But James and Conrad should be seen
together in the period in which they wrote, because the latter, with
the former, is registering, and searchingly criticizing, basic realities
of his time. Moreover, Conrad's realities relate to those which preyet these very things seem to colour his later work.
occupied James. Nostromo (1904), unquestionably Conrad's masterpiece, provides the definitive picture of how Western financial
imperialism
(that
its
roots are
may seem
it.
of substance,
effort
plutocracy
who
His chief fear, the point of Recessional (1897), was tnat the exploiters,
the parasites, were winning. What limits his achievement is that he
submits to the trend of his time. Even
as a poet,
audience to which his journalistic years directed him, and the result
is
lers
of British expansion.
hand; and
not the
it is
Princess
state
is little less
it
in
its
Western Europe.
it
agent provocateur
In
The
Secret
Agent (1907)
either
who knew
terrorists themselves,
embassy and
The
threats to the
in the Himalayas.
life
as
dealing successfully
poor. But that James of all writers should have taken up the subject
itself illuminating; it is a forcible
is
of the closing years of the nineteenth century were aware of all that
its circle of opulence. One can see, in
work, an awareness in James of those forces which were soon to
bring sweeping social changes, and in the end, contribute decisively
it
home. Hardy,
57
in
both
its
three million
his prose
and
verse,
TWO
PART
differentiated
all
energies.
New
influences in fiction
One
happening
is
in
Chapter 10 of
this
like to write.
Darwin) and
forceful
especially helpful in
new
Among
how
them, they
stress the
reminder of
brief
most
section of Gissing's
Street (1891),
is
helpful in that
it
all,
is
to deal with
gaining, as with
sense
sciences
some
time, and
however,
also
throws something
it
The
The debate
in
The
New
and
Grub'
this
new
factor
is
mon
life
com-
is
as a contrast
the detailed
58
Maugham's
novel Liza
first
oj
Lambeth
(1897).
my
. .
you can
September 1910) but the French influence as well. 'I ought during the
month to have read nothing but de Goncourt,' he wrote when
Anna oj the Five Towns was begun; or again, 'The achievements of the
last
finest
for
ail
coming masters of
set a
standard
belong to
1899).
this story
also.
The newer influences were not only French. It is not a long step from
and when Ibsen
of G. T. Grein's Independent
Theatre Group, 4 Shaw not only decided that Ibsen's topical concern
with current abuses was his most conspicuous achievement l The
decisively 'arrived' in the 1891 season
Quintessence
oj
followed
at
once
in the
included
(1903),
Ibsen's
Woman'.
Ibsen was also the recurrent point of reference (reference largely,
though by no means wholly, by opposition) 5 for Yeats as he developed
his ideas of poetic drama in the 1890s and early 1900s. Long before,
James in a number of critical essays had struggled repeatedly with what
he saw as the radical defect of the whole French school, its preoccupation with the drab intricacies of mere material or sensuous or
narrowly sexual realities at the expense of genuinely humane and
59
PART
TWO
who had achieved the massive and integrated richof external or material facts of writers like Flaubert or Zola,
without forfeiting realism in a richer sense, the realism which sees into
psychology, character, and moral values.
On the other hand, he had stressed how Turgenev had also achieved
Eliot as a writer
ness
this richer,
more humane
It is
realism in
some
important to see
respects
how
more
successfully
essay
of one's
little
of
how
as
rounded
Flaubert in
Madame
Bovary (1857), say, shows the whole course of the novel from the
standpoint of the central character. If James's immense admiration
60
tenderness,
Awkward Age,
rich, if limited,
detail to
mean
Conrad's rigid
seem
so carefully timed,
sequacious construc-
have
their counterparts
any Victorian
novelist,
own work
Law-
of
and measure mathematical folk' Shaw, Galsworthy, Barker. He is in fact speaking of plays; but the
parallel and the contrast are plain enough in his short stories also.
Moreover, there is a poetry and symbolism, a poignant strangeness,
and often a seemingly disjointed surface creating in the end a deep
inner unity, which are plain in his work as they are also, in different
terms, in that of VirginiaWoolf or Ford Madox Ford. Such qualities
rence in a
Cehov
letter
of
to that
and experiment
in poetry
it
had
also
Rimbaud and Mallarme and Laforgue; and the early-twentieth-century movement in English poetry which came to terms with
these writers should be seen as part of a whole continental impact.
included
61
PART
and necessary to remember
much
just as
as
it
TWO
did Dickens, so
it is
George
Eliot
Dr
poetry of the
later years
much of the
own
heart
word
altered,
is
part
poem from
lying causes
to the
man
why
in the street
and
much
also to
organized literary
taste,
by
'Sunlight
from the
later
sun's
own heart'
later,
when
this
it
would be to
the period after Eliot, to render the task of comprehension and inte-
gration
Dr
much more difficult. ('Not all of the poetry, or all of the poets',
is a term
which does not bring out the strength - though one must add at once
that it was a modest strength - of much later nineteenth-century
verse; and once that relatively sound and strong kind has been
identified,
it
can be seen
as a tradition
62
Pound and
Eliot,
is
and which
making
after,
the years in
their impact.
more
deliberate (one
might put
is
it)
somewhat domestic
it is
in
Hardy's
An August
Midnight (1899):
And
A longlegs,
Hardy,
it
its
nostalgic) awareness of
everyday
life,
his large
from the
steadily
and
its
strong
body of verse
(if
forcibly
'dream-
the turn
is
after,
so as well:
And
yet
I still
am
at
And
this
moon
that leaves
me
c.
19 10)
1913):
When
63
PART
TWO
and finally, with a slight yet salient difference in the closing lines to
which the discussion must revert, so does Robert Graves's Full Moon,
written (before 1923) at a time when Pound and Eliot were beginning
to dominate the scene:
As
It
come
garden.
even in Richard
They
Jefferies;
rurality
some of
clearer.
idylls;
64
modify the English tradition which has just been discussed, but
departed sharply from it. This new poetry looked not to the country2
side, but to the great city. Already, in this fact alone, the complex
story of
its affiliations
begins to emerge.
From one
point of view,
Eliot's
(Preludes,
first
as
After
all,
however, in a rather
special
further.
and Hindu
Eliot's Sanskrit
Moreover, there
is
a further
way
in
which
this
modern
which
respond to the
city in general,
class,
its
was
failure to
with
this
between the new poets of the 1910s and those of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1890s, and helps one to see how it was natural enough
that
Pound's
earliest
or
-3
immediate influence of A.
65
J.
Symons's The
PART
Symbolist
Movement
TWO
little
the
first
book
signi-
if it
of Irish life and of the Irish peasantry in the ease with which
he envisaged
that)
could take
Repudiating
to underlie the
the
first place,
it
in.
more
in the
technical features
demand
of the new
verse.
It
issued, in
literary
restrictions
convention impose
restrictions
be made easy for the relaxed general reader. Yeats in his early essays
made it clear that, for him, refusing to do this underlay dropping
tidily together:
a sequacious logic,
but though they are partly from France, they are not wholly
'the
so.
mode of
which he recognized above all in the Japanese sevenpoem, the hokku. 13 Ernest Fenollosa's brilliant The Chinese Written Character (finished before his death in 1908, published by
Pound in 1920) finds a paradigm for this, the true poetic texture, in
the very nature of Chinese as a language. But T. E. Hulme, an influential member of the circle of Pound's intimates, goes clearly back for
superposition',
teen-syllable
his
66
perpetually juxtaposed in
meanings perpetually
he
is
eingeschachtelt into
words
combinations,
meanings
ils
du
comme une
virtuelle trainee
poete, qui
le
pierreries. 14
known of
Demeny on
Rimbaud's
15
letters,
the 'Lettre
du Voyant', written
to
May 1871.
When,
that
we
of what probably
lies at
the centre of
recent British thinking about poetry, the power, depth, and suggestiveness
of metaphors. 15
If this
whole
who
own
idea of what this enabled the artist to achieve: nothing less than a half-
enough
in the
and
of the
occultist strains
poets;
poem
where the
fact
67
is
stress is laid
But the
upon economical
from
Imagists, apart
PART
TWO
Pound, and also Lawrence who had a slight and brief connexion with
them, have no importance.
From these considerations, and from the fact that Eliot had completed Prujroch
and
Portrait oj a
Lady by 1914,
work of this
it is
circle
clear
enough
went, the
that
articles
of
inspiration.
The new
Some
need to be drawn
distinctions, in fact,
at this point.
as
work
(it
the revival of
there
now
Donne) 17 than
surprisingly
is
Donne on
Eliot's
little
in his verse.
sign of a direct
and
of
on Yeats. 18 Again,
detailed influence
the fact that Eliot broke sharply with nineteenth-century verse does
not
mean
that
Pound
The
continuity in his
May
1928 he relates
it
also
Browning
ich
poetry was a
crisis
On
its
intelligence
its
move
the
whole depth
and capacity of the mind. As an example, here are the closing stanzas
of the first part of Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
:
He
fished
by
obstinate
isles;
De
No
The
sub-title
is
He
in Van trentiesme
E. P.
Ode pour
is
to say,
But the
and public
and deep
life,
pass
feeling.
beyond
The
up
again in the 'Muse's diadem', conveys Pound's service to a destrucis, at one and the same time, true devotion
mate and equal. Again, the poet is seen at
the wily Odysseus and a crafty fisherman ('obstinate isles'),
once
and
as
also,
through the
terse reference
which he misses
The mottoes on
sundials
What
this
account of develop-
Hugh Sehvyn
Pound called
19
it),
and still more so the new astringency, bluntness, irony, manysidedness, vernacular quality - and emotional charge - of such poems
ment.
'On Margate
I
Sands.
can connect
The broken
fingernails
of dirty hands.
69
TWO
PART
To
Carthage then
came
O
O
burning
terse
and
esoteric reference as
Pound's, these closing lines of the third part of The Waste Land provide the very
title
opening words
of.
Book IE of
St Augustine's Confessions:
words
'I
wandered,
and he
O my God,
vitality.
This radical
shift
becomes
easier to
that Yeats
latter
Little
Review, during the years of the Great War. This traumatic experience
marked
war
to all
Wyndham
That (1929),
brought
it
digenous kind
itself
now more
are
among
70
The
man
fighting
shall
life
earth
A Private (who
others, such as
time to our
see
them
And in
in foul dug-outs,
Dreaming of things
And mocked
Bank
gnawed by
rats,
regain
to
And going
to the office in
('Dreamers')
the train
much more
show an unexpect-
Our
it
"Wearied
we
. .
. .
. .
War and
curious, nervous,
crisis in fiction
disruption
from
the Great
Do
Not,
The
his early
prominence in
the literary scene as an editor (see below, p. 89), have concealed his
achievement
as a novelist.
The Good
71
Soldier (191 5)
PART
TWO
seek a representation of
and
its
how near
how novels may
come
have poignant compassion, sympathy, and insight without manipulation or straining for emotion)
upon
its
influence
English.
The form
is
one
is
clear
clearer.
enough; but
lies
in a sense
sharply differentiated concern for art as such, but also a sense of the
inexhaustible interest and significance and goodness of experience, even
at its
Moore
(in a
work
transient,
at its slightest,
can be disconcerting.
It
criticism,
Room,
1922).
72
to
Metaphysics (1904). 23
Woolf 's
painting,
But
if the
may come
must
also
be
mediacy brings Monet to mind, and the infiltration of the Impressionpainter's vision at least into poetry is something which may be
often traced in English poetry from the 1880s on: but she was also in
ist
the circle of
Roger
Fry,
(Cezanne,
first
to introduce
London
exhibitions
if Cezanne used
it is
Her
best
work embodies
the
her
which her writing endeavours to capture (and for this purpose she
was no inconsiderable technical innovator) reflects a genuine humanity, a real and compassionate concern for what makes life rich and
what dries it up.
Finally, her position in these matters fits properly into its historical
context.
It is
life
PART
TWO
Sir
patient to suicide. In
intellectual. It
is
What
is
typical
is
always
of the period
made
after
1918
life's
vindictiveness
a care for the immediacy of private living, a sense of its being sur-
rounded and threatened by meaningless violence - combine prominently in the work of E. M. Forster. It shows that the plight of the
liberal was one which could be diagnosed before 1914; and in Footer's works also, the pervasive sense is of how the good of life, ordinary kindly private living,
violence, the product
is
is
Woolf,
it is
because,
self-
more
though he
re-
lacks
what
integrity
is
is
by
little
nudely, in view.
More-
to
it
seem
radically
74
it
did so has
been a fundamental
its
reality
. . .
air
. . .
they
maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer country-
men: we
take
it all
war we wonder
at
nothing'
But
in
Virginia Woolf.
only a
that culture.
the
It is,
first jazz,
novels
(as
art,
still
to believe
rational conversa-
those
who
transmit
first
where
now
it is
not
far
is
is
to
make
Wyndham Lewis's
work throws
his earlier
work
into a
new
and shows him not only as one of the major destructive critics
of our time, but as seeing in fundamental terms what the writers just
focus,
having
its
mitted
as this is to
is
men them-
PART
selves; the idea
is
already clear
TWO
enough
in Tarr (191 8)
it
(Letters,
March
19 16) should be
known:
Lewis has just sent in the
first
dozen drawings
. . .
the thing
is
stupendous.
not merely knowledge of technique, or skill, it is intelligence and knowledge of life, of the whole of it, beauty,
heaven, hell, sarcasm, every kind of whirlwind of force and
emotion.
It is
Probably the most enigmatic associate of this group, however, remains to be mentioned. It was Joyce. Like Pound, Joyce has a link
it
shows in
his early
in
intense
work
is
spiritual
development. Moreover,
of
al-
though Joyce took his stand as a rebel against Irish life and the Roman
Catholic religion which dominated it, this novel shows how deeply
his own mind had been influenced by both. The combined variety
and shabbiness of the social milieu, and theTich facility and inventiveness
76
redemption point to
their
work make
it,
in
some
example of the
respects, a clearer
linguistic
Thus,
many
lines
vious century,
who
in
how men
seem
most
live.
is
His compassion
trivially prurient.
This
'dirty-mindedness'); but his vitality and many-sided awareness sustain a true sense
life at
the
Yet
self would
have seen
as
would be
to omit
is
a core
of truth
in the aesthetic ideal that Joyce early encountered. 'Art for great art's
sake',
all
great
of
art, this
substance and
it.
The
no mere
unique
medium
reality
idea
is
of the work;
re-making where
new
world of language,
style
is
a progressive energizing
77
PART
TWO
medley of pastiche, quotation, extravaganza, dramatization, complex literary allusion, all interfuse with story and character
and grotesque realistic immediacy so as to create the richness and
heterogeneity of a new cosmos. Ulysses itself is an undoubted masterpiece: whether Finnegans Wake (1939), which pushes much further
in the same directions, is a success, the present writer had best admit
that he cannot say: the book is beyond him.
unhesitating
The
There
is
Joyce; though
it is
much more
from
a representation
of
life. It
Huxley and
distinguishable
which lend life validity. T. S. Eliot made clear his own concern
of literature in his essay on The Pensees of Pascal
(193 1). Here he implicitly contrasts his own position with that of
forces
'the unbeliever'
... is, as
who
is,
modern
its
its
disorder; nor
by
is
clarity, to
its
substance,
diagnose the
he
. .
human
at least set
'dis-
its final
values,
my
on
lands in
about
Eliot's solution,
(The Cold Heaven, 1914; An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, 1919;
the Swan, 1928; Long-legged Fly, 1939, are merely a few
Leda and
as
perhaps the
78
last
tradition
in
mind
widely in both
and
later
that Yeats chiefly valued the philosophy for the poetry, not
conversely:
the main road, the road of naturalness and swiftness,
have thirty centuries on our side.
alone can
'think like a wise man, yet express ourselves like the common
people'. These new men are goldsmiths, working with a glass
screwed into one eye, whereas we stride ahead of the crowd,
its swordsmen, its jugglers, looking to right and left. 'To right
and left - by which I mean that we need, like Milton, Shake. . .
ours
and
is
We
we
by
tradition. 25
Here
may
That in
its
as
taking up a
Irish poet.
early attachment to the Irish Heroic Age, to his later admiration of the
eighteenth-century Ascendancy.
brings out in
the 1914-18
that he, as
own
time,
much
it is
as
realities:
To
(as
this
79
War
set
beyond
TWO
PART
in Ireland
it
which were
and prolonged
a direct
after
it.
much
mate
if Yeats's
of life
itself;
a validity of
validity
is
and
in
=>
The
'cavern'
message
is
may be
the Neo-Platonic
it is
its
of a Universal,
own
Irish
Two
itself,
more
underlies
all
his findings
when he looked
quotations will
vigour of
life
is
to his
at the
Dancers (193 3)
God
Houses (1928):
as it is in Ancestral
among
Surely
Amid
a rich
hills,
poems
grandiose
silliness
not self-evident.
work
Values
and
his
exposes
ideas, parts
itself to cavil
of his
life,
and
and
in prose
some of his
appears in
more circumspect
that of a
little
of
is
to be
rains
verse,
supremacy
and
splendid vitality,
its
beyond question
his greatness
in fiction
Of all
the writers
But Anna
acceptance - so does
all
the
(Letter to
Here
is
indebtedness to the
shows
A.
of the
more
in a letter to Catherine
issue.)
He may,
condemn
in loose terms,
as
George
be
Eliot;
PART
TWO
rural
world
in decline,
characteristically
modern
steadily
circle
house
in the
widow
life
own
of the
late colliery
...
a villa built
by the
more ambitious
registers
pattern
how
of life came
a wider, looser,
in;
more complex,
and recognizes
no longer meet
its
needs.
Most of
j
fact,
82
topicality
character disappears, 27
all their
disjointed
of the
book
itself with
preclude
out, to be sure.
it.
But there
is
more
to say.
is
insistent
The abrupt
through-
transitions, the
of unity, belong
moment
to the
aside)
have
would seem
The more
oj J.
traditional
be-
fore 1914, to a progressively freer verse style, to the new, looser kinds
his prose,
and
of
edition of his
make
clear
how
overcome weaknesses,
. . .
and
my
is
integral to his
work:
my
That
(Letter to
Edward
83
PART
Lawrence becomes
of
it.
TWO
is
an
evil,
Somme
of the
battle
he could
write:
will not live
... I
sibly can,
any more in
this
time
I
pos-
my life, and if
slides in
that seething
far as
... as
will live
possible,
down
horror
matter about
it
(Letter to
also write:
Frieda says
think a
... 1
women, without
follow as
it
Above
all, it is
is
191 8)
own
December
of his
women must
predicament:
(Letter to R. P.
is still
most
writing in
is
much
. . .
relations
that
is
the same
way:
human
vital sense.
little
suffer
One
. . .
clearer
ail-
how
badly from
has
no
real
so devastating.
(Letter to T.
84
Burrow,
August 1927)
may
be that
England
is
abandoned
this alienation
from
his
own
country
('the
thought of
entirely repugnant',
this
dissatisfied visitor)
lies
dirt
on life'
him
in his other
swallowed
gall,
and
it's
my
eating
when
inside out,
get a turn,
and no-
forget
it all
again.
If Lawrence
is
of the century
artist as
him)
it is
(Yeats, in
upon
are
what help
to give
Thus
it is
human
personality like L.
H. Myers (The
and
is
so
sensitive interests
Clio, 1925;
The Root
and The Flower, completed 1935; Strange Glory, 1936). Myers's preoccupation with what
is
real
and what
is
work
hollow
in life
is
akin to
specifically as fiction
is
his
Much more
PART
in fictional terms
is
TWO
this
He marks an important later phase in the period as a whole. The reason why this is so may not at first be clear. Cary's continuous but
loose and episodic structure,
akin to Dickens rather than Lawrence. His predilection for the chronicle novel, straddling several generations, hints at
there
is little
that
is
Galsworthy, and
it
it is
the
as this discussion
it
throw-back.
On
the contrary.
It is
period in which
turns out to
itself,
links
of the contrast between the corand the restoring strength of private affection;
but Cary's sense of this is easily the fuller, and his rendering of it
correspondingly more substantial. At its richest his work is almost
poetic in its imaginative apprehension of life and its lyrical expresMachiavelli (1913) in their sense
ruptions of public
life
impressive for
its
reasserting itself
sense
through
its
where Lawrence
made
sense,
is
own
deepest,
Lawrence)
weak. Throughout
a unit in the
strongest,
his
many
yet crudest
work
of how each
at
is
strong
runs a confident
man
woman lives
how everyone
or
others; of
whole
social fabric
rence
is
place
... it is
Lawrence
will
of
Beach:
86
And we
Developments
are here as
on
a darkling plain.
. .
in literary criticism
who
The
concern with
by Wilde,
critics
have
from the
being
how
from
were ultimately one
beyond
proper spheres, stood out as matters directly conMoreover, much that is distinctive of criticism in
the modern period has developed along with the development of
English literature as a major part of higher education (at school
values
cerning the
their
critic.
87
PART
It is
of studying
explain
literature;
and
TWO
forward to a
mind,
Many who
that, as the
it
deplore Arnold's
way with
literary tradition. 31
with
it
as sustaining
society,
at first appear.
('moral decadence
in style
is
its
sign-manual
Moreover, they
tinguish decisively
insist steadily
between the
on the
first-rate
critic's
duty to
dis-
they employ both crushing irony and also close poetic analysis.
They
(whom Orage
constantly
praises,
'
its betes
of The Times,
'the frivolous
like
work seems
Ford
When
his
work
is
A number
literary
to radiate out
last
century.
Madox
critic,
columns of his English Review (he edited this from 1908) often dealt
seriously with central issues of criticism and culture, even if Orage's
New Age was ill-satisfied with how it did so. Before 1912, T. E.
Hulme had repudiated 'romantic' poetry and the primacy of emotion,
and had stressed how writing which is not trivial uses words pre-
cisely
response to
its
life
seen in
its
it is
so through
phor. Moreover,
Murry
anticipated
in insisting that
34 Eliot's
the greatness of Shakespeare himself lay precisely here.
critical
temporary
life,
that
humane
. .
culture
and that
is
threatened
a loss
that
con-
now
possessed by the
As
went on, however, its editorial commentaries proved
in tone, and less concerned with critical than with ec-
Pound put it in
Much
facts of
the spread of a
by commerce. 'The almost imone should write in some way that will
stilted
by
literature
more
Eliot
an integral part
of life, that
the Criterion
is
superior to
(1925-7), edited
it
as
critical
or publishing
issues.
oj Letters
PAST
TWO
of standards'
hilating
('the subservience
by
or the modern
of
criticism to publishers'
advertisements') as reflected
'Establishment',
section
Verse;
and
of
values,
science.
On
oj English
much
that
is
best in later
and the
much
as verse)
it is
the
in the
decades, of
and what a
what makes
trivial
a significant
argument in
critical matters,
one.
'analysis'
was developed
in several
im-
also to
The
series
of funda-
less,
thirty years
ideas,
full
or their extension to
This
literature).
atic
last
new
fields (for
twenty or
example, to medieval
is
in the language,
The
work:
Empson's studies of ambiguity are much more systemIt is to point to the kind of import-
ance which
threatened
work
this later
by many
difficulties, a
major
when
literature
did
critical effort
make
was
much
to
body of original
and difficult creative work understood and valued by the front line of
serious readers. Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence are now comprehended
and valued by thousands who have never known the appearance
of baffling strangeness which these writers presented a generation
ago. But the fact of a basic contrast between the best critical work
of the
The
last
a great
closing years
it,
remains.
of an age
made both
and urgent by the latter. It is at this point that the reader
should recall what was said above about Gary (p. 86) and that the
general picture of literary development over the past fifty years - one
writing and naturally so, for in large part the former was
:
possible
of which no
anywhere -
clear
and
full
become clear. From 1930 onward the avanttwo preceding decades begin to retire from the
starts to
Pound had
left
isolation
and Eliot produced no verse (other than his plays) after Four Quartets,
completed by the early 1940s. A number of new writers appear, and
the question is of the relation which they have to the outstanding
figures who preceded them. Again, it is probably best to suggest an
answer in broad terms, before attempting to illustrate it.
Two forcesseem to have been at work. First, a number ofthe younger
were
On
91
PART
TWO
by
now
more
various
or
sometimes seen
less
in simplified
of
areas
It
stands with
of recent
What
it
for a
throw
light not
To turn,
for example, to
the traditions of
social
and
Pound and
cultural disorder
is
In unlighted streets
Factories
where
concern about
lives are
made
the appalling;
for a
temporary use
But the resemblance is a strictly limited one. Eliot's gaze was upon
the culture and society of his own time, but he saw it in the abiding
terms of one whose ultimate solutions were spiritual and universal.
Topicality in the work of these new poets was both sharper and
more limited, the counterpart of solutions in left-wing political action,
and of a current political tension inaugurated by the slump of 1929-31,
and mounting month by month as a result of such factors as the rise of
Hitler, the war in Spain, and the unemployment and industrial policies of the government (see pp. 334). These differences of attitude
92
and syntax,
is
like that
of ordinary
dis-
course.
his
and
self-deflation in verse;
mode of
social organiza-
his verse
or singular nouns
employed with
'Streets', 'Factories',
plural force)
Achilles, there is a
my
love' to
religious.
But
back to
and
on
is
Eliot. Influenced
a partial
The Shield
of
political,
more prominent in
be
it.
this
continuity with
Certainly,
is
make
perhaps by Yeats,
it
way be
referred
p. 63-4.
Death, by
Fire, oj a
Never
. .
Shall
let
Child
in
lines are
Refusal
to
Mourn
the
Or sow my
salt
seed
from
London:
mourn
child's death.
further
PART
'
TWO
and several other turns of phrase in this passage bring to mind Eliot's
words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations,
meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings' (see above, p. 67).
But when he wrote this, Eliot was discussing a passage from Tourneur,
and pointing to the firm-set muscularity of its language. Thomas's
conformity to Eliot's principle is superficial. In these lines it appears
as a
last
vironment and
with
his oneness
it,
. . .
ignored or disparaged.
by
this
period
who
Eliot
it
case
is
a very
of Eliot or Richards
It is
the pain,
it is
What
What
It is
my
later
hands reminded
my
muscles through.
me
of yours.
kindness
the pain,
it is
show
of
('Villanelle')
my
Moreover Empson,
as these lines
deep
which Auden
lacks.
94
('poise
hands', 'this
on
to that of
later writers
Auden
of verse,
much
so
as parallel to
it.
This
poems
is
Dive) have not been imitated. Later writers have taken their direction
rather
like Villanelle
to a kind of verse
Empson
practised,
and
is
nearest
identified as
at his
Ah, no.
And
It
shape themselves
From
And
The
ever
making
nearest parallel
not in Empson
is
words alone
. .
at all,
it is
decisively close:
The
hell
illness
of the ear;
is
but
as
intrinsic qualities,
an influence
it
its
made against
it.
thus transpires that recent verse has not been under the dominant
Pound.
It
has picked
repudiated or ignored.
Among
and Donald
like
95
TWO
PART
in recent years as a poet
who
has
made
a substantial contribution to
and Pound; and the latter's best verse (written late in his life)
another link with the poetry of the past, in that the chief
stresses yet
English influences
Perhaps
upon
it
become
perspective will
this
clearer
if
as a
it
shows,
in that
continuity, but not (as could have been argued twenty years ago, say)
something
Pound and
all
will be
of
it.
and Pound
during the
now seem
last
intellectuality, or
wide
But
forty years.
it
its
at
bottom
a continental impact,
and
have been
reasserting themselves.
shift
may be
the novel. Since Gary, the most remarkable and original writer of
fiction in English has
much
French versions
English versions
by
earlier;
But Beckett
at all events,
his case
published
subsequently
195 1-3,
is
perhaps
in
more
Apart from him, the years since the war have produced fiction of
strictly limited interest. But if the question is one of detecting a direction of
movement, then
it is
that
many of the
Wain
from
for
all
that
is
in
more or
less
conscious revolt
a degree of continuity
like
Wells and
Bennett. 36 Lawrence Durrell's tetralogy onovek[Justitie, 1957; Balthazar and Mountolive, 1958 ; Clea, i960) has been based on the idea that
96
human
chief impression
which
which
ation
is
surprising in a
is
works leave
these
work intended
of human love; and as narratives they are straightforward and traditional rather than experimental or avant-garde.
and
picture of gradual
on
his
own in
partial change.
Pound, writing
after
fact
this
1920
Italy,
how he began.
By contrast,
more
shows
as
Pound
on
its
literary scene.
we
meant
are
more and
work
later
his prose:
to see
we
His
from
which
points
in a direct line
an established landmark in
it.
that
art possible,
has gone
it
we
With
42) take
on a special
interest.
sombre
lucidity
of expression
ment and
idea;
satirical
C .A. - 4
97
PART
TWO
make
things
it
clear that
are traditional
poems
essay, Tradition
and
from
several points
in a sense
Eliot's
19 17
condemned.They
of English literature from which that
areas
is
among
condemn then%
work which they comprise.
how
is
his
if their
far
he has
NOTES
See Q. D. Leavis. Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) F. R. Leavis and D.
Thompson, Culture and Environment (1933); George Orwell, 'Boys' Weeklies'
1.
and
(1939),
M.
'Raffles
to the
New
Island
3. See his essay 'The Art of Fiction' (1884; in Partial Portraits, 1888, and
Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Janet Adam Smith, 1948).
4. For sporadic earlier productions see Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic
Movement (1939), Appendix B; and The Guardian, 28 November 1959,
p. 6.
5.
6.
Plays and Controversies (1923), pp. 157-8; but compare pp. 12 and 155.
See Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (1956) J a short
New
8.
Some
confirmation of
See, e.g.,
this is
Letters, ed.
'Illuminations' (1953), p.
I09n;
also,
among the Illuminations themselves, 'Villes I and II', and 'Metropolitain' (which
may be a source for Eliot's description of the fog in The Waste Land).
10. Selected Essays (1932), p. 37311. See
Pound's
series
(Little
98
366.
15. F. W. Bateson, 'Dissociation of Sensibility ', Essays in Criticism, July 1951;
Le Probleme du style (13th ed., 1924), especially pp. 91-101.
16. Wagner, The Musk oj the Future (1861); Prose Works, transl. W. A.
Ellis (1894), Vol. Ill, pp. 317-18; and Vol. V, p. 65, on Schopenhauer's 'Platonic'
theory of music.
17. See, e.g.,
(in Essays
18. J. E.
1959),
especially Chapters
19.
p. 54-
22. See her essays, 'Modern Fiction', in The Common Reader (1925), and
'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', in The Captain's Deathbed.
23. But compare J. W. Graham, 'A Negative Note on Bergson and Virginia
in Criticism, January 1956.
have discussed these points more fully in 'Wyndham Lewis: the
Massacre and the Innocents', Hudson Review, Summer 1957; reprinted in
The Charted Mirror, i960.
25. Letter to Dorothy Wellesley, April 1936; in Yeats's Letters, ed. A. Wade
*Woo]', Essays
24.
(1954), P- 853.
26. See for example Amaryllis at the Fair (1887),
models.
28. 16 December 1915;
29.
tic
It
p- 49).
31.
32.
A. R. Orage,
30.
Selected Essays
ed. S.
Further Specu-
35. On Milton, see The Problem of Style, p. 109; and also Read's 'The Nature
of Metaphysical Poetry' (Criterion, 1923; reprinted in Reason and Romanticism,
1926).
99
PART
36.
have discussed
this suggestion
XXX
Autumn
TWO
more
fully in 'Notes
on
the School of
Draft of
Cantos, 1933 ; Cantos XXXl-XLl, 1934; The Fifth Decade
37.
of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII-LXXI, 1940; ThePisan Cantos (LXXW-LXXXJV),
1949; Section: Rock Drill (Cantos LXXXV-XCV), 1957; Thrones (96-109 de
los cantares),
i960.
PART
III
HENRY JAMES:
THE DRAMA OF DISCRIMINATION
HENRY GIFFORD
Senior Lecturer in English, the University of Bristol
waste.' This
Henry James in his power of lonely decision and his uncommon ardour. The particular choice was to live in England: a step
the essential
ofJames,
strictly logical.
his disabilities.
Almost from
it
he overcame the
last
of
infancy he had known his talent - that of 'the visiting mind', to gather
impressions and to read aspects
faith in his
- but
for
own lights. The elder Henry James, his father, thought little
of 'mere'
'being'.
Henry
rejected his
He waged
American environment.
of Turgenev as
'having what one may call a poet's quarrel' with his native land. 'He
loves the old, and he is unable to see where the new is drifting.'
James recognized this 'poet's quarrel' as necessarily his own, though for
tion.
An
him
the conditions
. .
arts,
103
PART THREE
of Europe, America gave too little suggestion. He
coveted the 'deep, rich English tone' of George Eliot, and the density
of Balzac's France. Instead, America offered too often scenes like this
in The Bostonians
indefeasible sense
made
bald
by
the
rigour of the season; the general hard, cold void of the pros-
Cambridge, of a few
of factories and
engine-shops, or spare heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something inexorable in the
poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details
loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn
with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of
chimneys and
. . .
places.
The
friends
the
few
'good' -
But
of a society once
that predicament
- seen
in terms
of 'social
impossibilities'
- was
the years,
is
own
who
to
know
the
life.
scarcely
of a 'formed
critical habit'.
'critic'
and
'creator'
accept
from
Mr
Eliot that
him
more
Haw-
subtlety,
latter dis-
played (what he might find also in George Eliot and Turgenev) the
values of intelligence and irony and of the finely disinterested mind.
he wrote in 1867,
to a letter
Sainte-Beuve in English
as a
letters.
owe more
Portraits (1888)
however remote,
The American
in
The
Portrait
than their
it
then,
we find
it'.
Deprivation
at
on the hearth-rug
as
the small
in 'medieval
was to
etc.)
home
and
'pick
caused a hunger to
was something
boy discovered from reading Punch
promised in books,
to Sainte-
of a Lady.
James saw
privilege, as
title
'portraits'
life
of English
life;
recognitions.
two
in
subsequent
visits
to
like T. S. Eliot
mutual enrichment.
of counterpoint.
first
to the international
was
theme:
fitted
as if I had,
him
vulgarly
their
con-
could show by itself- these interests held his attention from the be-
involved him,
as it
as
An
less treatable:
renewed
105
indefinitely.
such
and Lady
There was in
fact
PART THREE
a risk of monotony: they had too
to confront. Far
little
ous,
studies
more numer-
of American in-
In presenting the
to
to offer him.
avoid 'the poor concussion of positives on the one side with negatives
other'. Just this difficulty arose in the
on the
Square (1880),
which is
working of Washington
Though James's
subject
New
a
is
it
The Europeans gains by bringing the European values - merely implied in Washington Square - into
an active relation with those of Boston. Felix Young and the Baroness
receives something
of an
idyllic frame.
not only provide two differing registers of the scene, two projections
as F.
com-
mentary, 4 does not directly intervene. His sympathies may well lean
to the American order - homely, pious, frugal, earnest, candid - but
nothing
is
made simple or
is
schematic.
Mr Wentworth
the note of
and
Mr
appraise
Brand:
Wentworth:
a shy
for
New
shall
tacitly
an
James's
York. 5
own
On
loyalties,
coming
to
in the
Harvard
Law
School he
at large'.
That
is
106
'it's
Wentworths
patriarchal;
it's
the
HENRY JAMES
ton
at
of the golden
home from
veys
this exactly. It
form
picture' to
age').
is
'the items
is
over against a
plants'
muddy
admit the purifying sunorder, confidence, a quiet joy in 'the abundant light
'to
and warmth'.
was an ancient house - ancient in the sense of being eightyit was built of wood, painted a clean, clear, faded
grey, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat
It
years old;
wooden
The
pilasters,
painted white.
same span
in
It
which James felt at ease; the more remote past was 'dusky' for
hirn, the past of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and of
iniquitous feudal Europe. But the 'big, unguarded home' in its
cleanliness and sobriety has no guilty secrets: it reflects faithfully its
in
master, also
'a
a more sympathetic, an unselfish if still pedantic kinsman of Mr Casaubon. Certainly the notation
is
similar:
It seemed to him he ought to find [the materials for a judgment] in his own experience, as a man of the world and an
almost public character but they were not there, and he was
ashamed to confess to himself. ., the unfurnished condition of
;
this repository.
(The Europeans)
feeling
shallow
When
rill it
a page or
was.
two
(Middlemarch)
Mr Wentworth 'as an
107
we may
recall
PART THREE
Ladislaw's idea of Mr Casaubon as a
model
relations :
a convincing
he required was the appropriate tone. One might say that his
delicacy is Hawthorne's, his mild asperity - the light brush of satire -
What
itself
Eliot's.
in their essence playful. The Baroness quits the scene, a superior woman
disabled
by American
Lord Lambeth
in
An
In-
and the Prussian Count in Pandora, she had expected to conquer. But American simplicity holds the field.
The Portrait of a Lady carries on the debate in much graver terms.
The tone has utterly changed:
ternational Episode,
She could
live
it
in Washington Square.
Each
108
The
'silent,
'a
the reminder
that there
remarkable
places
tracts,
a trusting
It
girl in guilt-laden
as
'I
Hawthorne's novel.
Isabel, of course, stems from a proved social reality. She is the unique
American girl, 'heiress of all the ages', and for her as for Milly Theale
in The Wings of the Dove (1902), a novel that returns upon this theme,
there must be 'a strong and special implication of liberty', to bring out
the poignancy of her case. The American girl in Europe - 'a huge
success of curiosity' who had 'infinitely amused the nations' - con-
fronted the old order with an entire freedom: she was not 'placed'
socially,
it
its
own
privileges.
Thereby he
superior to conditions.
Isabel's self-regard,
at
109
PART THREE
ofa Lady
is
indeed brilliant on
its
social surface.
surest
Keen observation;
Madame
the
Merle, Henrietta
having
all these, it is
we may not
m our
Isabel awakes from her sweet delusion - oh, the art required for making this delusion natural! - and finds herself
face to face
with a husband
own
who
has ended
by conceiving a
larger qualities.
is
much away. As
made
...
a matter
quite convincing.
needed to bring about for the expression of some deep personal theme.
His mind was fixed on suffering and renunciation.
Popularity
- never very
- deserted James
al-
together in 1886, the year of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. If Daisy Miller (1878) - an exhibition of the
American girl
made, as he admits, in poetical rather than critical terms - won him a
fairly wide success, The Bostonians blighted his fortunes with the public at
home.
started to
It
tale'
then publishing
Silas
a daylight raid
on an unsuspecting
city, merciless
no
and complete -
is
brilliant in a
nities
manner
quite
of, say,
Washington Square or
its
brilliance did
affi-
A New England
Mark
not appeal to
knowledge,
and
their
The
spell
of Huckleberry Finn
arises
strikes hard.
James knew very well the intellectual tone of Boston (he made one
year later a compensatory gesture in his portrait of Emerson) the
absurdities of the lecture hall and the passions of female insurgence
did not escape his eye searching for the 'salient and peculiar'. He noted
;
'the situation
sex' as
his
an
drama
of conflicting values around 'a study of one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England'. The battle
for Verena Tarrant's soul between the implacable female zealot,
Olive Chancellor, and the rude Southern knight-errant, Basil Ransom, enacts in passionate and personal form a conflict of ideas - between North and South, reform and reaction, the feminine and the
masculine principles. The periphery is richly comic - a world of queer
female missionaries under the gas lamps, of fraud and exaltation and
in
PART THREE
selfless
service
and crude
publicity.
is
otherwise con-
ceived:
There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver - a sparkwhere the stars were like a myriad points of ice.
The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel.
Olive now knew very definitely what the promise was that
she wanted Verena to make
ling vault,
. .
Gerald Crich
dies.
snow
in
which
the
is
The
Princess Casamassima, a
places the
is
thesis,
is
in certain
ways
lacks the
Again, a group with a fixed design (here they are anarchists) wish to
is
not
when he
own
Nezhdanov
in Virgin Soil,
calism'
. . .
112
. .
of James's own
upon his
story, perhaps in part unrecognized by himself. 'The dispute between
art and moral action', from which Hyacinth at last escapes into death,
had its unhappy familial side for James. And the theme of the exquisite nature cut off in its first flowering was to return with Milly
springs (as
spirit.
One
Mr
from a
necessity
Theale.
composition?
James clung to the forms of English life, but his sense of alienation
grew, in a society where art received every kind of empty homage:
'the line is drawn
only at the importance of heeding what it may
. . .
mean'.
modern
Years, came out in the volume called Terminations (1895). Only a few
months before, James's desperate fling at the theatre had been ended
by the miscarriage of Guy Domville. These five years of deluded endeavour betray something like a failure of nerve. He had dropped the
writing of long novels after The Tragic Muse (1890) to win wealth
and glory as a dramatist. He found neither: and it is difficult to see
what he gained from the whole misadventure except perhaps 'the
divine principle of the scenario', which enabled him to project an
113
PART THREE
entire novel in
its
them more
fronting
him
is
bound
directly,
to
either
or,
as
some
merits, as A. B.
make good
in
is
left at
in
Nanda Brookenham
in
A London
Life,
easily';
Wing
Laura
Rose Tramore
'let
Van down
(1897) a cul-
The
sins
Gereth
suffers 'the
ridiculous.
The
now
difficulty
is
which
first
almost excessively
pumped
114
The
notation
who
delighted in
now
must
of disembodied
style really so
cumbersome?
made
Portrait of a
in
The
every one
is
intelligences.
a gain in dramatic
power and
lucidity.
few random
illustrate this: I
version in brackets:
in
Pagoda
is
the Palladian
the 'tortuous stone staircase' of Prince Amerigo's moral sense in contrast to the
ii),
Often they give a patterning to the whole work. Their effect is that
of the classical simile as Johnson saw it, which 'must both illustrate
subject'.
explicit
meaning:
'the
breakage [of the golden bowl] stood not for any wrought discomposure
among
it
Love,
and sublime little American girls, acting out between them a drama
of wonderful intensity, stand a poor chance with the contemporary
115
PART THREE
reader. Meticulously charting the course, James leads
Maggie Verver
to a kind of Gethsemane: seeing her father, her father's wife, and that
wife's lover
- her
darkness outside,
has
ous pride. Yet the conclusion of the novel, with Charlotte safe in the
silken halter, worries our sense
acquisition;
Maggie
of fitness.
herself, in that
Adam
of youth, are
circuit
it
through the
fearless
innocence
desire'.
One might
far,
use
is
that
actualities
of operative
two companion
must be given.
see
should
It
like
Those who are dissatisfied with these novels should not forget that
James was still to write excellent smaller pieces (as in that collection of
1910, The Finer Grain, to which Ezra Pound gave especial praise).
Much could be said in a discussion ofJames's pre-eminent skill in the
slighter thing - the short story and nouvelle. After his visit to America
in 1904
drove him to
'felicities
past', originally in
New York
'growth of a poet's
mind
in particular
116
villas
the
title
poets,
James
of poet. There
no
is
less
nothing extravagant in
a master for
'certainty
is
all
who
much
prize (in
incision'.
NOTES
on 'The Hawthorne Aspect' and the detailed exploration
by Marius Bewley in The Complex Fate set James firmly in his native tradition:
Balzac, Turgenev, George Eliot, Dickens seem to have been consciously assimilated, Hawthorne's hold on his imagination was not perhaps perfectly clear to
1. Eliot's
essay
him.
2. Both James and T. S. Eliot in early manhood wrote review articles greatly
outnumbering their attempts at original work. This allowed each to think
over the bases of his art. James's fullest statement on this subject before the
Prefaces was 'The Art of Fiction' (1884), reprinted in Partial Portraits.
3. On the significance of these themes for the American novelist of the
nineteenth century see The Complex Fate and its sequel The Eccentric Design.
4. In 'The Novel as Dramatic Poem (m): The Europeans', Scrutiny, Vol.
XV (1948).
5. W. D. Howells defined 'New Yorkishness' as 'a sort of a Bostonian quality,
with the elements of conscious worth eliminated, and purified as essentially of
pedantry as of commerciality'.
117
PART THREE
See his preface to The Bostonians in the Chiltern Library edition (London,
1952) reprinted in The Opposing Self.
6.
7. In
The
Liberal Imagination.
See his appendix to Henry James: The Major Phase, entitled "The Painter's
Sponge and Varnish Bottle'.
9. Quentin Anderson in The American Henry James takes them rather as a
'divine novel', in which James sought to dramatize the religious views of his
8.
One may readily acknowledge Mr Anderson's insight into the deliof James's moral sense. It goes without saying that James like his father
abhorred greed and domination; and we must treat "with caution the view
that his moral sense in these later novels surrendered to ambiguities. One can
only enter here the plea that it is preposterous to conceive of father and son as
standing perpetually in the same Swedenborgian pew. Mr Anderson has
suffered the novelist's mind to be violated by an idea.
father.
cacies
School, Cambridge
It
human relation-
it
tory.
But there
offers
no point
is
in
To
limitations, for
parcel of them.
(1917).
of The
The
ness,
Secret Agent',
Secret Sharer,
The Shadow-Line
call to
mind
some compulsion
to
own
make
life
of
beck of
knew both
world. In his
experience he
strict
commitment
moment,
still
to
119
PART THREE
and recreate it, its immediacy still
meaning enlarged and clarified by distance. The recurring, figure of the raconteur, his experience separated from the
novelist's own, or the aligning of a series of distinct attitudes, deny the
look back
vivid but
its
Now
scepticism.
it
reflects
now contemporary
when
events reach
now
Add the
another - Mitchell's;
Decoud's,
drama.
so
much of the
we
shadow through
mind of the in-
sufficiency
Nobody
And the
is
method? -
elliptical
may
be right to
Nostromo,
is
It is
an enigmatic figure.
of Conrad
(i 857-1924)
with
com-
mitment of the sailor. His artistic manifesto, the Preface to The Nigger,
speaks of imaginative creation that shall address the senses irresistibly
and so reach down to 'the secret springs of responsive emotions'.
The
it
calls into
viction of solidarity'.
They
word
work
brates fidelity
confidence;
on Macwhirr's
lips.
'ought'
So Con-
and heroic
moral sanctions;
gale
it
discipline. It
probes anxiously
at traditional
we move
upon
it. It
seems,
on one hand,
that
silver,
no
tradi-
or that other
tives tend.
trusts
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
nothing but the truth of his sensations, finds he desires
leave behind him a true record of his acts.
to
who do
world has
people to
fail,
social roots, it
dues to
at the crisis to
of desolate gesture
always some note of compassion, or
It's
live
a sort
by 'some
is itself
distinct ideal'.
suggestive betrayal in
:
experience in
terms.
the
we are to depend
on the evidence of our senses, and our power to respond delicately
enough to the story-teller's arrangement of his scenes, and to his tone
of voice. (Though he was Polish by birth, Conrad became a master
of our speech. He learnt it from the talk of seamen first, as he learnt
our language generally from manuals of navigation, entries in ships'
itself, its
121
'glow';
PART THREE
logs, as well as studies in
our
literature.
its
led
him to
And
present
incertitude
upon the
we
drawn
are
of clarification.
Frequently the
way of the
as the
whom Marlow
Patna
relates his
Congo
The
Secret Sharer
and includes passages that are by common consent among his very
Most important, and when due regard has been given to its
dramatic fibre, it exhibits - like The Shadow-Line - a profoundly
finest.
attendant
breakdown were
like.
It
is
own Congo
decisive in confirming
own
journey and
him
is
its
in his voca-
remark prepares us
about: 'before the Congo I was only a simple
tion as an imaginative
for
Conrad's
artist.
His
animal'.
122
laconic
AN APPROACH TO CONSAD
Marlow's journey
is
of
ships. In
more
it,
is
as
counts. In Sulaco,
it
presence
felt in
Congo, Nostromo
the
He
is
the
at first
commits
common
his
their
whole
mysterious
folk's
of the
silver.
the adult.
Soon he
is
some adventure
the villain of
romanticizing his
new manhood,
upon
his resentful
story
Hood:
fittingly,
cavalier. 4
tensions,
Growth
brings to the
posure of the
in the
self.
Marlow
But the
of Heart of Darkness
feeling
of growth and
a.
radical
discom-
fuller participation
little
acts
self.
me
don't
want
personally,'
123
PART THREE
kind of light on everything about me - and into my thoughts.
It was sombre enough, too - and pitiful - not extraordinary
in any way - not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet
it seemed to throw a kind of light.'
There
is
a subtle
A slightly mannered
and
reticences, alert
Navigation, and the duty of the helm, and the experience of danger-
of
responsibility,
of purpose.
memorable
one way')
in
line runs
('fixed to
look
End of the Tether, and the African steersman here, through Nostromo
at the helm for Decoud on the Placid Gulf: towards those later vindications of responsible purpose, the terrified but obedient helmsman of
The Secret Sharer, and the sharing of the helm at the nd of The
Shadow-Line between the captain himself and the
Ransome. As
for
Marlow's
'farthest point
frail,
indomitable
of Captain
Giles,
imagined
living.'
The
among
novelist himself is
inconclusive experiences'.
The
turbing
124
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
tone and arrangement. Arrangement, here, includes the companydirector - 'our captain and our host' -the lawyer, and the accountant,
alongside the novelist, comprising Marlow's audience. For the codes
and vocations of
all
come, and
ments.
its
tialities
of the
by
suffered
is
also to vibrate
tremors
Not
that
is
to
some new
orientation.
So
far as
my thoughts.'
Then
there
is
be
complathe securities of
tale, like
the
overweening confidence in
initial
review of the
piratical,
A boyish
is still
PART THREE
what
threatens the
human
as
storm, and
of menace, under the image of becalmed or stagnant condiwith the collapse of the power or the will to act. This is more
insidious, it turns the mind in on itself to probe at the rationale of
intuition
tions,
living
is
and question
its
diary entries in "The Shadow-Line and the hours just before the rain
reflect one focal image from episode to
though the human condition in Sulaco is perpetually this
loaded with the silver that all factions and individuals adjust
themselves
to,
a motionless
Gulf. There are three figures abroad, Hirsch, impotent with fear,
when he
lies
dead. 5
oj
Darkness
is
'
126
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
first
speculations
to that
brooding
mind
stillness
is
promotes that
activity.
Congo and
So the grim
'also',
now to re-live them deviously, and diminish the tremor by refercommon historical experience. What the experience has done
Marlow, how it has wounded him - this, as much as the journey
has
ence to
to
itself, is
something
The
is
caustic flippancy
Marlow discerns himself in his predecessor; their roles are the same.
The episode makes an embryo of things to come. Both the naval
community and the African community disintegrate: 'The steamer
Freslaven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of the engineer, I believe
The village was deserted, the huts gaped black,
rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures ... The people had
.
vanished.'
It
it
to attach itself
web. Marlow, replacing the Danish skipper, finds his way to the
shadowed and deserted Company Offices, to the two women knitting
black wool and 'guarding the door of darkness'. And so the web has
him. His interview with the doctor, if it adds an ingredient of observant humour, quickens our apprehension of quiescent unbalance.
you know.'
Congo, forms of immobility and of
activity group themselves on either side. We observe in a more extended passage such as this, how the Trading Company's new repre'The changes take place
With
inside,
127
PART THREE
dance of death and trade goes on in a
like that of an overheated catacomb.'
still
The
idleness
Consider
as a
and
attitude
it is
128
is
chain-gang moves
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
by: 1 foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would
become acquainted with a flabby pretending weak-eyed devil of a
rapacious and pitiless folly.' First, a scene of desultory mess: the halfburied boiler, the railway truck with
dated machinery.
soon appears)
Then
recalls the
its
wheels in the
air,
the dilapi-
its shells.
it
The chained
gang of forced labourers comes very close, in one of the most incisive
and pitiful paragraphs anywhere in our fiction. The eye fastens again
on material disorder: a heap of broken drain-pipes, 'a wanton smashup' in a quarry dug for no purpose and abandoned. Then, to draw
these sights and sounds into the larger web of the novel, comes an
extraordinary impression simultaneously of violent motion and infernal stillness in the African scene. Next, the pity
victims of this
of vision to
wanton smash-up
owing
summoned by
is
objectless blasting
to the
human
a painful closeness
Sounds of the
gloom of
itself to the
dividual
human
beings.
hand.
He was
ear.'
C.A.-5
I20
PART THREE
submerged. The
effect is to locate
Kurtz
human
power
solidarities.
at
He is both
Marlow's
to
Hence the
tale.)
serves as a point
It
Higuerota
it
silver in Nostromo.
power; and
focuses
keep
its
it.
it
As the
fastens
as the
the
it is
emblem
all
rally to,
silver.
more and
This
is
And
Raw
of
Darkness
resonance
is
mani-
the
raw
affects
it is
civilization.
it
mal,
of
who
bloodless
is
than mineral
possessing those
is
or refined,
and impenetrable.
human
plunder.
By its
it
insinuates
may
corrupt the
presenting the question to his listeners. All the suggestions latent in the
ivory, and this last especially,
come
nation of the waiting traders and agents at that station: the pilgrims.
air,
130
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
all,
like a
ivory ball
I
it
should think
boat with
. .
it,
'
him.'
As the
actual appearance
memory comes
of Kurtz to Marlow's
of narrative loosens
The
manner
some foothold in these shifting nightmare-like places.
But more and more he lapses into mordant quirks, spasmodic adnearer, his style
still
its
hold.
sardonic
maintains
The
yells
and
'fantastic'
chooses
more
think'.
The
novelist
of
circle
listeners
is
and
significantly
normality:
'Do you
I
am
tion
trying to
cause
no
tell
relation
you
.'
. .
He was
'No,
he
its
And
Conrad's.
like jabber'
they register
mind, words
recur,
does so twice
his
it is
impossible;
it is
131
life-
PART THREE
any given epoch of one's existence - that which
makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating
essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone.'
He paused again as if reflecting, then added 'Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then.
You see me whom you know.'
It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly
see one another.
sensation of
something 'moral' about Kurtz's final state. 6 The final scenes concerning him suggest something insupportable in the direction and
life by the hallowing or authorizing of economic
work beneath the ostentation of a civilizing mission, and
purpose given to
forces at
by
It is
Conrad's
achievement to communicate a powerful sense of sacrilege, independently of any traditional religious sanctions. Sacrilege, essentially,
against
human
dignity.
African workers
what
first call it
collaborative
diseased
and
cast-off
work ought
And
in
Kurtz
human
dealing,
132
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
and nation drawn into the novel's web, and the interlocking responsibilities of warships, soldiers, traders, and seamen, provide authority
for the claim thrown out as if accidentally - 'All Europe contributed
to the
pany
is felt
in a ghastly
Europe, requiring
human
ties
its
way
to
Company he
serves,
him
and that
takes
Com-
without end.
This
not
is
all
be
that needs to
that
Marlow
it is
said
is its
own
plain force,
Other darknesses,
fashion.
too,
pages
is
hand, the
human
is
an abyss
and
solitudes
seas
of The
at
We
Secret Sharer
lurk in the
wanton disregard of
own
interior.
The
Roman
novel's
first
movement opened
But the rivets are quite another matter. By contrast with the ivory
and the darkness there is the salvage of the steamer, the order of work
and purpose. The need of ships to be under way, in other Conrad
tales, is to enable seafaring activities and skills to be exercised in
purposeful collaboration. So here, the work of repair. 'Waiting for
rivets' Marlow 'stuck to his salvage night and day'. Those rivets are a
characteristic
naturally.
The
folly disrupts,
itself
perfectly
and
it resists
the paralysis
manner
all
round
it.
Marlow
133
doesn't
A man
PART THREE
can 'find himself in such work,
finds in
work
it is
is
both a social
reality,
and yet a
as
here, relationships
skill
same
effect,
And
there
is
of
work
helm
to look to.
Taking
this aspect
of Heart
oj
as Single-
coming of rain
at
down,
'the
go down
too,
we
are left in
Conrad's
no
art. It is
a sceptical intelligence. If
'builders -
in
and the
man
it,
at
its
the
by simple
work Charles
reference to his
Gould
own
gives to the
mine in Nostromo
The
selfless
making
beyond
his
worthy
is
offset at
expedition.
'this
in the
When Marlow
wretched bush'.
real'
of having
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
of the manager and traders, puts the book in his pocket, and
'started the lame engines ahead', now and again picking out a tree 'to
measure our progress towards Kurtz by'.
So energy takes more grotesque and irrational forms, activitysight
becomes more
clearer.
the shore
jig
the
Marlow
their boats
loom
from
the chain-gang
the
Kurtz
at
last
trading station,
and
last
(in
we experience many
pene-
darks of time; into mingled social forms, neither barbaric nor civilized
anarchy
once of
re-
their
confidence - above
no superior
in
all,
may
of absorption,
this loss
feels sluggish:
The
135
PART THREE
warm and
clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or
drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something
When
solid.
It is
and again
as
end of Nostromo.
finality' just
we have at
form
is
the
falls in
my moral
dissolution'.
The
contrary forces
stand over against each other that of the gulf, the typhoon, the wilder:
the needle still swings between them in Conrad's next major achievement 'Both the typhoon and Captain Macwhirr presented themselves
:
to
me
'
the necessities
as
There
which
is
is
a fine ease
. . .
about the
later parts
of Conrad's
best
work,
stages in the
in
the orgy,
draw
all
web
on
is
covertly.
end of such an
The achievement of
affair'.
136
is
more
equivocal.
The
AN APPROACH TO CONRAD
between the Congo wilderness, and the elegances and
proprieties of the Europe at the other end; the sepulchral city replacing the ivory pallor - this is well managed. But it seems that
collision
Conrad tries to accomplish too much, after enough has already been
done for the scale of his invention, when the deceptions and speculations and moral somersaults perceptible through the haze of memory
as
it
The absurd
put to
it
to find
tones of the
account
fall
and keep
last
all
his bearings.
fits
lies
to
is
hard
into perspective.
it
have
The
final
sentence
is
economy of
the novel:
Marlow
ceased,
and
'We have
I
raised
lost
my
the
head.
first
and
silent, in
Nobody moved
the
for a time.
The
NOTES
on most of these, F.R.Leavis: TheGreat Tradition.
2. For example in parts of the writing on Conrad of A. J. Guerard, R. W.
Stallman, Robert B. Haugh, and a number of other American critics; and such
essays by English critics as those on The Secret Sharer by D. Hewitt {Conrad:
1. See,
a reassessment)
3.
vol. n),
and
D. Hewitt.
See chapter 8 of 'The Lighthouse'.
Nostromo pp. 465-8 - Nostromo's return to Viola's Inn - gives very
poignantly this omnipresence of the Gulf.
6. It seems perverse and sentimental to attribute to anyone except Marlow
the notion that Kurtz represents a character to be admired, or his end some sort
4.
5.
a Marlow, moreover, recording the disorder and fasremembered from a state of nervous collapse. Yet a good deal of
criticism appears to suppose simply this to be Conrad's own view of the matter.
of 'moral victory':
cination
7.
8.
Typhoon: Preface.
EDWARD THOMAS
H.
COOMBES
unduly, that
to say
with
minim um of
it
to fantasy or
its
own
sake,
weaker
make
.the
usefully
is
significant
discriminations, but
it
interest.
We can
wear the
refusal to
Of
iabel of a category.
Walter de
la
Mare (i 873-1956)
is
the
to nine-
is
is
Mare,
we shall
la
all
And
if,
of
on
'reality' as in
It is
indisputable
de
gift.
final estimate
reality in various
that
minor poetry.
He was, of course, perfectly aware of the dream-like quality of his
poetry he cultivated fantasy, he aimed consciously at entrancement.
created a
body of
exquisite
But he was not wholly aware ot the hazards for a poet in postulating,
as he repeatedly does, a dichotomy between 'the day's travail' and
'the garden of the Lord's' in which he is enchanted by the dream that
brings poetry:
Ev'n
in the
Dreams
their intangible
138
enchantments weave.
An
Mare from
saw
in
such a creed:
We had
The
grown
heart's
as
on
brutal
fantasies,
from the
fare.
is
nothing
is
unquestionable, his
Many
we hear
delight children.
murmur of
There
little
is
atmosphere
rhythms
or the wistful or
la
Mare's
idyllic or
humorous
fancies (Sam,
Tailor,
in various
the
skill in
At
the lan-
creating
the Keyhole,
kinds of narra-
The
Quartette, Where), or
the small pathetic pieces [The Silver Penny, All But Blind, Fare Well);
these are plain for
handle
his
a dependence
on
all
themes in
a
to see.
But
his habit of
a particular
world
dying
And
in
moving about
his
fires,
on
stairs,
shrill cries
of birds,
woods, musicians -
we do
sailors'
at
Our concern
those
poems
in
139
PART THREE
many poems,
but
real,
more than
'Come
!'
snails
a 'pretty fancy'
said
Old
Shellover.
fast asleep;
In the rising
The Witch
tells
creatures.
as she slept
under
terms - jerked
final effect
it
of 'romantic' economy:
Names may be
writ; and
mounds
rise;
But empty
Of all
is
that churchyard
save stones.
and Nightjar,
Haunt and
Where
Sometimes,
a
Mole
as in John
Mouldy, atmosphere
minimum of supernatural
story.
Mould
is
in a cellar has
sinister:
140
moved
the
ran
rats
in,
is
on
Brake the flame of the
In context the self-conscious poeticality
the
gloom
is
laid
on
la
Mare
'magic'
the porch
stars.
is
effective
poem
and the ghost of the loved one has become almost an occasion for
The reality of sharp perend been evaded. In The Song oj the Mad
purposive and seems a quite natural move-
ment of feeling
is
in the totality
Who
said,
of the poem:
'Peacock Pie'?
Who
said,
to the sparrow:
Who
said,
Where
Bathed in
That's
'Where
rests she
sleeps she
now
eve's loveliness'?
what
said.
141
now?
her head,
PART THREE
'Ay, mum's the word'?
Who
said,
Sexton to willow:
said, 'Green dusk for dreams,
Who
Moss
for a pillow'?
Who said,
'All
Hath she
Life's
prince
Time's delight
narrow bed,
what
That's
The mad
for
said.
is
as
well
as
comment on life
which contains his feeling. The echoes of Hamlet, and the suggestions
of colour and feasting, harvest and the passage of the seasons, death,
both intensify the poignancy of lost love (stressing its universality
too) and serve with their width of reference as a check to disproportionate indulgence in grief. If we feel some uneasiness at the underlining that occurs in the last but one line of the poem, it will be at
least lessened if we think of the incantation of the Weird Sisters in
seemingly inconsequential images he makes a
de
la
oj the
Mad
Prince
is
poem
Mare wrote.
melodrama
stale; flat
like 'heart's
in his
as (say) a prisoner in
yearning for
and peace;
rest
set
cliches
and
poeticalities
when women
is
measure of de
la
Mare's
gifts that
when
all
an alarming
list. It is
of his total achievement, there remain poems of his fine enough and
numerous enough to ensure him a permanent place among twentiethcentury poets.
Thomas Hardy
we commonly
designate as 'courage to
142
it,
live'.
and in
His
his rare
it is
of change and of bereavement was exceptionally acute; furthermore he was dogged by a view of life which could afford him no
illusory comforts. And the power of these agencies in his life was the
stronger because his interest in humanity and in phenomena was great
sense
and
He was a humane,
lasting.
sensitive
man who
who
usually understood;
Out of his
life
and
beliefs
who
and the
feelings
first-rate
found
with which
Perhaps
his
one escape
he held to
his
while
to be
is
Mother
with sentience;
in the pertinacity
mankind endowed
him often into heavy
presiding over a
unquestionably sincere,
is
deeply:
AN ENQUIRY
A
Circumdederunt
'We
down
to
But
It
it is
- Psalm
xvm
betrayed -
here, so
And
Or he was
Phantasy
dolores mortis.
you meant,
narrowly pinched and pent)
crowning Death the King of the Firmament
The query I admit to be
One of unwonted size,
I said
(Dwelling
By
me
not in idle-wise.'
if the
phrase
is
tion separating
hears about
it:
143
PART THREE
T thought
But
be there
she's to
Let
cynicism that
Ere nescience
How
long,
and drown
shall
be reaffirmed
how
long?
me
a return of
Yet the
bent-
of Hardy's mind
is
ultimately conditioned
pathy for human and animal suffering and usually even the
in their context,
have saving
sincerities.
for
There
instance)
are,
The
case that
is
sym-
banalities,
many
we may
moreover,
which, though
by
show
a steady
impressive.
Apology to
on the
is
is
is,
in truth, only
the
first
step to-
wards the soul's betterment, and the body's also.' He claimed that his
poems were 'a series of fugitive impressions', and not the expression
of anything like a systematized view of life. This is certainly true of a
limited
the claim.
a view of life which seems to
poems provide an abundance
of people and incident and perceptions; they are the work of a man
who is also a novelist. Eye and ear are delicate and vigilant: he notes
'the smooth sea-line with a metal shine', and May's 'glad green
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk'. In Old Furniture, where
leaves
. . .
'relics
With
In the
wont
Moments of everyday
of a
life
moth on
are seen
lift
and linger
summer
night.
in-
dividual intimacy:
Icicles tag the church-aisle leads,
is
'positives' in
Hardy's poetry.
its
He
value simply as
life,
life, is
rendered
one of the
as
he
does in some of the novels, any big or sustained account of the rural
civilization
press itself
He
on
us as a
it is
given in such a
profound element
way
trees,
as to
im-
ings,
maypoles, and
flings';
He
(see the
in Friend* Beyond,
Hardy's poetry
it is
important to him,
them
is
PART THREE
observation and kindness to living things, at the same time envisaging
with detachment
his 'bell
of quittance' the
;
poem
is
full
of particular
to Ancients,
tone and
movement
more
are
An
make
home; disappointed by
moon
silence
. .
.*
the tone
is
who
wastes weaker to
And
rejoin the
roomy
unemphatic, and the feeling comes from the quiet manner of con-
in Five Students,
her.
The
feeling,
it
should be
said, is
comparatively unsubtle, as
it is
in Beeny Cliff,
What
justifies
the use of
previous paragraph
is
the extraordinary
in his best
which has not involved any evasion of the felt multiplicity and force
of life. There is none of the simplifying division into ideal and actual
which Hardy was prone to fall into, no over-spiritualization of
women. The actual in these poems is imbued by the fineness of
Hardy's spirit with a profound significance. Most, though not all,
concern a man-woman relationship. All are an outcome of intensely
pondered experience. There is simultaneously a vivid evocation of
tke past and a vivid rendering of the feeling of the present moment.
The grey bleakness of loss is conveyed as strongly in Neutral Tones,
written in his twenties, as in The Voice, written in his seventies,
though the earlier poem has a note of bitterness not present in the
later one. Both poems make wonderful use of the natural scene:
in the first, 'the pond edged with greyish leaves', and in the
second
the breeze, in
its listlessness,
of feeling.
146
mead
to
me
here
now
scene
of twelve short
in the space
gives the
lines,
dance and the woman, and realization of their failure to live that past
moment
to the full.
The
bareness of
Where
in
emblazoned
Blessings
to produce a rich
economy. In
that
day
contrast,
tion
given except
is
is
sugges-
of the clock striking the hour which should have brought her,
poem rests upon the steady painful recognition of the
and the
muning with
is
at the
edge of the
woman
be
sea, at night,
com-
years before.
in
'ghost'
is
as
who
carry
awkward
poem 2
R. Leavis has
life as if
she had
shown how
the appar-
F.
on
of my affirmation,
is
the
147
PART THREE
to
remember vividly is
utterness
at the
of loss.'
is
less fine
(1 878-1917) that
away from
and
also out
move
with
quite
of the landscape that Hardy too often colours with his own
air. When we call him a poet
we have in mind both phenomena
of minute
particularity
and
fidelity
and mood. His poetic output, compared with that of Hardy and de
Mare, is small, but a high proportion of it bears his characteristic
excellences. The fact that he did not start writing poetry until he was
thirty-five accounts in part for a degree of self-awareness and selfcriticism that served him well. He knew from the start that there were
certain things he wished to avoid in his poetry, and it was because he
la
was an
original poet
editors to
whom
discouraging.
Reviewing Robert
Frost's
Thomas wrote:
from
at least
some of the
alleged,
aspects
by
148
different
from the
He was
lack 'form'.
typical
felt
advice to
'chisel'
way he wanted
Lob
characteristic
is
to be disturbingly
Edward
Garnett's
in the
to go.
own
mode of experiencing;
The presentment
is
mainly
sake, are
and presenting
for exploring
his
mood and
character and a
whole
quiet, delicate,
mood,
character,
attitude to
life,
into a
of experiencing because he
natural world.
This
poem
He can
is
in close
is
and
vitalizing
entitled
Tale:
Of the
into the
wood.
In flowerless hours
Never
With
will the
bank
fail
everlasting flowers
On fragments
of blue
tale
of man's
life,
149
PART THREE
wish from the juxtaposition in the poem of the known and bright
with the strange and dark. But what is essentially communicated is a
way of
still
'wood'
introduction
experience he
regions of
is
is
a recurring
symbol
in
is
With
describing.
human
its
of death
it is
connected
in
natural manner.
In
home
at
fair
and
market, carrying with him the image of what he has seen and heard:
scanned
Like a ghost new-arrived.
Were
The
The
is
like
feeling of a dark
unknown immensity
is
it
not all-conquering: against the blackness and the words of the tune
(suggesting an ever farther recession) there are the spark, the strength
of stamping, the new moon. Even in the most stark among the poems,
Rain for instance Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On
this
Remembering
- and
in the
render, there
poems, such
is
again that
as Lights
no defeat and no
shall die
me
.
flaccidity.
150
sensitiveness
of move-
exactness of statement
show
alert control.
In
it is
a subtle intermingling
veying
less
a feeling
is
of diverse sense-
of energetic
life
child paddling
and
silent
evitable whole.
What
is
by
a remarkably
sensitive account
of the day
filling earth
now
near
light,
the
warmth:
sleet, hail,
On
gates,
Grew
moon
And
And
after.
Not
till
its stars
aware of
silence
end
but no
PART THREE
To
appreciate this in
necessary to see
comes into
all its
with the
it
rich significance,
first
half
it
would of course be
of the
way
the silence
of the
poem is
words about
Frost
- 'through
His language
it is
true,
words
disillusion
is
quite free
common in
- sweet,
from
stale poeticalities. It
frequently has,
happy -
but they are never simply exploited for their stock emotional content; they are used as
other items.
an
essential item,
He makes good
homely
vivid-
of phrases which were deemed unpoetical by many of his contemporary readers: his thrushes pack into an hour their 'unwilling
ness,
hoard of song'.
It is
(like his
rhythms)
humour:
Women
he
Bob,
And
with such a light touch in Old Jack (to use one of Lob's several folknames), is an ingredient of his own character:
. .
Old Man, The Glory, The Other, are among the finest of many
poems that present a self-questioning which does not preclude a
wealth of outgoing feeling, and a reaching for fulfilment which we
feel cannot for him be dependent upon any possible creed or any
group-support. The nature of the statement and the self-searching
152
we
different
quite
The glory of the beauty of the morning The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts
Or must
me on
. .
By
happiness?
And
shall
Or
let all
shall
go,
perhaps
know
How
Is
Time?
he cared
new
attitudes
on many of the
things
for.
now
relevant
Mr
Eliot's
Thomas's are in some important aspects still with us and must continue to be so. Furthermore the partial supersession of the rural civilization which he himself saw declining, does not affect his status as a
poet, for fundamentally he deals with
his
own
widened
enabled
explored
stresses.
If
his range,
him
NOTES
1.
2.
In Scrutiny, Vol.
XLX, No.
2.
1959).
WORLD WAR
D.J. ENRIGHT
Johore Professor of English, University oj Malaya in Singapore
Though
Owen
Wilfred
of the
First
World War
experience of the
veyed
what
we call
may
It
this
not be con-
Owen's
he was
Ezra
in
no sense
Pound
a conscious
S. Eliot
or
had read
War, a great
poet and an honest man, to find
crisis,
quite possibly he
way of speaking.
The compulsion behind
another
subject-matter. This
is
War
poetry, that
is
to say,
whose
this
is
unashamedly old-fashioned,
was one of
style,
in the
successful
War
in the best
when
more
was
in
the subject-matter.
War
accompanied by
by now variously
form of an anthology
writers are
minimum of commentary.
We begin
with a brief
though hackneyed,
serves as
twentieth-century
abandonment by
tic'
is
still
useful.
poetry
and
modern
poetry:
the
154
But the
War
instigate
What
it.
Safe shall be
Secretly
it
did not
armed
my
against
going,
all
Safe
though
all
And
if these
poor iimbs
death's endeavour;
where men
die, safest
of
fall;
all
(Brooke: Safety)
and
wire patrol
We
Not
sniped?
No.
(Later they
ball.)
(Owen: S.I.W)
implies
a poet
is
who, whatever
follow the
new
on
and
their effects
to perceive
directives of experience.
Sonnet
I,
Peace,
is
Eke a jolly good swim. A grand change, in fact, from 'all the little
emptiness of love' (whose love?) and from 'half-men, and their dirty
songs' (who are they? Was one obliged to listen to their songs?). The
only thing that can suffer in war is the body. (Enough, one might
think - and later writers showed how wrong Brooke was, at that.)
Sonnet II, Safety, testifies in a cloud of witness to the safeness of
war. War may even lead to death, which is the safest of all shelters
against the dangers of life. (These dangers are not specified: they may
be the 'dirty songs' of the preceding poem.)
Sonnet III, The Dead, is a conventional trumpet-piece, free from the
utter irrationality of the first two sonnets, though later poets were not
so sure about the grand abstractions of the sestet 'Honour has come
:
anti-life feeling
of
PART THREE
I
and
II;
affectedly
life
The
sestet
describes water
which has frosted over, and seems to have nothing to do with the
octave.
ment
peace of patriotism'),
celebrated
summed up
copy before
quote in
me
full, as it is
still
in a student's
as 'frank
certainly Brooke's
more widely
com-
and unashamed
most
Strange Meeting.
If I
should
That
That
is
die,
there's
There
shall
be
And
In
its
it
suggests that a
little
is
hardly
more con-
erations
found
in the 'In
In short, Brooke's
156
pleases,
it flatters, it
charms,
is
it
finely trained
soothes:
it is
a living
lie.'
...
He made
When you
see millions
Nor
honour.
It is
easy to be dead.
where the
conflict
more
Annals
against
was already
this
of Innocence
hate.
point
is
And
Sir
ways we
stand,
Herbert Read's
(b.
1893) remark in
and Experience:
to the imagination.
little later it
was to
imagination was blown to pieces. There are the few poems of Arthur
to
show how
imagination was
that
exploded:
Of corrupt
fragments
(Night Patrol,
Owen comments,
157
March
\
1916)
everything un-
PART THREE
all day, all night, the most execrable
on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious/ Finally,
there is Robert Graves (b. 1895), in Goodbye to All That, reporting a
conversation with Siegfried Sassoon in November 191 5:
bodies
sit
sights
...
he showed
me some
of
his
own
poems.
One of them
began:
'Return to greet me, colours that were
-
Nor
in the
woeful crimson of
men
my joy,
.'
slain
I
told him, in
my
his style.
In considering the real poetry of the War, or the poetry of the real
War, we may most conveniently begin with Siegfried Sassoon (b.
1886), the one major war poet (one would not include Robert Graves
or Edmund Blunden, b. 1896, in the category of war poets) to survive
the War.
The great compulsion here, as to a lesser extent in Owen's work,
was to communicate reality, to convey the truth of modern warfare
to those not directly engaged in it. For this was the first modern war,
in respect of destructive power; at the same time it was (for the British
people at least) the last of the old wars in which the civilian population
were at a safe distance from the destruction. As Professor de S. Pinto
reminds
us,
whereby a
by 1916
the Nation at
and
all
the
more
so in
lies
of the
politicians,
of the profiteers. The common soldier could not speak for himself,
and the casualty lists apparently did not speak plainly enough. Thus
the writers in the trenches
felt it a
poems or
The mood
War
is
of
And, fighting
(Absolution)
158
documentary manner:
a sober
And
in turn this
aside
by
last
said
to the line.
And
But he did
for
them both by
his plan
of attack.
(The General)
Counterattack
first-class
is
angry
only with the obvious meanings of the words used, never suggesting
more than
is
I
knew
Who
a simple soldier
grinned
at life in
is
said:
boy
empty joy,
And
In winter trenches,
lice
He
No
You
Who
when
soldier lads
march by,
Not
poetry, perhaps?
phrase from
But did
that matter?
The poetry -
to adapt a
PART THREE
more powerful, or more permanently powerful, had the mode ofsatire
been more controlled, more calculated, and had Sassoon drawn these
victims less sketchily, we must yet admit that in the best of his poems
it is the spontaneity, the lack of calculation, which impresses us. They
were
Perhaps
it is
when remembering
so forcefully
War
Who
One
it.
fate,
its
dim defenders by
with a
pile
is
early thirties
lies,
this
pomp
of peace-complacent stone,
endured that sullen swamp
a preflgurement
The Road
to
. .
radical destruction.
The^opening
poem
more
of Dark-
Lord, what
and praying, 'Make them forget,
Memorial means ...' The best is probably An Unveiling:
respectful',
and
this
The
They
could,
who
(Even
We honour here'
Who,
"Are
Its
as a living
now
forever
London"
.'
. .
effectiveness
piece
in
Dead;
said,
160
Now,
power
world to see
Be proven within
- is no more than
us for the
relief to
1940:
But you,
Knowing
In
all
your
sacrifice,
if you can go
no reward, no certain use
then honour is reprieved.
is
war poet
Owen
for those
is
who
are fascinated
war poet
the
for those
by
who
excellent
life
affixed to
my
hands, for reveries;/And one deep pillow for thy brow's fatigues')
little way beyond his enlistment in
wrote from the Somme, 'I can't tell you any
more
Facts. I
'Those
"Somme Pictures"
the trenches
on exhibition in Kensington
They must agitate. But they
. . .
needn't hope.
And
in
later:
refers thus to
comforters?
Did he hear
his 'neurasthenia',
Owen met
Sassoon,
and the two became close friends. Sassoon's example confirmed Owen
in his resolve to speak out against the War, in harsh, clear, and unC.A.-6
l6l
PART THREE
pleasant words, unsoftened
He
by any
These two
extracts
One
come from
poem
called Disabled:
down
his leg,
was
He
after football,
when
Some
cheered
Only
a solemn
He wonders why
. .
man who
It
may be
that this
it
goes
this
is
far
poem found
its
as
much
as the best
poems of Sassoon,
it is
The success of Sassoon's antiwar verse depends to a great extent upon the reader's personal attitude: you will only agree with what is said if you are already tending
towards the same opinion. The power of Owen's poetry is greater.
poetry of a different and higher order.
It
life,
'density',
a presence,
which
is
only hinted
interesting poetry
is
composed
of
it
'Jack'.
'he'
of Dis-
convenient
Sassoon's
most
the nail
it is
and
their co-
(It is
Brooke or
Julian
his
and the
poems
results
of surgical operations.)
no
by
ties,
The
though their bodies have been destroyed - these are in the end a more
powerful indictment of war than Sassoon's fluent indignation. And
they do not 'date'.
Anthem for Doomed Youth is one of his best-known poems:
What
who
die as cattle?
The
pallor of girls'
in
its
intention
But the
rifles'
rapid
at
Home. The
'cannon-fodder'
cliche
hovers
rattle'
is
a cliche.
looked
The word
at releases
whether
'patter', similarly,
when
an unexpected complexity of
.'
. .
is,
163
PART THREE
The
though
when we
shrill,
what
noticing
what
brought
it off.)
It is
a risk
official
one. Then,
prevails
is
Owen
took in
by
side a
may
prevent us from
how
narrowly he
of which were
clearly similar:
last
attack
face to face/
First
'There ain't
Ye
get
more nor
knocked out;
Scuppered; or
One of us
else
wounded - bad
feeling mushy.'
or cushy;
Now me,
reckoned
a blighty),
through the heart, a sitting duck. We feel less indignant than the poem
wants us to feel. The Chances - one of the very few successful English
'proletarian'
poems, incidentally -
is
poem which
will
anger: that
is
full
onslaught of the
last
short sentence.
As
for
in the reader.
it is
for suffering
. .
Move him
Gently
Think
Woke,
its
how
it
Are limbs,
To
it
seeds,
star.
Full-nerved -
Was
wakes the
still
warm -
too hard to
grew
tall?
at all?
165
toil
stir?
PART THREE
And
more
By
To
choice they
made
themselves
Before the
last sea
whom no
moans
in
cannon
of
Insensibility,
stuns*
immune
man
stars;
these shores;
"Whatever shares
The
-
eternal reciprocity
of tears
prove that
Owen is
a poet, not a
war
it
(in view of
chime of pure rhyme. Simultaneously, and notably in Strange Meeting and Exposure, it contributes a
telling music of its own, ominous in its intonations:
we
Watching,
hear the
mad
gusts tugging
Northward,
In
August 191 8,
feeling that
life
among
its
on the wire,
brambles.
gunnery rumbles
...
he returned to France,
now
borough Sands'. There was a more positive reason for his readiness to
go back to the trenches: 'there', he wrote, 'I shall be better able to cry
my outcry'. It was this compulsion to speak so as to be understood
which guarded him against his Keatsian taste for rich sensuous language. In a letter to Sassoon, he declared 'I don't want to write anything to which a soldier would say No Compris !'
When Owen was killed on 4 November, among his papers was
found a draft preface to a future volume of poems. It is the best com:
is
left:
is
not yet
fit
to speak of them.
is
in the pity.
166
They may be
warn. That
In the table
of
is
why
no
sense consola-
must be
do today
truthful
is
. .
last
tunnelled dug-outs', as
dream
at all
It
seemed
Down
He
Blunden remarks,
we think of it as a
if indeed
that out
of battle
some profound
escaped
.'
dull tunnel
. .
now
And
its
lived.
The
untold,
. .
would
'all
is
out of place
we
in the
men have
'lifting distressful
bled where
I
I
poem
as if to bless', 'fore-
ends:
am
Yesterday through
I
hands
no wounds
parried; but
Let us sleep
me
as
my hands were
now
. .
167
killed.
PART THREE
Isaac
Rosenberg
work
undigested,
is
loss
incurred in the
his
(i 890-191 8)
it is still
energy and colour. For example, the image of the 'dead heart' in
Midsummer
Frost
dances;
would
fish
When
night
'Scriptural'
...
and
lost in light.
'sculptural'
by which Sassoon
of language. 4 True, the lines
at
figures.
written
at
perience,
is
to
All
Robert Graves's
That,
'autobiography'
War
ex-
crammed with
With
at
we
by Herbert Read,
168
of the retreat of
the Fifth
Army from
is
a consciously 'literary'
work:
tapestried
and 'modernistic'
at the
immediacy.
If less urgently than the poets, the prose writers too
were under
new human
NOTES
have been much indebted to Edmund Blunden's recent pamphlet. War
Poets 1914-igi 8 ('Writers and their Work' Series, London, 1958) and to the
short but substantia] chapter on 'Trench Poets' in V. de S. Pinto's Crisis in
English Poetry 1880-1940 (London, 1951)1. Compare this comment and the following comments on the need for a
change in poetic style with Ezra Pound's remark: 'the poetry which I expect
will, I think, move against
to see written during the next decade or so
"nearer the bone"
poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be
its force will lie in its truth' {Poetry Review, February 1912).
2. Complete edition, edited by Edmund Blunden and first published in
193 1. Poems, edited by Siegfried Sassoon and published in 1920, consisted of a
I
selection.
3. 'Modernist Poetry and Civilization', A Survey oj Modernist Poetry (with
Laura Riding, 1927). This essay is reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London,
by G. Bottomley
B.
YEATS
GRAHAM MARTIN
Lecturer in English Literature, Bedford College, University of London
There seem
more
importantly,
event
is
it
details the
way
in
began to re-formulate
is
nineteenth-century
not simple.
his poetic
When
idiom in a way
pedigree.
about 1903 he
that was soon to
in
170
YEATS
B.
intensity.
many of his
me
to
to be sufficiently unlike
some
Among
The complex,
self-
difficult
it is
stress.
lesser
any other
not to
feel that
they
by, for example, Cleanfh Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn. But
'Those
men
- that
is
most wise
quite
Own
commonly
nothing but
Yeats's centre
and, in the twentieth century, not the least either of his challenges
it,*
And
it.
There was certainly not much in it for Yeats - 'never .more than two
hundred a year . .' he noted of his early career, 'and I am not by nature
economical' 4 - and without Lady Gregory, without the Irish move. .
ment
as a
whole,
it is
unlikely that he
which
precarious independence:
age demanded'. As
down of
1865, he
Mr
much
is
as Eliot,
to have
had very
'New from
his
different
Born
in
171
PART THREE
William Morris, I dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come
to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris aridRuskin hated
We were to forge in Ireland a new sword on our old traditional anvil
for the great battle that must in the end re-establish the old, confident,
joyous world.' 6 With memories like these, it is not surprising that the
tone of Yeats's dealings with the 'filthy modern tide' has little in
common with the mordant commentaries of Eliot and Pound. And
in all of Yeats's mature poems, it is tone - in an exact sense - that one
immediately notices.
. .
What
shall I
heart,
do with
this absurdity
As
to a dog's tail?
A tree there
Is
is
that
from
its
topmost bough
Abounding
foliage moistened
grief.
('Vacillation', 1932)
me
Come,
fix
1 thirst
upon
is
was sung,
lie
No
172
B.
YEATS
range of feeling.
It
than that humanistic figure, 'the normal active man', 8 that the poet
set
theme,
it is still
The
The
Yeats's
command
that
one principally
notices.
turn
away and
on the
stair
times
O
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
!
It
The
Yeats
is
elaborated only at
Even though,
as
he
mind
wings' point towards nightmare, but the effect - hawks are not
made
applies to hussies,
173
PART THREE
insight:
image. 10
Yeats wrote 'Meditations In Time of Civil War' during the summer
of 1922 - the war broke out in June - and, significant enough in his
country's history, the event had a particular meaning for the poet.
He had already (certainly by 1922, but the following passage was
come
dream
of
round
its
men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring
He had, that is, given up hope that Ireland would
century'. 11
to,
community of some
the old
dream
that Ireland
is
art
a sympathetic coterie,
stricted
an
is
is
little
plays
for
Dancers
knew
that I
fifty
no exception
way. The
come
fact
true
expected.
Thus, the
poem
is
was
this
because the
'Irish'
dream was
moving
function as a poet begins to take shape in the context of Irish nationalism, out of his deliberate and many-sided effort to provide the
finer
class
move-
from
whom
174
He
their journalists
suffered
and
movement,
B.
YEATS
- have
one energy of their
which is the intellectual equivalent to a cerHence the shrillness of their voices. They
creative power as the eunuchs contemplate Don
through Hell on the white horse/ 13 The function of
a deprivation
contemplate
Juan
the
as
all
he passes
Abbey was
15
'.
. .
in the
[as]
self-moving,
self-
and
literary nationalism as
powerful
as the old
done, they could bid the people love and not hate.' 16
The journalists,
it
he associated them.)
By 1922, all this deep personal and
artistic significance
was
a matter
which destroyed
good
part
the nightmare
Can
To
crawl in her
The
own
murdered
at
her door,
rule,
Yeats
felt
Rising,
is
175
at the
1921)
PART THREE
We, who
The
despair.
is an advance on this. The political catastrophe appears
an unexplainable revelation of man's state, but as the inevitable
'Meditations'
not
as
of 'life's
There are seven
things' but
own
self-delight'.
sections to the
poem.
In the
first,
'Ancestral
. .
now
it
seems
The very
gies,
176
is
likely to
command. Here,
then,
is
B.
YEATS
most extended meditation on the contemporary theme, written withfew months of the appearance of Eliot's poem in December
1922. One major difference is clear at once. In both poems the
identity of the observer is comparable: both are poets, both witnesses
of threatened cultural traditions; but in Eliot's poem, the observer is
not distinct from what he observes - we see a state of mind as much
in a
as a social condition
exists
on
its
each poem's
own
- whereas
in Yeats's
detail,
and
leads to others:
DA
Dayadhvam I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key each in his prison
Thinking of the key each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus. 19
:
is turned
our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
On
The
the
common
common
metaphor,
But it is the
is
common
- is wholly given
listless
- and
over to defining
self-involvement
of this condition. Eliot's T is incapable of experience, because incapable of the self-definition which
precedes it; and his 'we' is an aggregate of such lost souls. Yeats's lines
follow a different direction: the fear and menace are there (who
which
are
effect
them
A man
is
become more
is
'uncertainty'
killed or a
clear fact
[is]
the condition
house burned'
- it
to be discerned',
has
still,
exact:
177
'The
The
PART THREE
Nest By My Window'
Stare's
Of loosening
The mother
My wall
Come
is
masonry and
there
and
flies.
loosening; honey-bees,
build in the
stare.
is turned
our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
On
Come
down
the road
build in the
stare.
The
prison
is
two meanings
as
well as a
two
distinct
lines ;
in',
rather
war
to 'That dead
involves
him
'fantasies'
young
It
178
The
of the
poet's
'We'
and
Eliot lines),
YEATS
B.
this gives
Come
his sickness,,
Comparably,
it.
'Dayadhvam'
Eliot's
is
part
of the diagnosis,
an Olympian comment.
Now
own
'life's
as witness,
poems
in 'Medita-
are, in
later
. . .
self-creating energies
Surely
Amid
of life
among
a rich
. . .
Life overflows
And
itself.
rains
hills,
down
life
. .
Had he
that
is
the
superannuation of the old social forms which throws the poet upon
his
own
'My
resources
Descendants', and
An
A farmhouse
An
acre
Where
that
is
sheltered
of stony ground,
is
is
italics]
no change appears No
work of art'.
of new
sensitive to this.
Nest'
'if
[My
life.
179
Stare's
PART THREE
But there is another change which the poet cannot turn to account:
the portentous vision of poem vn / see Phantoms of Hatred and
of the Heart's Fulness and of the Coming Emptiness. Faced with
'Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency', with a future
'indifferent'
uninvolved in
from
delight'
And
I,
'life's
own
self-
coming Emptiness'.
'the
that count
grubs and
flies'
if
we
is
not simple.
clear statement
situation.
Yeats
of what
is
The
central appeal
'poet'
and what
evoking in terms of
is
away
underwritten by the
'culture'
mean
in this
20
less subtly than Eliot, but
traditional protest,
dom from
hesitation
candid
'
as the
is
wholly
historical
event.
is
is,
is
more
'positive'
after all, in
being
180
B.
YEATS
it
and
took the severe pressure of the whole
experience to arrive at the control and understanding ofthe later poem.
There
is,
interplay
own
'events' - inti-
emerge in what people call Yeats's myth - is central to his development as a poet. You cannot understand this process simply in terms of
a literary tradition, working itself out; simply in terms of maturing
'personal' experience.
You
that
This book or
Where my
friends' portraits
The
from a genuinely
is
important whatever
from
Eliot,
it,
as
- and
if the
public, a gen-
final assessment
women'
as
group for
Auden
whom
called
Ireland
it).
22
It
was the
common
first
instance, a
be
began,
Imagining a
man
. .
181
PART THREE
But scorn is a relationship, and the tension between the flawed reality
and the ideal Unity of Culture was enough for Yeats to work on.
In that relation, Yeats could write 'as a man speaking to men' - in,
at
any
rate, a richer,
other poet of
thecentury.
Yeats's identification
particular,
plexity.
There
...
is,
Things
fall
Second Coming'
(1920).
of passionate intensity.
full
The
now I know
last,
As often with Yeats's prophetic or visionary poems (where the reci'a man speaking to men' is qualified by the
poet's special 'disposition to be affected more than other men by absent
things as ij they were present', [his] ability of conjuring up in himself
passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced
by real events') 23 these lines suggest something unsettled in the poet's
final attitude. Louis MacNeice ascribed this ambiguity to the fact that
'Yeats had a budding fascist inside himself' 24 and therefore heralded
'the rise of this tide ... with a certain relish'. But this is to confuse
procal relationship of
Yeats-and-his-reader with
tensity
Yeats-and-his-subject.
The poem's
Second Coming
...
a rocking cradle
...
in-
like 'the
is,
in order to express 'his vision of absent things' lays hold of the only
available public language,
and adapts
182
it
in a
number of bold
para-
The magus
foresees,
final lines
is
urges,
is
mind,
is
is
it is
drowned'
more
a discreeter
is
at
and -
crucial in a polemical
whether the
sanctities
famous
example of
it;
and here,
about
YEATS
who
full
putting
B.
the poet
the difficulty.
The poet
it is
memorable
lies
but
poem
invoked in
is
- what he
'sleep
. , .
line.
one way of
vexed
is
not sure
. . .
cradle'
It is
of 'A
many
of the
a very
cal
extreme form
is
equipment
The evidence
entirely
and project
much
restricted histori-
arts,
and while
of 'A Vision'
may
this
is
almost
help to organize
when
it is
not
('gyre')
is
help
itself
it
ambiguous,
it
simply
ratifies
is
Uncertain of
teners.
183
PART THREE
phecy is,
after
all,
My Daugh-
ter' (1919).
is
stating his
final attitude
Now shall
Compelling
make my
In a learned school
and
at 'learned',
What
is
we
soul,
to study
it
two
'learnings'?
life
were not
Dream and
we
star, all,
rise,
so create
Transiunar paradise.
I
have prepared
With
And
my peace
of Greece,
Poet's imaginings
And memories
of love
. .
When Yeats begins to sound like 'the annual scourge of the Georgian
anthology' (T.
S. Eliot), it
seems
fair
to protest.
What
is
the basis of
. . .
. . .
left,
attitude
is
it
(as distinct
very different.
184
from the
B.
YEATS
In a learned school
wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Till the
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come The
Of every
brilliant
eye
Seem but
When
Or
Among
in the breath
sustained
The
of the poet's
friends,
the
last
stanza of Keats's
if it
is
profound, then
of
'ideas'
refusal-to-die.
paradise'.
this instinct
is
instinctual
confronted with
not
this 'philosophy',
display
tliinking about
human
form
group of experiences:
185
PART THREE
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
...
The
own
finished
man among
his
clumsiness;
enemies
Assume the
and we get
... distress
pain
. . .
through the
it
clumsiness
. . .
detail
of experience,
ignominy
terms of
of experience does not question, it
illustrates the ideas (as the poems on the Troubles show), which have,
so to speak, been decided upon outside the poem. Adopt, then, another
ing', idea
and
the other.
But
we
Whatever
is
It is
is
Byzantium', 1927)
my
idea -
ideas
arrives at his
tions
most varied
of 'thought'
in simplification
insights.
And
it is
and ambiguity.
would
it
feel
186
He
and
...
it's
B.
YEATS
plain
The
You mean
[My
they argued
poems on
italics]
love, in
the relationship,
Maybe
Though
When
these
two
things,
oil
To
Did
wing
before her mind
('On
. . .
sort
of beauty that
Prosper but
Yet knows
little,
. . .
So
let
I have loved,
have approved,
that to be
chances chief.
hatred
is
the worst,
my Daughter',
1919)
As the various dates show, Yeats has here brought together unpublished and previously published poems which apply a common
187
PART THREE
and relationships. The insight is not exany one instance, but provides rather
the organizing centre for a number of experiences of introspection
or observation. A poem of a decade later shows how such a keyinsight to different situations
plored, nor
is it
fully realized in
itself, still
know not what the younger dreams Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
Con
Markiewicz', 1929)
Here it is not a metaphor so much as the beautifully managed cadences of the final lines (from 'Pictures') that judges 'such polities'. For
dreams of the Vague Utopia' - and 'vague' is the important word Yeats offers the precise alternative of his delicately stated feeling for
what has gone. This is the stress: the actuality of human interchange,
however, transient or imperfect, is of 'the living stream', and therefore a test for the questionable truths of 'thought'. Whether the
result
is
distracts
It is at
from, where
it
and with
this
mind, the force of saying that Yeats's poetry works from ideas
rather than through them should be clear.
A related impulse is important in the unique series of occasional
in
till
anticipation in
to) in
The
Seven Woods (1903) is clear; see for example 'Never Give All The
Heart' first published in 1905 - but his first unquestionably great
poem is 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' (191 8). One difference
this poem and, say, 'To A Shade' (191 3) has been well underlined by Professor Kermode. It is the first poem fully to incorporate
between
188
But
YEATS
B.
it is
long line of
My
style',
30
and the
humane central
style
human
experiences they
commemorate.
Make human
They
intercourse
The
glass
to the host,
my
because
glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more
The
stanza
is
it
of 'arrogant'
ments of feeling depend wholly upon the changes in pace which the
elaborate verse and
reacts
not
stiff.
The poet
is
possible.
The
directness
and the
one
occasional poems,
it
of
Qr
manhood
tried,
or childhood loved
With some
appropriate
commentary on each;
A fitter welcome;
Of that
late
all
these
is
but a thought
death took
all
189
my heart
for speech.
PART THREE
'We
had
is
The formal
memorated
device
this
is
affirming.
poems expresses, then, an importmeaning the terms on which we share in the com-
elaboration of these
:
prominent, and
much
it
off" the
ness. Feeling in
with
all
Yeats
is,
in general, not
it'.
33
ways. There
death', 'casual
word
effect
The
is
process of disengagement
is
we
know
to
comedy,' 'popular
34
rage', 'civil rancour'
usually
undertaken in several
- where one
by the
other.
190
The
(cf.
More
B.
YEATS
is
'artificial'
'Easter 1916'
Eighteenth-century houses.
I
Or
Or
nod of head
And
thought before
Of a mocking
To
please a
Around
tale
had done
or a gibe
companion
...
The lofty opening rhythms quickly give way to the loose 'casual'
movement of the later lines, and this follows the contrast of the 'vivid
faces', and the commonplace gossip which the poet retails about them.
But before
houses', forcing
its
way
is
the
by
slightly departing
its
from
point.
it,
that
is, it
own definition
it is
title,
then,
is
a first
approximation
the
191
PART THREE
me what I
is
do'.
But Ribh
is
is
Mask,
says
makes
its
own
. . .
that
What he
point:
when
There
Nor
is
no touching
here,
nor touching
whole
is
there,
joined to whole;
Where
Here
in the pitch-dark
atmosphere above
Lies in a circle
I
The
turn the
light
light,
is
metaphor for an
book'.
The
effect
is
is
by the
his 'holy
convey
life
voyeurism about
nostalgia, or spiritual
Baile,
it is difficult,
(as,
for
but
because
it
35
suous, concrete, rhythmical'
is
is
'complex', Yeats
YEATS
B.
arrives at the
strands.
miniature instance:
O
Shall
we
Rocky Voice,
in that great night rejoice?
for
have
lost
face
the theme,
Up
stricken rabbit
And
its
is
struck,
crying out,
cry distracts
my
thought.
Out of context,
for example,
it is
way
as to
sharpen that
impossible to
know how
Only
('all
we
is
not
is...');
not
away with the usual blur of feeling that accompanies the direct
commonplace question, to make it more direct without making it
any the less commonplace, and so genuinely the question of the generic
Man in whose name the poem is written. It need hardly be insisted
that this ability, in a culture that has driven the
wedge between
artist
direct centrality
me good
as the
most
lasting,
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
The Letters ofW. B. Yeats (ed. Allan Wade, 1954)* PP- 397. 460, 462.
Collected Poems (1950), p. 182. My italics.
Ezra Pound, 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', Selected Poems (1948), p- 179-
c.a.- 7
I93
PART THREE
5.
p. 167.
The
of the
publication - in
first
some
(1954)8.
9.
10. Cf.
'And
bats
with baby
wall'.
T.
S. Eliot,
12.
Fow
P-
My
italics.
486
"The
(1950), p. 124.
ibid.
p. 77.
Romantic
poets,
in art of certain
destroying'
to be threatening or even
felt
summed up
in
artist in general, is
ture
21.
24. F. L.
MacNeice The
25. Allen
Poetry of
W.
W. Wordsworth. My italics.
B. Yeats (1941), p. 132.
most
critics
is
more
generally
194
it
YEATS
B.
since.
little
Man Wade
Hone,
1954), p. 851.
1944), p. 97.
2.
'Coole Park
33.
The
the
Ure. Towards
32.
phrase
is
1',
'Preface to
p. 276.
34. Collected
p. 170.
THE
IRISH
CONTRIBUTION
GRATTAN FREYER
Half
it
among
Today
it is
Irish writers. It
is,
in this century.
Ireland,
asset
of particular
interest-
is
necessary.
It is
this
is
an
when
no introduc-
community
feel-
ing arose from the unity of the Irish people in their historic struggle
against British occupation. Yet this is not entirely true, since even the
margin between the British 'ascendancy' - the descendants of those
who were given land when the native Irish were dispossessed - and
the local people was never a sharp one. In Yeats's early novel John
world in a day's walk, for every man one meets is a class.' The capacity of the Irish to absorb their invaders and make them 'more Irish
than themselves'
is
proverbial.
It is
the
is
196
fitted.
of
social
is
concerned. There
Shaw
Mars. Even
is
an almost complete
as alien in Ireland as
as
men from
'uncom-
novel
will
Waugh
or E.
M.
It
lies
in the absence
of such
a social
framework.
Ireland possessed,
became
Christian in the fifth century, and the golden age of Gaelic culture
lasted
to
educated.
What
survived were a
language began
at the
dependent
came
state
when
It
is
common knowledge
Irish
among
the
Irish.
in the
met
among Welshmen
than
today that
an in-
in English.
drew
its
peculiar quality
(b. 1897),
is
who is
first
book, The
Black Soul, appears to have been written in Irish and then translated.
197
PART THREE
fewer than four contemporary translations into English, and it deserves
mention here. This is Brian Merriman's Midnight Court, and it deals
in racy
Irish
problem even
quote
at
The
rhythm and manner which is directly brought over from the original
the lady
is
is
With waves
And
that's
as
not a
half,
tide,
maximum
pleasure.
Two
Both
Though
Ireland's population
is
less
than
art
form
likely to appear
198
The
Day
among
in the
is
ordinary people
is
given in
that in Yeats's
in
was seeking an
date
from
this time.
new
London,
new medium
landlords
of self-expression.
from
little
money,
AE
Hyde (1862-1946),
199
PART THREE
as president.
English
Two
drama
years later -
enthusiast,
first,
itself,
From
though
it
led to
its first
Abbey
into
(1 872-1909), as
manager.
to be a lasting innovation
which
cleared the
way
Dublin over the subject-matter of the new plays showed a straightforward cleavage between an enlightened band of artists and patriots
and a priest-led mob. This was in fact far from the case. William Fay
in
wrote
it
in his
memoirs
Was
it 'a
slander
as
anyone
chief,
else
pacifist
200
of the
as
an attack on
who was
favour of Synge.
Many
times
Glen,
womanhood.
it
looked
as
though the
theatre
would
Yet somehow it weathered the storm. A small army of policeto be on hand to allow The Playboy to finish its first week
men had
and even then no audience was enabled to hear the play through.
on
a generation later
The
by the Abbey dramatists reflected the contheatre's founders, which have already been
mentioned. Yeats wrote two expressly patriotic plays: the Countess
Cathleen, and Kathleen ni Houlihan, an allegory in which the spirit of
Ireland is personified by an old woman who rouses her people to the
national struggle. This was a moving play to an Irish audience, but fell
plays written
trasting ideals
flat
elsewhere.
with
Irish
of the
The remainder
They are
Lady Gregory, who had
a line
West of
peasant comedies.
see.
and wrote
Ireland dialect,
One
number of
slight
its
drama.
Many
Colum); the
modern
frustrated ambitions
as
man-
hunger for
of provincial
life
stage Irish
comedy
has
emerged
in
last,
But there are two Abbey dramatists whose work forms part
of the wider theatre - Synge and O'Casey.
More than any other writer, J. M. Synge may be said to have been
the creation of the Abbey Theatre. Yeats describes in one of his
audiences.
201
PART THREE
autobiographies
how
he met Synge
private
own
return to his
country, learn
Synge followed
theatre.
supplementing a small
in Paris,
lessons
Irish,
is
doubtful if even
The
plays of
Synge
rise
They
becomes
He
is
hero - until
acclaimed
his
as a
'murdered
lies
in the
which
is
cramped by
industrial
pitchpike
We
it
was not
would
on the
flags of hell.
of the
possible
is
and probable
at a certain
level
civilized inhibitions
of modern
Within
living,
this
and enormously
man
but
alive.
And
sick
(Synge died
202
Moreover, a
consequence of the
First
radical
World War,
in the
who
wished for a compromise within the British empire, and those who,
like de Valera, wished for an independent republic. Each of O'Casey's
is
on
self-sacrifice
without dramatic
lives that
His
embodying courage
sordid and
motif is
pity,
struggle
is
accepted,
it is felt
who show
its
soldiers,
who
without sentiment
and without conscious idealism to aid the suffering and afflicted, and
to protect their
fight
own.
of these
After the
last
mon
drowned in a sardonic and indiscriminate contempt for the upper classes, which soon becomes monotonous. It is
relieved only occasionally by the old vitality of language. There is
a basic failure of any organizing intelligence.
people, but
it is
new
theatrical
Drama
from the
by
Pirandello,
Eugene
PART THREE
and Michael MacLiammoir. Denis Johnston (b. 1901) was at one
time producer for this theatre, and though the subject-matter of his
plays is still Irish, his treatment reflects the wider horizons of this
second company. The
welcomed
in
Moon
London and
in the
New
York,
Chehov-Ibsen
tradition.
with the
deals
It
still
presented with
origins.
He
are juxtaposed.
graduated
at
left
Ireland for
His
since.
first
academic
a slim
became
novels, Molloy,
first
trilogy
play,
En
attendant Godot,
204
was performed
of
in Paris
winter of
there,
and was
by
staged in France since the war; shortly afterwards, the English version
New
Beckett's dramatic
work
entitles
him
it is
their significance. In
is
a typical
its
its
philosophical implications
Eliot's
is
it
half-comic half-tragic
Castle.
2,
volume,
history
is
Ben Bulben.
The succeeding
less
fortunate.
The
had taken part personally in 'the troubles'. Liam O'Flaherty (b. 1897)
was shell-shocked in the European war. For English and continental
writers who experienced the First World War, it was the futility and
anonymity of mass bloodshed which horrified. In the Irish struggle,
particularly in the civil war, personal relationships
205
were
tragically
PART THREE
close: often a family was divided against
was not
so,
the existence of a
common
itself,
this
illustrates this.
There
is
later
no stimulus
velopment.
which is
It
to creative de-
and
in a different
form in Joyce.
has already been mentioned that the absence of a firm class struc-
ture in
modern Ireland has been blamed for her failure to produce any
novelist
years.
Perhaps
it is
true that
set,
even though
their action
is
which
to be a
movement. But
Irish
intellectual
As
movement,
it
had
on
earlier at
of the same
is
true
of Liam O'Flaherty.
206
He
good
material
is
diffuse
of
his stories,
in his autobiography
plays of
But
is
Patrick Kavanagh,
most
featureless
poem 'The
Clay
of the
Irish counties.
Where
the
work and
clay
is
The opening
this
lines
of his long
land
the flesh
move
Of life as it
Of Death?
is
Book
If there
is
but there
a forerunner here
is
more
a parallel
integrity of imagery,
and
a devastating integrity
207
of vision.
PART THREE
Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
that
spirit
apron on
from the
fearful to
inside.
marry
lest
is
an epic of
is
life
ally
life,
both of them
fin-
unappeased:
he
...
is
When
not so sure
now
if his
mother was
right
in 1927,
Book
and whose
first
over, of
Society's
all his
contemporaries, he
last
There
which
is
your
trade.
is
to
mood
work
NOTES
1.
Those
who
think of
Moore
of his later period will be surprised at the insight and realism of such early
works as The Unfilled Field (1903).
2. For a good discussion of the wider themes involved in Godot, particularly
the religious implications, see the Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1956.
BARNES
Dramatic
art has
Pauperum - a Bible
me
long seemed to
a kind of Biblia
who
when
process
... is
dead.
The
passage
is
well
known, but
which Shaw
(1
it
it
a description
since.
account,
by
F.
worth quoting
has seemed
at
of
his
it
at the
re-
own work
this
Royal Court
as
something
like
209
And
it is
easy to compile
PART THREE
a
of worthy
list
plays,
from
to Thunder Rock or
Strife
Sleeping
Strindberg's 'board-school'.
The
attack
on
the imagination
fashioned though
it
may sound
is
today,
it is
of
characteristic
much
first
ite,'
'scientific'.
'What we wanted
as the basis
of our
history';
flatly
examination',
'reflection, investigation,
the drama.
and
also,
we 'lack
It
you
contemporary examples
are sitting
-
belied
are
his
above
all
in
the reason
why
so
much
dead today.
Shaw claimed
classic
and part of
'is
'My
business as a
his technique
(it is
Mr
Eliot's
one of
immense
seriousness of purpose,
his contemporaries, in
one
work with
that
it still
that, say.
play,
his
much as
work. But
210
man of
we say
we can return to it,
lives for us as
con-
opinion)
as
we can
to Moliere,
le
Don
Apprenez
dans
la
enfin
M.
rire
a tout
Jourdain:
...
le
le
concubinage?
Juan)
quun gentilhomme
qui vit
mal
est
un monstre
de faire donnent
motide.
Qui
Mme Jourdain:
est
Don
Par
nature
Mme Jourdain:
a
qu'ils debutent?
est
Tour
done tout
ce
monde-la,
ce
monde-la
esi
s'il
vous plait?
un monde qui a
raison, et qui
Mendoza:
Tanner:
am
am a
I
a bandit.
gentleman.
live
I live
hands
Undershaft: Poverty,
my friend,
is
Shirley:
Me
and
my
of.
like.
I wouldn't have
your conscience, not for all your income.
Undershaft: I wouldn't have your income, not for all your
Mr
conscience,
Shirley.
All these bits depend for their impact on the weight of certain key
words - galanterie, manage, nature, monde, gentleman, poverty, riches,
conscience, and so on. If Moliere's terms have
think
it
much
greater weight
same language
as
this
is
be-
difficult, if not
211
PART THREE
we must
can be chastened
by what
move
a group.
it.
The
The
own
novelist or poet,
who
writer,
addresses
of his
age,
it.
and
Our
this
language
reflects
guage are such that it is far more difficult to produce truly creative
and original work in a medium like the drama, which depends for
its effect on immediate public consent, than it is to do so in the comparatively private media of poetry and fiction. The dialogue in
which Shaw's characters discuss the ideas about society and politics
and justice which he wanted his audience to respond to remains brilliantly clear: we have only to turn over the pages of Strife or The
Madras House to see how vastly better he was than his contemporaries. Yet many critics, from A. B. Walkley onwards, have felt that
there was something 'wrong' with Shaw's plays. They certainly wear
less well than those of his near-contemporaries, Ibsen and Chehov.
The reason lies in his curiously ambivalent attitude to art and literature.
is
it
annoys
a Puritan:
me
'My concom-
to see people
',
creates
new
men.'
but
when we remember
speech,
we
'artist',
and he
also
is
a refined
important, and he
is
is
is
knew human
by
strength
. .
.',
well, never
world
as
he knew
it'.
we must estimate what he has added to our knowledge of ourselves, and how he has
If,
we
then,
on his own
made
it
very
difficult
for us to
do
this
momentousness and
prove
win
has
it is
no more destroyed
made, yet
its
style remains.
Dar-
ful of
with the matter-of-fact
credibility gone clean out of them, but the form still splendid.
And that is why the old masters play the deuce with our mere
Later,
and so
fossils,
susceptibilities.
How
did a
man whose
were so often so
acute,
specific
come
arts? Because,
when
he was uneasily
wit and a pamphleteer he
believe,
its
efforts to
dialectic;
move our
'mere
susceptibilities'
are failures.
213
PART THREE
could hear the wind in the
One
'Except
frost,
is
when
it is
young
trees,
realistic
drama:
or deliberately argumentative,
superficial,
it fills
It
still
living.
Man
in the
above
Shaw was
says
Mr
all his
undimmed.
. . .
prompt copy of a
were
people imagined
. .
the
emoThe
described.'
same authority
that G. B. S. in
tells
us that 'dull
all'.
beginning of
Man
in his study:
He
men
. .
If we
its
economic, and
and
its
prejudices,
busts
on
214
pillars:
one, to his
left,
ofJohn
Mr
by
G.
F.
. .
furniture,
made
possible
Dickens in passages
to think that this
deduces.
Mr
Shaw
made about
play at
how
thought-
all,
this description
might
also
of Ramsden
add that
it
how
is
simply that
can't
in great
it is
not in the
And
they
characters at
We
mind to put in
drama in general.
need not, in
is
largely true
of
way of comparison,
speare or Moliere:
naturalistic
Wilde
will do.
Sailor, or Sir
Shaw
discusses stage
goes on to say:
215
PART THREE
for
It is
want of
Shakespeare, unsur-
and
character
If
and
Shaw's drama
society.
intellectually coherent,
is
grasped by a reader.
its
...
we may
also
aries
and successors
who
and
discuss society
and
Much work,
interest.
problems,
like that
Maugham,
Galsworthy,
we
find
of permanent
little
trivial.
is
as
work, some
flashes ot
They
their
invincibly dull:
Not
all
poetic
He
found
from the
actors
this
ideas.
of crowded
and managers
that imagination,
who
which
cities to live
who
upon the
to
its
poets
have learned
surface
of
life,
...
and
is
the voice of
what
is
come
modern
it
life
to an end, because
eternal in
ritual,
words
and
man, has
it
cannot
to their ancient
sovereignty.'
It
would,
216
literary
what we might
Though
call
last
who were
dissatisfied
felt
many
besides Yeats
to be the imaginative
Mostly they
failed,
Poetry anthologies, but their plays could only lead a brief obscure
theatrical existence in private
ances in the
lists
away from
'plays
on Brussels
carpets',
pounds
be
sterile,
from
a day, not as
dedicated to picturing
a stage
it is,
but
as it
is
'life
on
thirty
determined to get
most part
into romantic
banks or Tavy.
In the thirties,
Isherwood,
W.
H. Auden,
tried to assimilate
in collaboration
with Christopher
the contemporary
was an uneasy mixture of satire and nostalgia, of
moral indignation and self-pity, seasoned with tags from Freud and
Marx, but it had at least a certain energy; it evinced a genuine concern for the human situation, and tried to express that concern in a
poetic idiom tough enough to work on the public stage.
That the poet should try to make use of the forms of the commercial theatre, instead of taming his back on them in despair or
disgust, was an important departure which has obvious bearings on
the dramatic work of Mr Eliot. We are now no longer surprised that
a play in verse should have a run in the West End. Audiences have
begun to welcome verbal exuberance and rhetoric, after a starvation
diet of the dullest prose, and some of them seem to be beginning to
share Yeats's views (thirty or more years after he wrote them) on the
situation.
The
'play about
result
modern educated
people'. Indeed,
217
Mr
..
PART THREE
practitioner in that line, has dignified this
describing
as 'a
it
development of taste
by-
It is
Rattigan, and
of
Mr
Eliot
many
and
Mr
with
its
in
common. Mr Fry
is,
of 'poet-dramatists'
of course,
more
like
is
cer-
batters
lines in detail,
we
Gordon Bottomley,
fashionable:
Oh no
Thomas:
You
Mr
can't postpone
mean
to sleep
it
. .
The Lady's Not For Burning is not really about anything; it is a sort of
conjuring trick - the quickness of the word deceives the ear - and the
images, unrelated to any over-all pattern of meaning, remain a series
of disconnected bright ideas.
similar criticism
may
be made of the
ingenious phrases:
Cain.
...
a huskular strapling
. .
. .
his
direct contact
in
with
poet
suffers.
educated people'.
twofold:
first
'process' to
it is
patently
which
'a
play about
'form'
this
is
man', though
this
modern
subjected
is
it
is
has a
eternal in
Mr
Eliot
convince his friends that the source of The Cocktail Party was the
Alcestis
some
is
few persons,
which only the verse play can satisfy.') This verse has 'a rhythm close
to contemporary speech'; the lines are 'of varying length and varying
number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses', and the whole
there
is
is
intended
at
as 'a
Few
spite
Mr
of
skill,
human sympathy.
we
vitality
is
Mr
impossible to believe in
tail
of
charity.
we
We
are
shown
their
we compare
a page or
Mr
is
verse
no
this. It is
if
in
solution
or to
Eliot's
strikingly
brought out
219
PART THREE
marks on Yeats's last play, Purgatory, 'in which ... he solved his problems of speech in verse, and laid all his successors under obligation
to him'. When we think of Prufrock and Gerontion, where verse
follows with insidious intent and exhilarating vigour the quirk of
character, the shift of mood and feeling, we may feel like applying to
Mr Eliot the remarks he makes about Browning, in the essay entitled
'Three Voices of Poetry':
What
. .
may be significant
Murder
Festival,
in
the
that
Cathedral,
in aid
social purpose,
living
and
real,
The poet was here playing a traditional role; his gifts served a cause
and commended beliefs which he shared with his audience, and this
have liberated energies which have given the play
enough to dominate an audience in a public theatre, a greater
strength, it seems to me, than is exhibited in any of the plays which
use the conventions of drawing-room comedy.
Shaw once said that what was wrong with 'the drama of the day'
was that it was 'written for the theatres instead of from its own inner
necessity'. The sort of play that Shaw was complaining about is still
the staple fare in the West End theatre. But thanks to him that fare
now usually includes a few dishes more nourishing than any he had to
feed on in the days when he was a dramatic critic. His precepts and
his example have had their effect. Shaw cannot be considered a
major artist (he ranked himself about number ten among English
playwrights); but we can with some justice claim that our best
dramatic work is livelier, more serious, more deeply concerned with
situation seems to
strength
life
than
any one
it
There
CHURCHILL
it
Henry
was one of the chief influences behind the inform of his later novels. What has not been remarked is the curious fact that at the same time as James was trying to
get the dramatic virtues into the novel, Bernard Shaw, who had started
as a novelist and had the same failure in fiction as James had on the
stage, was trying to get the virtues of the novel into the drama. Shaw
was to become the leading platform debater, as well as the leading
dramatist of ideas, of the twentieth century and there was nothing
that this experience
tensely dramatized
survived.
it
we have the
summed up by
of the
is
In
classic
Wells
an end, to
me
had rather be
called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it.' He was to
satirize the literary artist of the James type in Boon (191 5), as he had
satirized the sociologist of the type of the Webbs in The New Machiavelli (191 1). Both James and Wells, however, were inclined to
literature like architecture
is
a means,
it
has a use
... I
He was
art'.
On
PART THREE
action against the beliefs
of the James-Conrad-Ford
circle,
Wells was
on
most of his work would survive only so long
as their ideas remained current. This view is obviously correct in
regard to such novels as Ann Veronica (1909) but in the best of his
social comedies, such as Kipps (1905) - which James thought his
masterpiece - and in the best of the scientific romances and short
stories, like The Time Machine (1895) and The Country oj the Blind
(191 1), he attains the stature of a literary artist of a minor but decidedly
inclined to over-emphasize the reliance of his fiction
the
moment, saying
the topics of
that
original kind. The 'idea' is still the mainspring, but it involves the
moral idea of the novel proper and, though most of such stories had
it
would be untrue to
now read-
Shaw
in retrospect
is
we
see
them
em-
as
on platform and
with the Distributism and the Christian Liberalism of Hilaire
Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, all four very much in the public eye.
And
An
many of Wells's
inner distinction
is
remarks
in his contro-
music
fame
critic,
playwright.
as a
in
pro-
we
was always
He was
convinced that the 'new drama' must compete in elaborawith the contemporary novel. He was thinking of Meredith,
Hardy, and Gissing rather than of James, 4 and James of course was
tion
this: 5
'She gave
me
Mrs Wix
stared.
a lot
of money.'
money?'
'I
gave
it
to
Mrs
Beale.'
it?'
a lot of
back.'
it
'To the Countess? Gammon !' said Mrs Wix. She disposed
of that plea as effectually as Susan Ash.
'Well,
What
the
'What
mean
is
that
rest.'
rest?'
this: 6
'Oh "bear"
!'
Mrs Assingham
fluted.
Fanny
hesitated.
'For love,'
It
play.
father.'
repeated.
'For love,'
That
'Of your
Maggie
is
Maggie
said again.
Shaw,
at the
directions, being
at that.
actors an
Raina's
The
spirit,
untamed mountaineer
is
of a
chieftain.
chin
in a Parisian salon,
shewing
faculty
arrival
of western
precisely
what
The
by the
result
By
his
is
first
brooding on
up
to his ideals
(etc., etc.:
223
more
lines
PART THREE
This massive
his plays
detail,
to say nothing
of his lengthy
novel; assisted
by
prefaces,
literature
becoming famous
move
makes
and the
in print first,
padding out
make
his
early
por-
his
His Shakespeare carries a notebook about with him and when anyone
utters a 'strain
of music' he copies
it
down
down
it
goes in Shakespeare's
'tablets' for
bethan drama,
common
like the
is,
when
of grace defend
us!',
!
The
that poetic
were written
I
at
c.
all
They
was so to
and the attention of the reader fixed throughout on the main scenes,
like a spectator in the theatre; Shaw's intention was to provide plays
with so extensive an elaboration that they could bear intellectual
comparison with the novels of a Meredith. We cannot doubt the
224
of
results
this curious
some observations on
juncture in
mind
that
should like to
make
twentieth century.
in justification
of
as
say, the
debate
for James
come
were, have
at
each other,
co blows: they
tion.
we cannot
For
proceed very
far in
He
is
the
relation of
in
Dickens.
manner of fames
In
his autobiographies
George
Eliot,
sonally. 9
James.
We
purpose to note that the novel proper in the twentieth century has
is
originally sprang
c.A.-8
a tradition
of comedy
in
its
which
highest point in
PART THREE
in our time is principally found in the novel of
from Weiis to Orwell and in the novel-drama of Shaw. They are
the inheritors here, not only of the comic richness and the concern for
social justice of Fielding and Dickens, but of that looseness of art in the
genera] run of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature against
which writers like fames and Conrad reacted. They were right so to
react; but we must not put all the righteousness on the one side.
What a sprawl is Chuzzlewit compared with James's Lady or Conrad's Nostromo If James had written Chuzzlewit, we can be sure that
the novel would have been a unified work of art, as Dickens's novel
is
ters as
it is
such charac-
whole Colum-
wit
a
mamly
sudden
resides.
Mrs Gamp,
flush
and
was the practice of the early Dickens to
draw up a rough plan and improvise the details as he went along - a
practice encouraged by publication in instalments. It is the whole
achievement of the work of art which we admire in fames (though
some of his novels, including What Maisie Knew, were serialized in
'a really
magazines)
in
miration of the
I
Dickens
we
it
details.
and that to
is
criticize
It is
by
in its virtues
the standards of
and in
Henry James
is
its
admirable
like
226
literature
lesser
as
works of
art,
artist as
artists.
Com-
Wells compared
novels and essays of Wells, Belloc, Chesterton, Huxand Orwell are variants of the same species. The literature ot ideas
in our time is a very untidy business; but no more so than in the
novels (or assorted scrapbooks) ot Peacock, Disraeli, and Samuel
literature, as the
ley,
Butler.
Proportion
exaggeration,
is
if
all its
is
Where Dickens
'a
Pyecraft (1903),
small
I
in
boy carry-
ever conversed
'British
tion)',
(1894)
is
comic
artist;
absolutely irrelevant; in
Arms and
the
Man
which is itself a hundred pages long and the wittiest summary of the
Darwinian controversy ever written; Chesterton pads out to novel
length the simplest of short stories, like Manalive (19x2), as if Hans
Andersen had taken three volumes to
ling;
Huxley
in Brave
New
tell
resist
Ugly Duck-
the temptation
Banbury T, to see
1984 (1949) inserts
a fine
go along, too
rich to
mind of the
...
is
In
all
these
evidently no
writers as they
PART THREE
bitter end. Equally,
it is
in these details, as
it is
in
Mrs Gamp
in
Huxley
Quarles in Point Counter Point (1928), discussed the difference between the novelist of ideas and what he termed the 'congenital' novel-
And
ist.
in that novel
Huxley has
of ideas
like
since
Brave
New
have
'ideas
They
is
as irrelevant as
about everything
...
in the
com-
Mr Britling, who
them out
to pour
lets. It is
in an
unending
series
a matter
with only a
little
alteration
Notting Hill (1904) could have developed into an essay with equal
plausibility,
The
relations
ters
for
of his characters:
my
'I
is
interested
above
all
ideas
in the personal
starting point',
to conceive
them.
of
embody
woman
question;
it is difficult
Stanley as an individual
commonly remember
woman.
Ann
Veronica
gift for
comic speech;
228
if
more
we do
not
often as the
we do
sometimes
idiom.
istic
Shaw
tramp
. . .
We do not conjure
up such a
Cockney pro-
who
is
more
impersonal.
a 'character' in his
own
It
must be
difficult for a
writer
of Shavian figures
as full
as the
novels (and
Comstock
in
and Bowling
as
in
own.
and
is
subtle, ironic
Forster.
easily
become
vices
that
we do
as
they go along.
artists
line in
was evidently,
'Heavens,
how we
like
Mrs Harris, an
inspiration
words
much
in relation to
later
still
the journalist
of the moment.
between the
literary artist
we must
and
nor forget
the significance ofJames's failure in the theatre and the relative failure
of most of
Yet our
229
of ideas
as a
whole
PART THREE
managed to carry on something of the Dickensian tradition of
English comedy. In an increasingly cosmopolitan literary world, that
is an achievement by no means to be despised.
has
NOTES
I.
less
H G,
and G. N. Ray
(1958).
For the
upon
the European continent. In every bookshop in France you would see, in the
early years of this century, the impressive rows of his translated works ... I
believe
it
Knew
I,
p. xxi.
7.
8.
To
5.
6.
What
Maisie
(1898), ch.
Shaw complained
!'
(ref. Note 4 above)".
See Autobiography (1957) reprint in 1 vol. of Small Boy and Others (1913)Notes qj a Son and Brother (1914), and the unfinished The Middle Years (1917).
10. In The Maturity oj Dickens (1959) Monroe Engel, whose object is 'to
sixteenth century
9.
insist that
intelligence
12.
Two
Novelists on the
13.
ig8$.
14.
I,
Novel (1959),
cited in
Miriam
p. 26.
Allott,
p. 103.
W. F.TOMLIN
The
British Council
a commonplace that the behaviour of language in prose is differfrom its behaviour in verse; what the difference is may not be so
clear. As with many distinctions so fine as to resist precise formulation,
an example may instantly Hluminate it. The lines are from Yeats's
The Crazed Moon:
It
is
ent
Crazed through
The moon
The image,
a brilliant one,
is
is
much
child-bearing,
itself.
without
this
existence;
it
lives for
something beyond
munication of a meaning or
repetitiveness
idea. It
is
to maintain intelligibility -
Moreover, within
all
1 mean
...
\ 'What
mean is
two
...
',
etc.
elements,
may
is
be called the
which
that
dialectical
elucidates
its
and the
eristical Dialectical
manner
exposition
is
of dialogue. There
is
aim
it
aim of
eristic is
231
PART THREE
who
Even those
Hume,
Berkeley,
find
writers. Latterly,
sophy,
is
allergic to their
and Bradley
Mill,
come
and
this
to be written.
may
and elegant
One
thought
satisfying
at least in Britain;
philosophy has
view
remain indifferent or
way
in
of the tenets of
which
this
new
termed
words, our
common
language
is
no
'style',
no
thought. Moreover,
it
analytical or linguistic
First, it seeks
movement
common
of
called the
is
it
upon
the
linguistic ambiguity.
common
of a flaw
phrase,
is
The
in language.
The reason
movement is
behind
it
of the
even
linguistic
political
Works on theology,
movement. Without
the early
The same
applies to
more
New
oj Politics (1953),
(1955).
By
contrast,
movement
we
which the
analytical
To
still
may be,
dox
a stylistic link
classico-literary tradition.
There
232
is
between these
de Biran. The
if
last
can be classed
as belles lettres;
is
distinguished
Logic (1883) for instruction than for the spectacle of a sustained literary
is
visible
no
set in
less in
many
Lord Haldane than in the basic poverty of his thought. (It is only
fair to say that Haldane disliked the term idealist but it is not what one
likes to be called, it is what one is.) Similarly, the balance and precision of such an early work as Moore's Principia Ethica (1905) marks
a new departure in philosophy, the birth of a New Realism. The
'philosophy of common sense', which Moore initiated, needed a
medium of expression radically different from that of the idealists;
it needed plainness, an approximation to common usage. Stripped of
;
its
most part of
prolonged
hymn
to the Absolute.
to
all
part
of a metaphysical
ritual.
To embrace Reality-as-a-whole,
in the nineteenth
as
much from
worn-out phraseology as
It is surprising to what
extent much modern theology has remained linked to a form of philosophy long outmoded. 2 Moral exhortation does not make for good
prose, though it may provide material for rhetoric and for inferior
has suffered degeneration as
its
trained congregations.
poetry.
By way
prose of thought,
233
is
PART THREE
one experience, sell-pervading and superior to mere
relations. Its character is the opposite of that fabled extreme
which is barely mechanical, and it is, in the end, the sole perfect realization of spirit. ... Outside of spirit there is not, and
there cannot be, any reality, and the more that anything is
Reality
is
spiritual, so
And
much
the
more
is it
veritably real.
further:
Spirit
is
Moore
My
point
Here
(Principia Ethica)
is
that
good
is
ow
'
ls
them
then
may
themselves, in the
first
instance, be capable
of definition,
ceases.
I have deliberately chosen Bradley, and the least rhetorical example of Bradley, because the selection of a more impassioned piece,
such as one taken from Stirling's rarefied work The Secret oj Hegel
(1865), would hardly have been fair. Even so, this brief extract,
despite its apparent simplicity, is found on examination to be blurred
by imprecise terminology and to be informed with an undercurrent
234
is
movement of
thought.
Its
little
peroration, if such
can be called,
is
Moore is
he remains, for
a transitional writer;
He
is
demonstrated
'ceases', as that
in the use
a stylist.
the
pedestrianly,
it
all his
we know,
commonsense,
he exerted no
Bloomsbury; 4 there
is even a
between him and }. M. Keynes. The effort towards
towards the lowering of temperature to that of cold state-
stylistic link
plainness,
ment,
is
of Moore.
disciples)
One
of the
most
interesting
is
Cook
Wilson.
volume of
Wilson's lecture and notes, gives the surface-appearance of meticulous, orderly, but essentially 'deflating' exposition.
more powerful
With
Tractates Logico-Philosophicus,
which he wrote when a war-prisoner, and the Philosophical Investigations, which he composed to deter the plagiarists, Wittgenstein's
philosophy took the form of a conversational game, an exercise in
verbal dialectic. The Blue Booh and the Brown Book consist oiviva voce
transcripts,
In the exercise
prone to
you
am
you
to
doing
so,
you
are writing?"
myself when
ask,
I
"Do you
say "Yes,
write, "I
have
fall
dissatisfied
he was
him.
less liable
me to
tell
felt
write a few
and while
lines,
this
something
feeling?"
Of course
in
can say
analysis has
it'
been de-
PART THREE
veloped, and indeed carried to an extreme, almost to a reductio ad
absurdum,
is
a typical
example:
- to stop the worry it was said 'He has the measle germ' just means 'He will give all the
measle-reactions'. Now this is incorrect. But that again is not
the point. The point is that this answer is too soothing. Or
rather not too soothing - nothing could be that, everything's
absolutely all right in metaphysics - but it's too sickly soothing. It's soothing without requiring of us that act of courage,
that flinging away of our battery of crutches, which is re-
You remember
was
it
said
vorous and won't hurt anybody who treats him right - that
treats him like a hippopotamus has to be treated; but it's a
mistake to soothe people by telling them he's a horse because,
though that may soothe them for a moment, they will soon
find out that to treat him like a horse is not satisfactory.
{Other Minds, 1952, p. 73)
The
philosophical
decorum
as to
is
to
catch
language
unawares
at
work of the
logical positivists,
donment of the
we
stylistic screen,
236
And
no
less
powerful in their
hardly an
in debate.
customary with
linguistic philosophers;
still
the listener,
its
racy, breaking
through the
The
fixity
bience;
it is
imposed upon
it
by
doctrinaire
Much
'suited'
mind our
it
initial
distinction
subject in
the truth
away
movement towards
colloquialism
it is
which
is
realized
most
effectively in dia-
thought
is
'spoken'.
By
contrast, eristic
is
an attempt,
by by-passing
manipulate the
it is
an attempt to manage or
of eristic
is
the kind of
he
who would
writer
a writer not
rational inquiry?
If,
as
the reader',
style.
237
PART THREE
In order to approach nearer to the criterion
of sincerity,
let
No
He
on excerpts.
solely
we
if
judged
us shift
First
writer,
whatever
own
has his
be
how
That
is
The
of economics
science
an abstraction from
nomics show
a tendency
Vhomme.
it is
either, like
The
style, c'est
political science.
linguistic philosophy,
'social studies'.
is
own
abstractness, they
style will
oscillates
become a branch of
A work such as
vary accordingly.
Hebrew prophecy,
it is never, except in some of Part n, pure economic theory. Indeed, the assumption that Marxism is an economic
theory instead of a social gospel has misled not merely individual
men, but whole nations. In Britain, unlike France, theories such as
Marxism, as well as those of Pareto and Henry George, have exerted
little attraction, at least for most academic economists. The result is
a tradition of writing at once dignified, clear, judicious; Alfred
Marshall is still read for the possession of these qualities. With wider
culture and greater powers of irony, J. M. Keynes continued the
tradition of Marshall; but he combined objectivity with considerable
social concern. In his work the eristic element is evident, though well
under control an early volume was aptly called Essays in Persuasion
6
(193 1). A writer on economics of remarkable literary gifts was his
:
238
economic concept,
of sustained elegance,
that
this great
of Marginalism. Written
book
possesses a clarity to
Newman. There
recalls that
be
of
We
more than
is
worth,
as certain
solemnity.
The
pedant, the
is
p. 341)
legalist,
I,
manner of writing,
open to parody. The test of sincerity may be not so much prolonged high seriousness or fervour, as the occasional ironic aside, the
play of wit. These are means to the preservation of balance and sanity.
In
all
of tone
239
is
to be expected;
we
can be serious
PART THREE
without being solemn. The portentousness and aridity of
much
Both
flexible
medium of the
latter
much by
oj Imperfect
abstract subject-matter,
show command of
by
of
on
Rent' (Chapter VIII), a topic not as a rule productive of liveliness. Such
qualities belong to effective dialectic; the sarcasm characteristic of the
unbalanced or wayward personality belongs to eristic. Given space,
one would wish to pursue this investigation in the realm of law and
related subjects. Sir Carleton Allen's Law in the Making (1927), to take
their
particular doctrines.
An
example
as
Mrs Robinson's
is
'Digression
it is
eristic
enter
into partnership.
The
reflect,
of writing of such a work as The Golden Bough (1 890-1912) remains even and steady throughout a succession of volumes, the prose
level
voiumes of Arnold Toynbee's Study oj History (1954) somebelow the level of the earlier part, rallying again in An
Historian s Approach to Religion (1956). There is a study to be made of
the variations in quality, throughout a long and colourful career, of
of the
last
times
falls
the prose of Earl Russell. In his middle period, this penetrating thinker
240
volume
Portraits from
essays,
Memory (1957),
To
reflection.
all,
far;
but
movement of a man's thought can and does thus reflect itself. There
are not two things, the thought and the style; there is either one
thing, or a mere string of words. Nor is this to say that the manner
necessarily changes ; the prevailing
we may
take five
modern
sufficiently long-lived to
writers, differing
By way of
illustration,
mood
The
Belloc.
The
early prose
oj the
to
Nona
historical studies,
(1927) was a tired and disillusioned idealist: hence the invective, the
Shaw,
even
such
as that
all
erratic.
241
PART THREE
work of all
In the
subtly, a
change
men we
these
in outlook.
mysticism; Belloc
lost
however
to distrust
way
fell
thought. This
may be
is
included;
many
genre
are
great writers
Bacon and
Sir
Thomas
The Dithyrambic
a vigorous
mind
marked
wrestling with
eristic vein,
show
generating an original
prose to
Ellis.
charm but
often
im-
10
perfect conceptual realization.
The
flective
prose of T.
and the
logical.
two
To
is
more
is
mind
into
new
trains
of
Some of
recent
works such
242
as
certain
we may
and an
suggests that
between the
and
dialectic
eristic
eristic aspect.
This
elements themselves
The
stand
its
eristic, that
New
Realism.
eristic side
of their
upon empiricism,
medium of expression
were
finally
eristical
J.
where the subject-matter was such metaphysical problems as Negation, Individuals, On What There Is, etc. Indeed, there was a remarkable and perhaps significant resemblance between the style of the
later Ayer and that of McTaggart. It is now only too clear that
Analysis, the
is
philosopher, has
only that
'reality'
it
limit;
but
is
its
own
can be con-
a process which,
if it is
pushed to the
we may
As
far as the
writing o( philosophy
is
concerned,
as
PART THREE
rigid but infinitely flexible
and
full
NOTES
1.
The Revue
de Mitaphysique
et
The point
is
symposium Metaphysical
Beliefs,
edited by Macintyre and Gregor Smith (i957)> P- 53. I make no comment here, or elsewhere, on the validity of the argument.
The
reader
who
is
W.
D. Ross's The
known
as
the
mance.
E.g. The Dance of Life, Chapter m, iv.
Cp. in the case of Yeats, the prose of Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1917)11. It might be remarked of this writer that some of the most powerful
9.
10.
14.
as a
An Essay
p. 214.
MR
GOOD INFLUENCE
FORSTER'S
G. D.
KLINGOPULOS
content
may
reader
is
likely to feeJ
sit
down
to write his
own
some
classic'.
or
two of the
cannot be
all,
novels.
There
whole
guilty
is
made
to apply to
his
if
it
is
of what
dis-
Such a
account of work he has
at his
author
would regard
Is
he, perhaps,
of
'humour'?
Bring out the enjoyment. If 'the classics' are advertised as
something dolorous and astringent, no one will sample them.
But if the cultured person, like the late Roger Fry, is obviously
having a good time, those who come across him will be
tempted to share it and to find out how.
Surely these are sentiments to which the
person' returns an echo?
Or
good
is
humour
to evaluation,
cession
is
my
Mr
this,
bosom of every
'cultured
Mr
Forster
is
about 'having a
almost too ready
of view. 'Were
attitude
so large that
it
I professionally committed
would of course be different.' The conmakes agreement more remote. Is the
distinction
to
which
criticism,
however
is
prescriptive.
the simpleinindedness
which ignores
245
this
possibility,
a necessary
PART THREE
task
course,
much more
Mr
than this to
it
of a
of
emphasis on the need
As the
his insistence.
justification
not do.
will
Forster's
There
is,
for "humour'.
Much
of
Mr
Forster's, as
Thomas
of
some of
He
by
how
his prose,
work
his
he
far
Mr
how
to decide
will do.
Forster
is
Whatever
a consistent
and almost
exclusively to those
...
it.
if"
aristocracy of
influence, but an
They
human
tradition, the
...
one permanent
This
is
when many
of
Mr
Forster's readers
seemed, with
it
all
its
frailty
and absurdity,
invisible participation.
For
time
his
immediately hoped for Victory, but once the Liberation had begun
it
became
'We
fight
will triumph.'
most evanescent
part
246
of a writer's achievement.
is,
It
GOOD INFLUENCE
Mr Forster will tend, in time,
consideration. A later generation may not
MR FORSTER
is
in
accounts of
classic'
many
at times, to
at
any
rate.
Hardy,
as
we
it
appears,
should expect,
'my home'. Later there was India which made a deep fusion with
some of his earlier attitudes and preoccupations. And the astringent,
timeless impact of the Alexandrian recluse Cavafy. One would have
guessed the influence of Butler, but not the order of importance which
is
Mr
deal.
me
a great
He, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust are the three authors
helped
me
the other
most over
two
to help
my
me
who
either
of
to look at
more than
life
the
relevant.
The enumeration of
up
influences,
however extended,
we
have of Mr
will not
add
Forster. Per-
world described
in
modern English
writers
whose work
He
is
of assimila-
growth of a genuine sensibility, by which we mean something different from style, or technique, or learning. It is as rare among
poets as among novelists, for determination and a certain amount of
verbal skill often suffice for the production of quite reputable verse.
It is not manner, though Mr Forster has written much that is only
mannered and Lamb-like. It is a quality of interest, sympathy, and
judgement which is no more to be achieved by the activity of the will
than the idyllic effect of the best of Hardy's prose and poetry. To
acknowledge this genuine, experiencing centre in all Forster's work
tion and
247
PART THREE
is
as
important
as
making up
one's
mind about
the writing in each of his books. Because of this principle of life and
new
books, and
new
lands,
without becoming
new
people,
laneous or ^discriminate.
scientific progressive
age.
With
Mr
all
Forster
Forster's 'sensibility' will decide one's attitude to, for example, his
early
promise.
to the terminus
from R.
Pan
is
all
wood, if you
go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his
pipe ... It is no wonder, with so traitorous a scheme of things,
look, the type of the shaggy world: and in every
248
ME FORSTER
wise people
if the
that of
all
embraces
who
And
still
GOOD INFLUENCE
we
terrible, since it
Puerisque, 1 8 8 1
But though Mr Forster has defended 'escape', he was never a wholehearted escapist. 'I cannot shut myself up in a Palace of Art or a
Philosophic Tower and ignore the madness and misery of the world.'
Nor has he been tempted to insist on optimism or fatalism or any
doctrinal position which would simplify the stresses of life. His
slighter works of fantasy must be regarded as attempts to organize
and bring to a focus certain intuitions which at first derive from
books, and later from experience and from travel. They attempt
to open windows for enclosed and regimented men, and to evoke
intuitive or childlike memories, as in dreams, of other levels of
existence - 'the magic song of nightingales, and the odour of invisible
hay, and stars piercing the fading sky'. Criticism is forestalled by the
description of Rickie's stories in The Longest Journey, but these fragile
reworkings of classical myth have their place in any account of Mr
development. 2
Forster's
novel of which he
fulness
of The
novels,
is
is
Celestial
it
contains
How
The book
can
is
remain loyal to
their
in all the
generous
world which inevitably imposes mere conformity with its coldness, its cowardice and polite deceit? How can
men achieve a good relationship with nature and with other men, and
avoid the self-sufficiency which is based on various forms of pride
or hubris or hardness of will? These themes are as old as European
literature, and, recognizing them, we confer importance even on
work which embodies them faintly and elusively. They certainly
help to give an impression of continuity and completeness to
Forster's work, whatever our views of the individual novels may
and best impulses in
be.
249
is
immensely
PART THREE
one cannot avoid the impression that a subject-matter
requiring some of Lawrence's powers is, in the end, only very
sketchily dealt with. The moral disintegration of Rickie and the
fulfilment of Ansell's prophecy that Rickie's marriage would fail
readable, but
The
novelist,
one
feels,
should have
any other device can men insure themselves a vision: and Rickie's
had been granted him three years before, when he had seen his wife
and a dead man clasped in each other's arms. She was never to be so
real to
him
again.'
Why
The
novel does nor provide a satisfactory answer, and the business about
inherited deformity in Rickie and his child
symbol
from
is
AnselJ
guessed
an evasion, a feeble
Agnes is made unsubtly inthe marriage was a failure. 'She moves as one
life'
which
is
Is it
Meredith:
riot of fair images increased. They invaded his being and
lamps at unsuspected shrines. Their orchestra commenced in
that suburban house where he had to stand aside for the maid
to carry in the luncheon. Music flowed past him like a river
... In full unison was love born, flame of the flame, flushing
The
lit
250
MR FORSTER
the dark river beneath
wings were
As an attempt
its
in intention.
tic
disappointing.
bathos by
GOOD INFLUENCE
infinite, his
his finger as
is
him and
The
own
life' this
of descriptive or impressionis-
when
Only
in
Passage
tive, secure,
to
through their
real
'success'
even
distinction
Comic
am making
novelist's ex-
Spirit or
here
is
of the
little
'failure'.
a long time to
tainment', they
Proust. If Mr Forster
Melcombe
place in
established his
basis
own
it
Mr
Forster the
now hangs
same
intensity
The
Lawrence
in this respect.
Italian novels,
is
felt
251
PART THKEE
ledge, but
and
'principles'
life.
Mr
and
its
is
its
'culture'
fear
make
his point.
What
he
sees in
the infant.
much
about
this
its
its
healthy
The
morals,
man
its
on
itself.
It did not stand for a principle any longer. It was so much flesh
and blood, so many inches and ounces of life - a glorious and
unquestionable fact, which a man and another woman had
And this was the machine on which
given to the world
she and Mrs Herriton and Philip and Harriet had for the last
month been exercising their various ideals - had determined
that in time it should move this way or that way, should
accomplish this and not that. It was to be Low Church, it was
to be high-principled, it was to be tactful, gentlemanly, artistic - excellent things all. Yet now that she saw this baby,
lying asleep on a dirty rug, she had a great disposition not to
dictate one of them, and to exert no more influence than there
may be in a kiss or in the vaguest of heartfelt prayers.
.
When Harriet succeeded in stealing the baby, she 'dandled the bundle
laboriously, like
killed.
some bony
prophetess'.
The
child
is
accidentally
the
mode
252
MR FORSTER
GOOD INFLUENCE
Mr Forster
now in fashion. But the
satire against the Rev. Mr Eager and the Rev. Mr Beebe in A Room
with cl View would be still more effective if we could be clearer about
the rationalist Mr Emerson, with 'the face of a saint who understood'.
many
other observers,
the gout-stricken
its
Lucy
is
seemed dreadful
that the old man should crawl into such a sanctum when he was unhappy, and be dependent on the bounty of a clergyman'. The stock
surely
to
'it
and
that
it is
Mr
Forster's.
Emerson
Nor
is
He knows when
and moral
an unimpressive representative of
life.
this sort
clarity
as nearer
But old Mr
of attitude.
makes on very
Forster
common
'You
Here
Mr
intellectual Cecil:
enjoy comic
we do.'
'Then why didn't
songs as
The
general
first
253
PART THREE
is also the case in the more substantial
work Howards End. Here Mr Forster is again concerned with the interaction of cultural levels, and he returns to the attempt made in The
Longest Journey to analyse and describe the drift of modern English
The
'a
Return
the
oj
It
is
Native and
is
Mr
it,
work of Hardy's
oversimplified. The hunt is
last
half century.
wiD have to discover just what part was played in the decline
by the behaviour of Englishmen - not to mention English-
women - who
men or Singapore
Wimbledon?
angry young
transplanted
a product of an exclusive
The
India (1924)
more
than
Passage
to
now
than
it
Passage
to
India has
been a best-
Hardy have
work
as a
also
whole,
political
of the matter.
the book reveals none of
in relation to
Mr
Thomas
Forster's
254
MR FORSTER
as
any
modern
in
GOOD INFLUENCE
of
by Stephen, or
in Rickie
in
from was
His
last
clear
enough, but
What Mr
his alternatives
Forster recoiled
seemed oversimplified.
a solvent not
acts as
Moore (who
is
And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human
had learnt to manage
and make the best of it on advanced European lines,
had developed his personality, explored his limitations, controlled his passions - and he had done it all without becoming
being. After forty years' experience, he
his life
moment
passed, he felt he
felt sad.
Some
'defeatist',
but
this
seems to be the
of negation and
must
nullity,
result
was her
distinction to
of misinterpreting the
inci-
be affirmed despite the dark rumband it was the strain of this task which
still
value.' It
She had come to that state where the horror of the universe
and its smallness are both visible at the same time - the horror
of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved ... In the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual
muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can
be found.
also her
255
PART THREE
consciousness?
not
. . .
Perhaps
life is
tell'
tolerable
and patterns of
belief.
of the book
tapestry
The
is
effect
positive
of
this
and
far
from
depressing.
few
reservations,
is
And
it is
words of
an impressive structure of
last
NOTES
of Mr Forster that he should conclude his biography of
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson (1934) in this way: 'Mephistopheles. who
should inhabit a cranny in every biography, puts his head out at this point,
and asks me to set all personal feelings aside and state objectively why a memoir
The case for Mephistoof Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson need be written
pheles would appear to be watertight; and a biography of my friend and master
1. It is characteristic
uncalled
2.
See
for.'
my
No.
2.
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
There
are probably
with a proper
no
critical
writers
whom it is more
difficult to discuss
one
Bangor
as a student.
first
outmoded
from an inadequate technique and a limited vision. Her own achievement may appear now to be a more limited one than it did when her
novels were first read, and her lasting contribution to fiction may be
reduced to a single novel, To the Lighthouse. Yet she had imagination,
great sensitiveness, delicacy, wit, and the infinite capacity for taking
pains of genius. She, at least, did not curb the spirit, or erect barriers
that her followers have had to break down. If one thinks of her limitations, it is only compared with the greatest of her predecessors,
Jane Austen and George Eliot, two artists whom she admired and
whose work as a whole gives one a sense of achievement and triumph
beside which the writings of the twentieth-century novelist, inevitably perhaps, appear, for
all
Virginia
is
is
a thought that
Woolf remarks
who
has
somehow
got herself
at the
admirers',
beginning of a review of E.
M.
CA.-9
357
PART THREE
Reader
Edwardians:
concerned not with the spirit but
they
they write of unimportant things
with the body
spend immense skill and immense industry making the
triviaj and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.
Life escapes
. .
look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like this'.
Examine for a momeni an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.
The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of
steel.
From
all
This
may
be inadequate psychology,
it
it
it
may
describes
what
life
meant
for
particularly
such
as
Elizabethan
the
novelists,
own day, James Joyce. These writers, rather than Thackeray, Thomas
Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, whom she also esteemed, provided her
with something in the nature of a tradition, though she 'felt the lack
of a convention, and how serious a matter it is when the tools of
one generation are
Her
attitude
is
useless for
no such thing
as 'the
stuff of fiction,
and
spirit is
is
is
the proper
amiss' (The
Common
Such
all-inclusiveness has
its
dangers, and in
ate
Woolf believed
us.
life'
whatever you
reality,
him
- pass
like
in
it
Writer's Diary,
is (this
was
its
shriek of
Unhappiness
Yet
'it
it
has
its
weren't for
my feeling
that
a strip
it's
is
worse.'
frequent if
(A
Writer's Diary).
life,
whom
but
she
it
saw
kind of
it
less
'Why
live?'
Sir
in the
Thomas Browne
Modestly
realizing her
massive genius
found in the novels of jane Austen, who was, in this respect, she
thought, superior to George Eliot herself (The Common Reader, First
Series).
Woolf was
women writers,
directly deals
woman writer,
is
interest-
women
and
is
a sense
259
PART THREE
women's
lives will
in poetry that
women's
and
spirit,
weakest.
It
it is
them
will lead
encourage the
fiction
is
still
and no
This 'poetic
spirit',
destiny and
life,
fiction
from the
characteristic
'A method
first.
own
and apparently
E. M. Forster has noted (Two
essentially poetic
trifling
Cheers
had been
Democracy).
for
Arnoldian
sense,
'criticism
of
life'
in
any
was a most
must be
experience. Just as
life
of experiences, so
fiction
subtle
infinitely adaptable
and supple in
order to catch the 'tones', the light and shade of experience. The art of
the novelist was similar to that of the painter, and painting for Virginia
George
Eliot,
were various
the
'phases'
Van Gogh
Matisse.
There
novelists,
modern novelist was to make use of whatever was of value in the past.
The truth-tellers, the romantics, the character-mongers and comedians,
the psychologists, the
the different paints
methods
to
on
satirists
and
the palette.
fantastics,
Experience
there
must be some
sort
like
of order in the
art
it.
Yet
by means of which
it is
presented:
registers the
260
at a distance
from the
and
powers so
that the
obliterate
its
features;
Woolf 's
of
Roger Fry, Vanessa
and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf,
M. Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, and (rather on the fringe) E. M.
J.
Forster. 5 The danger of the clique spirit in the modern literary world
does not require stressing to anyone who is sufficiently alert and
informed to see what goes on, and the Bloomsbury group suffered
like any other school of writers from a tendency towards mutual
admiration that was merely a form of narcissism. There were also
certain blind-spots. Virginia Woolf refers to 'the chants of the worshippers at the shrine of Lawrence', and then, in the following essay,
proceeds to chant at the shrine of Roger Fry, who is praised for his
honesty and integrity, qualities that he may have owed in part to his
Quaker blood. He also went to Cambridge (King's College) and is
meant to represent the Cambridge mind at its best. While giving a
sympathetic account of Sons and Lovers, Virginia Woolf asserts that
D. H. Lawrence
Virginia
He
. .
from those who have a settled station and enjoy circumstances which allow them to forget what those circum(The Moment)
stances are.
or in
human
said to
is
not interested in
it
is
PAKT THREE
of someone with
whom
she
is
md can
acquainted,
oj the
To
even be ironical
standards -
'it is
relief for
Death
its
is
pass
is
an unconscious irony.
and
ideas,
to realize
criticism to
conventional she was than she imagined. The Voyage Out (191 5), her
first
novel,
when
room
best
moments occur
is
of
Mr
Ambrose, her
what one
and the
is
she
and one
uncle,
liked because
one liked
his
is
Leslie Stephen,
it,
that
was
his
was
tradition that
is
the
gave her:
'to
read
of reading.
meant -
visits
art
To
write
what one
Mr Ramsay
to produce
of To
the Lighthouse.
She did not mean to be prejudiced against the poor, but her intense
intellectual life
much
carpenter,
from the
is
intolerable
boredom of petty
was
many
Common
children' (The
Reader,
artists
First Series).
and that
ideas.
it
is
When,
the duty of
in
artists
is
George
Eliot
might
a character called
Hewet says
'I want
But the
is
Woolf is merely
Mr
is
Knightley's proposal).
characters
has
its
262
is
it,
too,
going to
It
was
were
Bloomsbury
brains that
in
Woolf
manifests
itself.
Day
Night and
realistic
story,
. . .
vast shore that she gazed upon' (Night and Day), there
Jacob's
is
ing of the
foreshadow-
the Lighthouse.
in this poetic
almost vicious,
satirical
263
PART THREE
some indecent
The
phrases'.
astringent wit
of Virginia Woolf,
as in the reference to
woman
offer',
derives
sale,
Soho,
or there an old
though the subject-matter is that of Defoe (cp. the end of the essay on
Defoe in The Common Reader, First Series). Virginia Woolf also
shares with Jane Austen a sense of the importance of the apparent
trivialities
age and
of life:
'it's
the
way
The
diseases, that
Room).
moments
in the novel,
and co form patterns apart from character and plot, becomes more
confident and consistent in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Images, in Virginia
Woolf 's
to another.
Mrs
Dalloway 'sliced like a knife through everything' again in Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh is frequently described as playing with a knife, and
it is connected with his habit of 'making one feel, too, frivolous;
empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox'. The image of a knife is
also used in To the Lighthouse, in connexion with Mr Ramsay, to
describe the ruthlessness and insensitiveness of the male intellect,
as opposed to the feminine imagination of Mrs Ramsay. (There is,
perhaps, too, a suggestion here of Time's 'scythe and crooked knife',
one of the themes of Shakespeare's sonnets.) 8 The use of the background of the rhythm of the waves when evoking those isolated,
significant moments in experience with which Virginia Woolf is so
concerned, appears in Mrs Dalloway, looking forward to the extended
use of this image in To the Lighthouse and The Waves. A mood of
serenity and resignation is usually conveyed by this image (though
sometimes the thundering of the waves can suggest terror). The
hypnotic rhythms of the falling waves induce the appropriate response in Mrs Dalloway: "Fear no more," says the heart, committing
its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and
;
'
a certain
lets fall'.
complacency
One
and
it
appears again in
at
dress,
Hamletizing,
as Virginia
Woolf imagined
. . .
cent -
Mrs Ramsay
effective than
is less
To
the
Lighthouse
is
Woolf s
masterpiece.
poetic
results
is
never shaken.
metaphor',
make towards
to their
end
. .
(No. 60)
265
PART THREE
How with
Whose
this
action
rage
is
no
shall
. .
(No. 65)
. .
(No. 98)
It is,
been suggested) in
The method
to
is
be found. 9
To the
Waves in terms of mystical experience is equally
dangerous. 10 The symbolism of the lighthouse is clear, and Virginia
Woolf is no more mystical than E. M. Forster in Howards End, where
the symbolism of the house performs a similar function and music
replaces painting as the source of aesthetic experience. Mr E. M.
is
that
discuss
Forster has, perhaps, been less successful in his 'poetic' effects, but in
the
is
Fifth
Symphony there
pettinesses
moments during
of ordinary
life
the novels,
are surpassed.
when
During
the
trivialities
isolated
and
moments of
when 'the miracle happens', life takes on the inof art. The long steady stroke of the lighthouse beam is Mrs
Ramsay's stroke, and symbolizes the stability and security which her
intense experience,
tensity
life. The
movements of
of the beam
flashing
equivalent in
Ramsay and
life
to the
is
the
Mrs
Lily Briscoe are equally artists - and the novel ends with
the long steady stroke of the brush that also completes Lily Briscoe's
picture in the mind,
of the perfect
woman whom
she loves.
Both
in
the novel and in painting, formality and discipline are imposed on the
chaos of experience.
periences
is
and
one must
lose
it
the painter;
by absorb-
ing
it
in
266
and gained the peace which passeth all understanding. Virginia Woolf,
for once, used directly religious terminology, but the experience she
Opposed
is
it
involves. This
is
the
Leslie
Stephen:
We
of course, can
Such an
attitude,
very
far
The
finally
that
it
Woolf 's
portrait
in
The
(as,
Mans
of Mr Ramsay
convincing us of
egoism and
pretends to be
greatness of Virginia
which
result in self-dramatization
Worship).
is
his
of the male
is
for in-
that she
heroism,
intellect, its
Mr
and Mrs
Ramsay is comparable to that ofJane Austen's Emma and Mr Knightley: the end of Virginia Woolf 's greatest novel also vindicates 'the
essential
pettiness.
contrast
between
of true
of Emma)
as
Mr Ramsay
band
reaches the
end of his journey to the lighthouse, and Lily Briscoe completes the
painting inspired by Mrs Ramsay. 12
Orlando (1928), though
To
the Lighthouse
it
is
and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more
capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven
beams in quick succession
and then lapse into darkness for
a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it
.
is said,
much
. .
267
of
inclined to pall.
PART THREE
what appears to have happened to Virginia
The Waves (193 1) deals with the theme of the progress
That, unfortunately,
Woo
If
herself.
is
like the
waves and ending, for the individual, with death. There are beautiful
passages, such as Bernard's final monologue, with which the novel
concludes, but no sense of a larger pattern or rhythm. The Years
(1937) contains, near the beginning, a flash of the old satirical wit in
the description of the hypocrisy of Colonel Pargiter and the death,
after a painful, protracted illness, of his wife. The novel, as a whole*
shows signs of tiredness, and is dull and monotonous. It ends with the
sun rising on a new day, 'and the sky above the houses wore an air
of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace'. It is a conventional,
not a strenuously achieved ending, like the serenity of the conclusion
of To the Lighthouse. There is a reference to 'the heart of darkness',
the title of Conrad's tale, and it also appears at the end of the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941). The heart had gone out
of Virginia Woolf 's work.
That her genius had burned itself out is confirmed by the six previously unpublished short stories at the end of A Haunted House
(1944). Her short stories, despite some brilliancies, tend to confirm
the sense of a minor talent. Yet if she is not among the very greatest
of English novelists, her fiction leaves one with the impression of a
delicate and subtle artist in words, who upheld aesthetic and spiritual
values in a brutal, materialistic age. Mr E. M. Forster reminds one
of the permanent significance of her work:
Order. Justice. Truth. She cared for these abstractions, and
The epitaph of such
tried to express them through symbols
.
enemy and
its
friend.'
{Two Cheers
To
these eloquent
Virginia
for
Democracy)
268
tion of
NOTES
1.
The
quotations
uniform edition,
2. See D. S. Savage, The Withered Branch
An
(1950),
II, p.
are taken
from the
105.
1938).
5.
ch.
Miriam
its
original context
William James's The Will to Believe (1897); she was also, of course, a great
admirer of the philosopher's brother, the novelist Henry James, to whom there
are some interesting references in A Writer's Diary. For the intellectual background of the Stephens, see Q. D. Leavis's article on Leslie Stephen, Scrutiny,
Vol. VII, No. 4, March 1939, and the study by Noel Annan.
12. Two recent American academic studies are 'Mythic Patterns in To the
Lighthouse' by Joseph Blotner, p.m.l.a., lxxi, September 1956, pp. 547-62, and
'Vision in To the Lighthouse' by Glenn Pedersen, p.m.l.a., Lxxm, December
in
L. H.
G. H.
BANTOCK
The work of L.
interest.
fifty years
ignored Myers's work. As might be guessed, the two points are not
work
entailed
his
moral
the novels,
may
upon one
in the
word
'moral',
W.
best
House, Cambridge,
a
by
L.
H.
friends that he
this adolescent
society.
Board
powers extra-human and transcendental throughout his life. Intellectually he developed late. His first novel, The Orissers, took him
twelve or thirteen years to write, and was not published until 1922,
forty.
at regular inter-
The Pool
vals, until
As
a writer,
Eliot, than to
When
ment from
tions
271
PART THREE
instance,
ance,
by
and
treating
all
all
import-
Thus Myers
seeks to
appear
at first sight to
'Why do men choose to live?', and the problem of personal relationships. What he investigated through his 'serious' characters was the
possibility of a way of life which should at once stand the test of a
morally fastidious
isolation.
taste
The books,
and end
his feeling
therefore,
are
of
social
peculiarly
and personal
autobiographical.
Fundamentally,
his
from
strictly local
and contemporary
he
for
my
part, shall
Amar
denies.
Be-
272
H.
L.
For Myers this distinction between those who affirm and those who
ignore - the Fastidious and the Trivial, as he called them - was
An
how
of
what
social classes
examination of
these
and
institutions.
from an apprehension of
spiritual forces
Of such
all real
genuineness vanishes.
human
reality
of the
'Evil
allow for compromise in the conflict between the Trivial and the
Fastidious.
Such a
conflict
is
first
novel,
which
is
concerned with the struggle between the Maynes and the Orissers for
the possession of the family seat of the Orissers, Eamor.
The Maynes
is
him of
his
beyond
is
ultimately Myers's
own problem.
They
c.a.
are self-isolated;
- 10
273
critical
PART THREE
material spirit of the society of the day; to gain
it
when
com-
cut off in Eamor's 'dreadful peace'. If the Orissers are the spiritually
members of an
Myers's
effete
and dying
social order.
first
problem; 'too
not be regarded
Orissers
as illusory,
even
Myers does sense that the moral isolation of the Orissers is equivocal, and that such isolation represents a desiccation.
The 'Clio' hardly merits serious consideration; Myers wrote it
because he wished to produce something in the Aldous Huxley vein.
The Root of the Flower (193 5), the first three sections of The Near
of the Orissers are taken up and explored more fully. The Orisser group - the sensitive and fastidious -
It is
in
and
son
Jali,
Sita,
and
their
an active to a contemplative
for his small state
The Rajah
spiritual
life.
He
between the
political
and
He
tricably
bound
taste for
does not realize that the policy and the person are inextogether. For he feels that, despite his personal dis-
him on purely
274
abstract grounds.
L.
H.
It is
Rajah
with
his
trivial,
which he
sword.
The
action
is
unavailing,
but symbolically Myers has indicated that the evil of the world
is
is
satirizing a
prominent
literary
group of his
Bloomsbury.
The camp
is
its independence of
freedom from conventions, its emancipation from the
and the Prig. It casts off 'dreary actuality and basks in the
glories in
its
Philistine
glitter
that
he
of
is
Not only
all its
is
its
inhabitants are
bound by
camp
same vices
intellectuals subscribed
Mr
clared that
"Works of
art
275
PART THREE
means to good'. The potential value of a work of art lay
in the fact that it could 'at any moment become a means to a state of
mind of superlative excellence'. The aim of every civilized man was
the 'richest and fullest life obtainable, a life which contains the maximum of vivid and exquisite experiences'. Civilized man desired
'complete self-development and complete self-expression'.
What Bloomsbury made of Moore's doctrine, then, was subjectivist and aesthetic, something very different from Myers's transcendentalist position. As Keynes put it in his Memoir:
are direct
people's,
quences.
They
and
'after'
. .
The effect was to 'escape from the Benthamite tradition'- there was
no place for social effort or moral strenuousness of the Victorian
type:
.
. .
an end in
social action as
itself
as a
lugu-
brious duty had dropped out of our Ideal, and, not only social
action,
The
but the
life
success, wealth,
ambition
anti-traditional
element in
politics,
all this
was strong:
We
. .
We
The self-regarding mind, then, freed itself from locality and background which might have carried a hint of continuity and obligation.
This represents a position very different from that to which Amar
came, with its underlying acceptance of social responsibility. But what
Myers particularly detested was the Bloomsbury 'tone', the element
of communal self-congratulation implicit in the self-conscious
of social aloofness and 'difference': 'The
or woman', urged
Mr
Clive Bell,
'is
life
spirit
one long
assertion
of his or her
276
L. H.
merit.' (Civilization.)
Keynes, reveals
It
developed
allusions. It
is
true that
members
criticized
in a spirit
of mockery and
differences
raillery,
Mr
Bell,
letters,
restrained.
Certain syllables,
stressed,
but not
at all in
In Bloomsbury, then,
it
might be
said, as
Myers so
ironically
wrote
of the Pleasance:
Here you might come across people of every variety - except
one, the commonplace. Dull, conventional people - people
who weren't lit by the divine spark, had no chance of gaining
admission here. Daniyal had thrown away the shackles of
ordinary prejudices and cant.
In this, the reasons why Myers, who had formed many Bloomsbury acquaintances, gradually but effectively dissociated himself
277
PART THREE
from the group become
clear.
personal.
and Damayanti, Myers reveals the positive nature of a married relationship based on complete candour as between absolute equals
working through communion with transcendental powers
'All
communion', says the Guru, the wise man who defines, too overtly
for good novel writing, the moral implications of the book, 'is
through the Centre. When the relation of man and man is not through
the Centre it corrupts and destroys itself.' This notion, of course, was
. . .
it
in
fact, right'.
years of his
278
acquaintances
It is
book
inhabit imaginary
real
problems
as
been.
say,
George
life,
for
an immediate and closely realized English environment; nor did he, like Lawrence, possess the 'spirit of place'.
setting characters in
He
observed individuals.
setting
as self-consciousness
than
as
intimately
which marks
of the
civilized
a desire to be approved.
life,
He
has,
of personality, which saw beof such a life - polite conversation and a dabbling acquaintanceship with the arts. He sees the
inadequacy of liberal humanism for the sort of being man is; and one
remembers certain scenes - Daniyal's stepping on the cat's head is an
example - because they challenge the easy optimism of the liberal
tradition. He has, that is, a sense of evil. Had he had more 'imaginaof
tion' in the
vitality,
criteria
and
is
intelligent;
D. H.
easy to
The
Unconscious
through
But even
in the
is
relation
between
In the case of Lawrence the outlines of the 'legend' are very familiar.
280
D. H.
IN LOVE
between husband and wife, and between child and parent, in a working-class environment; the youth and early manhood of a provincial
elementary-school teacher, with an early success as a writer which
him
distinguished
as
much
sustenance to the
conflict
man
(as later
quarters
all
illustrated
common
sense; the
ness, the
much
them
is
ill-
unnecessary.
be read over again, and probably with more objectivity as the years go by and the personalities and topicalities involved cease to irritate or to divert. Lawrence is a person that future
students of English literature and English civilization will have to
meet; and
it
will
may
anecdote,
the
brilliant
of
his life -
letter-writer,
is
journalist,
and travel-book
his creative
Many of
Now
he
is
most completely
it
a poet these
281
PART THREE
human and inhuman power of the universe, which we may suppose
archaic man to have felt, and which Lawrence, with that strong
'archaic' strain in his genuis, can make articulate more wonderfully
than any other modern writer in English. When this poetry appears
in Lawrence - more often in his prose than in his verse - our doubts,
objections,
silenced.
human
But Lawrence
cosmos, and
is
a novelist
when he
and
deals in
- and he himself described his own subjectbetween men and women' - we are often
disturbed and challenged, and sometimes repelled, by what we sense
of the point of view of the author. This is not only because Lawrence
preaches to the reader, and many of us dislike being preached to anyway, apart from disliking what he preaches. Even when Lawrence
is more fully an artist and makes us feel what he want us to feel,
instead of insisting that we ought to feel it, bafflement and irritation
often occur. It is at such times that our attention is drawn away from
the work to the man behind the work, and we cannot but deviate
into thoughts about those well-known sexual obsessions and social
unease which critics and biographers have so much dwelt on. So we
lose contact with the world of the author's imagination and find ourselves on the plane of ideas and opinions. It is easy then to discover that
Lawrence as a moralist is thoroughly incoherent. Any attempt to
institutionalize his moral, social, or political teaching would produce
chaos - assuming we could imagine what the attempt would be like.
Lawrence is too obviously generalizing improperly, and at times
erroneously, from his own case. This is especially clear in the matter
of sex. There is obviously self-deception, hence insincerity, in a work
matter
relationships
as 'the relations
authority'.
But
of Lawrence, though
is
it
it
exists, is relevant
reflects a failure in
Lawrence's
when
mood
D. H.
turning in the
deflect us
on
of
to the plane
which compel us to
a valuable reappraisal,
we may
life
has got,
is
so powerful that
we
is
and
Rawdon
show how
it
would, and
sufficient to
it
is
his curious
Lilly.
happened.
may
indeed
feel
woman
the writer
when
book, to
with any
own
forming
a relationship
is
to
his
less
powerfully.
we
can find this fullness in the presentment of the donnees of the situation
PART THREE
and
The Daughters
self-mistrust.
of the Vicar, in
represents instinctive
is
at its best
when
it
'life'
It is
who
movement,
Lawrence's over-insistence on
telling us things
we
obscure from us the very real extent to which he often succeeds in conlife and actual human problems. A man who
much of his life as Lawrence did in preaching to women, or
to one woman, may fail (as Lawrence so often does) to pay due regard
to the rules
but
this
which govern
does not
mean
that
he
is
who
and proof;
human
reality
of the people
strains
may
in the
Perhaps
it is
than his matter, which has proved a stumbling-block for many readers.
If we take
up The
Tales o/D.
we
will soon
counted for
much in
is
common,
there.
we
are
accustomed
is
that
Lawrence
Never-
absurd.
it is
certainly
In his
and
where Lawrence
is
sensitive
and
spiritual.
He
can use a
284
D. H.
IN LOVE
have a tone and ring uneasily reminiscent of the intellectual underworld of 'British Israel', Count Keyserling, or Max Nordau. This is
a pity, because
it
which ordinary
But
vitality
it
is
of Lawrence's
question, even
style in general.
What
seems
still
and
an open
among
his admirers, is whether he succeeded in expowers in self-sufficient works of art. It is well known
that Lawrence rejected the traditional canons of structure and method
in the novel. He wanted Arnold Bennett (the 'old imitator') to be
told that the principles Bennett invoked held good only for novels
that were 'copies' of other novels, and he spoke in exasperation about
the 'ossiferous skin-and-grief form which others wanted to impose
on him. Some of what Lawrence said on this subject can be dismissed
as mere special pleading. A judicious admirer of Lawrence will not
cite Aaron's Rod or Kangaroo as triumphs of originality of form. They
'
wrote too
fiction
It is
faults.
Much
can be urged in
life as
a professional
about the
faults. If Lawrence is
and j ournalism.
285
PART THTtEE
Nor
will
writer
is
latter.
own maxim
American
Literature, 1923)
to those
tale
artist.
Trust the
tale' applies
artist.
The
cohere
at
as
from
ideas
if
looked
Too much
of what seems to
filter.
in
- that in
was going against his own proclaimed prinWhat is harder to make out is just what positively those princome to: just what is the formal character of the works that do
didacticism Lawrence
ciples.
ciples
D. H.
would be missed
if
IN
LOVE
we
as fully representative.
It is
on
books which
is
like
a fuller significance
and work,
it is
when we know
self-sufficient
ignorant of
life
that a reader
dom from
literariness.
They
mark
in
its
free-
and
which
by 'Miriam')
to deal
directly
it
lies
make us
is little
would
in the
lie
book
to
in the imagin-
it
shows no
clear anticipation
Rainbow.
It is
best
of the
stress.
And whether
tion
Women
am sure his
in
in
selection here
Love seems a
or not
what he
is
right.
we
can go
says about
And
all
Lawrence
Lawrence's mature
art.
his greatest
287
PART THREE
(despite the carry-over
it
it
it is
work (though
initial
Love
is
is
Women
it,
rather than
its
predecessor,
it is
seen for
puzzling as
it
Women
has not
in
all
Women
in
so radically
Love
is
the
more 'modern' of the two, the one in which Lawrence is more concerned with what we recognize as contemporary life. There is something of a pastoral, idealizing, idyllic quality about The Rainbow - at
any
rate, in
life
in the
story of the childhood and youth of the girl Ursula. That earlier
part has a certain epic spaciousness
which
is
Its
idyllic quality
is
beauti-
But
Eliot
that quality
of The Mill on
is
the Floss.
Women
288
in
Love, then,
is
chosen here as
D. H.
the
more complex,
difficult,
to
IN LOVE
(as in
Dr Leavis's treatment of
(in
Chapter
rx)
even
(in
reading as essentially
at a first
do not go
far
beyond the devices of previous fiction, in that they are the economical
and vivid summing-up of a significance that has already been made
explicit. In chapters like that called 'Rabbit' (xvm), and most of all
in the wonderful chapter called 'Moony' (xrx), where Birkin,
watched by Ursula without
water to shatter the moon's
Their significance
is
his
reflection,
that they
Lawrence
Dr
art
as a
formal innovator
justifies
is
happening
of fiction.
Leavis's
method of analysing
representative themes
nificance.
But
this
An
which the
What
is
artistry.
critic's
But
more
Women
in
it
also
seems to
me
critic's
claims for
to reveal weaknesses
Love about?
It is
think,
by beginning at the beginning of the novels with the conversation between the two sisters,
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. This opening scene impressively
illustrates Lawrence's power of suggesting undercurrents of feeling
best) to set
about answering
and atmosphere:
dimly
in the
this question
more
background, the
social
unease of the
- yet
done
up and fading out in
girls
all is
is
about
28o
are introduced to
this
is
simply but
PART THREE
book gets going we are ready to assume that
be about marriage, and the varying attitudes of the two girls
to
(who
men
in marriage.
as central characters.
soon becomes
are thus
We
two
is
to
become. But
of the novel
girls
is
not
the
we
Women
in
up the book
in exasperation.
It
is
may
in the
found
in the novel.
And
it
all
on
Though modelled on
the
it.
is
definitely a character in
He is exasperating and
touching,
290
D. H.
in
how
Chapter xrx,
this effect is
in
is
IN
LOVE
comparatively rare in
sisters
obtained:
life in
many
way he
things in
life
clever enough, he
is
much of
a preacher.
He
is
really a
priest.'
'Exactly
He
what anybody
can't hear
'He
cries
And of course
violence.
with him
It
makes
it is
hopeless.
talking to
- he
Nobody
is
force
convinced
too ioud.'
of violence.
by
is
should think
it
live
exhausting.
One would be shouted down every time, and rushed into his
way without any choice. He would want to control you entirely. He cannot allow that there is any other mind but his
own. And then the real clumsiness of his mind is its lack of
self-criticism.
Ursula
'assents
No,
think
vaguely' to
it
would be
this,
perfectly intolerable.'
pre-*
from Gudrun',
are
made both
291
PART THREE
understandableness of Ursula's reaction to
. . .
we
it.
We
him
see
often as
hear of
... his
won-
man: and
there
was
at the
of the
stiffest
of
his self-dramatization
realists
And
achievement
merely
is
in the
of literature. Not
we
it is
are inevitable in
any
live
shifts
human
spectators, because
we
are
made
to feel that
between
Mr
broken and
not
relationship.
The
result
way
mere
lived,
which
that
this
in Sons
is
is
it
is
that
than as
continuous
too great,
as in the
is
to take sides, to
it
his best
good
work
is
art requires.
But
this
compatibility
would not be
possible with-
is
personally
objections
which
this
as a
cious Ursula.
Birkin, then,
is
292
He is
D. H.
IN LOVE
Lawrence both to
wandering which seems
give
some
trace
of plausibility to the
restless
to characterize his
from every
class
social structure
is accompanied by a deep
of England. Birkin has no
to put in
its
place. This
political significance;
but
tween
in
'fulfilled' individuals,
who
It is
to be a relationship be-
in the
who
One
power.
lover
is
understands,
it),
and
The
as the
in love,
of individuality
some
unknown, non-human, and trans-human
still
(as
unknown
Birkin-Lawrence
is
woman
and to
loss
access.
Birkin theme
Ursula
with
we learn
it.
His
about early
D. H.
between
relationship
this.
He
IN
LOVE
in the novel,
represent the
love-affair,
man and
woman.
wrong kind of
feels
evoked
in the
noveJ
by
West
is
introduced,
we
ism. But
as such.
we have
it is
calls
is
it
too he supposes to be a
and
on
He
their relationship.
senses behind
maternal
egocentric
essentially
it
that
devouring
which readers
possessiveness
We have
of the novel.
tion
foreshadowed
it
in
Chapter
v, in a conversa-
his friend
think
is
the
because
it
kind that
is
suggested
it
seems to be
that he has
life
together
as
some
no answer
a certain
pure single
really
does
when
much
'What do you
characteristic question,
life?' It is a
activity.'
It
is
'I
find that
difficulty in
to
it,
'It
doesn't centre at
social
mechanism',
is
as
of
by the
one
also characteristic
'Wherein
all. It is artificially
held
to say.
Birkin agrees, but presses his view that 'there remains only this perfect
union with
woman
isn't
anything
else'.
rejection
which expresses
294
his
D. H.
relations
with
his
close,
his extinction in an
It is
so
much
easier to
work out
contrasting to
analytically, after
in
Women
in
Love.
's
domineering, sentimentality, aestheticism, nirtatiousness, smart flippancy - as all symptoms of living at too shallow a level, excessive
'consciousness' (as
Lawrence
drawing
its
perverse
but
it is
general failure.
is
apt to
sexual
more
PART THREE
Now we may
him
in
at
that,
many of them,
like
Love
is
Gerald
He
is
wholly convincing;
is
assigned.
is
more
drama
is
felt
is
him
is
felt like
It is
at last flies
worth nothing
away
to
its
final
may
history.
its
validity
from any
still
faithfulness to social
be valid even
if there
were
in fact
296
D. H.
IN LOVE
'idealism', the
father.
in
him they
ruthless,
hate
respect
sibility for the amusements on the water' -lest this 'responsibility' for
what happens, the drowning of his sister, should seem too tenuous,
the point is driven home by the failure of his attempt at rescue. And
ironically this cruel expression of his limitations comes just at the
moment when he has been able to achieve one of the rare moments of
'apartness'
woman
he loves.
It is
not Lawrence's
is
it
which
is
On
the corollary of
'will-power'
is
Gudrun. But
it is
lar
home
incapacity for true love - that this need should call out in
Gudrun
development
as a possible
it is
in
sisters are
in
Gudrun, and
shown
as different
cold
is
Everything
organized.
in
And
Women
it is
297
PART THREE
of characters and setting is necessary for successful fiction.
'People don't do such things' remains a valid adverse criticism of a
novel. Now, once the total structure of Women in Love has been
understood - and it is this on the whole that has been found difficult the characters do affect us as belonging to a life we know, and behaving in keeping with it (given a certain amount of poetic licence in
credibility
ment.
It
It
enables Lawrence to
mother
relevant to the
Gerald theme, and yet are given the kind of dramatic presence,
natural dialogue,
expects.
and ordinary
credibility
Birkin's relation to
Hermione.
Hermione
is
a sort
of feminine
cannot meet,
mione
is
is
a counterpart
knows he
bring in
some
satire
(he
Gerald theme
is
attitude to sex.
And
there
is
no need
which
dual theme.
also to
in
who
in
plays his
Love has a
his
be accomplished with
Women
its
arises naturally
Loerke,
Thus Women
inevitability
and naturalness.
'plot', if it is
to be so called, does
D. H.
IN
LOVE
is
de-
If
the
velopment, but
it is
at a
whole book had a convincingness equal to what we find in the treatment of the Gerald theme, it could be judged an assured artistic
success. But it suffers from a grave central weakness. The book's
strong pattern derives from the contrast between the destinies of the
two couples, and the subsidiary, though important, masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. (We may compare the strong
pattern given to Anna Karenina by Tolstoy's use of the three marriages
of Anna, Dolly, and Kitty, the 'unhappy', the 'ordinary', and the
Dr
Leavis
would have
is
meaning of Women
in
Love?
up a standard
- or at least
book) achieve with Ursula the kind of fulfilment which he has made
Perhaps if Lawrence had conveyed the positive quality
of those moments - as distinct from the mere feeling of repose and
as
no
better here
by
Chatterleys Lover.
And
if
it is
urged
that,
is
But
fully
enough
this
is
to
all
he could do,
we must
oiLady
understand the
state
of
To
mind of
understand Birkin
the Lawrence
who
wrote of him. It is true that Women in Love, as part of The Sisters, was
presumably conceived before the horror of the war-years had closed
down on Lawrence: conceived during the happy interval between the
break with 'Miriam' and the coming of the war. But it is hard not to
see in Birkin the Lawrence of 1916, amid the penury and misery of
his life in Cornwall, and in his mind always the horror of the war and
299
PART THREE
the nightmare of suspicion and persecution.
of human
must be granted
licence
life?
of
in the presentation
who thinks
of making
it
this
experiment in
to be at
all
convinc-
ing,
in
This suggests a
Birkin's
Birkin
first
Birkin has
not
come
sufficient. It
'In
the Train'.
and there
show
of love he wanted
illusory.
is
to
is
is
And
work of
say: pointing a
NOTES
I.
D. H. Lawrence,
Novelist,
by
F.
to say this
imagination.
James joyce
pleteness
as a writer, a
is
consistency
coherence and
com-
which he aimed
From
ment when,
first stories
the extraordinary
work
there
If
is
it is
the
be remembered
not by
Everywhere
it is
else - in
this
Dublinen,
zation of
final effect
From
...
is
right,
from
his point
of view,
it.
Stephen Hero
By
we
theory of epiphanies:
spiritual manifestation,
man
mind
to
like the
to reject
poet that he
as a
it is
kind of poetry.
itself'
in a
memor-
for the
most delicate and evanesmoments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast
Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable
seeing that they themselves are the
cent of
countenance.
301
PART THREE
'Yes,' said Stephen.
refer to
it,
will pass
'I
it
catch a glimpse of
it,
it.
and know
'What?'
my
'Imagine
spiritual
once what
at
it is:
The moment
once
all at
is
epiphany
It is iust in this
Then
see
it
epiphany.'
its
of a
is
epiphanised.
of beauty.'
'Yes?' said
Cranly absently. 1
wrought
after.
discussion
on
clearly in analytical
aesthetics in
worth
modern
fiction
relation
painting. Joyce
it is
is
Woolf-
work
his
bristles
the measure
of his superiority
itself in
Even
was
concern with
it
if his
emphasis
also his
incom-
parable strength.
right at this point to
It is
An
time
esthetic
image
What
audible
is
is
presented in time,
tained
stasis'
spatial,
what
is
visible
mminously apprehended as self-bounded and self-conupon the immeasurable background of space and time
. .
is
The
it
.
quiddi.as, the
is felt
the artist
302
JAMES JOYCE
supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic
image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has
been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is
the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state
very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Gaivani, using a phrase
almost as beautiful as
enchantment of the
heart. 2
Stephen goes on, incidentally, to develop a theory of the depersonalization of the artist
which reminds us
is
that
Mr
Eliot
was not,
particularly interesting
is,
in 1917, a
the
first,
apparently abstract passages have - they are part and parcel of Stephen's
in
his devil's
vow
of 'non serviam' and rejected utterly the claims of church and state,
sets forth upon his life of silence, exile, and cunning to encounter 'the
of experience and to forge in the smithy of
reality
created conscience of
The
my
race'.
achievement.
in
my
He
is
embedded deep
leaves
Dublin
It is
in the
whole ofJoyce's
life
and
artists,
who
politan
a more than
word - more cosmo-
Rabelaisian
is
the
richly and
303
PART THREE
remarkably convenient starting-point for the would-be initiate and
one which requires the minimum of outside support. The reader need
not know or worry that Stephen is to be Telemachus; he will grasp
soon enough what is at this stage of the book far more important,
that Stephen is his mother's son and that the mother, though she is
one and unique, is also something more impersonal, Irish and Catholic,
and so linked - not just arbitrarily but in the complex inter-relations
of life itself - with mother-figures more pervasive; and Stephen,
though he is Stephen Dedalus, student and artist, mummer and
pedant, is a little boy lost, partaking of the problems and nature of
Hamlet and of Jesus, as well as of Parnell and Ulysses' son. IrelandIsland is also all islands, the sea all seas, and the key in Stephen's
pocket has not just in the ordinary sense 'dramatic significance' but
is
. .
Ulysses can
of the
best,
an awareness ofJoyce's
own
life.
The Homeric
parallels,
though too
is
conveyed
Odyssey,
is
Dublin day,
easier to plot
partially
doubtless
in the
geographic-
all
rules
broken - from behind Homer. But one should most certainly not conclude that Joyce's interest in his hero
hand.
He
is
who saw
Joyce frequently while Ulysses was being written and read passages
they were completed, relates that the author's
back
a section
vincingness of
first
question,
as
on getting
Bloom
as a 'character',
Ulysses.
And
304
is
ambition
JAMES JOYCE
man, Bloom is.' With him,
human manysidedness achieves a new level of literary expression.
Which is not to say that he makes a more vivid or convincing impression than, say, Faistaff or Mr Boffin or Isabel Archer. What one
can confidently say is that one knows more about Bloom than about
was
a cultured all-round
fulfilled. 'He's
these others. 4
Ulysses
is
at
about convincingly
'real'
and
people in an actual
book
presented with a
is
at the
world. In
woman is
is
applied to a
is
city,
implied through a
Dublin Bay)
series
in a hostile
continuity of life
The
difference
is
involved.
between the
significance
and
in, say,
is
is
is
nothing mystical
CA.-I2
30$
it,
PART THREE
plot.
You
Lady Deadlock, even though they are in a very important sense searching for one another and are indeed daughter and mother, with the
relationship of Bloom and Stephen. Nor does the word 'psychological', in its more workaday sense, help us much in defining this
new significance which Joyce expresses. Bloom's need for a son is not
to be thought of primarily in terms of an individual 'psychological*
it is
work
as guilt-ridden.
an alternative to a philosophy.
- to
it
grow
in an
fellow-citizens
crowded Dublin,
In this
phrases as
it is
306
is
JAMES JOYCE
productive material basis in the Joyce world
is
very significant.
It
is.
What Joyce
is
phrases
is
in contradiction to the
life
of the
book. For it implies that the fabric is stable, and that its surface
can be decorated with the most subtle intricacy, like the Book
of Kells ... It assumes something as permanent as the church
was for its monks. Yet Stephen and Bloom are both drawn as
What
is
insight, as
opposed to mere
stimulating as
the
book
is
itself,
is
the
virtuosity,
enormous
vitality
the inter-relationships
which Joyce's
it is
and human
sensuously haunting.
What
is
leit-
as intellectually
unsatisfying about
to: the
words
'play with'.
They
it is
its own sake. It would be naive to imagine that Joyce, the admirer
of Ibsen, believed that the activity of the artist ignored morality.
When he wrote of forging the uncreated conscience of his race he
for
307
PART THREE
meant what he said and knew as well as James or Conrad or Hamlet
the ramifications the of word conscience. 'I believe that in composing
my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I
have taken the
try.'
through
around
towards the
liberator
a conception
art,
all
step
first
many-worded
as
of my coun-
other struggles, as
spiritual liberation
also
below and
many-sided, reaching
all-round.
It is
awake
not by chance that Ulysses ends with Molly Bloom's halfreverie. The final chapter pushes to the furthest extent the
'stream of consciousness'
method-
way
('I
try to give
considerable
scholastic
philosophy and a life-long passion for vocal music), his aim was not
that of the analyst, the scientist. And he was bound to run up against
an outstanding difficulty you cannot isolate the individual's consciousfrom what is happening around and to him. Hence, throughout
most of Ulysses, 'stream of consciousness' is mingled continuously and
:
ness
of consciousness'
is
finally
comes
into
its
and for the simple reason that Molly Bloom is half-asleep. She
doing nothing and can therefore dispense with punctuation. Joyce,
own
308
JAMES JOYCE
remarkable chapter, seems to have stumbled - not that one
normally thinks of him as stumbling - on one ideal possibility in his
in this
moment of sleep
its
he defeats
implications.
his
By
enemy; but
con-
it is
at
Molly Bloom
is
permitted
is
of affirmation associated
with a principle rather than a person. Her yes, like Anna Livia's, is the
yes of the Eternal Feminine, no more an act of volition than the
sea, without which life would stop alwhich even Joyce does not seem seriously to
contemplate.
Finnegans
Wake
Bloom
an all-round book.
is
an
all-
think
it is
is
it
as
theory of 'self-expression'.
is not a
development of public
language, involving a use of the resources of half a dozen different
tongues, though fundamentally it is English, with the spoken (or sometimes sung) note of Dublin guiding its cadences. Every sentence,
indeed every word, can be logically explained. It is true that for any
private language,
it is
a very extraordinary
is
is
virtually
is
which
is
in the
end perhaps
its
most vul-
nerable quality.
the
tic
book is not
to
be dismissed
as a
mere
309
PART THREE
The
than
Wake
that
is
it
can, in
its
its
parts perhaps
more
not easy,
in a
few words, to
only propose to the sceptical reader that he should, duly armed with
some of the
essential
Robinson, 12 take the plunge into one of the more accessible areas of the
book - say the opening of the 'Shem the Penman' passage (p. 169 ff.) assured at least that in this
of
means of acquiring
it,
all
still,
to the
that
gramophone record
in
which Joyce
It
should perhaps be
is
unusually lyrically
'attractive'
both
and
in Ulysses
may
this particular
passage
Those passages,
and Finnegans Wake, in which the author indulges possibly raise false expectations.
rivers and seas seem to tempt him to it - in somewhat lush and easy
rhythms do not show Joyce at his best.
The core of the method of Finnegans Wake is contained in a famous
anecdote related by Frank Budgen
I
'I
'Does that
'Two
I
mean
that
it
progressing?
it all
a great deal?'
said.
thought of
Flaubert.
'What
'I
way
appropriate.
believe
think
have
it.'
asked.
my book is a modern
310
JAMES JOYCE
my book as women's silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which express the effect of on my
in
it
tells
method of work
By
about
his
of
its
in general.
by putting the
of language,
putting
as
'assailed' at
word
is
well
as
the end
allowed, so to
comes through of a possible reversal of object and subject. The position of 'all' in the sentence gives it a maximum effect, referring back
to 'embraces' and forward to 'him'. This last would be lost, or weakened, ifJoyce had written 'all of him', and at the same time the maleness of 'him' would have been less potent too. Just as the perfume,
placed anywhere else in the sentence, would have impregnated it less
thoroughly.
What Joyce
playing the
the
is
up
game
to here
all
order of words.
is
He is
Poets arrange
is
them
the
way
that will
as far as
is
Joyce
did, but in
its
essence the
And
the experi-
method of
Finnegans
Lost or The
Waste Land.
subject-matter.
neither, if
It is
It is this
that
makes
his rhetoric
Tom
uniquely
rich.
Com-
How
is
the Crostiguns,
311
and
PART THREE
lowness
Stellas
vespertine
vesamong them)
at
Poisse! 14
a bare
more orthodox
sense,
which
is a circular book
more or less impossible, for
ultimately all evaluation must depend on some objective reality against
development or decay,
is
us. It is
Wake is
whether, Finnegans
will
be judged, and
this
is
how
precisely
far,
what
or indeed
is,
in
the
more
it is
A. G. Strong,
undermined.
it
two
uneasily.
as
that
processes,
association,
fusion. 15
I
think one
is
bound
to
come
to this conclusion if
by any
one attempts to
with
his wife
fun,
to the passage?
would be tempted
to assume,
were
it
Joyce had never seen a cricket match in his life and had merely
collected the terms from a study of Wisden. Judged by a normally
that
avoided that
this
312
JAMES JOYCE
let
is
is
constantly brought
up
name - or are we to imply that names are got by somemore than chance? Always in the later Joyce there is
chance of his
thing
hovering in the
some mystic
air
in
themselves
significance.
is less
real
it
is
real
except words.
Finnegans Wake can only be read and enjoyed in its own terms, i.e.
by an acceptance for the purposes of the book of the whole Joycean
it,
the great
objections
That
Strong
is
to a theory',
regard
is
this
judgement
as a dismissal.
still,
Wake
is
likely to get
hesitates to
make
a larger
as,
all in all in
releasing
does things with words that no one previously had done, but
final
predominant
effect
is
the
tears assert
force?
Certainly in the
themselves as a humanizing
with their sanity any tendencies towards pedanYet the very consistency of his total effort, the very
completeness of the structure he creates has in it something inhuman,
leaving one in the end with the feeling that he who accepted so boldly
all the implications of his exile - poorjoist unctuous to polise nopebobbies - had flinched at nothing except life itself.
force, counteracting
try
and
isolation.
313
PART THREE
NOTES
Stephen Hero (1944), p. 188. See also Introduction, p. 13 fL
Spencer.
1.
by Theodore
2.
otherwise almost incomprehensible, but also because it counteracts the overmetaphysicaj approachto Joyce which many of his admirers (including Messrs
6.
Op.
7.
me
96.
simple
does
8.
cit., p.
(p.
390).
it?
9. tetters, pp.
10.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934), p. 94.
Wake. p. 115.
11. Finnegans
12.
13.
Op.
Skeleton
Key
cit., p.
to
Finnegans
Wake
20.
Wake, p. 177.
The Sacred River (1947),
14. Finnegans
15.
p. 147.
(1947).
But
EZRA POUND'S
The name
first
of his long
career, together
least
one phase
and
artistic battles
mentor and
Moreover, two of his major works
of that period, Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917) and Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley (1920), are explicitly attempts to portray and diagnose the
state
of British (not
at all
S. Eliot.
ofAmerican) culture
at
Women
the historical
moment
in
in
Mauberley at any rate has been accepted into the English poetic
tradition, in the sense that
about
this
his
work, accepting or
British culture
no
less
necessary to
it
else quarrelling
than with
its
with
come
its
at all serious
to terms
with
conclusions about
methods.
Because Eliot has thrown in his
the British reader will probably
lot
with Britain
come
to
315
PART THREE
is
the strategy
to
common
to
of
which
is
the past,
sources.
When
interlarded and
poem
such re-
sown more thickly than in The Waste Land, and that the
are sometimes more devious, it is easy to decide irritably that
ferences are
allusions
which
less
is
and open to
Eliot escapes:
'eau-forte
Par Jacquemart'
Was
And
Flaubert',
The
engraver's.
his tool
Firmness,
Not
His
but an
art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To
forge Achaia.
means an etching;
and the context then makes it clear that the fictitious minor poet,
Mauberley (whose career we are following as in a biography), is at this
point turning in his art from the relatively full and detailed richness of
the etcher's rendering of reality to the severely selective art 'In profile'
knowledge of Flaubert
from his English contemporaries, at least in intention, in rather the same way, as throwing his
emphasis upon selection of the one telling detail rather than on
of the engraver of medallions.
very
little
accumulation of
many
details
and
instances.
And
in the art
3i6
of the
of composition
EZRA POUND
and colour. This
may well
without
is
entirely
and
all
this
sufficiently intelligible.
name-dropping'.
It is
is
pretentious, a parade
which
at
is
work
as a
we
we
Eliot's,
uncover what
whole, and in
this
poem
in particular.
In the first place
pertise'
lion,
is
that to talk
of 'recondite ex-
of paintings by Piero
della Francesca,
us,
it
Pound
these
names represent experiences which should be familiar to any educated man, and he is arguing, in particular, that neither we nor the
Americans can see our own cultural traditions in proper perspective
except in the context of achievements in other languages or by other
cultures. He would be happy if our reading of these lines sent us to
the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the
National Gallery to look
and
at Italian paintings.
all
of
Percy
Roman
in fact, while
not share.
Eliot does
as in his
by
at late
Pound
He
unexampled conwhich
a further intention
his
contemporaries
Wyndham
already illustrious
whom
he respected -
paintings they
should look at and what books they ought to read. For instance,
concealed behind the cryptic reference to the etching by Jacquemart
the name of the French poet Theophile Gautier, who is
much more explicitly elsewhere in the poem. Pound
is
Gautier
as Eliot does,
because he
In fact
human
is
sure he
because Gautier
fits
suits his
pointed to
alludes to
knew
it.
own sake,
317
not merely
as
of
somehow
PART THREE
reflecting his
own predicament.
whom
Robert Browning,
which he
shares
with
as his
own
interest
It is this
first
master; and
it
is
ment.
this,
by
Though Pound
than Eliot
is
state
of mind and
Prufrock', 1 the
Mauberley, the
fictitious
poem
is
presents,
own
poem
is
commonly
his
own
predica-
more Mauberley
read as if H.
S.
no more than
poem
Pound
diffident aesthete, all too tremulously aware of the various artisachievements of the past (herein, incidentally, another reason - a
and
tic
of nuance
poem
pro-
poem
ley,
but about E.
is,
Pound
a section
himself:
318
EZRA POUND
E.P.
For three
yea-rs,
de
Son Sepulchre
No,
Caught
Tqoit]
The chopped
He
De
No
presents
Pound
as
as
signs
him
native
De son
eage';
this inserted
quotation,
first line
of
is
deriding, in
so conclusively con-
as 'a half-savage
country'
is
Pound's
an example of the Eng-
Englishman
is
no
we know
fool.
all
this
fictitious
poem
the
America
lishman's
'For
of
who in
as passing
wittily
Pound had
already started his version of the story of Odysseus, the long epic poem
319
PART THREE
which has occupied him ever
home
view, Circe,
jective,
this
as
famous line
have seen,
we
'His
in a
a transatlantic critic.
(=
mind of the
first
Penelope for
this energetic
...
American. 2
Thus the speaker of the poem says what is true while meaning to say
(in identical words) what is false.
Pound has lately said, of commentators on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
'The worst muddle they make is in failing to see that Mauberley
buries E. P. in the first poem gets rid of all his troublesome energies.' 3
But though we have been obtuse if we suppose that the speaker of
this epitaph is Pound himself, there is no way of knowing that the
speaker in fact is Mauberley. Moreover Pound's comment implies,
what it is not easy to discover within the poetry itself, that subse;
quent
sections,
of the
poem
of language,
Section
incidentally,
of Walter Pater
in
is
in others,
more
this
320
comment on
the First
EZRA POUND
World War,
isn't
acknowledges that
age demanded',
if
still
less
it
demand
his
own
'classics in
themselves incapable of
paraphrase'.
this
do,
sulated history
of
D. G.
'Yeux Glauques'
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin
like
brook-water,
still-born
In those days.
of feminine beauty,
as
embodied
in
women (the most famous is Rossetti's Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall) who were at once these painters' models and their mistresses, but
several
321
PART THREE
embodied also in the paintings of the school, of which one of the most
famous is 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid'. But metre and
rhyme make 'Thin like brook- water' refer also, in defiance of grammar, to Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam's Ruhaiyat,
which went unnoticed for years until discovered by Rossetti, remaindered on a bookstall. Such ('Thin like brook-water') is Mauberley's view of the Pre-Raphaelite ideals, of the painting and poetry in
which those ideals were embodied, and of the public taste which
mdisainiinately overlooked or applauded them. In the next poem,
the focus has shifted to the later literary generation of 'the nineties
and
it
1
,
Veil,
among
Yeats's Autobiographies;
Ernest Dowson
by Victor Gustave Plarr, who is concealed in the poem under the
fictitious name, 'Monsieur Verog'. To read these two poems as
spoken by Mauberley rather than Pound turns the edge of the otherwise weighty objection 4 that Pound's irony here is of the unfocused
kind which enables him to have it both ways, so that the tartness and
the indulgence, the mockery and the affection, lie side by side without modifying each other. If Mauberley is the speaker, however, this
unresolved attitude is dramatically appropriate and effective, and
own
subsequent
failure.
of affairs
it
Max Beerbohm)
ful best-seller
of
ness:
Stretches
in
bark
leafy hands',
drawing-room
await the Lady Valentine's commands.
the
first
Gautier.
EZRA POUND
The
transformed
sexual connotation
is
present
meaning by which Apollo the god of poetry figwaiting humbly upon his
patroness. What the poet wants from her is the traditional acknow-
is
the allegorical
nothing
from
no such
body or principle of
It would require
metamorphose her in this way,
respectable
less
one
whole sequence of twelve short poems
We have to
reads better, that several difficulties are ironed out, if they are taken
fictional Mauberley. Yet many of them can be read
spoken directly by Pound. The limitation involved here is
inherent in any use of a created character standing between the poet
as
as
spoken by the
if
and the reader. This device, by- which the poet speaks
in an assumed
was first exploited consistently by Browning in his dramatic
monologues. What Pound called the 'persona' and what Yeats called
the 'mask' are refinements upon Browning's model. Eliot's Prufrock
and Gerontion, and his Tiresias who speaks The Waste Land, correspond to Pound's Mauberley, and so (though with certain important
differences) do Yeats's Michael Robartes, his Ribh, and his Crazy
character,
Jane.
To
all
appears to
all
recommended
itself
because
it
at different
work only
if the
persona
is
sufficiently differentiated
from
the poet himself- otherwise the irony lapses, and the reader overlooks
seems to
me
to
Eliot's
Gerontion.
How
Pound and
323
Eliot
were working
in
PART THREE
concert can be seen from a
later (in 1932, in
The
years
Criterion):
at a particular
. . .
. . . ,
Pound
point
is
the pedagogue
clear:
is
characteristically evident.
poets
But the
central
surges of expansive
rhythm never
On
terns, as in
short.
one of the
sections
Some
case ...
quick to arm,
some
. .
324
of slaughter;
This
EZRA POUND
may look like free
verse; in fact
it is
a learned imitation
of the
Standing on
its
and Part
n,
is
all
which he
had seemed to contrive just so as not to speak in his own person at
all. This wonderfully dramatic moment is signalized by the sudden
appearance of a wholly unexpected metre and style, flowing, plangent,
and cantabile, so wholly traditional in every respect that the voice of
to speak out personally, even confessionally, into a situation
tradition
of English
song:
And
The
in the
is
Comus;
it is
is
invoked
moment,
would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and^ all made
Life to the
I
One
Braving time.
We
are
now enough
325
its
different
way it is
still
deal-
PART THREE
ing with matters that the earlier sections, out of their chilly smiling
poise,
spoke ot
'Fleet St,
last
where/Dr Johnson
section of Part
flourished',
i,
for instance,
and remarked:
Of
cultivation
Pierian roses.
if sealed in
amber,
would be 'Red overwrought with orange' and saved from the ravages
of time. Thus, the 'she' whom the book must address is surely the
England that Pound is preparing to leave. In an American edition of
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the title-page carried a note, reading, 'The
sequence is so distinctly a farewell to London that the reader who
chooses to regard this as an exclusively American edition may as well
omit
it
.'
.
It
this
as full
her
lips
knows
The maker of it, some other mouth
But
May
be as
fair as hers,
in
laid,
on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone
Siftings
It is
impossible to read
distress.
Only Lawrence,
one
this, if
is
an Englishman, without
real
the death of England as a live cultural tradition with such sorrow and
with the added poignancy that comes of being English. (Nearly thirty
years later, in
The 'two
And
326
the 'other
EZRA POUND
land's,
may
which
in
new
new
worshippers,
may
North America.
The ambitious and poignant perspectives which have been opened
before us underline the irony by which the poet who was so conclusively dismissed at the end of the 'Ode pour {'Election de son
Sepulchre' is the same who, twelve poems later, here recaptures the
tradition of English song at its most sonorous and plangent.
Only now, with Part n, does Mauberley, the titular hero of the
whole work, emerge for our scrutiny, his emergence signalized by
a new cross-heading 'Mauberley (1920)*. As with Eliot's Prufrock, so
weiJ be the
is
symbolized
come
nations in
to grips
in the inability to
and
is left
with
mandate
Of Eros,
The
a retrospect.
last
reference to a story
exclusively sexual.
until
he becomes
in brief,
Irresponse to
Amid
human
aggression.
Of insubstantial
manna,
Of his
As Mauberley
subjective hosannah.
in the
very
first
section
as Flaubertian,
327
PART THREE
parallels to
and
do
it
with, so here
'the juridical
are taken
from
Pound
The Simoon
which would
juste)
from the
spiritual state
is
now
The unforecasted
Then on an oar
Read
'I
this:
was
And
An
no more
Here
exist;
drifted
hedonist.'
is
his grave,
as
'a
is
set in
by
the sand to
acci-
mark
Mauberley's epitaph
The troublesome
is
clear
and damning.
question of who
first
four
Since
we have
is
to
be imagined
poems of
last
as the speaker
It crops up
whole poem.
Section n.
section of the
title
'Medallion' given to
328
his abilities
go
le
informed by any
mot juste to describe the braids
all its
Venus Anadyomene, the mythological expression of how sexual and other vitality is renewed, hardens under
Mauberley's hand into the glazed frontispiece to a book on Comparative Religion.
is
rising Venus-like
not
just
from the
sea,
for Mauberley,
loins.)
And
damning
figure
artist is likely
to
do any
better than
is
Mauberley
no
did.
NOTES
1.
The
Letters
1951), p. 248.
3.
4.
See
2.
Yvor Winters,
pp. 170-1.
T.
AND
ELIOT: POET
S.
CRITIC
SALINGAS
L. G.
Since he
published his
(b.
critics
an authority such
son
publicist,
formed
He
and playwright.
means of expression
modern mind,
of a representative
and
modern
writer to the
to ask whether
it
is
that,
of ideas within
which English
a great deal
he
ignoring or suppressing
seriously,
intensely
framework
it
other
take
of
heavy
common
decisive
of
spective.
Two
One
states of
is
accomplishment
The
'observations', written in
something
And
mind.
flexible
first
is
is
some
sense
from the
by
outside,
this
is
poetry of
whether the
else instead.
from
his
early study of Jacobean stage verse and the free verse of Jules Laforgue
Browning and
ot
to-
ELIOT
T. S.
from the
Portrait oj a
Lady
(written 1910):
I feel
like
My
who
one
Suddenly,
and turning
smiles,
shall
remark
self-possession gutters ;
we
a sign
to these
of Eliot's
originality
two models in
verse
From
metre, Eliot
has adapted his urban settings, with their burden of tedium and nos-
and his notation of feelings by means of fugitive and intermingled sense-impressions, diversified with literary allusions or ironic
talgia,
asides:
You
...
keep my countenance,
remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
I
Are
This
is
so, too,
wrong?
is
Prufrock's
'No
am not Prince
be'.
inadequate
they are
(as
somehow
how
Eliot's
331
PART THREE
cupation and the central problem of Eliot's
work from
the outset.
moves
swiftly -
asking what these feelings are worth on the plane of personal living
to asking
what
their status
left
is
at first.
The Love Song ojj. Alfred Prufrock (finished in 191 1, when he was
twenty-three) already shows Eliot's distinctive manner and indicates
the range of his wit in the quizzical title followed by a sombre epigraph from Dante. His break from Victorian poetry comes out in the
opening lines, where colloquial language presents a situation at once
distinct
and mystifying:
Let us go then,
When
you and
the evening
is
I,
The muttering
Of restless
streets,
retreats
And
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming
question
. .
room
the
women come
and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The
speaker
is
distinct, acutely so
and the precise movement of these irregular lines tells us directly how
Prufrock feels: they reach forward only to fall back. The two striking
ending in 'table' and 'question' are left without the support of
rhyme, but when Prufrock clinches his words in rhyming couplets he
only seems to be losing balance. Similarly, there is a continuous
undercurrent of half-audible images from the 'muttering' streets with
lines
their 'tedious
it
moment,
in irrelevance
is
that
between
fixity
and
flux, this
con-
332
T. S.
which
is
is
the very
life
of verse'
And
contrast
between
ELIOT
comment on
fixity
his
own
3
).
This
much more
than
1917
practice.
romantic
tion.
sunsets,
The
and
illogical.
With
He
is
a side-glance at
he merges the evening into his own state of trepidahe notices are neither calm nor silent. He reads 'an
'retreats'
overwhelming question' into the layout of the city blocks. What that
question is - a proposal of marriage? the question of human dignity?
- is not put into words; but the way it emerges expresses the condition
of seeing a problem and shrinking away from it.
Beyond Prufrock's vacillation, moreover, there are hints of something permanent which he can dimly perceive but cannot grasp. The
sky and the table are
'restless
women
at present; conversely,
coming-and-going of many
himself.
that
But
human predicament
if Eliot's attitude
of Laforgue,
it is
lives across
is
made
to
here
hardly as yet
is
Eliot's Prufrock
dissolution
of value had
essential attitude to
unresolved.
Sweeney Among
333
method of the
PART THREE
rhyming poems. The narrative is kept obscure but it appears that in a
tavern somewhere in South America a number of shady characters
are plotting against Apeneck Sweeney. Possibly he escapes. But at the
end, as if in a film, the images of the present scene are transposed into
others emerging from a remote and tragic past:
The
And
"When Agamemnon
wood
cried aloud,
Agamemnon
coupled together; religion and poetry (the Convent and the nightingales) have always been witnesses of the same squalid agony. And yet
what these lines emphasize most is not the horror of the spectacle but
its monotony, with an overriding sense of the neatness of the versification Technique here is not a means of clarifying the tangle of human
experience but of withdrawing from it towards an artificial objectivity.
Although
this
passage
is
best,
it
pose behind his finest poetry. His central purpose can be described
a search for detachment, or impersonality (as Eliot calls
on
as
in his
pro-
De-
it
grammatic
essay of 191 7
tachment
is
spiritual absolute,
that falls
(1925).
but only
Or
they
feel
Orestes, because
of
form of a
in the
And
privation, as 'the
Shadow'
Hollow Men
with
guilt - as
ELIOT
T. S.
a variety
ambiguous. But
through a
by converting
In the same
it
into a
mode
is
for
in literary styles
and
on
free himself
of it
of European
The
Eliot,
from
of detached contemplation.
which he needs
life,
of unreality, to
whole -
of attitudes to
it
means
literature as a
historical sense
and permanence; a
of fixity together with flux; and further, 'a sense of the timeless
as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal
together'. In his reaching out from America to the tradition of
sense
far
beyond James;
and, especially in his sense of the relativity of values, he speaks for the
general
mind
of his
own
age,
imbued with
tionary thought of the nineteenth century and at the same time per-
- time
as
belief.
From
an aspect of individual
lives
on the
idea ot
Time
minence
as the idea
of Nature
Time
in the
It is
method.
Gerontion
little
is
old man')
end of
important
is
corner'.
He
is
Gerontion
('the
man at the
To a sleepy
man
blind; he lives in
is
not his
own;
as
no achievements, 'no
ghosts',
no
faith,
335
no
PART THREE
had made the speaker confuse his sensations with his thoughts; in
Gerontion, he makes the effort of thinking itself almost a physical
sensation, a straining to grasp at elusiveness
and
illusion:
History has
many cunning
And
issues,
now
memory
Into
in,
or
if still believed,
Think
shows
dramatists.
tears are
its
And
it
tree.
in his
of the Jacobean
own
by a
practice
of thought
works together with his
as a
obviously dramatic.
at their
whole
The
is
nightmare
own
it is
most
way
to an impulse to hypnotize
him to a private
maze where he loses his
whole of mankind, with the
trivial
336
T. S.
ELIOT
is
weighty than
The
a personal outburst.
presented as something
more
elements in the
Eliot
In appetency,
Of time
past
and time
future.
concerned with
is
his
own
taste
or
deeply (and
He is brilliant
when he
deals
comes evasive and inconsistent when he touches on poetic composition as a whole or on a poet's attitude to life, although he regularly
assumes an incisive and even dogmatic tone. Hence his critical pronouncements form a tricky instrument to use for the understanding
of his own poetry and still more for that of other poets. 8
Although he once proclaimed himself a classicist, his view of
poetry derives from the nineteenth century, not from the seventeenth
or the eighteenth; it comes from Flaubert and Baudelaire and thenFrench successors and from the more direct influence of Irving Babbitt and Santayana at Harvard and Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme in
London. The Flaubertian strain in his doctrine of impersonality
comes out where he argues (as in his essay on tradition) that a poet's
mind should remain 'inert' and 'neutral' towards his subject-matter,
keeping a gulf between 'the man who suffers and the mind which
c.a. 13
337
PART THREE
where he tries to equate literature with science
(comparing the method of Ulysses, for example, to 'a scientific discovery'). The influence of Baudelaire and his successors is powerful
both in the moral colouring of Eliot's poetry and in his views on
poetic symbolism, on the use of mythological or literary parallels and
allusions, on the music in poetry, and on sensibility.
The poetic world of Baudelaire contains 'forests of symbols'. His
creates'; or again,
spirit,
or else disclose an
between the
actual
and the
ironic contrast-in-resemblance
ideal.
And
in
which men
still
saw
visions.' 9
The important
factor here
is
rather
. . .
of those
feelings
drama is to 'touch
the border
Here
Eliot differs
cult
of pure
it.
As to poetry
in its
own
is
which includes
crystallized in language, is as
day personality
What
as
And
this
perception,
every-
is
poet's intelligence.
At
first sight, it
338
T. S.
ELIOT
whereas the
intellect
irrelevant. In
is
'the
elsewhere,
sensibility' -
without
on Shakespeare and
who
poet
"thinks"
which looks
is
who
is
he maintains
nonsense.
However,
real thinking'
'in
Now,
it is
was
'that
simply
is
upon each
a superior
'the
philosophy, the
thought current
is
almost
that a poet
is
philosophy of St Thomas,
that 'the
at their time,
of his
feeling'.
age.
It
is
difficult to see
how
Eliot supposes
mind
is
inert or neutral
in a
work
of creation
now famous
is
done by
towards
while the
example,
on The Metaphysical
Poets
(1921):
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they
do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work,
it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The
latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet
these experiences are always
forming
339
his
alike),
new
wholes.
...
The
PART THREE
poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the drama-
sensibility
tists
When
Eliot
home
bring
general statement
in
is
another matter.
What
is
valuable or suggestive
it
critics
- the concept
of the
poet's
some
privi-
of such
a poet as
- Eliot
But
dislike
it
surely
comes nearer
to
as 'a superior
it is
'the
amusement'.
Wordsworth,
sensibility,
it is 'a
had
man
also
criticism
of life'.
essential vision for a poet, Eliot has also said, is a vision of 'the
boredom, and the horror, and the glory' ( The Use of Poetry, ch. vi,
1933). His own poetry is defective as a criticism of life because he is
too deeply occupied with horror and boredom. He shares very little
of Baudelaire's moral passion or the human sympathy of Gerard
The
greatness as a poet
lies in his
striving to grasp
templation in Four Quartets. Eliot there does not define his meta-
much as
new form of monologue
which embodies
work. Here,
of
340
T. S.
the poetry
ELIOT
of mind. Through
all his
a single perception
of searching for
behind
his masterly
or state
fixity in
this
is
and
the prin-
is
more
sensitive
ciple
behind
his
with rhyme.
And
this is the
moral or
prin-
breaks
literary,
down
down
habits
(to
solid,
to
of sentiment,
In his
revert
mind
of Four
Quartets.
indeterminate
sisting
it.
states
is
present awareness,
is
an amazing anthology of
desire' re-
and superimposed across the boundaries of time and place. Reluctance and
bewilderment, as between sleep and waking, are given, for example,
in the very rhythm of the first lines, with their dragging participial
endings suggesting
April
is
life
Memory and
This in-between
alert,
state,
mixing
desire, stirring
rain.
PART THREE
thing that follows. Sometimes
it
rises
(352-8),
sense
of
Not
the cicada
And
Where
Or
sciousness
(215
ff.)
is
made
part of a
mechanical surrender):
He
is
is
to
feel
'see'
of the engine,
Tiresias,
lives ...
all
who, 'though
withered
Land
In The Waste
AD
method' he
brilliant
results. 13
and a Phoenician
is
own
development
is
instance, there
is
of myths. Early
342
in the
moment (35
ff.):
poem,
for
ELIOT
T. S.
Your arms
full,
and your
Speak, and
my
eyes failed,
hair wet,
could not
was neither
knew
nothing,
silence.
nothing
is
poem by
on
echoing both St
To
allusion
At another important
is
phase in the
Eliot relies
he
this crucial
passage (307
Carthage then
came
burning
- but
the
words
of the people
in the
Waste Land.
Instead
of
reflects
their confusion.
The Hollow
in the previous
a decisive
be described
as a return to early
14
The
central problem,
still
human
life
is still
so governed
by
time that the present dissolves into memories of the past and desires
for the future ;
central
problem by means of a
PART THREE
meditation aroused by a particular season and place - the vanished
rose garden in Burnt Norton (1935), the country lane in East Coker
(1940),
New
during war-time in
Little
its
Civil
War
associations visited
Gidding (1942).
first lyrically
lyric,
kind
last section
it.
As
in the earlier
states
of
throb of the
historical,
lines
calls
And
Little
deal
more
mood
concretely with
is
modem
from
ear. It
vers libre
flights,
T. S.
Time
ELIOT
in
And
If all
time
All time
is
is
time future,
time past.
in
eternally present
unredeemable.
(Burnt Norton,
i)
And
is
line:
Which
life,
(Little
Gidding,
m)
This has the deliberateness of prose, but the effect of poetry - even
(in its
subdued manner) of dramatic monologue; the verse moveact of the mind in distinguishing 'between'
neighbouring concepts. Eliot has found the exact rhythm and tone of
voice for his purpose.
And
this
'detachment',
where he
is
at
tion:
345
PAST THREE
my soul,
be
still,
darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away Or as. when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long
between
stations
Land is surpassed
Salvages
m)
distinctly
is
(11)
Where
is
tail,
of an ocean not
littered
is
oceanless
with wastage
with
its
compound of opposites -
human
('priceless').
effort is
loss')
now more
compassionate and
than before.
346
more
objective
ELIOT
T. S.
The
morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
By
the
made
sensation
universal.
by speaking
There
347
PART THREE
an aesthetic ideal.
poetry.
But
it is
a chilling reflection
have spent so
much
his
age
oi his
energy in negation.
NOTES
Introduction to Selected Poems of Ezra. Pound (London,
1928), and 'From Poe to Valery' (1948: repr. in Literary Opinion in America,
ed. M. D. Zabel, New York 1951). For details of French influence on Eliot,
1.
See T.
S. Eliot's
books of Greene Smith, and Wilson listed in Part rv below; and cp.
Arthur Symons.. The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, 1899); G. M.
Turnell, 'Jules Laforgue', Scrutiny, Vol. V (1936); and P. Mansell Jones, The
Background oj Modern French Poetry (Cambridge, 195 1) and Baudelaire (Camsee the
bridge, 1952).
2. Leavis, Education, p.
3.
96
belowl.
and
See Eliot's essay on Hamlet {Selected Essays) of the same year as Gerontion;
Commentary xxvi, pp. 401-2.
,
cp. Leavis in
Fiction, ed.
ff.
See F.
W.
Thompson
(1951-2).
348
in Essays in
Criticism i-n
T. S.
ELIOT
13.
See
Note
14.
On
Four Quartets, see Harding and Leavis (Education, pp. 87 ff.). Preston
ff. ('T. S. Eliot's Rose Garden') give studies of the imagery;
on the
1,
and Eliot,
On
Poetry, p. 80.
CRITICISM
ANDOR GOMME
Extra-Mural Tutor,
the University
of Glasgow
which we are
as
many
all
When we
true iudgment.
vails,
subject -
and compose
we begin
his differences
common
owes
his livelihood to
critics,
of his own with which he conto season the opinions which men already hold, and
or else to some
trives
with
pursuit of
trifling oddities
We are
prefer to maintain.
found
it
all
later,
Mr Eliot
Mr
Rethat he
in 1923.
said
The facts,
so
simply by
looking
in the files
of the
Mi
literary
Eliot's
350
If there
is
snobbism,
more
its
apparent.
It
remains true,
as
Arnold
is
its
perhaps even
said in Culture
and Anarchy
(1869), that
Each section of the public has its own literary organ, and the
mass of the public is without any suspicion that the value of
these organs
is
information,
correct
centre
of
farther
away from
taste,
and
or
intelligence,
it.
What is not true now is that there would be agreement between those
counting themselves educated on the direction in which the ideal
centre
lies.
With much
talk
doubt
as to
whether the
of the
relativity
of values, there
is
often
of
the
elite,
of critical standards
a little
The
is
as
marked
as
ever
it
was:
it
has merely
become
more lumpy.
period has been one of a great general cultural upheaval, in
which mass
literacy
decay and disintegration of traditional sanctions of belief and behavThus the literary tradition comes to have a greater importance
iour.
than ever,
as
on
it
alone
now
collective
ex-
consciousness,
when
left
to
and
resist.
The
'collective experience'
sounds
so
relics
351
PART THREE
which
did,
it
will
in an experience
judgement, better-than-individual
individuaJ
and perform
flourish
can
taste',
its
is
literature
The
'literary
The
appeal must
'a
public,
felt',
critic to
for
it is
intelligently
and making
its
response
effect'.
where there
is
such
The
is
common
to
all
its
men,
are
a more-than-individual process.
is
taste,
to-
naturally
James could remark that reviewing is 'a practice that in general has
nothing in common with the art of criticism' and his description of
the way in which 'the great business of reviewing' carries on 'in its
;
Periodical literature
... It is
is
but which
seats are
is
free to start
many, the
train
352
crook to
its
elbow, so that
it
may
of
dummies of
criticism
- the recurrent,
Yet reviews
that
some people
all
of critical standards,
way of talk-
ing about books which obscures and flattens out their differences in
adequacy and
literature
is
interest.
And
demoralized. There
is
a close
is
that
from developing
in the
talent
is
The
which
this
cherished
combination of the offhand review and of our wonderful system of publicity have put into circulation on so vast a scale
may be represented ... as an unprecedented invention for
darkening counsel. The bewildered spirit may ask itself, without speedy answer, What is the function in the life of man of
such a periodicity of platitude and irrelevance? Such a spirit
will wonder how the life of man survives it, and, above all,
what
is
much more
important,
how
literature
resists
it;
knowledge, the
failure
of thought.
nation at large.
means a decay in the very processes of thought and feeling. The language is kept alive by a living literature and a living commerce with
it: the effect of the genuine writers of the time is felt far and wide
353
PART THREE
our language goes on changing; our way of life changes,
under the pressure of material changes in our environment in all
sorts of ways; and unless we have those few men who combine
an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over
words, our own ability, not merely to express, but even to feel
Pound
Literature, as Ezra
said in
Save
in the rare
The absence of a
'a
is
felt
most
as 'nutrition
of impulse'. Society
in
Sopho-
cles'
consequence of
The
great
its
artist,
'is
to deprive
it
of
is
air
and
that
it
light,
and the
354
no
CRITICISM
doubt,
less
entirely
the writer's
commerce with
a living
own
environment.
On
the other
into
seen in the
way
in
which
Leavis put
it,
self
The
and
far
too
much
as
an individual).
the public
of the writer to
his
age
is
now of a
deeper and
its
5
the reverse of nourishing.
It is
the function of criticism at the present time, the creation and mainte-
PART THREE
notable aspect of the situation has indeed been the display of
new
human
criteria
of relevance in judgement.
An early (and
Nation.
Murry,
it
at all
first-rate
oj
Modern
Letters (1925-7), a
of such a body
as
had
(in its
own
its
purpose
difficulty
of
the creation
as
Its
position
was
stated
first editorial:
In reviewing
we
criticism, since
shall base
it is
and
far
in the
tone of
more than
its
At
its
most
356
CRITICISM
The
which
in
a half
value 7 -
is
work maintained by
the various
comes out at its most characteristically impressive in such a review as EdgeU Rickword's of Eliot's Poems
igog-ig25, an article whose significance lies in an exact appreciation
of the importance of Eliot's work - the struggle with technique by
which he 'has been able to get closer than any other poet to the
physiology of our sensations' - with an insight which can pinpoint
writers as a
team of reviewers.
It
which
Eliot
all
the
more
The
is
hostility. 8
from time to time in a rather unthinking acceptance of the counters of the poetical academy (awe in
front of Prometheus Unbound or Samson Agonistes), in a naivete of tone
(as when Muir complains that Eliot doesn't appreciate Milton and
Wordsworth as much as Marvel and Dry den), and in occasional uncertainty of judgement with regard to contemporary writers (an
over-estimation ofJoyce and even Wyndham Lewis at the expense of
Lawrence) - seems to come partly from a refusal to attempt live
critical judgements of past literature in terms of present needs and
The Calendar's weakness
- seen
judgement. Possibly
thrown out
it
is
literary
Mourning'
in the final
issue:
which we
are not
now
met by
a different organ-
in a position to form.
357
PART THREE
Scrutiny (1932-53),
most
by
influential critical
far the
it
will prove
it,
book
documented account of the development of popular
reading habits during the hundred years or so in which fiction-reading
had become largely responsible for spreading a lazy shoddiness of
whose
fully
of mass
new
realization
of the cultural
literacy
community of taste
more widely and firmly grounded than
concern not merely for literary values, but that their influence should
be
felt in a
the
literature to
matter
at all:
'intelligent
its
experi-
of constructive thought on
all
human
situation
Scrutiny stands for co-operation in the
work of
rallying
such a public, the problem being to preserve (which is not need we say? - to fix in a dead arrest) a moral, intellectual and,
inclusively,
humane
to learn to control
just
tradition, such as
its
machinery and
is
essential if society
direct
it
is
to intelligent,
While
place
than
which
practical
common
and
realization
political action
useless.
358
is
likely to be
worse
values inherent in
it,
to bear
What
it
literature'
The
literature
better than
his neighbours.
(xrx,
The
is
essentially cooperative
ing
it
...
The
critic
iii.
178)
it,
foster-
that
(n, iv)
For
if standards are
only
'there' in
orative exchange
between
an
intelligent, educated,
morally
In a later article
Dr Leavis expanded
A judgement
359
PART THREE
Standards derive from centraiity (which
procal pressures'), the many-sided exchange
some degree
the
initial
is
product of reci-
'the
working
to eliminate the
eccentricity,
which charac-
significance
culture
is
is
example
to discover and
make
human and
broadly
ment of its
we have of
contributors was
on
function,
the influence
in fact a
it
a cooperative attempt
its
group of highly
intelligent
common
The
agree-
initial
disci-
common
10
They formed
who had
trained
humane
values has
come
elite
upon whose
entirely to depend.
of a contemporary
first
place,
sensibility
of contemporary
elsewhere
may
be allowed to stand:
And
as
Dr
Leavis himself was able to claim, not only have the main
Scrutiny revaluations
become
of the
all
past'
the
work of
was done
in
Scrutiny.
So impressive was
this
achievement that
it
by the
360
CRITICISM
compliment, of course,
and
gramme. Revaluation
is
is
is
all
time:
is
it is
much permanent
within Scrutiny
conditions
may
itself testify to
done once
for
all,
the discovery of
the
how
be pointed to the
:
an understanding of
many
differences
this.
twenty-one years - in itself something remarkand death came not directly from the hostility
quarters so
much
as
was never a
breadth of
interest and concern was implicit in the conception from the start;
and the marked narrowing of attention which is so plain in the later
issues is a sign that to some degree the world had triumphed, and the
literary critic was no longer no be found who could feel that he had
anything important to say outside his own 'literary' field. Fewer
books were reviewed, and those on a much smaller range of subjects.
Moreover articles became longer, more 'exhaustive', and at the same
time less stimulating. Where earlier essays (for example, Leavis's on
Othello) had taken one or two central issues raised by their subject to
suggest lines where further inquiry would be profitable, there seemed
to be a tendency towards the end to assume that the work had not
been properly done unless every possible aspect had been covered,
every possible approach explored. Sometimes indeed subject-matter
seems to have been embarked on just for the sake of having somefunction of the discipline they were engaged
haphazard collection of
articles
on
36i
in. Scrutiny
literary matters.
PART THREE
new
thing
essay
The opening,
to say.
on Henry
for example,
of D. A. Traversi's
The
implication
borne out
(alas,
now
Traversi will
set
seems to be that
in the sequel)
Mr
criti-
cism but also the simplicity. Indeed the heavyweight treatment that
Shakespeare received at the hands of Mr Traversi and others seems to
lead
away
for
its
own
its
enough
in universities
treatment
is at
as
it
is.
This kind of
recent
from an
altogether
and to find
as
appeared in a
through
'the structure
of imagery
in
duction
without
Mention of Essays
Scrutiny,
essential
academic
demand
his
it.
in Criticism
uncontrolled by
critical insight,
human
point of view'.
And
in sight
of Arnold's
and
Scrutiny's limitations
like a true
its
362
CRITICISM
peculiarly fortunate;
four
critics
value
as
isn't possible
it
here to do
more than
value.
point to
to
is
is
unfair to
much
Of the four writers whom I glance at here three are among the
work
is
to their criticism
Among these,
Eliot
what
- especially
in his early
their
main
largest interest.
its
so notable
significant as his
more
may
be
historically as
assured successes.
F.
R. Leavis,
only necessary to
it is
say in introduction that of all the critics in our period he has been the
'A sense of relevance' has not only led Leavis to see in a continuance of Arnold's
spirit
and theory
as subservient
in a passage
literature
futility, also,
where he
from
must be
of ignoring them
is
discussing Jane
novel
fact, when we examine the formal perfecwe find that it can be appreciated only in terms
As a matter of
tion of Emma,
-
peculiar interest in
363
PART THREE
view that Emma is a great novel, and no intelligent
account of its perfection of form. It is in the same way true of
for the
the other great English novelists that their interest in their art
gives them the opposite of an affinity with Pater and George
Moore; it is, brought to an intense focus, an unusually developed interest in life. For, far from having anything of
Flaubert's disgust or disdain or boredom, they are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent
openness before life, and a marked moral intensity.
is
map
to
through George
Eliot,
The
become
a fact
of general acceptance
it
...
as
with
so'.
as Leavis has
shown
in
all literature,
and penetrating
analysis
up
in
it
expresses'.
The
and the
feelings
and
The need
lie
behind
all
discussions
of technique, and
it.
attitudes
of the present
series
to
Volume
Johnson):
364
CRITICISM
great
like
many
it,
second-rate poets, in
fact, are
have not the sensitiveness and consciousness to perceive that they feel differently from the preceding generation, and therefore must use words differently.
that they
this reason,
Eliot's
own work
intimately
man of
as the
bound up with
development
language
in
that
is
genius
of the
critic
development of feeling
is
the
work
of
The
as well'.
outcome of
critical intelligence
immediate relation to
at
that
moment
in
problems
his technical
as the
history,
poet who,
'altering
ex-
pression'. 13
'The Perfect
Eliot's
classical
in
decisive influence.'
first of all in
The Sacred Wood, Eliot noted the
Critic',
more
likelihood that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be
it
And more
consists
of his
own
best
who
distinction, generalizing to
earlier metaphysicals
No better introduction to
it
leaves
most
clear the
it
makes
PAST THREE
generalizations
poetry
as a
whole.
It is
hardly too
much
and
its
the
the
The
poet's
mind
is
represented as
up numberless feelings,
which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
a receptacle for seizing and storing
phrases, images,
How
ings'
this uniting
come
happens
we
feel-
together:
The ode
is
said
during
this process to
be
as unaffected as
somehow
it
'digests'
hear
man who
suffers
creates'
CRITICISM
the poet
is
age,
whose
no
business
part
and
is
on whatever
It is difficult
his
to
make
which
his
bility that
drew
It
poetry had
made
he had found.
It
of expression'
much
its
so notably
new
distinction,
seemed
hollow or arbitrary.
The same qualifications do not need to be made about the two other
great practitioner-critics, in whom nonetheless a close link between
the two sides of their work is always apparent Henry James and
D. H. Lawrence. Both wrote much about the fiction of their own and
earlier periods, and related it to the problems, opportunities, and
lent speciousness to
which faced them as novelists; but both also have produced judgements on novelists and novels which achieve classical
challenges
as
well
367
as
PART THREE
judged. James's book on Hawthorne, his essays on Flaubert,
passant,
Mau-
far
more
of
Thomas Hardy
recognition than
The
parallels
tical criticism in
least,
a review
the
way of
was an occasion
for delicate
at
and the valuations they then directly made have remained astonishingly secure. James's review of Our Mutual Friend is in its way a
for we are
is perhaps too strong a word [for Dickens]
convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius
not to see beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard a
definition of his literary character, we should, accordingly,
are aware
call him the greatest of superficial novelists.
that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the deInsight
We
partment of letters which he adorns; but we accept the consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence
against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest
novelists. For, to repeat what we have already intimated, he
has created nothing but figures. He has added nothing to our
understanding of human character.
assurance with which these generalizations are made and
grounded on accurate and pertinent observations of detail in the
The
novel
is
entirely convincing.
Antoine, particularly
its
An
is
the
later,
found wanting:
His book being, with
its
great effort
call
368
it
and
its
seems to
attention to
it
us,
if it
strangely
it would
were not
it
pointed to
more
own
defi-
that
whole
society of aesthetic
M.
Flaubert
demanding stronger
diet. But we doubt
raffines,
whom
for
Atlantic
who
is
knowing for whom he was writing dissome degree from James's later work. The criticism which
James wrote at the same time as his last novels has something of the
same air of having been written in unread loneliness, so strained and
needed). This feeling of
appears in
involved
is
And the work is correspondmore hesitant even - and more distant from us.
ingly
more
Even
in the essay
cautious,
on
Flaubert,
one of his
best,
which has
all
James's
judgements to
c.a.
- 14
369
PART THREE
Emma Bovary,
This
is
in their
grounding.
How
fine a
ment:
'the perfection
of Madame Bovary
The
particular
and the
James's criticism,
is
less
is
Much
more
wide
field
broad assessments
we
his essay
taste
and
returns to
in
all vision',
life', its
province
370
feeling, all
is
to 'survey
CRITICISM
the whole field'. And so for Lawrence the novel is 'the one bright
book of life', which 'can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is
more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation
can do'. In these terms, the novel was of course more than just prose
fiction:
- but
The
Bible
For Lawrence
'the business
of art
is
between
with the
balance
it kills
nail.
...'
between
is
man and
men and
dead'.
critics
celebrates or describes.
acuteness
with
and
its
originality
it
of Lawrence's
criticism, so
much
The
a piece
its
morality
is
life
aspects.
And
its
validity
from the conditions of the time and place. Or when the novelist denies
this and forgets the demand of honesty and has an axe t6 grind,
371
PART THREE
'when the novelist has his thumb in the pan, the novel becomes an
unparalleled perverter of men and women'.
The relevance of these passages to Lawrence's own work is veryclear. But the insight they show - the insight of a novelist of supreme
moral openness and integrity - acts also as a marvellously sure
him to go
makes Gals-
worthy so palpably
second-rate, while
it
con-
tinuing popularity:
Why
do
we
feriors?
It is
beings,
human
level
The human
individual
is
a queer
is
the
Lawrence, then,
all
which he brings
the criterion. So
much
is
said,
it is
so
the
life it
many
serves
is
always
on Verga, where
so
placed and the value of his work surely indicated, while the issues that
books bring to the fore are further explored and generalized; and
on a larger scale, in the Study of Thomas Hardy, where the novels
provide the natural occasion for some of Lawrence's most daring
his
so,
Lawrence's genius
there
is
in
him no
as a critic
division
have.
372
CRITICISM
much
upon
never be a science:
it is,
in the
first place,
concerned with
values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not
reason.
judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and
vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddletwaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical
fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all
its complexity and force. To do so, he must be a man of force
and complexity himself, which few critics are ...
More than this, even an artistically and emotionally educated man must be a man of good faith. He must have the
courage to admit what he feels, as well as the flexibility to
know what he feels. So Sainte-Beuve remains, to me, a great
critic. And a man like Macaulay, brilliant as he is, is unsatisfactory, because he is not honest. He is emotionally very alive,
but he juggles his feelings. He prefers a fine effect to the
sincere statement of the aesthetic and emotional reaction. He
is quite intellectually capable of giving us a true account of
what he feels. But not morally. A critic must be emotionally
alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in
essential logic, and then morally very honest.
(Essay on Galsworthy)
it is
We
In a short chapter
lines
of approach.
work
it
isn't possible
One cannot
to
possibly include
all
those
critics
a few
whose
whom
expect, and
certainly count
373
PART THREE
thought of the Spectator and
common
ous culture
of the
Tatler reviewers
common, because to live in a homogenemove among signs of limited variety'); the influence
to
sence was
felt
very impressively.
literary: that
it
on the large
it
is
not too
much
issues
this influence is
NOTES
'The gang' - a term used of themselves by prominent members of 'the
poetical renascence', who, amongst other things, had the run of Eliot's review,
The Criterion. Spender's autobiography. World Within World, is, from its title
onwards, a revealing document of the operation of a metropolitan literary
1.
clique.
It
not to
it; it is
is
capable of giving
some
at all times,
intelligible
but
at all
by which
mean
to that
account of itself.'
3. 'Criticism',
(New
How
is
to
How
to
as
is
make
liable to misinterpreta-
Appendix
is
11
to Education
a rather suspicious
that
be
'it
it
he
is
difficult.
Our
civilization
374
CRITICISM
this variety
a refined sensibility,
An interesting comparison
must produce
made between
poetry and that of more
can be
a review
the
by Edwin Muir
7. Scrutinies
I and
Criticism, edited
8.
by
F.
'The impression
analyzed into
first is
two
II,
in
in their readers.
edited
Standards of
R. Leavis.
we
Mr
Eliot's
work... may be
The
and comes near to breaking through the so finely-spun aesthetic fabric; the
second is the technique which spins this fabric and to which this slender volume
owes its curious ascendancy over the bulky monsters of our time. For it is
by his struggle with technique that Mr Eliot has been able to get closer than
any other poet to the physiology of our sensations (a poet does not speak merely
for himself) to explore and make palpable the more intimate distresses of a
generation for which all the romantic escapes had been blocked. And, though
this may seem a heavy burden to lay on the back of technique, we can watch
with the deepening of the consciousness, a much finer realization of language. .'
.
literary criticism
ary England.
375
impressive intelligence
PART THREE
is the most notable case of a
and vigorous taste andjudgement, which, while aspiring to be much more
than individual, have too often remained obstinately personal and idiosyncratic.
His work is however of great interest, strikingly original and often penetrating,
particularly noteworthy in a scene in which reputations are too easily made and
fresh
iv.
(vi. i) is
a different matter.
owe
elsewhere.
12. '...to insist that literary criticism is, or should be, a specific discipline
of intelligence is not to suggest that a serious interest in literature can confine
itself to the kind of intensive local analysis associated with "practical criticism"
- to the scrutiny of the "words on the page" in their minute relations, their
effects of imagery, and so on: a real literary interest is an interest in man,
society and civilization, and its boundaries cannot be drawn.' Leavis, Scrutiny,
xm,
i,
78.
No.
5,
November
author and
its
subject.
It
from
of 'Impersonality'.
14. James's and Lawrence's criticism has never been properly collected,
though in Lawrence's case there is a useful volume edited by Anthony Beal,
Selected Literary Criticism (London, 1955), which contains all the essays mentioned in this chapter as well as much of the Hardy and the Studies in Classic
American Literature. The Galsworthy essay and one or two others are in the
Penguin Selected Essays; many more appear in Phoenix (new edition, London,
1961). James's Hawthorne (and Lawrence's Studies) is reprinted in Wilson,
The Shock of Recognition (London, 1956). James's own collections French
Poets and Novelists, Partial Portraits, and Notes on Novelists have long been out of
trine
and the only readily available work now is in Mordell, ed., Literary
Reviews and Essays (a compendious anthology of James's excellent early
reviews) (Grove Press, 1957), Edel, The House of Fiction (London, 1957), and
perhaps still Roberts, The Art of Fiction (London, 1948).
print;
THE POETRY OF W.
R. G.
H.
AUDEN
COX
One could expect fairly general assent to the statement that of living
poets
Auden
ever,
we
(b.
ask just
how
near
is
and what
next'
is
When, how-
He
has
no
universally
as central as
Auden is primarily a satirist Auden's poetry is fundamentally romantic; Auden is most successful in light verse. Some of this is due to the
;
At
more
manners.
And
is
perhaps
Auden's
three,
first
made an immediate
377
PART THREE
talent, the
its
own
time and
'spring's green
home
you wake
Our dream of waking, we feel
Your finger on the flesh that has been
The
skinned.
. .
The
originality
of the derivative:
it is
normal proportion
Edward
Most,
as
Though
there
well as of Skelton,
signs
deeply interested at this time, but there remains much that looks
merely irresponsible. Christopher Isherwood has recorded 2 Auden's
early habit of constructing poems out of good lines salvaged from
poems that his friends had condemned, 'entirely regardless of gram-
mar
or sense'.
is
revealing.
However,
it still
this
its
was, after
all,
a first
positive originality
stress. If
fuller
volume and
and
its
promise
cent elements.
disease
'The Watershed'
Wanderer';
in,
poem now
now
entitled
'The
modern man
later
say a
Few Words';
in
elliptical
grammar not
ity in
its
better parts.
by
Mr
John Bayley as
and maturThe opening paragraph arrests the attention with
unfairly described
of personal
sincerity
a powerful contrast:
An
An
emphasis on
new
Where
so
Hanging
his
came
man
at
once
weeping on a bench,
head down, with his mouth distorted
solitary
sat
379
embryo
chicken.
PART THREE
and the rest of the poem develops the relation between death and
growth with, for the most part, a sense of complexity, a refusal of
easy simplification often lacking in later work. 3
The
characteristic
'a
the psychological
sharply
the
It
has the
rehearsed
insight
response';
quinsy'; the
end of drives'
school'. 4
This inequality is accentuated in The Orators (1932), that curious experiment, largely in prose, which
Auden now
Once more
is
thinks a
good
idea
especially that
of the psychological
and death in
more
'Ad-
In the
often exploited
instance
The
three later
plays in
collaboration
380
.. .
varied
scope,
and
although
they
contain
all
Coward on
passages
own
his
ground,
The
and
often picks
it
spersed
by
up
that technique
this
is
Auden
choric,
Poem xxrx of
critics):
of
inter-
hawk
best
the
by
view of the
number of
The Summer
holds:
upon
its
Wrinkling
its
glittering lake
many
rivers
ploughman's palm
first an English village
surface like a
cliff:
or
, .
. .
meadows where
Sometimes
this
ampler current.
to be blunted
by
a facile knowingness.
As
in The
may be a symptom:
Beware of those with no obvious vices; of the chaste, the nonsmoker and drinker, the vegetarian
Beware of those who show no inclination towards making money:
there are even less innocent forms of power
. .
When in
is
it
up
is
as
subdued to what
works
in.
The banal
PART THREE
'Lighter poems' in Another Time (1940) provides instances:
volume
why
in
trayed
him into
a peculiar uncertainty
some of the
ped from
intensity
later collections)
is
title
An allied uncertainty
dropbetween virulent
typical in
its
hesitation
thirties
is
to be found
in the
Island)
U.S.A.
On
to
this
War
As compared with the first poems these show less taut bareof language, less elliptical compression, and less awkwardness but
(1939).
ness
at the
of
feeling.
can give
The
and urgency
more
technique has
smooth
lost in pressure
as a
irresponsibility
too
much
or
slickness
the
absence
to sheer rhetorical
perhaps, partly
from
Yeats).
It
way
substantiate: 7
Our hunting
Of the
'
Saw
look
com-
THE POETRY OF W.
Who
AUDEN
H.
The
ways of
intricate
guilt?
'Love'
second stanza
is
presumably the
result
of the
gift,
but
why
then
insist
on the
'human ligaments'
in
both?
is
The
and
embodied in
'fathers'
it
appears at
Technical
henceforward.
first: if not, it
facility,
Poem
indeed,
after
poem
but
is less
successful as a
something
sharply
on the immediate
it,
yet at
crisis:
383
its
best the
poem
focuses
PART THREE
On
On
Our
fever's
by
rivers,
precise
and
alive.
tic:
'And
He apart like epochs from each other' 'Encased in talent like a uniform',
'Anxiety receives them like a grand hotel', 'added meaning like a
,
is
often concentrates
the
all
more
striking part
forming
pain', 'eternal
of woe',
abstract qualities.
general intellec-
when
1933' evoking
gestures,
culty
by
of control,
since Death's
movement might
ills
diffi-
in itself be equally
list
of
New
make
personification an automatic
habit: 10
And Wrong
new
disease
. .
. .
To
butes to a
or
new
is
its
this contri-
poem of Look,
Stranger!
the unruffled lakes', 'Lay your sleeping head', 'Underneath the leaves
of
life'.
Sometimes
reproduced, and
deliberate
and how
it is
difficult
far
it
problems
arise as to
how
for example, in
is
is
- the use of
are falling
fast'
Intellectual disgrace
Stares
And
face,
lie
in each eye.
Monroe K.
persona, but
it
easily.
it
number of poems,
make the characteristic trimeter his own and to marry the Yeatsian
rhetoric to a
new moral
content:
385
PART THREE
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Is
Not
universal love
But
to be loved alone.
ist,
more than
1939' a
poem
'
in
which world
away and
the feeling
is
conveyed with
sufficient conviction to
The poems
falls
avoid
of this
One
worn
characteristic vein
is
which generally
results in a
more convincing
mood of a
comment on
'Perhaps',
will
references.
Two
series
of critical
ing past writers back to Voltaire and Pascal. At their worst these run
to glib
ward
Lear)
at their best
most of the elegy on Freud. The second group consists of the poems,
mostly sonnets, written under the influence of Rilke. Professor En-
in
right,
who
'encouraged Auden's
gift for
386
that
it
and notes
Auden
applies Rilke's
aesthetic ends
human
and emphatically
concerns.
his
own
anti-
Even here he
re-
And
We live in freedom
A
These
by
necessity,
from the
lines
great door,
last
sonnet
Lost in
Islands of self
To
This, too,
is
through which
Or money
Of our
sailed all
of the heart
day
...
. .
be overworked:
thinking
He hugged
his
sorrow
it
like a plot
leads
on
of land
to one of the
. .
more
successful
work.
much more
influence
modern Protestant
ment of 6rthodox
Christian doctrines.
is
New
couplets,
387
PART THREE
The critic who called it 'a kind of
Hundred Points of Good Husbandry for contemporary intellectuals' 13
presumably had his eye on the verse style as well as the matter and
debate accompanying this change.
it
must be admitted
that
is
near doggerel in
thought in the
not
life,
and cannot be
new
it
its
as
new developments of
is
frank self-criticism:
Northumbrian landscape.
the
Caliban
the result
ties
at
is
hardly a complete
artistic success.
tend to become too wide for adequate control, and the attempts
are left
The
title
it
piece of the
volume
is
We find
- and
at times there
is
388
a particularly unfor-
'tortured
Horror roaring
and Mary's lullaby in the Manger scene, but on the whole the apparent intellectual and doctrinal intention is far from being adequately
realized.
is
again experi-
mental both in substance and style. Through the minds of four charac-
meeting by chance in a
alliterative forms,
handled
as usual
with great
virtuosity, but
seldom
strain
in
the choice
insight:
And let
But the general
our
all
too
remains: as
unsatisfactoriness
was
illusions die
poem
faithfully
'the
Mr
G.
S.
Fraser
mirrored
in
the
elaborate
maladroit
handling'. 14
last
decade
is
of his
earlier
PART THREE
experiments with assonance and internal rhyme and in the appearance
of a
rather loose and informal, mostly used for discurand lending itself rather too readily to diifuseness. It is
even found linked with the manner of an essay or broadcast talk, so
sive reflection
poem
that a
mountains'.
will begin
'I
know
a retired dentist
who
only paints
More
poem
line
tails
last
than one
of 'Lakes'
off their
spirit
things:
Are our
Common Prayer
. .
'a faultless
Auden
love
as in the
is
confronted with a vision of modern inhumanity stated with considerable directness and force:
390
all
That
carries
. .
poem
This
in these
the
human
situation
which tend
to be
damaging:
This mutilated
flesh,
our victim,
stamps,
wonder
Of tow-paths
Here the
restless internal
rhyming, too,
conscious experimenting.
is
typical
It is
we
feel this to
ample,
we
find:
... libera
Me,
And
libera
(dear C)
who never
anything properly, spare
in the youngest day when all are
all
poor
s-o-b's
Do
Us
Shaken awake
. .
No more than any other of the longer works can the Horae Canonicae
sequence be said to succeed
as a
whole.
latest
391
PART THREE
seem a fundamental quality of his talent, almost a necessary condition of his creative activity. He can always be relied on to
be more interesting, lively, provocative, wide-ranging, psychologically penetrating, technically skilful, and ingenious than most of his
It
comes
to
contemporaries.
and a great
fulfilled
all
his
first
volumes. This
not merely the obstinate prejudice of those who, in the special Auden
number oiNew Verse twenty-two years ago, were taken to task for
is
'a
wet day
in April
is
It
Auden's most sympathetic interpreters today whom we find doubting, even after the fullest possible survey of his poetic range and
is
quality,
and
his public
is it
as a
major
artist.
He
of the poet,
more
grow to
remains a
it
difficult
its
full
stature?
NOTES
i.
textual alterations
and
is
The whole
question
has been investigated in detail by Joseph Warren Beach in The Making of the
Auden Canon. References to titles added to earlier poems at a later date are
(November
in an article on 'Marxism
3. An interesting analysis of this poem appeared
and English Poetry' by D. A. Traversi, Arena 1, p. 199 (i937)4. In The Present Age from 1914, p. 121.
Alvarez in The Shaping
5. E.g. John Bayley in The Romantic Survival, A.
Spirit.
6.
The
early
work
R. Leavis (Scrutiny m, 76; v, 323; rx, 200, and see also 'This Poetical
Renascence' in For Continuity).
Introductory Study, gives a helpful
7. Richard Hoggart, in his Auden, an
commentary on the poem but does not, I think, quite solve the problem.
8. In Purpose xn, 149 (1940). The same number contains an essay by Auden
by
F.
on Thomas Hardy,
11. In
12.
13. L.
this country.
SNOW
C. P.
GRAHAM MARTIN
In any discussion of minor writers, you really want to say two things
why you think they are minor, and then, given the limitation, what
their achievement amounts to. But in a short essay about prolific
novelists like Waugh, Greene, and Snow - together they have written
nearly forty novels - it is impossible to deal fairly with both points.
It
With
from
is
the
the late 1920s and the present day. Moreover, since at least one of the
ways
in
which
more
of issues which
is
his presentation
certainly
Waugh
from
less
ness
or
more
novelists, that
of the material
acute and
more
raises.
is,
of the kind
Greene's aware-
of either
He
is
is
or
essentially a
interesting.
is
Waugh
strictures
interest in
but not
socially,
him
critically,
of both 'pre-war'
contemporary,
as
he was
ten years ago.) This judgement coincides with the strikingly different
social settings
394
plain enough.
Evelyn
Waugh
(b.
1903)
Evelyn Waugh's
first
The second group is less homoThere are one or two satires in the earlier
manner of which The Loved One (1948) is the best known; two
first.
novels in a trilogy about the war; and a historical novel, Helena (1950),
in
reasons
novelist. It
is
certainly necessary to
Waugh has
objected to the
do so
common
in this chapter.
work
an ideal of service and fellowship. Many of the boys come from the
very best families' - the stretches of dead-pan quotation from
speech, the sequence of fantastic
and grotesque
*pungent
satire
upon the
coteries
of
395
real
May fair'.
end
Penguin editions as
It
seems pointless to
PART THREE
wonder whether this is really satire because it lacks moral indignation
-it doesn't - or farce, or comedy of manners, or a peculiar amalgam of
all three. These terms have no precise modern application. With the
exception of
As
Out More
a narrator,
'social satire'
provides at
least
Flags.
Waugh
is
the result
is
is
interesting.
equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, drafttreaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged
to leave.
They came
as missionaries,
ambassadors, tradesmen,
None
seeing
taking
it
themselves. Accordingly,
were
called a Republic.
(Scoop, pp. 74-5)t
of
we
attack can be
itself,
the novelist
moment of utterance,
the only
396
this
and subsequent
cases.
is
who
ate the
European
anything,
colonists
raw.
Scoop and Black Mischief move into a slightly different world from
by Lady Metroland and the coteries of Mayfair,
that represented
though the two are not unconnected, of course. But in doing this,
they only extended to new material a manner and an attitude already
characteristic.
The nouveau
she
is
riche
one point the object of the satire society - and at another, the focus of a
Miss Mouse is
at
comment upon it. She innocently longs for the real barbarism
of which the Mayfair party provides a bored, decadent imitation.
Waugh does not exactly accept her (comparative) sincerity - as he
accepts the honesty of the more frank of the Ishmaelian cannibals satirical
but,
by implying
foolishness,
the novel.
PART THBEE
Miss Runcible had changed into Hawaiian costume and
was the life and soul of the evening.
She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she not been asked.
(Ibid.)
The cumulative
satirical
effect
of
is
true
of
this,
it is
only a
trick.
ment
fair
- in the context
high
life. It
commits Waugh
word
The world
but
is
disliked,
is
mis-
it is
not
must therefore communicate a generalized unselective distaste. To angle the view (as, for example, Angus
Wilson does) would be to expose a particular animus, and so a criterion of judgement. But there is no criterion. And, as a consequence,
the neutral manner is not simply a satirist's tactic, but the statement of
what we have to call, for lack of another term, an attitude.
If this is largely true of all Waugh's satires, it applies more exactly
to the two earliest: Decline and Vail (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930).
understood; the report on
it
Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938) offer (in part at least) a contrast
between types of social and political folly and a relative normality.
Put Out More Flags (1942) opposes the job-hunting of the phoney war
to the patriotic realities of personal sacrifice (though the presentation
of Basil Seal and the 'comic' victimization of Ambrose Silk are deeply
ambiguous).
Waugh
It is,
in Society.
But neither
398
is
allowed to
Each
is,
allowed to do so
explicitly not
Fenwick-Symes
from the
suffers
very
Adam
of
is,
he
is
his
trivializing folly
attitudes,
he
accepts
still
them. The action details his unsuccessful attempts to get rich so that
he can marry Nina. With her, he shares a feeling towards which we
are expected to be sympathetic. Yet neither this feeling (nor even
the old Edwardian order represented
Adam
fails
by Anchorage House)
in opposition to the
to get rich,
who
is,
is
set
up
social life.
Adam in-
and
visit
to Nina's
home.
War
Adam
Nina
in the midst
of
reading a
from
of the
letter
world'.
As
a sort
of reason for
all this
misery,
Young Things:
stick,
and for
thing's not
comment on
the Bright
all
we know
worth doing
everything very
tween
Waugh
S.J. this
may
it
well,
it's
them'
difficult for
(p. 132).
And
at
say, "If a
ah."
It
makes
an exchange be-
'difficulty'
more
'Adam,
general:
don't
can't
'Everything.'
(p.
It
view
is
192)
this as an intimation
of
'class' is
It is
We have to conclude,
is
towards
its
strictly,
particular meaninglessness
indulgent horror.
He makes
two novels
the writer
399
PART THREE
them through.
exploration.
The
a ruthlessly amoral
and again exposes sudden
of hatred and disgust; and the story moves easily towards the grotesque and the nightmarish. But one thing distinguishes
the two earlier satires: a quality of nihilistic acceptance which refuses
to escape into the general securities - the country-house, patriotism,
crystallizations
up
attitudes for
which
Waugh now
allows himself to
distaste.
It is
it
satirical, is
A Hand-
it is
sometimes referred to
as a
minor
classic,
we run up
The
responses
'real'
characterizations
and
begins
it
by
invoking.
Our
sympathies
substantial
a story that are scarcely there at all. Except in a kind of brilliant faking,
Waugh
in the satires.
We are left,
disillusion,
as a result,
but masked
Waugh
as
with an ex-
an impersonal
a peculiar
way. His
novels do not provide insights into the special aspect of his time that
Gun For
social
its
Sale.)
The
which
it
belonged.
this.
400
even
falsifies.
Waugh
avoids
faithful report.
it.
Graham Greene
Graham
(b.
1904)
and he
is still
novel, The
first
himself described
(1932), fourteen
as juvenilia
main
name
first
- and
three -
starting
fifties.
(1925).
thirties,
with
three
'enter-
more or
less
an early volume of
stories, essays critical
plays.
The
was pub-
poems
Within,
titles,
tainments' (Greene's
Man
topical writer.
from torpedoed ships, diamond-smuggling by neutrals, spyCold War, anti-Americanism - this list of headlines comes
only from England Made Me (193 5), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and
The Quiet American (1955); and even if Greene's topicality extended
only to the sensations of the national dailies, it would still be worth
stressing. This is one of the ways in which Greene has been popular,
without being any the less serious. But the sense for news penetrates
vivors
scare, the
this.
Greene
is
also
opinion, and in his novels these emerge, not through spokesmen for
(quaintly) period-views, but
through
made
their
mood,
of war
is
Gun
For
it
emerges
also
from the way the scene of the action is presented, from the buildings,
the streets, the anonymous crowds who fill them. Its presence 'in the
air' of the novel is underlined in a contrast with Vile Bodies, whose
conclusion adopts the same topical fact of war-scare, without any of
Greene's compelling social actuality. Waugh's 'biggest battlefield in
the history of the world' belongs to a nightmare appropriate enough
c.a.
- 15
401
PART THREE
to his novel, but remote
from
the thing
itself.
End
(195 1)
less as
of the Affair
something to be
up with,
like
question
serious
immediately
it
themes?
Kenneth
raises, i.e.
how
does
Simply
fatal disease.
And the
not to be despised.
it
relate to Greene's
is
establishes in
this
(through
peculiar sensibility
connexion; and
mon
Now
and
must be a very
views of Greene's
social observation.
more
close
which commends
it
it is
cer-
as a superior
'social consciousness' is
calls for
if,
then,
it
that,
and
at the
if the topicality
is
same
always
that
sight
it
thirties,
sistence points to
sensibility
is
fifties.
On
402
to identify
this condition,
is
and
at the
corrupt lawyer,
career of the
less explicit
is
we
ment
very
sets
he
detail,
fair description.
The
mind by
Hell,'
Hale.
is
than
of convincing period
also a
this
the language
it
is
com-
the viewer
is
uses
is,
when
this sets
its
with the relevant sections of The Waste Land, and the comparison
underlines not only a common emphasis on seediness, sterility, and
despair, but a common method of establishing it. Like Eliot, Greene
works through metaphor to convey a particular range of feeling
which ratifies, almost proves, an unstated general view of life. (E.g.
'Jug, jug to dirty ears' - the last two words overpower the whole
implication of what has gone before, and somehow exclude protest or
dissent.) Yet unlike the poem's, the novel's mood emerges not within
into
play),
Greene
is
is 'a
all
a successful novel,
and
this part
is
over-
The ambiguous
'realism'
is,
Rock the
effect
of
this
is
its
own
right,
and
as
a vehicle for
works
and the particular character de-
guilt
403
PART THREE
fine themselves in 'real' social environments. Neither
environment
his life.
cally.
this
condition
is
he
is
the victim of a
particular kind
of
religion, refuses to
own
this
having been
sistently in
felt
more
is
generally,
our society between 1930 and 1945. What Greene diaghuman condition - 'why, this is hell, nor are we
noses as an absolute
out of
it'
- existed
as
an experienced social
in his
more
with
his
recent
work
of
this
kind.
mean
this
works
contemporary
either for
agreement or
it
dismissal,
does
make
possible
two
offered?
I
discuss
The
it
first
does not
critical
questions
does
how
seriously
is it
being
below, but since The Power and The Glory (1940) is also a
it is worth applying the second
but in
at least
its
thesis
one instance
it
is
404
'radical'
is
two
with the
parody of what
it is
The policeman's
from the
which have
reasons
real
much
so
is
to
do
is
arguments get
priest's experience.
priest's
little
position
finer, so
much more
vivid than
it
seems to
In a slightly different
novels of the
thirties.
richness of scene
in the
Battlefield (1934)
moral absolutes of
about identifiable
social
betrayal, guilt,
and
Me (1935),
and
about
it.*
certainly studies
political conditions.
are never identified in the novels, and this withholding portends the
The End
oj the Affair,
The
final
where an over-
because
it
best coordinates
Brighton Rock,
cause
it is
of the
where the
Matter
is
From
this
point of
plan
is
of this
of his
state
its
Compare
It's
A Battlefield.)
chosen
not
it;
know
so thoroughly as Scobie,
all
human
beings share.
this reticence.
405
PART THREE
Why,
love
much?
this place so
Is it
because here
human
nature hasn't
had mie to disguise tself ? Nobody here could ever talk about
a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidty in its proper place
on the other side or death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere peopje so
cleverly hushed up. Here you could Love human beings nearly
as God loved them knowing the worst: you didn't love a
pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
(pp.
Evidently, 'here'
is
crucial to the
argument, and
it
33-4)*
supports
it
both by
being offered
as 'real',
and
at
the
projections, and such arguments. This early description of the policestation, for
example:
In the dark
in the
charge-room and
human meanand iniustice - it was the smell of a zoo of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack 'of liberty The place was scrubbed
daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and
policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.
the
cells,
ness
(p. 6)
Or
the description
He saw
the
fist
open and
close, the
damp
inefficient
powder
snow
in the ridges
(P-
23)
under contribu-
tion:
looked
He
at Scobie.
a stranger's direction,
interest
* Page
406
up Bond
Street.
(P-4)
In each case, a
and
emerges not
but
as
by metaphor, an
is,
way
sible one.
It is
on
to an
in this
Here
is
actual smell,
it
as a particular social
it
first
most extreme
quotation
same time,
is
it
projected
seems in-
mghtmare.
Father Rank came down the steps from the altar bearing God.
The saliva had dried in Scobie's mouth it was as though his veins
:
He
had
dried.
would
let
feet: the
fly
(p.
As well
the
as
of being moral
272)
Tlie
human relationships.
in relation to a
Heart of
Scobie's
world which
is
im-
proved there
as well.
And
he
since
is,
in a sense, an
Everyman, the
life itself,
his story
moral
situation.
Yet there
407
is
point at
PART THREE
which the record seems to have been too carefully arranged. In an
account of actual relationships, selective 'realism' is only a possible
method if the basis of the selection (as in satire) is fully confessed.
Yet Greene's method, his generalizing intention, necessarily conceals
this basis. Thus, Scobie's mistrust of Ah, his only real friend, leads to
the latter's brutal death. The narration makes this seem an inevitable
tragedy arising from Scobie's quixotic surrender to Helen Roth's
demands upon him - Scobie's 'responsibility' perhaps, but not his
fault. But in fact, either this catastrophe does reveal a moral fault in
Scobie which particularizes his condition; or, if not, then it is imposed on to
his likely
would
'realism'
him only
We are forced to
count.
which the
bility
behaviour to 'prove'
in the
way
it
is
to
no
wife seems
his
can be
less
more simply
structure
is
of the novel
is
fact,
no moral
'pity' for
her
Louise actually
it,
because the
rights. Scobie's
results
ships,
and
two women,
his 'pity'
them is allowed
for
to attract the
think. Scobie
is
him which
plot
of
works
less
life itself,
with great
skill,
but
it
in,
it 'realistic'
human
was
man who
. .
etc'
It is
of course,
condition.
it
It is
one
- 'Here
408
The argument
the
is
- that
is
it
Scobie's story
into
skil-
more candid
intensities
the last of the above quotations, Scobie's reaction to the dying child,
or to the dawn-sea) the argument of the plot seems rather shabby.
The point is impossible to discuss fairly in short space, but because
it
be mentioned. Greene's
of a very
world
as a novelist,
it
has to
art
specialized vision -
of the ways
of
his
in
which Greene
is
minor
novelist.
supporting argument or
in either case, a
a fuller
beyond
And
begins
it
one
'major' treatment
commitment
that
this is certainly
On
ambiguities evidently spring from the writer's belief that the condition he diagnoses
which
is
absolute, and
of criticism.
C.P. Snow
(b. 1905)
In 1959, C. P.
to be completed,
title
will
mem-
ber of the sequence, Strangers and Brothers (1940). (The Search, which
first
Rich (1958),
Snow
by
two
of
of time, roughly 1920 to 1950; and
to follow the moral growth of Lewis Eliot, the narrator of these
stories, as he experiences the struggle for power, both private and
public, within his own life and in that of his friends. Each novel can
relating the stories
all
by
their
PART THREE
narration. Eliot's presence
more
of course the
main
Thi
as in
is
is
marginal, he
is still
'consciousness',
link,
is
is
very certainly
his,
New Men
personal biography as in A Time oj Hope (1949). He is the
(1954),
only character in the whole sequence with whom we feel any degree
whether
its
ostensible interest
The
social history as in
is
of intimacy.
The scheme
is
will
suggest
it is
it
Career.)
bur the
spirit in
is
contemporary
More
- these
have
especially, perhaps
classic
which
it
is
its
of exencourages -
it
other kinds of
to
difficult
clearly
is
working
travelling)
social
the
which
and discourages
servant -
civil
make
overrate.
available the
his
at
the
above
though these
all,
As an observer, Snow
tive (cp. Greene).
He
is
has
Eliot, so that
success in
little
Lewis
acumen, and,
side.
fall
conveying any
is
mood
is
a certain
convincing.
society had
our youth. Its forms were
crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified
Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not
become more
rigid,
not
less,
or
since
410
the
test
air.
And
those
forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would
have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that weddingparty: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and,
except for catastrophes, fixed for good.
(Homecomings, 1956, p. 283)
He was propounding
view that,
was the sensible
thing to distribute it in small portions, so that no one should
be quite left out; we shouid thus lay up credit in days to come.
The extreme alternative view was to see nothing but the im-
since the
amount
of material
was not
large,
[atomic] pile
'If
that,'
said,
hearing
my
voice
sound remote,
up
'I
in this country.'
'Double or
my
quits,' said
Rose,
'if I
dear chap?'
nodded my head.
'And again, if I haven't misunderstood you, you'd have
for
doubling?'
I nodded my head once more.
Rose considered, assembling the threads of the problem,
411
PART THREE
on
committees, the
his
Ministerial views.
'This
is
rather an
awkward
he
one,'
said.
He
stood up and
is
Snow
interweaves a personal
private histories are the least successful parts of these novels. Snow's
present
are
account of his
objects
which
ization
is
in
own
the
feelings.
Roy
'there',
important enough in
it
The
but
itself,
sidered apart from the local use that Eliot makes of them, resolve into
mere aggregate of social-documentary detail. Eliot is therefore the
only explicit source of each novel's judgements, so that a contradiction between his essential attitudes and the ostensible scheme of the
two ways
it
by
Eliot's ability to
seems to
connexion between
me that
his history
and the
social insights
he mobilizes
is
never forged.
The
first
theme of power.
On
is
server,
his
oj
412
left to
of decision-taking,
as distinct, that
is,
or the meaning of the decision. In, for example, The Light and The
Dark, Snow recounts the arguments for and against the decision to
launch regular night-bombing against the Germans., Bomber Command's view is that it will boost civilian morale in such a way that the
men and
great expense in
more importantly,
great. GetlifFe
is
an influential
man
expense too
who
already
knows about
become
bomber
pilot.
life
is left
'losses
who might
have
of power.
Eliot's neutrality
is
at
(unawareness?)
at this
point offers no
other solution. Choice, control, understanding: these ideas are confined to the private histories,
which
lives,
some
people stoically accept the fact that they are victims of uncontrollable
forces. In public,
PART THREE
one way or another to the more or less severe detriment
of many private lives. But the two kinds of decision remain separate,
and their meeting in Eliot's narration of his experience only underlines
these forces
the
life;
The second
dissonance must be
more
briefly
mentioned.
And
since
Snow
is
life
enisled
We
Eliot's
is
that
mortal millions
of
live
comes
and
this
considerably
is,
is
in the external
manner of
whose
Snow's defeats
less
to be
his
own
hope. In the
is
so
remote and so
last analysis,
static as
Eliot's personal
journey
class-structure.
NOTES
1.
Taking
2. F.J.
3.
It
Easy (1958),
p. 5.
K. AHott and
T. F.
DAVID HOLBROOK
Tutor, Bassingbourn Village College, Cambridgeshire
Today,
as for
the
last
two
decades, T. F.
Powys
(1875-1953)
is
Thomas (1914-53),
on the other hand, who exploited the urge to 'make up in the Tavern
the time we have lost in the Mosque' (in Matthew Arnold's words),
captured a wide audience and a considerable reputation which it is
still infra dig to question - even though one doubts whether he is
really read more than Powys.
The difficulty in discussing Dylan Thomas is to know what it is
one is discussing, since the words are usually small clue. It is remarkable how such critics as Mr Bayley in The Romantic Survival and Mr
Elder Olson in The Poetry oj Dylan Thomas are able to produce what
appear to be, one would think, incontrovertible expositions of
Thomas's verbal weaknesses, without noticing that they have virtually
demolished
instance,
is
his
artist.
Here, for
Mr Olson:
. .
is
a Keats, a
seriously.
415
. .
these limitations
PART THREE
What
is
who
a native strength
vitality;
is
that
Thomas
is 'a
lyric
it is
T.
F.
Powys who
represents, for
rests
all
his
metaphorical
on
disabling
am
face to the
is
enemy:
inertness as a
effect.
he frequently said such things as: 'as far as he knew it had no meaning
'some of them may be poems' or 'to read one's poems aloud
at all* or
is
to
let
an emotive pressure
(as lies
And
at
times
poem
as 'If
is
my head hurt a hair's foot') and at times a flair for arranging words into
patterns that have the appearance of poetry, there
is
almost always
of control towards order and of those verbal expeditions into unploughed experience which are metaphor. Significantly,
in his letters, he discusses words, their flavour, but seldom the meaning
a total absence
sought.
With
is
often a
tenderness, a lack
lives
of
416
T. F.
by
nasty'
...
all
mad and
with humanity
is
would be
'they
air
of a
of adult sexuality:
now, with
tittering together
close'.
his
meta-
fun:
two
in that
comedy,
is
described as
'a
place of love'
it is
of malicious
love in
it is
all
mad and
goings-on
Llaregyb
at
is
reversed
God go f
the
is
at
Thomas
with
amusing
interest, as to a child,
Under Milk
only by
its
vitality as
Wood
and
a tedious piece
this lack
ures in verbosity.
human life,
rhythm,
his
modes. The description, for instance, of the fishing boats in the har-
may
evocations of the beach, the sand, the cockle-pickers, and other marine paraphernalia in the early chapters of Ulysses,
417
some of
the best
. .
PART THREE
The
sea
cocklewomen and
the webfoot
bobbing
...
seas as
. .
wade and
pick:
They waded
Cockle-pickers.
little
way
and
vital, if
The
somewhat
carcass lay
on
contrived, purpose:
his path.
He
dogsbody. Here
lies
flights
MOk Wood
modes
the
Unde>
of
his
are
of language
'vitality'
sake:
It's
organ organ
Parlez-vous
He
This writing
respectability
The
all
jig.,
Madam?
him
. .
and reinforces
essential failure,
indicated
in
is
jig
its
it
flatters
deficiencies of
communal sympathy.
artistic,
may
be briefly
the areal,
amoral
world of Llaregyb
is
lovable
derision-
is
418
T. F.
That's
Owen
(Cherry
sago.
laughs with delight)
my boy, as drunk as a
deacon, with a big wet bucket and a fish-pail full of stout, and
Remember
last
CHERRY OWEN
And
then?
And
then
{softly)
all
night like a
brewery.
The
lieve in this
exist,
human
Under Milk
life,
which we could
of immaturity. This
Woo d offers
is
'laugh delightedly'
all
what,
us: approval
in its rendering
of a
sailor places
'sin untij
on her thighs
world
All, in
life, is
its
helmet, to
still
his
reverent goat-bearded
of wiry
febrile obsessional
fire.
its ugMcation of
from the exigencies and obligations
in the poem Country Sleep, Dylan
be Time or Death and who threatens
of adult living.
Thomas's Thief,
his
his
like a tuft
of
spiteful childish
Significantly,
who
seems to
Powys
did not
flee
maturity.
He
419
PART THREE
work
is
hend some
possible
meaning
an apprehension of the
in
life.
The
man
seeking to compre-
best of Powys
supreme
is
done from
fiction,
while
of
Bunyan and
it
was
by
Mr
crawl over
its
the Bible.
By
life:
happened to
destiny,
laughter,
Mr Meek,
from
for
which
it
(Mr Weston
The
sat
- for
it
Good Wine)
was
a large
low
of blood
...
(Mr
Tasker's Gods)
Such power to disturb and enlarge our honesty of awareness, combined with Powys's tender and positive insistence on the potentialities
of love, and the need to accept death as inevitable and something that
makes for 'completeness', are the roots of his art.
Yet the art itself is at times marred by an over-insistence that is
the mark of a writer's uncertainty of his audience. Often this is mixed
with a strangely simple use of Freud's 'philosophy', amounting to
something of an assault on the reader which slops over into ungoverned
sensationalism.
In
Unclay this
rejection.
At
his
In
Fables
artistic
a sensational morbidity
uncertainty makes a
is
work
triumphant.
fit
only for
worst
it is
difficult to
know how
420
serious
Powys
is:
T. F.
.
rabbit
His.
The
soft
longings of
Mrs
And
there
is
morbidity in
his
work not
At his
best,
appetite,
'I know her well. She has a brown birth-mark about the size
She has a cherub
of a sixpence just a little above her navel
face and pleasant breasts ...' etc.
. . .
but vicarious
relish,
There
is
too
much
little
like a
is
placed, as childish:
display herself in so wanton a manner that Mr
She would
Grobe' s heart would beat with violence and his hand would
turn over the pages of the Holy Bible with hurried zeal.
. . .
And
thus throughout
Powys
there
is
inward
closer to awareness
PART THREE
our chief earnest of our physicaJ mortality), he is often guilty of an
offensive preoccupation with 'dead maidens', and reveals a corpseexhuming tendency, as it to imply savagely that this is all love comes
of the
Tis
as if a
him.
When the Mumbys are shown the body of the Ada Kiddle they raped,
Powys
is
Mumbys'
women
and
"The Devil!"
said
all
('
the
of human
Mr Weston
to shock us into
is
and 'German
they
may
have
cigarettes
His intention
lust,
'belief that
is
following
life:
and
call
to
One
little
required
me
come
to
to them.
Of
course
tantalise
... I
them
give
them
when one
sweet embraces
a
is
my
(Unclay)
revolting
living,
the writing
by evoking
as inevitable, or
is
recoil.
This
approaches
of acceptance; death
is
to
is
make both
- as
who
he can approach
here rendered
as
some
accepts death
derisory, hideous
At
his best,
of
He
re-creates
some-
mode
derived from Bunyan, the Psalms, the Liturgy and the Bible, Herbert,
ballads
as in
Winter
Tale,
which emerges
422
and something of
in such a
work with
T. F.
wild roots
as
mode becomes
sophisticated - he has his admiration for Jane Austen and for learned
divines such as
Law
too.
And
from many of
different
yet,
of course,
his sources,
very
Or
devotional.
it is
universal patterns
life,
Powys,
like
Mr
make
Weston
the responses.
Good Wine
(1927),
of
of
human
plain the
life,
chiefly those
meaning of
is
his
form the
create evil:
This
is
set
'Be'en
light
I,
life,
virtually
relate to
'before the
worms have
devoted to pondering,
problems suggested by
which
mug in the
him'.
Mr
as a poetic
Mr Weston
him-
village inn:
make
peace and
the Lord,
all
the mis-
chief in Folly
Is
God
stories
or
we
Adam
we blame God,
or the
Down
has a strong
PART THREE
moral pattern, and powerful and unambiguous consequences - the
morality
book
(as
at
is
love.
is
the
all
that
What he
ate
only Jenny.
It is
by
stages
can lead
us,
of such
plain, simple
as
it
It is
it is
424
T. P.
'good customer' - a
fit
moods of God)
to an appetite
Mr
by
Weston, the creative artist of creation, is the perfect end to the picture:
and the chief grief of Mr Weston himself is that he may not yet drink
of it - until the Last Day when he shall drink of it and all his customers
too.
Meanwhile, he
'I
would
willingly exchange
gotten
says,
and
all
that
am
...'
The
because there the customers order his wine, but never 'pay' - they
refuse to accept the awareness his
wine
brings.
compassionate
whimsy of
its
Kindness
or
rustic affection
in
No
Painted Plumage, as
of the
it
morbid nastiness of
was called in 1934),
mode of Powys's
writing
The tone
is
is
itself
them
firm,
all
all.
and
capacities for
He
is
book
sustained
all
Creation, and
its
limitations.
425
. .
PART THREE
'You are sure you don't think too poorly of that?' he asked
Luke when he sat down again.
'No,' replied Luke,
'I
only meant
it
like
'I
it all
very
as a picture,' said
much indeed.'
Mr Weston,
my
'but
proof in
much
'1 know what you would
had I the
think
how
last verse.'
most
living
That which
is
is
manner.
Much
is
human
life,
'good customer'
is
including an acceptance
which Powys,
us, by
interpreter
the tired hare, the dog had only done what he wished to do to
Jenny Bunce. He would have done worse than the dog. The
greyhound had left the hare dead upon the grass, but Luke
would have torn Jenny limb from limb in the excess of love
The
and destruction
is
valid, serious,
and
it
is
done by Powys
in a
mat-
Mr Weston
me
. .
Mr
Grobe
when you
... 'I
have brought
sorrow no more.'
'My
I
Alice,' said
Mr Grobe,
426
T. F.
'She
is
her wings
flap
goose,' said
little
at
you.'
. . .
At
this,
we
think,
protest
'poetical stories'
reality,
not acceptable
is
as
makes Mr Weston a
whole authority of the book, bringing
charlatan,
turbs the
it
and
dis-
at the reader's
Yet
in the enacted
Down
morality in Folly
there
is
minor writing.
much which
We
have no
doubt about the deserved fate of Mrs Vosper, the village procuress,
or of the
Mumbys,
'Wold
in the Folly
at this
'Wold Grunter*
pletely successful.
easily,
is
gical question,
He
is
the
one
to
recognize
on
before
in Folly
is
us.
and com-
Mr Weston
at the centre
is
Adam
most
of the teleolo-
Down. He even
adds to
Mr
all
Weston's
apprehensions
'Yes', said
mankind.
'Ha !' exclaimed Mr Weston, taking out his note book
never thought of that.'
The
final scene
is
the uncovering
men's
gifts
it is
... 'I
lust,
a superbly controlled
427
moment,
the kind
PART THREE
of thing which makes one claim this novel as a considerable work.
It represents the culmination of Powys' approach to 'the tragic view'
- this, 'the weeping clod', is the inevitable end of all passion: yet here
it is the untimely consequence of greed and lust. It makes Grunter-
Adam
abandon
his
We
his
as a seducer, or to cling
may
be
left
to the Creator.
Yet the Creator Himself, here, weeps compassionately over the life, death, suffering, and evil He has Himself
created. Coming together with the tender rendering of the love of
Luke and Jenny, it represents a claim for the sanctity of love, its
must
resign.
triumphant
human
potentiality:
and
in a mature, achieved
form.
NOTES
serious critical book written on Powys,
of Unclay for approval. Thus it seems to me
extraordinary that he can comment approvingly on the passage I have quoted
on p. 422; for if one accepts it, it makes pretty much nonsense of the rest of
1. It is
first
ing',
Powys', by
W.
I.
Carr, Delta
No.
19, i960.
me, she had read James Hadley Chase 'without blushbut Powys was 'filthy'. Chase is prurient: Powys is erotic.
As
a student said to
The
FURBANK
N.
P.
we
shall
fiction)
between
has been
used elsewhere in these volumes, and mere pulp fiction. Uncle Tom's
Cabin
is
has been.
It is
Steinberg,
also a 'steady-seller'.
The
best-seller,
is
The
and dissemination
on the public something that it
would never have positively wanted. Its menace is the menace of the
trivial, the thing which is too dead and empty to have intrinsic interest, but yet is thrust down people's throats until they become
accustomed to triviality and expect it. This cannot fairly be said
strongest objection to the 'mass' organization
of culture
is
that
of the
best-seller,
of
life
their
it
may
foist
and even
own and
off
less
of the
express
have
felt
beliefs.
What,
appeal
then,
and
makes
a best-seller?
later in this
chapter
There
is first
of
two
favourite
themes and patterns in best-selling writing in the hope ofthr owing light
on
this.
made
Otherwise, a
success
libraries
becoming
or
its
a paper-back, of
its
adoption by a book-club,
429
PART THREE
expected topical appeal or becoming notorious for some accidental
reason.
do a
towards creating a
best-seller,
great deal
newspapers
in
(a
brow
best-selling author
is
all.
And
the
by
first six
review by Augustine
weeks, seems
Birrell).
On
the
It is
them
like to
this.
is
if
he
know what
and
if
they
have bought once, they will buy again; the sales of fiction are not
much affected by competition. And once a middlebrow novelist has
achieved very high
sales, editors
his
reputation
up.
And
is
inflated,
do
is
is
done.
The
public like
it,
because they
430
no doubt helped
of critic
is
man who
art
has
he
is
him to
the truth.
mere
fact that a
also takes
it
given
work
two-thirds of the
receives attention
way
its
dangers, for
from
quarters
all
good
The book-club is an important factor in the growth of a bestThe first general club of this kind in England was formed in
1937, though the idea had already been put into practice in Germany
seller.
in the 1920s.
at
recommendations ensure
These
societies are a
sales
now
America).
They
431
(as
is little
of what they
evidence
shall write,
class
of
PART THREE
readers, and the fear that they stifle individual curiosity
and choice is probably not very real, for this class of readers is not
middlebrow
adventurous
at
50,000.
The
formula for
real
first
success,
however,
is
publication as a
as
may
be
seen
from the
Finally,
it
case
what he knows
what he
writes.
to be inferior?
authors
who
discuss their
own
content
my-
with
a passage
done:
The
. . .
interest
events
...
Of course
and Francis
lies
Sayers,
Nevil
spring to mind.
432
... I,
Shute,
Agatha
laborious technique
The
rise
of the
best-seller in
England
may
conveniently be dated
now
and
scene,
with
The
its
best-seller,
many ways
fiction
divided audience.
a special genre,
best-seller, is in
a special version
of an
of voice, that
its
own.
at least
it
does
it
Its
has
tell
story.
its
first,
many ways
pointed
it
in our period.
out.
The
c.a.
- 16
43 3
PART THREE
humanity, for there is no well-conceived novel which is not
read by many an ingenuous and noble mind, who can reflect
with pleasure that they have acted on some occasion with all
the high sense of honour, the exalted generosity, the noble
disinterestedness described in their author. But what they
must not look for in real life, what they would expect in vain,
what it is necessary to guard them against, is supposing that
such conduct will make a similar impression on those around
them, that the sacrifices they make will be considered, and the
principles on which they act understood and valued, as the
novel writer, at his good pleasure, makes them.
(Extracts of the Journals
to
1852, ed.
is
Nevil Shute
tralian
when
Town
who
form of a
tells
of a
staid
And
lips
bush to get help for an injured farmer (though she had scarcely
is
at
once made
Warwick Deeping's
by a
hotel-porter, persecuted
Sorrell
known
bullying sometime-N.C.O.
who
is
placed over his head, thinks his wrongs are ignored and misunder-
stood but
;
of all that
all
is
equal,
acknowledges him
If characters,
gentleman and an
by accident or design, have their actions misinterwhole dynamic of the book will be to make the
is
moment of explanation. An
looking
woman,
of course; yet
is itself illogical.
at first sight
you
It is
can't
many women,
ingenious
if
as a
feet
young
has fallen in love with her (he has been swept off his
he marries her,
his love
singing).
She
fears that
434
regret
They
it,
and so she
part.
how shall
now persuade him that she is returning out of anything more than
pity?
of the petite,
fluffy
and restoring
brought
home
first
wrong with it
more
logically.
tributes she
can
elicit
to
herself.
is
what we may
call
'romantic
Vagabond (1906), for instance - the unshaven, Bohemian, absinthedrinking 'wandering scholar' Paragot - has been to Rugby, and thirteen years ago
a gentleman
and
disproportionate
a cracksman.
The same
human relationships
Nymph (1924)
is a child with
and son share a passionate,
quasi-marital, relationship. (Of course much of the pathos in Dickens
springs from just such anomalous relationships - the adult as child or
the child as adult.) This vein of sentimental disproportion is a very
powerful and precarious one, and easily turns into a positive delight
in disproportion - so that Deeping is led on to propose (what would
be rather monstrous if you took it seriously) that not only should the
father sacrifice health and social position to his son's career, but that
he should constantly remind the son that he is doing so, and that the
son should make it the great sacrificial task of his life to repay the debt.
A third feature of best-selling writing is dependence on nostalgia,
the feeling that past things are moving and significant simply because
they are past. Here we are in strictly best-seller country. The popular
novelist can depend on this distancing of events, by itself, to create
435
PART THREE
pathos.
it
in this
When he writes
is
have the power of the natural article. On the other hand, when he is
writing with complete integrity, certain weaknesses of a best-selling
kind hamper him. In The Old Wives' Tale (191 1) he means to show,
in accordance with naturalist doctrine, that every detail of these com-
monplace
lives is interesting
contributes to.
later
no more
to say than
nostalgia.
The
imperial idea
is
important in the
wrongs. There
is
interests
War
in this, the
group form-
with
his
New
this
combines with
a late
As the thriller has developed, the hero has increasingly employed the same technical
ingenuity as the villain. And at the same time the moral status of the
hero has sunk. Novels of the Peter Cheyney, Ian Fleming school work
on the assumption that violent and treacherous enemies can only be
combated by violence and treachery; thus the reader can enjoy in
fantasy the full criminal life, save that he remains theoretically on the
side
as artist.
Drummond
sporting
skills
to defend
him (though
and various
an emergency discovering
in
fact).
The
issues
are decency
his
quarry
when he
thriller the
moral
issue
whom
becomes per-
man, but,
girls'
as in
savage animal, with gleaming teeth, lean body, and narrow hips
anonymous engine
driving of
Some
fast
for
detection,
an
437
PART THREE
Three Weeks (1907). Ruritania was invented by 'Anthony Hope' in
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), which itself looks back to the romance-
its
father,
seriously, or at least
more
literally,
by
popular writers.
The
First
World War
inspired
Raymond's
ethos
still
Vachell's
out of a job and up against the 'mob', who resent his pretensions to
gentlemanliness. By the end of the novel these heroes assume almost
Christ-like dimensions as representatives of the
'new poor'.
and
civilian
it
can
still
be
true
ism are reflected in the hysteria and romanticism of its popular novels.
The country was psychologically better prepared for the Second
World War and less profoundly stirred by it. Best-sellers on the subject,
like Nigel Balchin's The Small Back Room (1943) and Nicholas Monsarrat's
full
post-war
best-seller,
carries
on
this tradition.
He
through some enterprise detail by detail, step by step. His heroes are the
people
who
by some
438
who
We can distin-
town
who
ob-
Mary Webb's
wildwood
novels of the
amid
heroines
and oddity,
their
of
good
Farm
deal of
damage from
Stella
(1932).
Of
lasting has
been
oF verbal
precision, an exhibition
7
,
literary quotation,
cliche,
about
literacy,
style
parodied
is
a joke
processes of imbeciles
elementary of facts.
When we come
it is less
to the historical
class.
439
PART THREE
often
you
tell
what they
us quite frankly
style,
and
on the
incivil,'
first
says
Maurice
page of The
Forest
spilt,
woodland
'My
are doing.
horn
men,
Beauty and the Beasts, will tumble each other, seeking life or death
Most authors of this kind write with some
with their proper tools
such formula or recipe of ingredients in their mind. The charm of the
.
. .
genre
and
lies
in
feelings
its
being, to
'
some
modern bodies
make
on
dressing-
up. Thus, in an early Georgette Heyer, Powder and Patch (1923), the
modern boy,
as
we
at this sort
pastiche
phraseology. C.
S.
best
his
at
hero a
bluff, hearts-of-oak
seadog
analysis
of nautical operations.
440
it
It is this
links
that
him, of
that, indeed,
is
its
extremest
form. Unlike the novels of Wilkie Collins, the modern detective novel
is
and solve
its
problems without
seems to offer the normal constituents of fiction without actually doing so. It makes little difference
if the
It
what happens
make bewildering
only to
is
it
or simply from
life
on the
is
murder
part of a Cranford-esque
miraculously restored.
The
involved.
be
fruitful for
The
human
issues
The conventions of the genre are now set and will obviously
many
years ahead.
transcendent
the
admiring
imaginativeness of the
official
by
suspi-
by means of
culprit's
tion
the ultra-obvious
hand;
when
surprise,
...
the chase
done
is
One should add that the detective novel has the distinction of being
first best-selling genre to celebrate not deeds but the human
the
reason.
It
its
is
game or pastime.
Its
value to
its
readers
etc.) is
purely therapeutic;
intellect.
pas-
This
chapter
is
not about
It is
'serious'
is
it
range of recreational activities put out by the media of mass communication, activities
today.
which
Somewhere
reflect
outside
and
them
affect aspects
stands the
of British
work of
'culture'
the novelists,
Paper; so
do
ments, such
authorities
moment,
and arrange-
may
spend on the
are: Reveille,
arts.
But
which
local
advertisements
Jury, the
these to literature,
Monitor.
culture'
The
of which
relation
of all
literature
is
is
not immediately
clear.
historian
and Eliot (if we regard Eliot as British). This list spans more than one
hundred and fifty years, and in Britain alone. If we look more widely,
to European and American writers, we can span a roughly similar
442
De
Tocqueville to Ortega
Gasset.
The
larger debate
is
about the
is,
inquiry.
to
life
The debate
'class',
is
also, inevitably,
place, if any,
do
traditional
What
arts
and
inquiries largely
and
differently phrased
local
'working-class' culture?
Is
good,
What
Such a debate
is
ture to those
in the
as
well
as a political
and economic mission (to take another example from adult education:
the universities did not there plough a virgin field;
organizations
for
the
many
grass-roots
improvement of working-people
cultural
This
is
lar
emphasis
we go on
to describe.
is
this
culture'
bound
all
first
gives a
Is
'high
the
443
PART THREE
submerged in new substitute forms, in what the Germans call 'kitsch'?
What is the relation of the creative arts and of disinterested intellectual
activity to these new means of communication?
But, first, what are the mass media and how did they arise? No
definition can be precise, but a workable definition can be reached.
The
is
normally
used today, are sound and television broadcasting, the press (with
certain exceptions), the cinema,
general,
and
this
is
their distinction,
all
by
class,
(thus,
most books
are not in this sense mass media). All these activities are products
of the
last
eighty years
did not exist; the press and advertising existed, but not in forms
Two
must be mentioned
In Britain,
it is
new
first
is
press-lords, that
some
energetic
by
men
appreci-
this large,
new,
Three further
qualifications
universal literacy
the general
would be wrong
First, it
shown
by
that
the middle of
was
to
among the
amount of cheap
a considerable
Third
sensational.
if
two
and the
assumed between
is
these productions
working-people, that
and
substantially true
Two
is
daily losing
tell
in
planning. In almost
sciousness
mean
is
that
quality.
totalitarian
all societies,
becoming increasingly
some of its
rise
relevance.
of centralized social
in those which are
and especially
industrialized, a
what
is
commonly
is more
more and more to speak to
persuade them in certain directions. This is
body, to
number of forms:
communications
in authoritarian countries
Soviet Russia,
in
in a great
Communist China);
in
peacetime
difficult to
life
state. It
would be
when
more importance
We
we
tend
should give
and governmental
pressures.
Still,
In spite of the
in spite
of the increases
445
PART THREE
of many Western countries. Many more things are
made and have to be sold, competitively. Thus in Britain a
body of people who previously spent almost the whole of their
being
large
income
in providing,
necessities
now have money to spend on goods which are not essential - though
they may be pleasant to have. This is generally true, though not
evenly spread throughout society. Since the war marginal spending
by
people
serious
encouraged.
In Russia and China the mass media are substantially arms of government, with positive and comparatively single-minded functions. In
different democracies their use differs, according to the structure and
show
its
of
was considerable pressure for a commercial channel strengthened by the country's increased prosperity - and so in 1954
the Independent Television Authority was created, to run a second
channel from the proceeds of advertisements. Its advocates always
point out that programmes on this channel are not 'sponsored' by the
advertisers as they are in the United States. This is true, but the similarities between American television and British television on I.T.A.
are greater than the differences. And the general tendencies of both
are markedly different from those of the B.B.C. It would be more
and which
fulfil, as
two
one
who pay
is
full in-
objectively as possible,
pulled
by the pervasive
At
of the British people, and each representing one main form of 'dependence', are the most striking evidence for the two themes of this
essay: the intrinsic power and importance of the organs of mass
and cultural
pressures.
these four
factors
couraged two striking changes in almost all forms of public communication. To some extent these changes, towards centralization and
concentration,
must develop
as
the
447
PART THREE
(e.g.
Denmark
and
Street
its
States has
but thirty times her land area. Holland and Belgium have most of
the characteristics listed above, but the relative smallness of their
populations makes
it less
be founded in the
field
burgh and Manchester can make some claim, but a comparison with,
say, Naples or Milan shows how limited the claim is.
Centralization in communications reflects the centralization in
commerce and
industry.
Similarly,
is
available (family saloon, sports car, limousine, estate car) but the
number of
small. The
lower
different
makes and
is
price,
relative
stability
of employment, concentration of
some of
be usefully taken in the distribution of good intellectual and imaginative works, as in the issue of excellent books in paper-back form
which now flourishes in the United States and to a lesser degree in
Britain.
But
this
is
chiefly a matter
duct of good quality (and for every publication of this sort the same
mass audience most of the time. Motor-cars are not really very
important if by centralizing and concentrating their production we
;
we may
448
well be
satisfied.
But cheap-
and imaginative
intellectual
affairs
all
profoundly irrelevant to
concentrated.
The cinema,
since
is
it is
industry, has
attempted in a film
sufficiently suggests
what
its
explora-
during the
last thirty
centralization
gone
far.
more independent
close reading
life
town and
its
may
suburbs.
belong to a
But
more than
in
most im-
provincial out-
include a moderate
manner of the
and
the background
editorials,
articles,
major comment
the judgements on
all
topics
Concentration
is
all
over Britain.
Many
people
still
think
roughly equal
at
effect.
Among
by
are,
how far
of
but a glance
concentration
has advanced.
449
PART THREE
of material whose character is not affected by the manner
in which it is distributed. Yet there is some truth in the claim, and
it underlines the undoubted advantages mass communications can
bring. Television, it is true and we are told often enough, can suggest
a range of worthwhile interests and pleasures far wider than most
of us would otherwise have known. It can give millions the chance
to see at the same time a really informed discussion on some matter
of public interest; it can occasionally give an unusually close sense of
the characters of admirably impressive individuals who would otherwise have been no more than names to us it can present from month
to month plays, well acted and produced, which most of us would have
distribution
all
and myths. This harsh but meaningful sub-world has not been much
examined either by writers on mass communications or by students
of literature or - we may be glad, since they might make use of it -
upon
of those established
Its
and these are weakenings of the qualion which mass communications must
it;
arts
feed.
Mass communications are usually led, first, to avoid clear psychoand social definition. Sharp definition is possible in 'high art',
and concrete definition of a certain kind is possible in 'low' art,
since each depends on a limiting of the audience. The first audience is
nowadays largely self-selected, without overriding reference to
social or geographic factors. This is, for want of a better term, the
logical
450
may
though these
force their reading. Yet they are, whilst forming this audience, in a
say, Peg's
Paper or the
Tatler.
The mass media can only occasionally accept either of these types
of audience. The first is too small to be of much use; the second is a
series of audiences, of roughly the same type though divided by habit
1
and custom.
Essentially the
second
series
an immediate
loss.
Compare only
much larger
is
to
weld
this
group. There
is
life
society, dare
function
is
call in
question the
new
life
of
do otherwise would be
to inspire distinctions and so create minorities. By this means most of
existence is presented as a succession of entertaining items, each as
significant as the next a television 'magazine' programme or a weekly
illustrated magazine will successively give the same sort of treatment
- the visual, the novel, the interesting - to a film actress, a nuclear
ing'
and yet
'man of
letters'
or similar
or a
new
way
experience.
451
PART THREE
though they are exceptionally aware of their huge audience as
a huge audience, the mass media dare not have a real closeness to the
individuals who compose that audience. They can rarely be so precise and particular as to inspire any one of that audience to say,
.'
or, 'This attitude I cannot ac'There, but for the grace of God
...'
They retreat from the dramatic immediate presentations of
cept
art to the sterilized world of the 'documentary', where the close
So,
. .
of individual existence
detail
is
status
We
foundation. Yet
history
many
all
were
so
it is
not extensive.
many
It is
life,
much
human
exposed to so
those
may
intellectual
and imaginative
qualities:
kind of exposure
width ofjudgement, a
sense
of
making of
a cathedral.
way of showing
not always prompt others to build. For the stones are presented within a self-contained and self-sufhcient world in which, it is implied,
simply to look
at
try - to
make
is
sufficient in itself.
But
neither the real difficulty of these decisions nor their true and dis-
452
happy.
It is
form
who work
Establish-
be and whatever
have a vested
may
their
political parties),
boat
is
not violently
uncharacteristic.
Questions are important less for the 'stimulation' they offer than for
come
may
be-
mind and on the pulses. Mass communicado not ignore intellectual matters; they tend to castrate
them, to allow them to sit on one side of the fireplace, sleek and use-
less,
a family plaything.
Similarly, mass
and approaches; but they must also seek to exploit it. They tend to
cut the nerve which gives it life - that questioning, with all the imaginative and intellectual resources an artist can muster, of the texture
and meaning of his experience; but they find the body both interesting and useful. Towards art, therefore, the mass media are the purest
aesthetes; they
and
want
its
forms and
453
PART THREE
a pressing awareness
of
their
popular
which we may
say that a
artist
because his
not
is
Manner
than matter.
specific
single strategy
artist's
If
an
artist will
their credit
some
how
towards
his recalcitrant
is
more important
not one writer on a
is
contributing his
from the
serious
imaginative material.
becomes a
commodity. And just as the dilemmas of experience are reduced to
a series of equally interesting but equally non-significant snapshots,
or to the status of documentary 'problems', so the products of art
become an eclectic shiny museum of styles, each of them divorced
from its roots in a man or men suffering and rejoicing in certain times
and places. You may buy by subscription and renew, as often as you
renew the flowers in your sitting room, examples of Aztec art or
sought-after forms of 'marginal differentiation'. Culture
You have
last
which a
And
all
Culture has become a thing for display not for exploration; a presentation not a challenge. It has
become
a thing to be
consumed,
like
The above
it is
al-
together too easy to think that the mass media affect only 'them';
that the 'masses' are
some
large
454
all
allowing them. But these 'masses' cannot be identified with one social
class or even with our usual picture of the lowbrows and the middlebrows (against the highbrows). Not everyone who reads the book
page of the Observer is automatically free from mass persuasions, even
we have
communications
divides.
need
Where
is all
is
the mass
media
To
the stronger.
persistently noted,
sell
a centralized
and concentrated
their centralized
and encouraging
reflecting
tional changes
of British
life.
all
may
new
well be forming
stratifications,
birth
tated
of acceptable
much
much
as for the
as for
attitudes.
There
is
room
there for
is
not sig-
is
You have
then
What
little
classless
for granted.
more
which may
Much more
disconcert.
plainly
winning
little
one
op-
455
PART THREE
Some
may
they
must freshly introduce, with great care. This explains the strange
and limited narcissism of the mass media towards attitudes which
have been traditionally acceptable to large numbers of people, especially towards attitudes which can be made to assist in creating the most
suitable atmosphere in mass media themselves. Thus, they will accept
certain well-established working-class attitudes such as tolerance,
lack
buyers' and
This
Is
process
on the
reefs
risks
foundering
in a society
relations.
Here
we come
of mass communications,
456
and
what
at all levels in
relatively a
much
The
such a society.
life
It
expressed through
may be that
who
is
culture'
have
now emerging
is
may
which
normally recognized
the arts
all
literature will
is
else,
being changed. At
qualities
the
by
not in a position to
considerable fund of
society. If a thinner
common
imaginative strength in
consumers' culture
is
all
is
parts
of
much
more
of day-to-day
tions,
life,
this strength
It is
(some features
social organiza-
the nature of a decent demotic culture. Unless one believes that such
a culture
may
is
as
keep open
all lines
which
At
less effectively
present
POETRY TODAY
CHARLES TOMLINSON
Lecturer in English,
Over
to
The
effect
Eliot,
this
both in the work of the neo-romantics of the 1940s and in the poets
who have since reacted against these. As among the social poets of the
thirties, we see no one writer who, while acknowledging the point to
which the
ists,
art
of poetry has been taken by the three great post-symbolworking forward supported by a consciousness
has succeeded in
one
fifties
words of
a recent
A loss of that finer awareness of the commuEuropean values has made possible verse manifestos of the
by those of suburbia'.
nity of
following kind:
. . .
about philosophers or
mythology or foreign
hope nobody wants them.
cities
(Kingsley
[I]
Amis
have no belief in
casual allusions in
'tradition' or a
poems
to other
common
poems or
tells us,
'a
writers can
now
Enright)
myth-kitty or
poets.
same anthology)
by
its
television set
is,
laziness
of mind adopted
458
as a
POETRY TODAY
framework for an equally provincial verse. Against such a
background poetic culture in Britain would seem to be living on an
overdraft, the overdraft being the work of the writers of the older
as the
generation
I
have
who are
still
stressed the
with
us.
suburban culture.
second selection
choice
is,
Selected
may be won by
something of what
latter
conscious de-
ability.
in the full
he has retained in
to
his achieve-
vincial,
his best
is
Hugh MacDiarmid's
made
reveals
resist
itself
on
the Scottish past, and that can absorb into itself Chaucer, Dunbar,
The
Villon.
Second
Hymn
to
Man
Looks
Lass) represent
shows
itself
Selected
Me
even in such
lyrics
of a minor range
as
Poems of 1954:
Lourd on my Hert
Lourd on my hert as winter
The
lies
come slow
like to stay
For guid
And no
for guid.
is
maun be
a'
noon;
Like soot
sunlicht oot.
459
appear in the
PART THREE
Nae wonder if I think I see
lichter
neist
see
it
But ah
- It's juist mair snaw
The
caustic tone,
sureness of balance.
conditions
poem
in
Diarmid
who
like
And
patterns, entails.
it
is
one
as
The one
there
its
Scots, should
Mac-
end in
One
1956).
MacDiarmid would be
to illustrate the
way
a sense
Irish.
is
Yeats
his
abilities
of
F.
him
R. Higgins
show him
to be an epigrammatist
of remarkable individuality
A further volume, The
but what
it
what
Ireland
Clarke's
skill in
rhyming
patterns
is
similarly
with the
relation
past.
His
poem on
Dylan Thomas
children
in intention
out to
London:
460
sets
POETRY TODAY
Martyr and heretic
Have been the shrieking wick.
But smoke of faith on fire
Can hide us from enquiry
And
trust in
Providence
A burning orphanage,
Bar flight to little souls
That set no church bell tolling?
Cast-iron step and rail
Could but prolong the wailing L
Has not a bishop declared
That flame-wrapped babes are spared
Our life-time of temptation?
Leap, mind, in consolation
For heart can only lodge
Itself,
Those
children, charred in
Cavan
initially
more
trade. This
gifted than
is
Thomas, but to
reiterate the
point
artistic,
in 1936:
461
PART THREE
and the means to convey
to
by
me
but
its
it is
known
direct opposite,
confusion; he
it
is
at
malignants
we
common
English opinion and to relegate the Cantos to that total neglect they
by no means
deserve.
lengthy appraisals of
As Ronald
work
11)
in the Cantos
first
and
is
as
both
2
nobly impressive and of extraordinary beauty. 'More deliberate
words still apply
convey
it
Yeats's
to
means
the
nobility and
to those passages of processional magnificence in The Pisan Cantos '
Drill -
at
work
in this later
is
in
volume:
deferent prince
mood.
The
on
462
POETRY TODAY
3
High
flies
hawk
the
a-sky,
far, far,
The red
and
clear
wine
may
such
poured,
is
augment the
rite
felicity
fuel to spare,
And
tree
only in equity;
in his
mode
is
no crookedness.
'And
as
no chink
is
between vine-grip
.'
And not only have we
and tree/thick leaf over bough to press
of these lines, riding forthe
first
the power of the sensuous image:
ward on its stresses, enacts the vigour of the moral directness which
is being recommended. The didactic element and the poetic element
.
weaker
whether economic or
sections
political, are
too
much
with
modern dramatic
Version'
verse in
of Sophocles'
Women
of Trachis
Trachiniae,
463
suffice
(first
it
to
published 1954) a
say that
Pound
PART THREE
has given us one of the very few readable translations of Greek
drama. 3
If the wilfulness
results in his
attempting an
Grandmother,
forcefiilness
The Terraced
Country Mansion,
Valley, or to the
of Certain Mercies:
accepted curse?
Must we henceforth be
grateful
Over
we may
spread
A thin coverlet?
That the rusty water
In the unclean pitcher
Our
thirst
That the
Food
By
is
quenches?
rotten, detestable
yet eatable
us ravenous?
well.')
We do not experience
The punishment
cell?
464
POETRY TODAY
That each new indignity
Defeats only the body,
Pampering the
With
Here
and the
refused,
spirit
proud merit?
obscure,
is
being
of stoicism
trenchantly and vigorously parodied. Frequently in his love poetryits shift of the time perspective ironicchanged point of view - Graves exhibits a comparably sharp insight into the self-inflating glamour of half-truth.
His best love poetry exists somewhere between those poems like Cry
poems of
Questions
afflatus is
in a
Wood.
One
senses in
Beast,
The Succubus,
than to explore, particularly in his dealings with those areas of experience involving nightmare, hallucination, and horror
which
are hinted at in
his recent
if the
volume
Castle,
The
at
of the grave,
and in
Presence,
is as
and
The
constriction
result in a willed
away of the
Where an extended
vision into
trajectory
is
needed, a trajectory capable of deepening the meaning of the experience and implying the
mode of
its
resolution,
we
are often
by understanding,
One
senses,
as in
the
two
palpitating stanzas
of The Succubus.
comparable weakness
of William Empson
the poets of the
is
fifties.
Some of Empson's
- appeared
his
CA.-17
4<55
human
per-
PART THREE
plexity.
The
object of the
poems tends
six pages
of notes, and
with
its
is^ peculiar hollowness at the back of the terza rima, the villanelle, and
to his
adroitness, but
whose presence
is
(Ambiguous
gifts, as
be)
volume, The Gathering Storm (1940). This loss of nerve which must
of necessity relegate poetry to a minor art consorted readily with the
literary
mood of the
1950s.
What made
that
mood
must
now
was in
which we
possible
Surrealism, with
exercised,
'social
way for a
for
poetry
where the importance of precise moral and rational content was now
discounted and where communication with an audience meant for
the poet, as for the writer of those Gothick tales so popular during the
was
POETRY TODAY
when the yeast of surrealism was working.
It
go on even beyond the 1940s, and it was these two poets whose
verse was widely influential in establishing an idiom where the startling pun was one of the chief devices of poetic structure and where the
unit of poetic composition was the single line directed at the solar
to
plexus.
What
the
lar
cultural leadership,
published in 1950,
war.
'in
it
it.'
The
of the
for Barker
oratorical note
which
war
life
close brings in
makes
feels his
possible the
time to be the
is
(Epithalamium for
is
Two Friends)
Every morning
God in
bed,
make,
. .
(When I Wake)
with Barker's
Evil
is
simply
this,
my friend:
is
Thomas by
467
must be
PART THREE
to be the conclusion
New
work was
anthologized in The
Scream a shark-teeth
The
critical
frost
lips.
S.
Fraser,
from
bad
society. The end of such moral automatism is that poetry must
necessarily suffer and critical standards go unhonoured: 'We are
thrown back', writes Fraser, 'on the erratic judgements and uncertain
impulses of a few intimate friends.' In view of this - the friends, after
Apocalypse
in Poetry).
all,
is
is
blamed on
literary
is
that,
shifted
London
it
fizzled, their
forward
as offering
of the
forties,
satire.
all
468
POETRY TODAY
and the mental tautness which goes with them. But Miss
is essentially the technique of improvisation, intufocused in the telling image but unarticulated for want of an
habits
Raine's technique
ition
intellectual structure
is
is
the author of an
excellent autobiography,
his
poetry
of this in
measure of what
wrong
The connexion of
this
with
his
as a Scot,
want of verbal
he
evident if
is
that
Mun-
of course.
alertness offers, at
rate,
is
any
is
poems which
and
linguistic resonances
intuition
is
primarily
kindled.
The neo-romantic
Graham, whose
an evident
style
is
still
W.
talent.
Such,
it
seems,
is
S.
of
inevitably entailed
it
little
istic
trace
extremes.
Its
so readily to journal-
469
PART TflREE
was a poet whose death was a serious loss for English literature. Take,
for example, these lines from Time Eating (1941)he makes he eats; the very part
began, even the elusive heart,
Time's ruminative tongue will wash
But
as
Where he
That
volatile
huge
all flesh.
intestine holds
its
folds:
faces
for eyes,
leans
where the
I see
my
gossips stood.
underwater.
The
What one finds impressive in Douglas, even in those poems where the
idiom is not yet equal to the vision, is the intrinsically poetic nature of
that vision. In The Marvel, for instance, a dead swordfish has 'yielded
to the sharp enquiring blade/the eye which guided him' past dead
mariners 'digested by the gluttonous
last
glass,
port.
tides'
and a live
sailor,
using the
The
name of
firm yet malleable tone which can encompass the charmingly satirical
Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden, the satiric yet good-
470
POETRY TODAY
natured
Aristocrats,
refusal to force
himself into
stylistic
Vergissmeinicht.
fifties)
meant
a certain un-
evenness and want of finish in his later poems; yet even this
The
An Owen
is
evi-
difficult
generation,
the
fifties
who
in the public
Inaction, poetry,
one
feels,
mind
as the
Move-
has
turns
snirTs,
mudguard of my car.
through the window, past The Times,
pees against a
see this
And
drop
my
toast
and impotently
glare.
are capable
ensuing ironies (the poet has been praised for 'poking fun at himself)
from
as distinct
come
recommended as
to represent an
odd
critical positive
common
is
and
it is this,
whom
work shows
real
1955).
is
largely his
own
is
worthwhile.
One
471
PAST THREE
sixpence put in the church collecting box), he
Betjeman's
which he
niaiserie
is
all
is
nearer to John
events, a
movement in
of
as intelligent a diversity as
* To
this list
anyone but
Mr
Tomlinson would
certainly
Editor.
NOTES
1.
Speir's
The
Scots Literary
Tradition (1940).
Writing,
Voice (i959)4.
5.
Criticism, vn,
No.
2.
in
Joseph Conrad, E.
M.
as
Henry James,
Forster,
Virginia Woolf,
in imaginative
placent rejection of the culture of the past, and a retreat into parochialism.
critics
it
of continuing
vitality
rule.
developments
it is
who
archaic survivals
of the
thirties (that
is,
the writers
wars); novelists
gain full recognition until after the war; the so-called 'Angry
Young
Men' who
writers
who
The
general point to be
to
few younger
made about
tried to grapple
to
have
insufficient
with the
fact
of war
itself.
is
staying-power
ample, in The River Line (1949) wrote about airmen shot down in
enemy territory and escaping with the help of the Resistance: but the
mood and
as
and
'writers
essentially
as if
novels such
serves to
empha-
of sensibility' in
fundamental adjustment to
as in earlier
war merely
new
realities
fact
:
have
failed to
make any
PART THREE
had been chopped down. They have tended to
retreat farther and farther into the fantasy worlds of reverie, reminiscence, self-contemplation, and 'fine writing'. Their state of mind is
summed up by Cyril Connolly's valediction in the last issue of
long after the
trees
Horizon:
closing-time in the gardens of the West and from now
on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude
It is
is
attitude to life
and
this
literature.
Even those novelists who once appeared in the vanguard of contemporary thought have for the most part demonstrated that their
vitality was as feeble creatively as it was politically. Rex Warner, for
example, emerged from the pseudo-Kafka clouds of
Tlie
Aerodrome
(1941) to retreat in his last novel ( The Young Caesar* 195 8) into historical
fiction. In
become
some
cases
novelists
of
Evening (1954)
an example, and although Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1949)
sensibility.
is
it is
in the
effect a series
extreme.
is
perhaps
beyond
few
testy prejudices:
474
disgust
and change
ill,
intruded.
point of
able
is
novel
more
by D. H. Lawrence has
also
gone
unanswered.
There
is
however one of
'the novelists
of the
thirties'
Graham
Greene's
judgement purely
work - and
in terms
of
it is
literary criticism
only necessary to
it
sense
of topicality
is
it is
of
discussed
of the
the
his
is
stress that
has
who
this side
detail
or of
and characterization of each novel. Thus in The End of an Affair ( 195 1),
its other faults, the atmosphere of war-time London is
present in the reader's imagination in a far more fundamental way
whatever
in, say, Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1949). Similarly
The Quiet American (1955) the Cold War, in its particular context
of the war in Indo-China, is absorbed into the very texture of the
novel in a way that recalls the integration of politics, character, and
than
in
setting in Joseph
this
group, though he
The Childermass in 1927, but the sequels, Monstre Gai and Malign
475
PART THREE
(which together with the unfinished Trial of Man were to form
a sequence entitled The Human Age), did not appear until 1955. He
published other works of fiction too after the war, including the novel
Fiesta
human
more
significance, for
stories.
Wyndham
and largely
Lewis
really
was formed in
World War.
It is
any relaxation of purpose beyond the 1930s; but there was little
development in Lewis's basic attitudes, most of which were already
apparent in his early novel
novelist of the second group is Ivy ComptonAt first sight she strikes one as an eccentric, something in the
manner of Ronald Firbank, and she is the kind of writer who tends
to attract the distorting attentions of the cult. Her material is pecul-
iarly,
not to say idiosyncratically, selective; for she deals almost exwith upper-middle-class society of the Edwardian era. She
clusively
is
do not
feel that
than 1910.
or confidence. 2
naturalistic.
two obvious
476
considerations :
first,
that
is
she
is
upon
herself a set of conventions that one might well assume would be
utterly inhibiting. They do of course restrict her scope - but it is the
scope she wants and
it is
with
own
its
it
The
fictional
its
world she
own
presents
is
credibility. It
is
humane
stylistic
critical
way of life
but
The
differences.
stable reality:
that
Comp-
conventions
participant. Ivy
is
connexion with
upon
may
'organic',
it is still
extent dependent
in order to
its
is
own
to a very large
enough
are concerned
(it
is
real
as a
The
study
lust for
power
order to demonstrate
it
is
it
in the hot-house
477
differs
of the Ed-
PAST THREE
for she has
little
Many
is
human
relationships or for
a narrower and
in A House and Its Head (1935), Parents and Chiland Manservant and Maidservant (1947) ; sometimes women
- as in Daughters and Sons (193 7) and Elders and Betters (1944).
The plots usually depend for their resolution upon violent climaxes, either the actual committing of a crime or the revelation of
sometimes
men - as
dren (1941),
some
cupboard.
The
thefts
suicide in
sureness
'f
natural to be guilty
avoid
of it.
is
why it is
most of us
it.'
This does not mean that there is a lack of human values in her
work: the absence of sentimentality is indeed a guarantee of their
presence. Like Jane Austen she has no illusions about human nature
and makes no concessions to complacency or wishful thinking; like
her she is distrustful of moral generalizations. But a sympathy and
understanding for the victims of human wickedness - the evil-doers
included - emerge unmistakably from the drift and texture of the
conventionalized dialogues and in the tensions they generate.
It is
478
is cast.
it
hardly
particspecial
been living
conscious,
of incongruity.
respects
My
he
is less
A review
of L. P. Hartley's
first
tude'. It
serves
is
him
upon a
"situation"
',
when,
like
as virtues. It
his
that
well-worn phrase
really
is
applicable.
479
What distinguishes
it
from
PART THREE
by most of his contemporno nostalgic or sentimental distortions.
The
ground for the machinery of the plot which he isn't really interested
which has to be disposed of so that he can get on to the sequel.
Eustace and Hilda, which finally reveals the underlying nature of the
relationship between brother and sister and carries it to its tragic
conclusion, in which Eustace in effect opts out of life in order to release his sister from the attachment, is indeed an impressive work.
It is a theme which few English novelists have tackled, but Hartley
in but
with surprising
encompasses
it
looks at
sight:
first
gradual realization
intensity
own
it
ease.
His style
of the
situation, his
spirit
before
it
constitute
as
is
it
his sister,
effective scenes in
When
the results are not always as happy. The Boat (1949), for example, is
long and, for Hartley, surprisingly confused. The characters outside
the author's
own
social sphere
orders'
appear mostly as figures offun. The climax, too, is harsh and contrived
is
thrust
down
the characters:
'It
and the
was a death-wish. He couldn't face modern life
way out, a symbol of absolute peace, where no.
at
him
.'
reluctance to 'face
is
480
My
Perfect
Woman
(1955) -
though
of all
his novels
is
set in
is
is
the
He is, in the words he uses when years later he looks back on the
whole life,
'a
foreigner in the
world
Anemone and
long, hot
summer
almost alone
against
among
by Henry James.
Neither Ivy Compton-Burnett nor L. P. Hartley, in spite of the
inherent vitality that carried them out of the thirties where so many
of
their contemporaries
set
way
as
P.
first
novel, Afternoon
unfortunate as
it
481
PART THREE
far reveals little in the
way
style
is
analogies.
It is
municates
is
medium
flights,
and uncompromisingly.
C. P. Snow makes a more determined
emerge
human decency
clearly
new
areas
effort
of Graham Greene) to
is
achievement.
features
power
senses.
Too
style,
up writing
moreover,
times
at
as
we
is
so
cannot
an afterthought.
There
up
really
is
something in Lionel
Trilling's
he has done
show
it
that
it
'can be done'. 8
with outstanding
At
virtuosity.
482
tough, that
is
own
Cary's
personality
is,
lies
to a considerable extent in
it
fact
Hemingway
as
and
- the
reverse in
a fear of
deep
feeling.
such
is
in
Cary, one
Mouth
(1944),
oj
we
novels.
The other
is
that
he was
way
with
kind of joyousness
more
he
as if
work
is
to the
in his
that
Eliot,
by
and
traditions, leading
Joyce Cary's early novels, with the exception of Castle Corner (193 8),
greatest strengths.
The same
objectivity
is
apparent in his
is
My Darling
the
which
first,
is
483
To Be
Pilgrim
PART THREE
(1942), and The Horse s Mouth (1944), his ostensible aim was to deal
with 'English history, through English eyes, for the last sixty years'. 9
similar purpose
lies
which consists of
and Not Honour More
trilogy,
trilogy, as
shifts in
in dress, idiom,
and
mores, are
detail.
is
nothing of the roman a thhe in Cary's work: all the issues are conveyed through the destinies of fully realized individuals and there is
none of that thinness of the imaginative and emotional life that spoils
most other contemporary attempts at depicting the history of our
times. Thus in spite of the all-pervading presence of the Protestant
is
we
are offered
no easy moral
conclusions.
its
sequel
Bunyan's hymns)
into an active
we
To Be
are forced,
we
like
it
from one of
or not, to enter
oj
Chester
including even a
is
work. In the
there
is
make
who
last resort
it is
we
are called
upon
484
to
and
who
tions -
who
Cary
tends to overdo their inadequacies in the face of the world: when, for
example,
we watch
who
Nina
questioning
is
in Prisoner oj Grace
still
him about
Sara's
struggling ineffectually in
Nimmo's grip, we feel that the odds are too heavily weighted
and humour of his work (and
here there is space to do no more than call attention in passing to the
fact that he is one of the outstanding humorous writers of the cenChester
Joyce Cary, then, was the only major novelist to emerge since the
war and the only one who really responded to the wider movements of
contemporary history. It is, however, the group of younger novelists
- working at a much lower level of achievement and within very
narrow limits - which is most representative of the 1950s and most
clearly reflects the mood of the decade among some, though by no
means all, of the post-war generation. The label 'Angry Young
Man', which became current after the presentation ofJohn Osborne's
play Look Back
in
Anger
a rough-and-ready
Kenneth Allsop in
that 'anger'
is
think the
more
accurate
differing degrees
word
for this
new
fifties is dissentience.
and for
suggests
spirit that
They
are
has
all,
in
485
it
common, though
misnomer
is
PART THREE
word
that
dissentience has a
to dis-
This
is
we
do not
display
with D. H. Lawrence or with Wyndham Lewis in this century, or with such great eighteenth-century
satirists as Swift and Pope, or with the Elizabethan social filibusters
such as Nashe (with whom they have something in common), bethe kind of anger
cause
what
is
associate
is
either standards
of moral
refer-
still
possess a positive
Nevertheless the
dynamic.
mood of 'dissentience'
above
is
all
related to circumstances
to the
vacuum
left
by
the
of the writers of the thirties whom we have already mentioned - those whom Kenneth Allsop describes as 'the old literati,
collapse
posed the hollowness both of their moral and aesthetic standards and
of their
political pretensions. It
is
Young
accompanies
it,
ism,
is less
successfully
Hurry
it
at last.
The running
fight be-
is
one for
fiction)
is
of course a
The
It is
When in
his
review in
characters
are like
ashamed.
The very weakness of the forces which the 'Angry Young Men
opposed helped also to weaken their own creative detachment. They
are indeed involved with the Establishment in a kind of symbiosis.
They had only to blow their own trumpets hard enough and large
sections of it came tumbling down - it was after all Cyril Connolly
who was
The
Outsider.
In the
sought
487
and
PART THREE
those
the 'Angry
Young Men'
to
BBC
fifties
also to
as
designed primarily to
much
literary
many of
was a
gimmick became
In consequence the
resist.
it
lay not so
it
talent getting
down
to the hard
work of
creative detachment
and
control.
The faults of John Braine's Room At The Top are less glaring,
though the novel is marred by sensationalism and sentimentality, and
as the 'shiny
Its
comment on what
On
fully realized
more pointed
the other
Arthur Seaton in
Sillitoe's
here too there are evident faults in technique and construction, for
when
all
attempting to
assess the
it is
necessary
interest
mood and
temper of the
fifties,
who
with valu-
There are of course other novels in the same genre but for the most
on the band wagon, and in any case a
mood of disgruntlement against society cannot provide a powerful
s
Although
found
in
its
real passion
489
PART THREE
above the
On the face
of it
but in practice
it
this
looked
like
has involved a
good
deal
matter
of time and place had been communicated or new insights into human
destiny achieved. But in these respects it is difficult to see how Durrell's method can be regarded as more original thanJoyceCary'sin
his two trilogies. There is no doubt of course as to the frequent brilliance of Durrell's writing: there are some splendid verbal fireworks
and an impressive unity of tone is maintained. One's main doubt is
whether the human values offered are worth all the elaborate virtuosity. For the most part the characters in these novels remain flat
surfaces, upon which are inscribed, in bizarre ornamental profusion,
all kinds of gestures, habits, sayings; they never become three-dimensional figures, for the simple reason that there is no flow of sympathy
between them, or indeed between them and the reader. Moreover,
there is a startling gap between the ideas and the erudition ascribed
490
more the
is
which they
on examination
are presented,
original after
Pursewarden,
evidence
some
we
all.
This
who
is
is
supposed to be a 'great
are offered
is
novelist'.
average undergraduate.
We
are
shown nothing
to convince us that
he has the equipment, the responses to life, or the personality (as Gary
does convince us with Gulley Jimson, naive though he is in his
artist
almost entirely cerebral and cannot compare with that deep and
are thin
where
it
is
suggested,
is
his novels
The
'sex in the
it is
here,
The
other novelist
who must
do
dirt'
on
life.
14
be mentioned
satirist,
which
we live. He is
also the
who
has ven-
ground
in the
results are
sometimes uneven.
491
his zest,
PAST THREE
example in some of the short stories in
The Wrong Set (1949) and in Such Darling Dodos (1952), becomes
shrill in tone, and although he has the satirist's eye for dress, mannerisms, facial expressions, and an acute ear for sectional idiom he someIt is
times substitutes
satire,
for
women are
way
seldom
or other, as
with Ella Sands in Hemlock and After (1952) and the heroine of The
Middle Age oj Mrs Eliot (1958). His preoccupation with the forces of
evil in society sometimes involves him in unconvincing melodrama,
as
After.
that vivid
'girlish screams'.
an outstanding
And
fictional portrait,
is
liberal
humanist of the
the values
Melpham
tradition
since the
of English
fiction. It
that
of the
492
earlier years
of the century,
is
at least
is
by no means
spent force. 15
1.
2.
(Gollancz,
1955), P- 23.
3. Ibid. p. 87.
4. Ibid. p. 22.
5. Ibid. p. 36.
6. Ibid. p. 36.
Towards Standards of Criticism: Selections from the Calendar of Modern LetCo, 1933), pp. 61-3.
1925-7, ed. F. R. Leavis (Wishart
8. 'The Novel Alive or Dead', in
Gathering of Fugitives, Lionel Trilling
7.
&
A
ters
(Seeker and
Warburg,
1957).
The Novel Since 1939, Henry Reed (The British Council, Longmans
Green & Co., 1946), p. 28.
10. The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Fifties, Kenneth
9.
Allsop (Peter
Owen,
1958), p. 9.
12.
14.
The Great
15. I
R. Leavis (Chatto
Tradition, F.
my findings
& Kee).
and Clea
(i960).
Mrs Mary Winkler for the opportunity of dison some of the novelists and novels I have con-
PART
IV
APPENDIX
COMPILED BY JOY SAMUEL
FOR FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
The
Social
and
Intellectual Setting
Histories: General
The
Social
and
498
Political
499
501
Social Ideas
The
502
Music
Press, Broadcasting,
504
Cinema
505
506
Science
The
Literature
Biblio graphies
506
General Studies
506
Poetry
507
Drama
The Novel
508
509
508
and Anthologies
511
512
Authors
LIST OF
ABBREVIATIONS
S.P.
Philological Quarterly
Review of English Studies
Studies in Philology
Association
w.c.
World's Classics
B.L.
Everyman's Library
abr.
abridged
E.L.H.
J.E.G.P.
b.
born
c.
circa
d.
died
ed.
pub.
E.
&S.
M.L.R.
M.P.
O.S.A.
P.M.L.A
repr.
published
reprinted
rev.
revised
of America
C.A.
P.Q.
R.E.S.
B.C.P.
- 18
trans.
;?
497
translated
probably, uncertain
Social
and
Intellectual Setting
Carrington, C. E.
Churchill,
W.
S.
An
The World
Crisis
1911-18
London, 193 1)
Churchill, W. S. The Second World War
vol., London, 1959)
(6 vols.,
London, 1923-31;
1 vol.,
(6 vols.,
London, 1948-54;
(London, 1950)
War (London, 1948)
in England and Wales (Penguin, 1949)
Jenkins, Roy Mr Balfour's Poodle (London, 1954)
Jennings, Ivor The Queen's Government (Penguin, 1954)
Keir, D. L. Constitutional History of Modern Britain 1485-1951 (London,
Feiling, Keith History of England
1957)
1935)
Blake, R. The
Fulford,
History
Thomas Lloyd
Jones,
Lyman, R.
W.
The
First
Somervell, D. C. British
(2 vols.,
London, 1932)
the British
People 1911-1945
(London,
1945)
Adams,
W.
Altick, Richard
Carr-Saunders, A.
M. and Jones, D.
C.
Carter, G.
1941)
Cole, G. D. H. Organised Labour (London, 1924)
Cole, G. D. H.
Movement
London, 1946)
W. H. B. Concise Economic History of Britain from 1750
Court,
to
Recent
Day (London,
1950)
Frazer,
W. M. A
i95o)
499
PART FOUR
Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan The Long Weekend:
Social History
i95o)
Halevy, E.
1815-1915 Vol. vi
(rev. ed.,
London, 1950)
Harding, D. W. Social Psychology and Individual Values (London, 1953)
Hearnshaw, E. et ah Edwardian England (London, 1933)
Hinde, R. S. E. The British Penal System 1773-1950 (London, 195 1)
Hutt, A. Postwar History of the British Working Class (London, 1937)
Jones, G. P. and Pool, A. G. Hundred Years of Economic Development in
Great Britain (London, 1940)
Keynes, J.
Structure of England
and Wales
871-
Munford,
1925.
guin, 1950)
(London, 1954)
Williams, T. G. The
1956)
500
or
No
F.
F.
The
F. Labour, Life
British
Social Ideas
Adams, Henry The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 191 8)
Annan, Noel The Curious Strength of Positivism in English
Thought (Oxford, 1959)
Benn, S. I. and Peters, R.
(London, 1959)
S. Social Principles
Political
Fromm,
Frazer, J.
Hulme, T.
Klein,
M. Our
Its
Roots
in
in
1934)
PART FOUR
Webb,
Ayer, A.
J.
Ayer, A.
J. et al.
Flew. A. G. N.
(London, 1946)
Ryle, Gilbert The Concept of Mind (London, 1949)
Toulmin,
S.
Dawson, Christopher
Dawson, Christopher
Eliot,
T.
S.
The
Garbett, Cyril In an
(London, 1939)
in
the
1952)
London, 1950)
Mackintosh, H. R. Types of Modern Theology (London, 1937)
Mathew, David Catholicism in England (London, 1948)
Russell, Bertrand Religion and Science (London, 1935)
Spinks, G. S. (ed.) Religion in Britain since 1900 (London, 1952)
Temple, William Christianity and the Social Order (London, 1942)
502
I95i)
Adams, J.
(ed.)
The
New
in
Floud, Jean
et al.
Social
1916)
1956)
Ford, Boris (ed.) Young Writers: Young Readers (London, i960)
503
PART FOUR
Peters, R. S. Authority, Responsibility and Education
(London, i960)
Piaget, Jean Language and Thought of the Child (London, rev. ed. 1959)
Potter, Stephen The Muse in Chains (London, 1937)
Sampson, George English for the English (Cambridge, new ed. 1952)
Smith, W. O. L. Education in Great Britain (2nd ed., London, 1956)
Stocks, Mary The W. E. A.: First Fifty Years (London, 1953)
Sully, J. Studies in Childhood (London, 1895)
Red Brick University (London, 1943)
Truscot, Bruce
1951)
Ironside,
Robin Painting
since
1939
(b.c.p.,
1947)
Hitchcock, Henry Russell Architecture, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Penguin, 1958)
Inglis, C. E. The Aesthetic Aspect of Civil Engineering (London, 1944)
504
Richards,
Bacharach, A. L.
Blom,
(ed.) British
Music
oj
1946)
Hodeir, A. Jazz,
The
Angell,
Press, Broadcasting,
Norman The
Cinema
(London,
1922)
Mary
Broadcasting:
in the
1945, 1950)
505
part four
Science
D.
(London, 1939)
Burt, E. A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
Bernal,
J.
(London, 1932)
Crowther, J. G The Social Relations of Science (London, 1941)
Crowther, J. G. British Scientists oj the Twentieth Century (London, 1952)
Dingle, H. Science and Literary Criticism (London, 1949)
Dingle, H. (ed.) A Century of Science 1851-1951 (London, 1951)
Evans, B. Literature and Science (London, 1954)
Heath, A. E. (ed.) Scientific Thought in the Twentieth Century (London,
I95i)
Munroe, Ruth
Russell, Bertrand
The
Sherwood Taylor,
F.
(London, 1957)
Literature
Bibliographies
C.B.E.L. Ill (Cambridge, 1940)
Batho, E. and Dobree, Bonamy The Victorians and After 1830-1914
(London, 1938)
Bateson, F.
(ed.)
Kunitz, S.
J.
General Studies
Burke, Kenneth The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1941)
Fraser, G. S. The Modern Writer and his World (London, 1953)
506
S. Figures of Transition
Jacob
An
i960)
I95i)
Poetry
Alvarez, A. The Shaping Spirit (London, 1958)
Blackmur, R. Language as Gesture (London, 1954)
Fraser,
G.
S. Vision
don, 1927)
sota, 1948)
Pinto, V. de Sola Crisis in English Poetry 1880-1940 (London, 195 1)
507
PART FOUR
Read, Herbert Form in Modern Poetry (London, 1932)
Roberts, Michael Introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Verse
(London, 1936)
Savage, D. S. The Personal Principle (London, 1944)
Scarfe, Francis Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry 1930-1941
(London, 1942)
Drama
The Old Drama and the New (London, 1923)
Beerbohm, Max Around Theatres: Reviews 1898-1910 (rev.
W.
Archer,
don, 1953)
Bentley, E. R. The Playwright as Thinker:
Times
(New York,
ed.,
Lon-
1946)
The
New
Spirit in the
(London, 1925)
Craig, Gordon On the Art of the Theatre (London, 1957)
Downs, B. W. Ibsen: the Intellectual Background (Cambridge, 1946)
Eliot, T. S. Poetry and Drama (London, 1951)
Ellis-Fermor, Una The Irish Dramatic Movement (London, 1954)
Lumley, F. Trends in Twentieth Century Drama (London, 1956)
Two
The Novel
Allen, Walter The English Novel: a Short Critical History (London, 1954)
Baker, E. A. The History of the English Novel, vol. 10 (London, 1939)
Beach,
J.
Bewley,
Bewley,
Brown,
E. K.
Rhythm
Chevalley, Abel Le
in the
Roman
1932)
the
Modem World
(rev. ed.,
Cambridge,
i960)
The
Edel, L.
Psychological
M.
Frierson,
W.
in Transition
1885-1940 (Norman,
Oklahoma, 1942)
1948)
Phelps, G. The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, 1956)
Van Ghent, D. The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1953)
West, R. B. and Staleman, R. W. The Art of Modem Fiction (New York,
1949)
Zabel, M.
D.
1939)
509
PART FOUR
Buckley, Vincent Poetry and Morality (London, 1959)
Crane, R. S. The Language of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953)
Richards,
I.
West, A.
Crisis
Zabel,
M.
Allott,
(ed.)
1945)
(ed.) New Lines (London, 1956)
G. S. (ed.) Poetry Now (London, 1956)
Friar, K. and Brinnin, J. M. (eds.) Modem Poetry (New York, 195 1)
Grigson, Geoffrey Poetry of the Present (London, 1949)
Heath-Stubbs,J. F. and Wright, David (eds.) The Faber Book of Twentieth
Century Verse (London, 1953)
Holloway, John (ed.) Poems of the Mid-Century (London, 1957)
Conquest, R.
Fraser,
Irvine, J.
Irish
Poetry (Belfast,
1945)
Jones, Phyllis
M.
(ed.)
(rev. ed.,
w.c,
1955)
Lehmann, John
(ed,)
1946)
Lewis, C.
(eds.)
Lewis, C.
Day and
Strong, L. A. G.
Verse
M. and Thorp, W.
(New York, 1932)
Parrot, T.
(eds.) Poetry
to Eliot
(Penguin, 1938)
Roberts, Michael (ed.) The Faber Book of Modern Verse (rev. ed., London, 195 1)
Stephens,
J.,
English Poets
(New York,
Untermeyer, Louis
Williams, Oscar
(ed.)
(eds.) Victorian
and Later
1934-7)
Modern
(ed.) Little
1950)
Yeats,
W. B. (ed.)
Young, Douglas
511
PART FOUR
Bentley, Eric (ed.) The Importance of 'Scrutiny' (New York, 1948)
Hudson, D. (ed.) English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century (2nd
series,
w.c, 1958)
Hyman,
Jones,
S. E. (ed.)
Phyllis
M.
The
Critical Performance
(ed.)
English
Critical
(New York,
Essays:
1957)
Twentieth Century
(w.c, 1933)
Rhys, E. (ed.) Modern English Essays 1870-1920 (5 vols., ex., 1923)
Rhys, E. and Vaughan, Lloyd (eds.) A Century of English Essays
(e.l.,
1913)
Stallman, R.
1952)
Milford, H.
(w.c, 1927)
Authors
auden, wystan hugh
(New York,
Collected Poetry
Collected Shorter
512
fries
beerbohm, max
London, educated
at
during the nineties wrote for the Yellow Book and succeeded G. B.
Shaw (q.v.) as dramatic critic of the Saturday Review; first collection of
essays
The Works of Max Beerbohm published 1896; married an AmeriKahn, 19 10, and thereafter lived in Italy; Zuleika Dobson,
further collections of essays and sketches appeared in 1919, 1920,
can, Florence
191 1
bell,
Adrian hanbury
Uppingham;
and
the
(b.
The Cherry Tree (1932), Men and the Fields (1939), The Flower
Wheel (1949), and The Path by the Window (1952).
Essayist, histor-
Cloud, near Paris, son of a French barrister and his English wife; educated at the Oratory School, Birmingham (under Cardinal Newman), and Balliol College, Oxford; served in
the French artillery; married an American, Elodie Hogan, 1896; The
ian, novelist,
and poet;
b. Saint
Path
513
PART FOUR
State,
1912;
A History ofEngland,
;
The Crisis of our Civilisation,
including studies of Danton (1899),
1925-31
many biographies,
(1909),
Joan of Arc
and
(1929),
Milton (1935).
Life
Morton (London,
1948)
1951)
Letters
1936)
his
Work
at
Man
Anna of
first
novel
Towns, 1901;
The Old Wives*
the Five
novels; later
(1930).
1957)
(b.
at Christ's Hospital
514
war began
of the
Athenaeum; early volumes of poetry had appeared in 1914, 1916, and
1920; The Shepherd (1922) won the Hawthornden Prize; appointed
Professor of English at the University of Tokyo, 1924; returned to
England, 1927; Undertones of War, 1928; Fellow of Merton College,
Oxford, from 193 1; Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries, 1933; Choice
or Chance, 1934; Thomas Hardy, 1941; joined the staff of The Times
after the
the University of
made
Hong Kong,
1953.
Sturt - (1863-1927): Novelist; b. Farnham, Surrey, son of a wheelwright; educated at Farnham Grammar
School, where he also taught, 1878-85; then, entered family business;
The Bettesworth Book, 1901; Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, 1907; Change
in the Village, 1912; A Farmer's Life, 1922; The Wheelwright's Shop,
1923 A Small Boy in the Sixties (1927) is autobiographical.
housemaster
dissertation,
at the school;
the Elizabethan
Drama;
first
volume,
War;
died of septicaemia at Scyros, 191 5, on the way to the Darposthumous volume 1914 and Other Poems (191 5).
danelles;
educated
at Clifton
and Oxford;
Edinburgh and
Paris; joined
515
Comer
(1938),
The House of
PART FOUR
Children (1941), The Horse's
Mouth
(i944)>
Fearful
Joy
(1949),
and
to his
Noveb (London,
(1874-1936): Essayist,
1958)
critic, novelist,
b.
Life
Collected
Stories,
(i vol.)
An Anthology
guin (3 vols.)
See H. Belloc, The Place of Chesterton in English Letters (London, 1940)
E. Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet (London, 1937)
Mrs C. Chesterton, The Chestertons (London, 1941)
C. Clemens, G. K. Chesterton
(London,
1939)
(b.
1928)
1874); Statesman,
516
election in 1922;
;
Literature, 1953
1956-8).
Clarke, Austin
Rugby and
An
Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), The Principles ofArt (1937), and The
New Leviathan (1942); his Autobiography appeared in 1939.
compton burnett,
at
Two
Worlds and
their
first
appeared in
(1890),
517
PART FOUB
works include Micah Clarke
(19 1 2);
conead, Joseph -
Josef Teodor
is
an autobiography.
made him
Garnett
as his
was failing; married Jessie George {1896) and settled near London; The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897; Lord Jim, 1900; collaborated with
Ford Madox Ford (q.v.) on The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903};
The Mirror of the Sea, 1906; The Secret Agent, 1907; Chance (1913) won
him wide popularity; other works include The Shadow-line (19 17),
The Arrow of Gold (1919), and The Rescue (1920); Some Reminiscences
health
(1912)
is
autobiographical.
Collected
Line in
E.L. (3 vols.)
Letters in
1941)
M.
Century Fiction
(New York,
1958)
in Fiction
518
(London, 1957)
bourne; educated
at St Paul's
(1939).
(b.
Conti Academy;
after a
Italia
by
several
comedies, including Fallen Angels (1925), Easy Virtue (1926), and Private
Lives (1930); revues and operettas of this period include On with the
Bitter
Sweet (1929);
Happy Breed
Violin (1956);
de la mare, Walter
(1873-1956): Poet; b. Charlton, Kent, rethrough his mother to Robert Browning; educated at St Paul's
Cathedral Choir School; clerk in the offices of the Anglo-American
Oil Company, 1 890-1908; Songs of Childhood, 1902; Henry Brocken,
lated
1904; Poems, 1906; granted a Civil List pension, 1908, to enable him to
devote his time to writing; later works include The Return (19 10),
The
Listeners
several
Rhymes and
in Austria
519
where
his family
owned
cotton
PART FOUR
mills;
educated at
Uppingham and
Karlsruhe;
worked
thomas stearns
eliot,
1888): Poet,
(b.
Land (1922)
own
Church of England,
work
Wood
(1920),
The
Uses of Poetry (1933), and On Poetry and Poets (i957); he also wrote for
children Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, 1939; awarded Order
of Merit and Nobel Prize for Literature, 1948 ; re-married, 1959.
Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (London, 1936)
Four Quartets (London, 1943)
Selected Essays (London, 1932; rev. ed. 1951)
Selected Prose ed.
See A. Alvarez, 'Eliot and Yeats' in The Shaping Spirit (London, 1958)
C. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (London, 1948)
Vincent Buckley, Poetry and Morality (London, 1959)
J.
H. Greene, T.
S. Eliot
(London, 1949)
D.
F.
520
in Sources
and
Unger
(ed.),
Edmund Wilson,
ellis,
A Reader's Guide to
in Axel's Castle
henry havelock
son of a
(New York,
193 1)
boy made
sailor; as a
George Williamson,
with
his father;
in the
on
My Life,
his
An Artist
art
J. S. Collis,
also a close
Man
1959)
empson, William
educated
at
Oxford, and
Uppingham and
b.
London,
Trinity College,
Caius College,
Cam-
volume of poetry
1908 sent to Constantinople, where he met and mar-
first
ried a
13
forced to retire
by
tuberculosis,
London
until 1922
first
produced in
in 1923.
madox - Ford Hermann Hueffer - (1873-1939): NoveMerton, Surrey, son of the music critic of The Times, grandson
of Ford Madox Brown, and nephew by marriage of William Rossetti;
educated at a private school in Folkestone and at University College
School, London; received into the Roman Catholic Church, 1891;
married Elsie Martindale, 1894; Poems for Pictures, 1897; collaborated
with Joseph Conrad (q.v.) on The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903);
founded and edited the English Review, 1908-9; served in a Welsh
ford, ford
list;
b.
521
PART FOUR
Regiment during the First World War; The Good Soldier, 191 5; moved
to Paris, 1922, where his friends Ezra Pound and James Joyce (qq.v.)
were then living; edited Transatlantic Review, 1923-4; Some do Not,
1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man could Stand Up, 1926; The Last
Post, 1928 these novels were much better received in the United States
than in England, and from 1926 until his death Ford lived partly in
America and partly in France; It was the Nightingale (1933) and Memories and Criticisms (1938) are to some extent autobiographical; died at
;
Deauville.
Life
edward morgan (b. 1879): Novelist; b. London; educated at Tonbridge and King's College, Cambridge, of which he was
forster,
made Fellow;
later
Angels Fear
during the
to
First
A Passage to
lived for
Tread, 1905;
World War;
won
A Passage to
India in e.l.
(i
the
vol.)
A Room
(September, 1946)
1944)
Rex Warner, E. M.
The Golden Bough appeared in twelve volumes between 1890 and 191 5;
knighted, 1914; F.R.S., 1920; awarded Order of Merit, 1925; other
522
(1910)
and Folklore
in the
Old
Galsworthy, john
Life
Collected
1934)
atid the
New
(London, 1923)
b.
1929; popular success with I, Claudius and Claudius the God, 1934;
some time in Majorca and settled there permanently after
lived for
523
PART FOUR
World War; King Jesus, 1946; The White Goddess, 1948;
there are several collections of poetry; critical work includes A Survey
of Modernist Poetry (with Laura Riding, 1927), The Common Asphodel
the Second
and The Crowning Privilege (1955); he has also annotated a colof Greek myths; among his translations is a modern version of
The Golden Ass; elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1961.
(1949),
lection
in
N. Lees
M.
1954)
Gregory, Isabella augusta (1852-1932): Dramatist; b. Roxburghe, Co. Galway; daughter of Dudley Persse; married Sir William
Gregory, 1881 - he died in 1892; met Yeats (q.v.), 1898; with him founded the Abbey Theatre, 1899, and acted as its manager; plays include
Spreading the News (1904), The Rising of the Moon (1907), and The Story
brought by Brigit (1924).
Critic
and scholar
sity,
1936-9.
hardy, thomas
Grammar
tect
524
by
F.
E. Dugdale
1941); R.
1954)
Collected
A. P.
1935)
A.
J.
1949)
F.
A.
S.
South America;
settled in
PART FOUR
huxley, aldous Leonard (b. 1894): Novelist; b. Godalming,
Surrey, grandson of Thomas Huxley, son of a niece of Matthew Arnold,
and brother of Julian (q.v.); educated at Eton and Balliol College,
Oxford; studied medicine but prevented from practising by a disease
of the eyes which temporarily blinded him; married a Belgian, Maria
Nys, 1919; joined the staff of the Athenaeum first novel Crome Yellow,
192 1 Antic Hay, 1923; lived in Italy, 1923-30; friendly with D. H.
Lawrence (q.v.); Point Counter Point, 1928, Brave New World, 1932,
Eyeless in Gaza, 1936; later works include Ends and Means (1937) and
The Perennial Philosophy (1946) has lived in California since 1947.
;
Brave
New
Stories,
See
(i vol.)
J.
(b.
Zoology
at
(b. 1 904)
Nove-
Evening (1954).
Life
Letters, ed. P.
Lubbock
(2 vols.,
London, 1920);
Leon
1947)
French Poets and Novelists (London, 1878); Hawthorne (London, 1879);
Partial Portraits (London, 1888); Notes on Novelists (London, 1914); The
Art of the Novel ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934); Literary Reviews
and Essays (New York, 1957); The House of Fiction ed. Leon Edel
(London, 1957)
See Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (London, 1958)
G. H. Bantock, 'Morals and Civilisation in Henry James' in The
Cambridge Journal, vn (1953)
in
F.
F.
527
Golden Bowl'
PART FOUR
F.
Dublin;
in Zurich.
Life
The
(London, 1942)
(London, 1957)
See F. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London, 1934)
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (London,
Campbell and Robinson,
1947)
Stuart Gilbert, James Joy ce's Ulysses: a Study (rev. ed., London, 1952)
Givens
S.
Joyce,
Hugh
Two
Decades of Criticism
(New York,
1948)
1958)
kavanagh, Patrick
b.
Ireland.
1st
baron keynes
(1883-1946): Econo-
later
World War
528
Fellow;
in the Treasury;
Treatise on Probability,
Keynes, 1942.
Life
koestler, Arthur
Middle East; working for the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil
War, he was imprisoned by General Franco; settled in England, 1940,
serving with the British Army in the Second World War; novels
include Darkness at Noon (1940, translated from German), Arrival and
Departure (1943), Thieves in the Night (1946), and The Age of Longing
(195 1); Scum of the Earth (1941) and Arrow in the Blue (1952) are autobiographical.
ate
L,
but the
1934)
Intelligent
(ed.),
H. T. Moore, The
Lawrence: a Corpor-
- 19
529
e.l. (2 vols.)
PART FOUR
A. Beal (London, 1955)
H. T. Moore (New York, 1948)
Letters ed. A. Huxley (London, 1932)
Selected Letters ed. R. Aldington (Penguin, 1950)
See A. Arnold, D. H. Lawrence and America (London, 1958)
C. R. Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (London, 1932)
E. T., D. H. Lawrence, A Personal Record (London, 1936)
T. S. Eliot, in After Strange Gods (London, 1934)
F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, 1955)
M. Spilka, The Love Ethic o/D. H. Lawrence (Indiana, 1956; London,
Selected Literary Criticism ed.
1958)
W.
frank Raymond
leavis,
(b.
1895): Critic
Mass
Civilisation
Fellow of
Downing
and teacher;
Emmanuel
College, 193 5
from 1932
till its
b.
College,
New
195 1)
CamCam-
Bearings in
demise in 1953
lewis, cecil day (b. 1904) Poet and detective story writer; b.
Ballintogher, Ireland, son of a clergyman; educated at Sherborne and
:
Wadham
first
volume of poetry
A Hope for Poetry,
artillery
530
E.
W.
F.
(b.c.p., 1955)
Ar
ist
as
Enemy (London,
1957)
macdiarmid, hugh -
and
critic; b.
(1934).
macneice, louis
(b.
1907)
b. Belfast,
Birmingham, 1930-6; Lecturer in Greek at Bedford ColLondon, 1936-40; visited Iceland with W. H. Auden (q.v.)
and subsequently wrote with him Letters from Iceland, 1937; feature
writer and producer for the B.B.C., 1941-9; Director of the British
Institute in Athens, 1950; more recent works include The Poetry of
W. B. Yeats (1941), Springboard (1944), The Dark Tower and Other
Radio Scripts (1947), Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), and Autumn Sequel
(1954); he has also translated Goethe's Faust (1951).
Classics at
lege,
mansfield, katherine - Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp - (18881923): Short story writer; b. Wellington,
New
Zealand, daughter of
London; planned a
Bowden, 1909 met John Middle-
ton
Murry
from her
(q.v.),
first
191 1,
husband
whom
in 191 3
first
collection
of short stories In
and
much
in
German Pension
subsequent collections
titles
letters.
masefield, john
edward
(b.
sailed
in a
wind-jammer;
PART FOUR
him
New
York
to
biographical.
(b.
educated
at
King's
up
works
in-
Of Human
since 1930.
of a doctor, and brother of the poet, Sturge Moore; educated at Dulwich and Trinity College, Cambridge; Lecturer in Moral Sciences at
Cambridge, 191 1-25; married Dorothy Ely, 1916; editor of Mind
from 1 921; Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge from 1925; works
include Principia Ethica (1903), Ethics (1912),
and
Philosophical Studies
(1922).
Poet,
critic,
and
111.,
1942)
novelist; b. in the
moved
Collected
J.
532
worked
13,
as a journalist
on the
Critic,
staff
191 3-14;
works include
Son of Woman
The Mystery of Keats (i949), and Jonathan
wrote a biography of his first wife and edited her
and journals.
Novelist; b. Cambridge;
Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; had money enough
not to work, except for a brief period at the Board of Trade during the
First World War; Arvat, a play in verse, 1908; first novel The Orissers,
1923; The 'Clio', 1925; visited Ceylon, 1925; later novels with an
Eastern background are The Near and the Far (1929) and Prince Jali
(193 1), these two novels published together with Rajah Amar as The
Root and the Flower (193 5); Strange Glory (1936), The Pool of Vishnu
(1940), this together with The Root and the Flower published as The Near
and
the
at
Far (1943)
died
by
his
own
hand.
A Critical Study
1956)
Irene Simon, The Novels ofL.
H. Myers
(Leicester
(Brussels,
no
and London,
date)
o'casey, SEAN-(b. 1 8 84) Dramatist; b. Dublin; little formal educaworked as a shop assistant and then as a labourer; after several
unsuccessful attempts, The Shadow of a Gunman was produced at the
:
tion;
533
PART FOUR
Abbey
Theatre, 1923 ; Juno and the Paycock (1924) established his reputation; married Eileen Reynolds, 1927; moved to London, where The
Silver Tassie was first produced in 1929; later plays include Within the
Gates (1934), Purple Dust (1940), Red Roses for Me (1942), and The
Bishop's Bonfire(i9S5) I has written an autobiography in several volumes.
grwell, george -
Eric Blair
- (1903-50):
and
with the Indian
Imperial Police in Burma, 1922-7; returned to Europe and made a
living teaching and working in a shop Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933; Burmese Days, 1934; Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936; The
Road to Wigan Pier, 1937; fought for the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War; during the Second World War worked for the B.B.C.;
Inside the Whale, 1940; Animal Farm, 1945; became seriously ill, 1948,
and finished Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) shortly before his death.
Journalist, critic,
Selected Essays,
Selections
W.
owen, wilfred
was awarded the M.C. but was killed a week before the armistice; only
four poems were published in his lifetime, in periodicals; Sassoon
collected and published them in 1920.
See E. Blunden,
War
V. de
D.
S.
(b.
Critical
War;
Second World
to a mental
was confined
T.
S. Eliot
Conn., 1954)
See Alice S.
(ed.),
An
in the
1950)
the
Grammar
set,
1905,
See
W.
priestley,
john boynton
(b.
PART FOUR
appointed Professor of English Literature at Cambridge from 1912;
On the Art of Writing, 19 16; Studies in Literature, 1918-29; On the Art
of Reading, 1920; Charles Dickens and other Victorians, 1925; elected
Mayor of Fowey,
read, Herbert
edward
(b.
Kirbymoor-
at
(b.
1893):
Critic
and scholar;
b.
as a teacher
artist;
and
Rosenberg, isaac
all
the novels
killed in action.
536
1922)
RUSSELL, BERTRAND
ARTHUR WILLIAM,
3rd
in Scrutiny,
m (i935)
EARL RUSSELL
(b.
Cambridge; became a Fellow of Trinity, 1895; The Principles of Mathe1903 collaborated with A. N. Whitehead (q.v.) on Principia
matics,
History of Western Philosophy (1945), Authority and the Indiand New Hopes for a Changing World
(195 1);
(b.
111.,
1944)
World War;
Melodies, 1913;
from 1919;
War
Satirical
Collected
ful novels;
became a
socialist,
PART FOUR
Tell (1895)
Arms and
dramatic
the
critic
graphical.
don, 1952)
1949)
New York,
(rev. ed.,
1948)
538
clude The Masters, 195 1, and The New Men, 1954 (jointly awarded
James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Conscience of the Rich, 1958,
The Affair, 1959; became Civil Service Commissioner in 1945; married
Pamela Hansford Johnson, 1950; knighted, 1957; gave 1959 Rede
Lecture, Cambridge, on the Two Cultures.
spender, Stephen
journalist;
educated
(b.
at
educated
b.
Dublin, son
at
to the
first
Sea, 1904;
became
a director
of the Abbey
Theatre from 1904; The Well of the Saints, 1905; The Playboy of the
Western World, 1907; Tinker's Wedding, 1909; Deirdre of the Sorrows
1910) was left unfinished when he died of cancer.
539
PART FOUR
by D. H. Greene and E. M. Stephens (New York,
Life
1959)
(London, 1913)
(London, 1914)
L. A. G. Strong, J. M. Synge (London, 1941)
W. B. Yeats, Synge and the Ireland of his Time (Dundrum, 191 1)
Isabella
Gregory, Our
educated
Irish Theatre
Irish Theatre
(b.
Rugby and
at
Balliol College,
Committee of Oxford
Oxford;
University, 1908-
member of Executive of Workers' Educational Association, 1905and President, 1928-44; member of Consultative Committee of
(1914-53)
Twenty-five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939) increased his
reputation; unfit for active service in the Second World War, joined
the B.B.C.; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, 1940; later collections
of poetry include Deaths and Entrances (1946) and In Country Sleep
(1951)
casting
Under Milk Wood (1954) was commissioned as a play for broaddied suddenly on a lecture tour in the United States.
Collected Poems,
civil servant;
educated
make
540
Life
by Robert
P. Eckert
Collected
at
(b.
of Modern History
fessor
at
literature; b.
541
Studies;
first
published
PART FOUR
work was two collections of poetry,
translated
from the Chinese, 191 8 and 1919; The No Plays of Japan, 1921; The
Tale of Genji, six volumes, 1925-33; The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon,
1928 The Analects of Confucius, 1938 worked at the Ministry of Information during the Second World War; later work includes Monkey
(1942) and The Real Tripitaka (195 1); made Companion of Honour,
;
1956.
worked
as a
viewer;
first
1916; The Secret City, 1919; The Cathedral, 1922; study of Trollope,
1928; later work includes the Hemes Chronicle, four volumes, 1930-3;
knighted, 1937.
at
World War;
later
Revisited (1945),
among
the
(1949),
Men
at
Arms
(1952),
and Love
Ruins (1953).
webb, Beatrice
(1858-1943): Economist; b. Standish, Glos., daughof Richard Potter, a railway director and friend of Herbert Spencer;
educated privately; became interested in economics and socialism;
married Sidney Webb, 1892, and with him devoted her life to the
support of the Labour movement; works include The Co-operative
Movement in Great Britain (1891} and Men's and Women's Wages (1919);
also collaborated on many works with her husband; My Apprenticeship
(1926) and Our Partnership (1948) are autobiographical.
ter
542
at
Midhurst
b.
Bromley, Kent,
Grammar
School;
worked
Amy
pupils,
him
Man
(1897),
Moon
The War of
the
First
Men
in the
",
Ann
e.l. (2
vols.)
Penguin
(1 vol.)
H. G. Wells
ed. L. Edel
and G. N. Ray
(London, 1958)
See
M.
Cambridge; Lecturer
in
Mathematics
at
at
fessor
(1934).
Stephen by
his
sister
of Vanessa,
later Bell;
PART FOUR
home by
educated
at
brothers and
sister in
Collected
To
Works
(14 vols.,
London, 1929-52)
(London, 1956)
See Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: her Art as a Novelist (Cambridge, 1945)
B. Blackstone, Virginia Woolf, a Commentary (London, 1949)
Abbey Theatre
its
the
he
also
includes The
544
1942)
1953)
Stock, W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 1961)
P. Ure, Towards a Mythology: Studies in the Poetry of Yeats (London,
1946)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For permission to reprint copyright matter, the following acknowledgements are made: for extracts from the Collected Poems of W. H.
Auden to Messrs Faber & Faber and to Random House in U.S.A.;
poems from
for
'Safety') to
Messrs Sidgwick
& Jackson,
to
Eliot's Collected
to Harcourt, Brace
MacDiarmid ('Lourd on
My
poems by
'On Passing
Menin
M. Dent &
by Edward Thomas ('A
Messrs J.
INDEX OF NAMES
Theatre Company, 65, 200-3
Alexander, George, 114
Abbey
Bucolics,
390
Commentary, 386
The Dance of Death, 380
The Dog Beneath the Skin, 382
Dover, 1937, 386
For the Time Being, 388
Horae Canonicae, 391
In Time of War, 386, 387
Journey to a War, 382
Look, Stranger!, 382, 385
American
Adams,
influences:
13
Arendt, 39
Babbitt, 337
Cooley, 31
Cooper, 105
107,
108,
Nones, 389
109
Hemingway,
The
259, 483
Ho wells, no
Oxford, 386
Petition,
Perhaps, 386
380
236
Stevenson, 24
Rimbaud, 95
The Sea and the Mirror, 388
September 1st, 1939, 386
Twain, no, in
Wharton, 104
Stein, 47,
390
A Summer Night,
Whyte, 35
See also Eliot, James,
Through
Pound
Two
the
1933, 384
Looking Glass, 386
Worlds, 386
Annan, Noel,
93, 389,
22
379
Auden,
W.
H.,
92-5,
181,
217,
Ayer, A.
J., 24,
243
Bacon,
Baldwin, Stanley,
Francis, 242
Balfour, Lord, 30
Barclay, Florence, 434
548
439
INDEX OF NAMES
Barker, Ernest, 25
Barker, George, 466-8
Barrie, James, 216, 512-13
Endgame, 205
L'Innomable, 96, 204
Krapp's Last Tape, 205
Elizabeth, 475
Bradley, F. H., 24, 232, 233, 234
Braine, John, 432, 487, 488-9
163, 515
Brown, J. A. C., 35
Browne, Sir Thomas,
Watt, 96
Whoroscope, 204
Browning, Robert,
322, 513
Bowen,
Beerbohm, Max,
Booth, General, 57
Bottomley, Gordon, 218
Bottrall, Ronald, 472
Bourne, George, 15, 88, 515
Change in the Village, 16
277
261
513-14
The Cruise of the Nona, 241
The Path to Rome, 241
Benedict, Ruth, 22
330, 340
Buchan, John, 436
Budgen, Frank, 304, 310
Bunyan,John, 38, in, 213, 262, 420,
422, 423, 426, 483, 484
Burke, Edmund, 30, 36, 442
Burns, Robert, 459
Butler, Samuel, 16, 222, 227, 247,
251
488, 514
59, 81
Journals, 59
Old Wives'
Tale, 61,
436
Riceyman Steps, 61
Sacred and Profane Love, 436
Benson, A. C, 13
Bentham, Jeremy,
30, 33
Manalive, 227
Cheyney,
Trifles,
Hill,
228
228
Peter, 437
Classical influences
Aristotle, 25
Bion, 325
Euripides, 219
549
INDEX OF NAMES
De
Homer,
la
Horace, 390
Ovid, 327
The Dwelling
Place,
139
Farewell, 139
Sophocles, 354
Cobbett, William, 28
Coleridge, S. T., 41, 64, 240, 340, 374,
442
Collingwood, R. G., 25, 241-2, 517
Never-to-be, 139
Colum,
Sam, 139
The Silver Penny, 139
The Song of the Mad Prince, 141-2
The Tailor, 139
Where, 139
482, 517
437, 517
Congreve, William, 210, 215
H9-37.
Chance, 119
The
The
226
119
122, 124,
Donne, John,
340
Douglas, Keith, 469-71
Douglas, Norman, 519-20
Dryden, John, 42, 91, 190, 357, 365
Dublin Drama League, 203
Dublin Gate Theatre, 203
Dunbar, William, 459
Durrell, Lawrence, 96, 490-1
Victory,
Eliot,
Crossman, R. H. S., 34
Curzon, Lord, 30
Darwin,
George,
105,
109,
114,
153.
154.
550
INDEX OF NAMES
177, 180, 205, 315-18, 323, 335,
341-3, 346,
Ellis,
347
The Hollow Men, 334, 343
Homage to John Dryden, 366
The Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock,
Bacchus, 466
83, 332
Marina, 192
466
Letter II,
Value
ture,
242-3
Engels, F.,
European
The
Possibility
Preludes,
65
336, 341
Chehov,
Seneca, 339
The
influences:
Reflections
465
95
27
Bachelard, 232
Balzac, 104, 370
in Activity,
is
Villanelle,
354
369-70
Gautier, 317, 321, 322, 324, 333
551
INDEX OF NAMES
Gide, 34
Fielding,
European influences
(cont.)
3ii
Fitzgerald,
Flecker,
333. 471
Edward, 322
James Elroy, 521
C. S., 440
M., 14, 21, 26-7, 29,
Forster, E.
Musil, 490
Nietzsche, 487
Pascal, 386
490
Pushkin, 107
Passage
to
A Room
Rimbaud,
The Story of a
Two
Ronsard, 69
Rousseau, 20
232
Sartre, 197,
26,
74,
251,
What
India,
254-6, 261
I Believe, 27
Fraser, J., 15
Frazer, James, 2, 232, 522-3
Stendhal, 61
46,
204
299
Turgenev,
Fuller,
Roy, 471
Westermarck, 22
Garman, Douglas,
Garnett, Constance, 60
31, 32, 33
89,
356
Garnett,
Gasset, 443
Fabian Society,
Gladstone,
W. E.,
31
552
J.,
205
INDEX OF NAMES
Gonne, Maud, 200
Graham, W. S., 469
Grant, Duncan, 251
Haggard, Rider,
15,
284
Hardy, Thomas,
524-5
After a Journey, 147, 148
523-4
The Beast, 465
The Castle, 465
Afterwards, 145
Ancient
An
Beeny
to all
His
Jude
Laura Riding), 90
The Terrassed
The
400, 401
Hayek, F. A., 36
Hendry, J. F 468
a Battlefield, 405
Arthur. 200
146
Wife in London, 65
Harris, Frank, 54
Voice,
146
the Obscure,
A Laodicean,
Visitor,
54
54
Late Lyrics and Earlier, 144
March 1870-March 1913, 146
465
A Survey
147
Steps,
146
Cliff,
A Broken Appointment,
to Ancients, 146
August Midnight, 63
Henley, W. E., 65
Herbert, George, 422
Hewlett, Morris, 440
Heyer, Georgette, 440
Higgins, F. R., 207, 460
Hobhouse, L. T., 25 41
Hope, Anthony, 438
Hopkins, G. M., 94, 153, 340, 380
Horniman, Miss, 200
Housman, A. E., 385, 386
Hudson, W. H., 525
Hulme, T. E., 66, 89, 237, 337
553
INDEX OF NAMES
Hume, David, 232
Many
Guy
Summer, 228
An
Brave
New
New
World
Crome Yellow,
Revisited,
474
Eyeless in Gaza, 75
Point Counter Point, 228
Hyndman, H. M.,
A New England
Winter, ill
31
Inge,
Irish
W;
Portrait
115,
199-203
378,
29,
60,
69,
73,
ni. 369
What Maisie Knew,
Jefferies,
330,
Unicorn, 204
The Golden Cuckoo, 204
The Moon in the Yellow River, 204,
Broken Wings, 55
Brooksmith, 55
The Chaperon, 114
114, 226
103-17,
114
308,
114
13,
248,
54,
Terminations, 113
335,
221-30,
no, 112
Irving, Henry, 53
53-7,
226
205
Jones, Ernest, 19
Daisy Miller, no
The Death of the Lion, 55, 113
The Europeans,
369
554
INDEX OF NAMES
Dubliners, 76, 199, 301, 303, 306
Finnegans
Wake,
78,
306,
301,
The
Young
The End
o/Laisser-Faire, 33
286
Memoir, 276
Thomas, 208
380
Knight, J. Wilson, 90, 265
Knox, Ronald, 20
Koestler, Arthur, 31, 33-4, 36, 529
W. S. 89
Langland, William, 344
Landor,
82, 280-1,
St
297
Lady
Kavanagh,
Horsedealer's Daughter,
Insouciance, 32
300, 315
Edward, 386
Lear,
106,
in,
530
555
INDEX OF NAMES
Lewis, Percy
"Wyndham
The Revenge
for
(cont.)
Love, 75
357,
One Foot
W. J., 435
Lynd, Helen, 31
461,
in
Eden, 468
533
53i
Mannheim,
384*
Locke,
380,
468-9, 532
278
Strange Glory, 85
Karl, 41
No well-Smith, P.
H., 25
Marx,
533-4
Moore, G.
24
534
Animal Farm, 229
Coming up for Air, 229
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 229
247, 275
Politics
556
INDEX OF NAMES
Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 535-6
Owen,
Owen,
Robert, 28, 33
Wilfred, 71,
154-8,
159,
Disabled, 162
157
In Retreat, 168
165
Insensibility,
166
S.I.W., 155
Strange Meeting, 156, 166, 167
Analysis,
237
Postan, M., 18
Egoist, 70,
Pound, Ezra,
English Review, 89
Horizon,
Little
defined
by
Confucius, 462-3
425
Praed,
W.
M., 95
4.74.
Review, 70, 77
Nation, 356
Nation (American), 369
76
The
no
324
Richards,
The
I.
39, 90,
232
Midsummer
557
Frost, 168
INDEX OF NAMES
Rossetti,
D. G.,
52, 321
Snow, C.
481-2, 539
Ryle, Gilbert, 24
Sabatini, Rafael, 440
168, 537
Dorothy, 489
Scott, Walter, 225
Sayers,
Seeley, John, 25
Shakespeare,
116,
William,
53,
215,
213,
142,
224,
225,
Man,
227
Back to Methuselah, 214, 227
Caesar and Cleopatra, 214
Candida, 20, 224
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 224
The Doctor's Dilemma, 224
the
270, 374
90,
89,
Arms and
32,
J.
M.,
Major Barbara, 59
and Superman, 20, 59, 212-13,
214
Man
Tennyson, Alfred,
Mrs Warren's
390
Thackeray, W. M., 58, 60, 72, 258
Thomas, Dylan, 93-4, 4I5-I9. 460-1,
Plays
Profession, 59
Pleasant
and
Unpleasant,
214-16
The Quintessence oflbsenism, 59
St Joan, 213-14
Poem
Widowers' Houses, 59
Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 200
.,
94
93-4, 460-1
Thomas, Edward,
Smith,
George, 201
in October,
A Refusal
Adam, 238
558
INDEX OF NAMES
The Gypsy, 150
The Hollow Wood, 149
Liberty, 63
Lob, 149
March, 151
Ann
Boon, 221
A Private, 71
Experiment
Rain, 150
222
Polly, 64.
Kipps, 222
486-8
95, 96,
in
The History of Mr
Tale, 149
Titmuss, R. M., 32-3
Tomelty, Joseph, 201
Edmund, 326-7
Walpole, Hugh, 433, 541-2
Warner, Rex, 474
Waugh, Evelyn, 75, 197, 394, 395401, 410, 439. 474-5, 481, 542
Black Mischief, 396-8
Waller,
47, 61,
399
A Handful of Dust,
396, 400
Helena, 395
400
Scoop, 396-8
Vile Bodies, 397-401
Webb,
Blind,
Autobiography, 32
The Future in America, 117
Wain, John,
Mrs Dalloway,
221, 542
On
33,
Modern
Fiction, 73
Orlando, 26J
221
559
INDEX OF NAMES
Woolf, Virginia
The
Years,
An
Irish
Airman
78,79
John Sherman, 196
268
41, 51,
In
(cont.)
.,
78-81,
Never Give
323,
382,
385,
415,
458, 460,
186
all the
Heart, 188
On
Among
Schoolchildren, 171
Ancestral Houses, 81
189
Autobiographies, 322
A Bronze Head,
Purgatory,
172, 189
220
Responsibilities,
The
69
182, 183,
3i8
175
Statues, 183
To a Shade, 188
The Tower, 172,
184, 377
A Vision,
What
is
183
Popular Poetry?, 65
..
to
English Literature
offer
is
is,
to
draw up an ordered
concerned,
is
ment
traditions
first
and foremost,
this as a direct
encourage-
Each volume
sets
of related material:
(i)
of literature in each
period,
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
The Guide
consists
of seven volumes,
as
follows
2.
From Donne
4.
to
to
Marvell
Johnson
5.
From Blake
6.
From Dickens
7.
to
Byron
to
Hardy
The
series
of which
this
volume forms
part
many
what
known
less hesitate
George
as
our
who
Eliot,
Langland,
Marvell,
not a Bradshaw or a
It is
'literary heritage',
is
it
but
Yeats,
them
as
the
Pope,
Hopkins,
Crabbe, or D. H. Lawrence, or to
fit
this
It is
into
map
is
It
this
contour-
attempts to draw up
concerned,
this as a direct
first
and foremost,
encouragement to
final
volume
is
James,
W.
B. Yeats, T.
S. Eliot,
M.
Forster,
Henry
World War.
There are
Finally, the
volume
contains an
Appendix of
y Penguin Boohs