A Selection from Scrutiny: Volume 2

A SELECTION FROM SCRUTINY VOLUME 2

A SELECTION FROM

TINY COMPILED

BY

F.R.LEAVIS IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME 2

w w CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1968

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521069540 This selection © Cambridge University Press 1968 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1968 Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 67-24940 ISBN 978-0-521-06954-0 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-09509-9 paperback

CONTENTS 1

JANE AUSTEN A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's writings Q. D. LEAVIS Part i (Vol. X, 1941)

page 1

Part II: 'Lady Susan9 into 'Mansfield Park9 (Vol. X, 1941) 23 Part II concluded

(Vol. X, 1942)

Part III: The Letters 2

47

(Vol. XII, 1944)

65

NOVELISTS REVIEWED Clear Horizon by Dorothy Richardson, reviewed by Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. IV, I935)

8l

Gissing and the English Novel: Stories and Sketches reviewed by Q. D. LEAVIS

(Vol. VII, 1938)

82

Hollywooden Hero: The Fifth Column by Ernest Hemingway, reviewed by w. H. MELLERS (Vol. VIII, 1939)

89

After ' T o The Lighthouse': Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. X, 1942)

97

Henry James: The Stories: a review by Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. XIV, 1947)

100

The Institution of Henry James: The Question of Henry James, edited by F. W. Dupee, reviewed by Q. D. LEAVIS

(Vol. XV, 1947)

107

The Appreciation of Henry James: Henry James: The Major Phase by F. O. Matthiessen, reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. XIV, 1947) 3

H E N R Y JAMES'S H E I R E S S The Importance of Edith Wharton (Vol. VII, 1938)

4

114

Q. D. LEAVIS 124

WORDSWORTH A Preliminary Survey JAMES SMITH

(Vol. VII, 1938)

137

CONTENTS

5

ON METAPHYSICAL P O E T R Y JAMES SMITH

(Vol. II, 1933)

page 157

6

'AS Y O U LIKE I T '

7

REVALUATION: JOHN WEBSTER W. A. EDWARDS (Vol. II, 1933)

8

JAMES SMITH

(Vol. IX, 1940)

172

192

THE ENGLISH T R A D I T I O N Lives and Works of Richard JefFeries: reviews by Q. D. LEA v i s (Vol. VI, 1938)

202

English Tradition and Idiom (Vol. II, 1933)

211

ADRIAN BELL

Beatrice Webb in Partnership: Our Partnership reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

A Cure for Amnesia, (Vol. II, 1933)

(Vol. XVI, 1949)

216

DENYS THOMPSON

219

Revaluation: 'The Vision of Piers Plowman* D. A. TRAVERSI (Vol. V, 1936) 9

10

227

THE HISTORY OF CRITICAL JOURNALISM The Great Reviews R. G. COX Part I (Vol. VI, 1937) Part II (Vol. VI, 1937)

241 256

A Hundred Years of the Higher Journalism DENYS THOMPSON (Vol. IV, 1935)

272

THE RESPONSIBLE CRITIC or The Function of Criticism at Any Time F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. XIX, 1953)

The Responsible Critic: Reply (Vol. XIX, 1953) Rejoinder F. R. LEAVIS

VALEDICTORY

F. W. BATESON

303

(Vol. XIX, 1953)

PostScript F. W. BATESON 11

280

(1966)

F. R. LEAVIS

vi

308

315 (Vol. XIX, 1953)

317

CONTENTS TO VOLUME 1 Prefatory 1

page xi

THE CAMBRIDGE T R A D I T I O N Academic Case-History Q. D. LEAVIS

(Vol. XI, 1943)

'The Discipline of Letters' Q. D. LEAVIS

2

(Vol. XII, 1943)

1 7

Leslie Stephen: A Cambridge Critic Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. VII, 1939)

22

Henry Sidgwick's Cambridge Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. XV, 1947)

31

Professor Chadwick and English Studies Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. XIV, 1947)

41

T.S.ELIOT Selected Essays reviewed byEDGELL RICKWORD (Vol. I, 1933) Mr Eliot at Harvard: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism reviewed by D. W. HARDING (Vol. II, 1933)

47

50

Crumbs from the Banquet: Points of View reviewed by R. O. C. WINKLER

(Vol. X, I941)

The Family Reunion JOHN PETER

(Vol. XVI, 1949)

53 57

Sin and Soda: The Cocktail Party reviewed by JOHN PETER

(Vol. XVII, 1950)

69

Mr Eliot and Social Biology L. A. CORMICAN (Vol. XVII, 1950)

75

Poet as Executant: Four Quartets read by the author, reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

3

YEATS AND

(Vol. XV, 1947)

88

POUND

The latest Yeats: The Winding Stair and Other Poems reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. II, 1933)

Yeats and the English Tradition: The Oxford Book of Modern Verse reviewed by H. A. MASON (Vol. V, 1937) vii

89

91

CONTENTS

The Great Yeats and the Latest: Last Poems and Plays reviewed by F. R. LEA VIS (Vol. VIII, 1940)

page 93

Petulant Peacock: Letters on Poetry', from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley reviewed by w. H. MELLERS (Vol. IX, 1940)

96

The Case of Mr Pound: Active Anthology reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. II, 1933)

99

Mr Pound's Propertius: Homage to Sextus Propertius reviewed by J O H N S P E I R S

4

(Vol. Ill, 1935)

101

POST-ELIOT POETS REVIEWED William Empson's Verse: Poems reviewed by H. A. MASON (Vol. IV, 1935)

108

Mr Auden's Talent: Look, Stranger/ and The Ascent ofF.6 reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

5

(Vol. V, 1936)

no

Another Time by W. H. Auden reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. IX, 1940)

114

Auden's Inverted Development: For the Time Being reviewed by R. G. LIENHARDT (Vol. XIII, 1945)

115

The Latest Auden: Nones reviewed by ROBIN MAYHEAD (Vol. XVIII, 1952)

120

Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems reviewed by ROBIN MAYHEAD (Vol. XIX, 1952-53)

125

LITERARY

CULTURE

Wyndham Lewis: A Discursive Exposition reviewed by T. R. BARNES (Vol. I, 1933)

131

The T. E. Hulme Myth: T. E. Hulme by Michael Roberts, (Vol. VII, 1938)

132

Mr E. M. Forster: Abinger Harvest reviewed by Q. D. LEAVIS (Vol. V, 1936)

reviewed by H. A. MASON

134

Lytton Strachey: Characters and Commentaries reviewed by T. R. BARNES (Vol. II, 1933)

I38

The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers: Gaudy Night and Busman s Honeymoon reviewed by Q, D. LEAVIS (Vol. VI, 1937)

141

viii

CONTENTS

Charlotte Yonge and 'Christian Discrimination': a review by Q. D. LEA VIS (Vol. XII, 1944)

page 147

D. H. Lawrence Placed: a Note by F. R. Leavis and a letter byH. COOMBES

6

THE LITERARY

(Vol. XVI, 1949)

156

WORLD

The Literary Racket F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. I, 1932)

160

The Background of Twentieth Century Letters: reviews by Q. D. LEAVIS

(Vol. VIII, 1939)

162

'Under Which King, Bezonian?' F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. I, 1932)

166

Retrospect of a Decade F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. IX, 1940)

Henry James and the English Association F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. XIV, 1946) Mr Pryce-Jones, the British Council and British Culture F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. XVIII, 1951-2)

7

177 180

Keynes, Spender and Currency-Values: reviews by F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. XVIII, 1951)

185

Reflections on the Milton Controversy JOHN PETER (Vol. XIX, 1952)

196

J U D G M E N T A N D A N A L Y S I S : N O T E S IN T H E ANALYSIS O F P O E T R Y * Thought'and Emotional Quality F. R. LEAVIS (Vol. XIII, 1945)

211

Imagery and Movement F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. XIII, 1945)

231

(Vol. XIX, 1952-3)

248

Reality and Sincerity F. R. LEAVIS 8

175

CRITICS Arnold as Critic F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. VII, 1938)

Coleridge in Criticism F. R. LEAVIS I. A. Richards D. w. HARDING

(Vol. IX, 1940)

(Vol. I, 1933)

258 268 278

The Christian Renaissance by G. Wilson Knight, reviewed by F. R. LEAVIS

(Vol. II, 1933)

ix

288

CONTENTS

Hardy and Criticism: reviews by Q. D. LEA VIS (Vol. XI, 1943) Edmund Wilson of'The New Yorker': Classics and Commercials reviewed by JOHN FARRELLY (Vol. XVIII, 1951-52) The New Scholarship?: reviews by R. G. c o x (Vol. XIX, 1952-3)

page 291

299 304

I

JANE AUSTEN A CRITICAL THEORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S WRITINGS (I) Q. D. LEAVIS (1941)

It is common to speak of Jane Austen's novels as a miracle; the accepted attitude to them is conveniently summarized by Professor Caroline Spurgeon in her address on Jane Austen to the British Academy: But Jane Austen is more than a classic; she is also one of the little company whose work is of the nature of a miracle.. . That is to say, there is nothing whatever in the surroundings of these particular writers [Keats, Chatterton, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte], their upbringing, opportunities or training, to account for the quality of their literary work. The business of literary criticism is surely not to say ' Inspiration' and fall down and worship, and in the case of Jane Austen it is certainly not entitled to take up such an unprofitable attitude. For in Jane Austen literary criticism has, I believe, a uniquely documented case of the origin and development of artistic expression, and an enquiry into the nature of her genius and the process by which it developed can go very far indeed on sure ground. Thanks to Dr Chapman's labours we have for some time had at our disposal a properly edited text of nearly all her surviving writings, and scholarship, in his person chiefly, has brilliantly made out a number of interesting facts which have not yet, however, been translated into the language of literary criticism. Correlated with Professor Spurgeon's attitude to the Austen novels is the classical account of their author as a certain kind of novelist, one who wrote her best at the age of twenty (Professor Oliver Elton), whose work' shows no development' (Professor Garrod), whose novels 'make exceptionally peaceful reading' (A. C. Bradley); one scholar writes of her primness, another of her 'sunny temper', with equal infelicity, and all apologize for her inability to dwell on guilt and misery, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This account assumes among other things that the novels were written in ' two distinct groups, separated by a considerable interval of time. . . thus, to put it roughly, the first group of three were written between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, and the second group between the ages of

JANE AUSTEN 1

thirty-five and forty' and only notices revision where internal dating makes it inevitable—e.g. the mention of Belinda (published in 1801) in Northanger Abbey', or of Scott as a popular poet in Sense and Sensibility (which indicates a revision in 1809). As long ago as 1922 Dr Chapman pointed out2—but cautiously, as becomes a scholar, and with a distinct refusal to commit himself to any positive deductions— that 'the chronology of Miss Austen's novels is unusually obscure' and that for 'the great part of this assumption there is little warrant'. But we can go much farther than this. There are, besides the six novels, three volumes of early work in manuscript,3 and drafts and miscellaneous pieces at various stages, as well as the two volumes of correspondence, which taken together offer the literary detective as well as the literary critic a harvest of clues and evidence; and these writings cover her life from the age of fifteen to her death. Cassandra Austen, besides her notorious work in censoring those of her sister's letters which she did not destroy, left a memorandum of the dates of composition of some of her sister's work; other evidence exists in Jane's Letters^ and the manuscripts generally tell their own story. Moreover, she had a habit of constructing her novels on the current calendar for her own convenience. From these data we can make out the following table of Miss Austen's working life: JANE AUSTEN, 1775-1817 Between 1789 and 1793 she turned out for the amusement of her family a mass of satiric work (some dramatic and some in epistolary form), some unfinished stories, and many type epistles. From these she selected a number for preservation by copying them at intervals (to judge by the handwriting, over some years) into three volumes. Of these three, Volume the First has been edited and published by Dr Chapman; Volume the Second\w& been published under the title of one of its pieces, Love and Freindship; while the third volume has unfortunately never been printed, though a sufficient description of it can be found in the Life and Letters published by W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh. 1795 ca. Elinor and Marianne was written as a novel in letter form. 1796-7. First Impressions written as a novel in letter form. 1797. Elinor and Marianne was rewritten as Sense and Sensibility 1 the Memoir says 'in its present form', which means only that it was 1 2 3 4

A. C. Bradley, address to the English Association. The Times Literary Supplement, 9 February 1922. All now published (1967). Edited by R. W. Chapman.

Q. D. LEAVIS

no longer in letters; in some respects at least it could not have been the novel that we know. 1797-8. Susan, a novel, probably written up from an unfinished story in Volume the Third called 'Catharine, or the Bower'. 1803. Susan was rewritten and sent to a publisher. Before 1805, probably in the interval between the two versions of Susan, Lady Susan, an epistolary nouvelle, was written. It is untitled; its paper is watermarked 1805, but what we have is 'not a draft but a fair copy' and, judging by Jane Austen's habits of composition, we can assume that this is a rewrite after a period of years. Between 1806 and 1807 a new novel, The Watsons, was started; we have a fair copy corrected, but not finished. Calendar evidence shows it was located in 1807. 1808-9. Lady Susan, on my theory, was expanded into Mansfield Park (the 1808-9 calendar was used to construct Mansfield Park). 1809. Susan probably revised again. 1809-10, Sense and Sensibility rewritten or revised, for publication in 1811. 1810-12. Pride and Prejudice was rewritten for publication in 1813, radically, beyond all doubt, since it is built on the ' punctilious observance' of the 1811-12 calendar. 1811-13. Mansfield Park rewritten as we know it for publication in 1814. Since she spent so long over it, the alterations were probably considerable, and I suspect the 1808-9 version to have been epistolary. 1814-15. Emma written up for publication in 1816 from the earlier story of The Watsons (as I hope to show). 1815-16. The Elliots written, but not, I believe, intended for publication as it stands; two of the last chapters towards the final version were completely rewritten, and we have the rejected chapter to compare. The prototype, which exists for every other novel, could hardly have not existed for this work, and as the author's hands were full from 1806 onwards, it can possibly be allotted to the pre-1806 gap. Other reasons can be adduced in support of my theory. 1816-17. Susan was revised for publication as Catherine; it was published posthumously as Northanger Abbey, with The Elliots as Persuasion, by Henry Austen, who gave both these books the names we know them by. Jan.—March 1817. Sanditon, a new novel of which she was writing the first draft when she died. The MS remains for us to see what a first draft of hers looked like.

JANE AUSTEN

We can see from this table of what Jane Austen chose to preserve of her work and the records, accidentally preserved, of what she preferred to destroy that our author wrote unceasingly (we should be unjustified in assuming that nothing was being written in the one period, 17981803, for which we happen to have no evidence). She had, it appears, some very peculiar habits of composition, which quite destroy the popular notion of her writing by direct inspiration, as it were. One habit was to lay down several keels in succession and then do something to each in turn, never having less than three on the stocks but always working at any one over a period of years before launching it, and allowing twelve clear months at least for each final reworking. Another was to start writing her novels much further back in conception than most novelists or perhaps than any other novelist; what is usually a process of rapid and largely unconscious mental selecting, rejecting and reconstituting was, in her case, a matter of thoroughly conscious, laborious, separate draftings; in every case except that of Persuasion we know, or I hope to show that we know, of early versions which bear little resemblance to the novels as published. Indeed, I propose to argue that her novels are geological structures, the earliest layer going back to her earliest writings, with subsequent accretions from her reading, her personal life and those lives most closely connected with hers, all recast—and this is what gives them their coherence and artistic significance—under the pressure of deep disturbances in her own emotional life at a given time. This at least is clear, that Miss Austen was not an inspired amateur who had scribbled in childhood and then lightly tossed off masterpieces between callers; she was a steady professional writer who had to put in many years of thought and labour to achieve each novel, and she took her novels very seriously. Her methods were in fact so laborious that it is no wonder that she produced only six novels in twenty-seven years, and the last of those not finally revised, while another {Northanger Abbey) was so immature that she despaired of doing anything with it. Another point that emerges is that she was decidedly not precociously mature as an artist. There is no reason whatever to suppose that Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey as we know them agreed in form, tone, content or intention with those versions which were offered earlier to publishers, who (not unnaturally) did not care to publish them. In their original form they were no doubt as thin and flat as The Watsons, as sketchy as Sanditon, as unsympathetic as Lady Susan, and as much dependent for the most part on family jokes as Northanger Abbey still is. The novels as we know them are palimpsests through whose surface portions of earlier versions, or of other and earlier compositions quite unrelated,

Q. D. LEAVIS

constantly protrude, so that we read from place to place at different levels. Two of the novels, Emma and Mansfield Park, are the results of an evolutionary process of composition, and bristle with vestigial traits. The novels as a whole, then, cannot be said to be the work of any given date, but the published versions are certainly to be ascribed to Jane Austen at the final date of revision, since before such final revisions they would probably have been unrecognizable to us now. Thus Pride and Prejudice was not the work of a girl of twenty-one but of a woman aged thirty-five to thirty-seven, and we have actually nothing as it was written, besides the juvenilia, till Lady Susan, a slight but accomplished piece of writing in her thirtieth year, and The Watsons, a thin sketch for a later novel, written when she was two years older. Since it is not until Emma, written when she was nearly forty, that she brings off a mature and artistically perfect novel, in which the various elements are for the first time integrated, we are justified in concluding that she was artistically a late developer as well as a slow and laborious writer. The wit similarly has a pedigree, so have the characters and much of the plots, and even the details of the intrigue. Much more in the novels is dependent on reference to, reaction against, and borrowings from, other novelists than is commonly realized, I believe. Northanger Abbey is generally held to be a 'sport', in its relation to the Gothic novels, but several of her novels were largely, and the others partially, conceived in a similar manner and are as little to be appreciated without at least as much realization of what they are tilting against or referring to. Far from the Austen novels having fallen straight from heaven into the publisher's lap, so to speak, they can be accounted for in even greater detail than other literary compositions, for Jane Austen was not a fertile writer. Her invention except in one limited respect was very meagre; casual jottings of aspects of 'character' and bits of situation and stage business made in her teens turn up at intervals to be worked into the shape required by the story in hand; a great deal of what seems to be creation can be traced through her surviving letters to have originated in life; much of her novels consists of manipulation and differentiation of characters and group relations made long before in cruder and more general or merely burlesque pieces of writing; rarely is anything abandoned, however slight, Jane Austen's practice being rather thriftily to 'make over'. Her inspiration then turns out to be, as Inspiration so often does, a matter of hard work—radical revision in the light of a maturer taste and a severe self-criticism, and under the pressure of a more and more clearly defined intention over a space of years. Her invention consists chiefly in translating the general into the particular; she proceeds from the crude comprehensive outline and the dashing sketch to something 5

JANE AUSTEN

subtle and specialized by splitting up and separating out—in fact her tendency is to overdo this process, so that in the end Mrs Norris and Elizabeth Elliot and Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine are each too much on one note, rather monotonous and over-attenuated, whereas the original piece of characterization in the void from which they all derive, Lady Greville in the second MS volume, is more robust in possessing all these facets—she abounds in all these forms of feminine ill nature instead of exhibiting only the one eternally, and is better comedy because she has no such tendency to get on the reader's nerves. But these later inventions were intended to get on the reader's nerves because they were aspects of social intercourse that had got on Miss Austen's. I will take one illustration, a particularly neat one, of a process common in her work, from the second MS volume (which, like the first, is of the greatest interest to the literary critic). In 'A Collection of Letters' Letter the Third, the only one which is not burlesque, is an account by *a young lady in reduced circumstances' of a couple of encounters with the local great lady, who first takes her to a ball and then calls next day to invite her to dinner. This letter is probably the best-known piece of Austen 'juvenilia' and it has been noticed by one or two critics that Lady Catherine de Bourgh is descended from Lady Greville and that the incident of Charlotte Collins being called out to the carriage in all that wind is also reproduced from this Letter. But anyone who will turn it up in the Love and Freindship volume, however sceptically, will have to admit that it indisputably contains all the following: 1. Lady Catherine's general line of impertinence to Elizabeth and some incidents slightly improved in Pride and Prejudice. 2. Mrs Norris's scolding Fanny when she is going out to dine with the Grants—the business about the carriage and walking in spite of the possible rain and the necessity of knowing her place are all there, with just the same tone of voice. 3. The ball which itself produces two balls later on, the one in Pride and Prejudice where Miss Bingley is rude to Eliza and the one in Northanger Abbey where the situation of being engaged to a partner who turns up at the last minute when the heroine is embarrassed at seeming to have no partner is here first set down. (And this last is borrowed from Evelina.) 4. The incident of Miss de Bourgh stopping her carriage, sending for Charlotte to come out in all that wind, 'abominably rude', etc.

Q. D. LEAVIS

5. The conversation between the Bingley sisters on Eliza's indelicacy in taking a cross-country walk is clearly anticipated in Lady Greville's remarks to the letter-writer in similar phrases. 6. The characters of Lady Catherine and Mrs Norris are unmistakably delineated in Lady Greville, just as the sensitive and down-trodden Maria Williams who writes the Letter, with the humble mother, is the original of Fanny Price. To see, however, how such jottings are used item 2 should be placed beside the relevant passage in Mansfield Park. The idea has not been merely polished or written up or expanded, it has been worked into an elaborate complex of characters, motives, plot and so on, so that it is part of the living tissue of the novel and is given power to move us by all that is behind it and embodied in it. It comes at the turning point in Fanny's history when she ceases to be in the general esteem what Mrs Norris has always represented her, and becomes thenceforward a person with a position of her own (Mr Crawford is to fall in love with her at the dinner). Sir Thomas's ordering of the carriage that Mrs Norris (like Lady Greville) has made a point of denying her with evident malice is not only employed to affect Fanny deeply as a mark of his consideration and exhibit both Mrs Norris and Sir Thomas characteristically, though it is meant to do all this by the way; the carriage incident in Mansfield Park, unlike the similar incident in the Letter, where it remains a piece of mere ill-natured rudeness, is a symbol of Fanny's changing status and a critical, indeed a pivotal, point in the plot. What was originally simple satiric humour, a piece of external and isolated observation magnified to the proportions of farce, has been fused into a work of art. It is this power of seizing on every trifle at her command, whether drawn from nature or literature (as we shall see, they were of about equal authority for her) and making it serve a complex purpose, using it in the one place and context where it will tell and do exactly what is required of it-—it is this kind of ability that constitutes her genius, rather than any more mysterious and inexplicable quality.

The large Austen family, well born, but not well off", well educated, singularly united, with tentacles of kinsfolk reaching out into great houses, parsonages rich and poor, Bath and London, the navy and the militia, with its theatricals, dances, flirtations, marriages and invalids, was a rich source of raw material for any novelist, but it contributed in two less obvious respects to Jane's equipment. One was that in her capacity of constant visitor to outlying branches she necessarily

JANE AUSTEN

wrote letters home, addressed, it is true, to Cassandra, but evidently meant, as Dr Chapman notes, to be read aloud to a group, keeping them in touch with their friends and relatives; similarly, when at home, she wrote to friends, nieces and nephews to transmit family news and give advice. In these letters we can not only find much that later went into the novels, but we can see that material in a preliminary stage, half-way between life and art. The character sketches, the notes on conduct and social functions, were written for an audience, and written also from a point of view that is the novelist's. There is unfortunately no room here to enlarge on this interesting relation of the letters to the novels, but I will summarize my argument by saying simply that without the letter-writing one of the conditions essential to the production of the novels would not have existed: the letter-writing, like the drafting of story into novel at different stages of composition, was part of the process that made possible the unique Austen novels. The other service this family unit rendered the future novelist was in providing a literary springboard in its reactions to novels, which the Austens consumed largely but in no uncritical spirit. In addition to acting among themselves (these amateur theatricals have left, of course, other traces besides the acting in Mansfield Park: a preference after epistolary for dramatic narrative, and a tendency to characterization too broad for any medium but the footlights)—in addition to acting plays the Austens by reading aloud and discussing their reading had evidently acquired by the time Jane was fifteen a common stock of conversational allusions, jokes, understandings about the absurdities of their favourite writers, and certain literary criteria. The fruits of this were the contents of the three manuscript volumes—these items have mock dedications to members of the family. Some of these remain private jokes, others are jokes we can understand, while some, though closely related to the rest, are positive pieces of original composition. The trend of this family joke is satiric, but it implies also a habit of discussing the theory of novel composition and style. Jane was a sound critic of the novel before she began to be a novelist at all (among other numerous references in the letters to this subject there is a significant one to Cassandra—'I know your starched notions' in the matter of digressions in fiction). The family joke and writing for a circle which understood her allusions gave her the habit of writing with a side glance at her audience, which though it has in the earlier novels given us some cryptic passages, is nevertheless the source of that intimate tone with the reader that has made her so popular. It is the recollection of such a critical audience liable to pounce that accounts also for her poise— her hold on herself (so disastrously lacking in George Eliot) which constantly evokes self-ironical touches like that in Persuasion where,

Q. D. LEAVIS

after Anne's indulgence in the poetry of autumn melancholy, she remarks on 'the ploughs at work [that] spoke the farmer, counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again'. The Austen family were hard-headed and demanded not poetry but uncompromising fidelity to nature in their fiction. There is hardly anything easier to ridicule in literature than the eighteenth-century novel by contrasting it with daily life, particularly when manners, idiom and social conventions changed as rapidly as they can be seen to have done between Clarissa and Evelina, and Evelina and Pride and Prejudice. So the MS volumes are full of burlesques of the literary conventions, the style and the conversations of Richardson, Goldsmith, Sterne, Fanny Burney, and Henry Mackenzie among others, of the novel of sentiment, the language of sensibility and the language of morality. The value of such a start is obvious when compared with the 'sedulous ape' recipe for training an artist of a century later: dead conventions are not propagated thus, and a study of how other novelists wrote, combined with a critical perception of where such writing leads and why and how not to get there, is a tremendous help in finding where one wishes to go oneself. But the burlesque can already be seen in the MS volumes to have a positive side. Though it is impossible here to enter on a detailed examination of Volume the First and Volume the Second a few main strands are worth following. There is an unconsciously very funny scene in Evelina (a novel the Austens seem to have known by heart) where Evelina visits her hitherto unknown father and experiences the correct emotions on the occasion, a hackneyed enough situation in eighteenth-century fiction to be satirized as a type of the false. Make the father a grandfather and multiply the grandchildren, and the burlesque does itself, as can be seen in Letter 11 of' Love and Freindship'. This device is used again, as we shall see, in Pride and Prejudice. Many systematic attempts to prepare booby-traps for the reader and to throw cold water on his expectations are tried out in these pieces for use later in the novels. Many characters in the novels are to be recognized in a certain primitive form; since their origin is an important clue to the way Jane Austen conceived her novels, I will give some illustrations of what I shall call the functional origin of her characters. The burlesque nature of the early work is visibly the source also of Northanger Abbey. Catherine is the anti-heroine of romance, and her family and upbringing and disposition are described entirely in antiromantic terms. It is essential for the purposes of the joke that the book was meant to be that Catherine should be simple-minded, unsentimental and commonplace, that unsolicited she should fall in love with a young man who snubs and educates her instead of adoring her,

JANE AUSTEN

and should be launched into the world by an anti-chaperone (for Mrs Allen, like Catherine, is purely functional—hence her concentration on herself and her inability to advise, instruct or watch over her charge). This is generally admitted. But Pride and Prejudice was originally the same kind of story as Nonhanger Abbey and it is ignorance of this that has led the critics to debate problems such as whether Darcy is, like Mrs Jennings, an instance of the artist's having changed her mind about the character, whether Elizabeth Bennet is open to the charge of pertness, whether Mr Collins could possibly have existed. But such problems are non-existent. Besides taking its title from the moral of Cecilia^ Pride and Prejudice takes a great deal beside, part borrowed and part burlesqued. One of the absurdities of Cecilia is her behaviour in defeating, out of the morbid delicacy proper to Burney heroines, the hero Delvile's attempts to come to an explanation with her about his feelings and the obstacles to a union with her (like Darcy he is driven to write her a long letter); it is necessary in her role of an anti-Cecilia that Elizabeth should be vigorous-minded, should challenge decorum by her conversation and habits, and eventually invite her lover's proposal; she is 'pert' and of a coming-on disposition, just as necessarily as Catherine is green and dense. Darcy is only Delvile with the minimum of inside necessary to make plausible his conduct (predetermined by the object of the novel). For the original conception of First Impressions was undoubtedly to rewrite the story of Cecilia in realistic terms, just as Susan (or Catherine") was both to show up Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest and to contrast the romantic heroine's entry into the world {Evelina) with the everyday equivalent. What would be the reactions of a real girl if, like Cecilia, she was appealed to by her lover's family not to marry him because she was an unsuitable match? In Cecilia the hero's mother, a * noble' aristocratic figure, intended to be impressive, attacks Cecilia with all the appeals of which Lady Catherine's arguments to Elizabeth are a close but comic version (and succeeds in her appeal to Cecilia's higher nature!). Now the character of the intolerable great lady was fished out of Letter the Third in the second MS volume, as I have noted earlier; by putting her into the high-minded Mrs Delvile's place, changing mother for aunt (the old trick of substituting grandfather for father in burlesque), and suppressing the plausible objections to the marriage which existed in the original (the terms of a will which binds the heiress Cecilia), the moral situation is exquisitely burlesqued and the incredibly unrealistic tone of Cecilia brought down with a jolt to the level of stage comedy. Mr Collins is invented in functional terms for the same purpose; his lengthy proposal is devised to give the author's views on Fanny Burney's preposterous conventions about 10

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female behaviour (exhibited by both Evelina and Cecilia)— 'the usual practice of elegant females'— and the stilted, grotesquely Johnsonian, diction of Burney lovers (funnier because the professions in Mr Collins's case are bogus). And the disapproval of Bingley's sisters as a possible bar to his marrying Jane that is put forward by Jane for ridicule by Elizabeth is also part of the anti-Cecilia intention: the Bingley sisters underline the Lady Catherine-Mrs Delvile skit. The Austens certainly grasped all this, but unless we realize it too, and a whole order of such literary allusions in the novels, we cannot respond to the novels adequately. A few more of the sources of Pride and Prejudice may be noted here. Mary Bennet, who like Mr Collins has been objected to on the grounds of impossibility, is also a machine for burlesque. She is to be found in isolation in a letter in the second MS volume called 'The Female Philosopher', a mock portrait of'the sensible, the amiable Julia' who 'utters sentiments of Morality worthy of a heart like her own'. A specimen of her utterances: Mr Millar observed (and very justly too) that many events had befallen each during that interval of time, which gave occasion to the lovely Julia for making most sensible reflections on the many changes in their situation which so long a period had occasioned, on the advantages of some and the disadvantages of others. From this subject she made a short digression to the instability of human pleasures and the uncertainty of their duration, which led her to observe that all earthly Joys must be imperfect... On the other hand, there are many positive borrowings from Fanny Burney not in the least in a spirit of satire. The conversation overheard, at the ball where Darcy first appears, by Elizabeth's friend, when Darcy speaks slightingly of Elizabeth, is lifted from Evelina, where Evelina's friend overhears the hero speak similarly of Evelina at the ball at which they first meet. Mrs Bennet in her role of embarrassing her superior offspring by her vulgar and insensitive conversation, particularly on the subject of matches, is Mrs Belfield in Cecilia. Elizabeth's twitting of Lady Catherine both at Hunsford and at Longbourn is an echo of the lively impertinence of the Delviles' niece, a Lady Honoria, whose cool wit at the expense of Mr and Mrs Delvile's convictions of superiority (his on grounds of family dignity, hers on the score of highmindedness) is quite as amusing and cleverly managed, and rather freer in scope. But in another function Mrs Bennet was taken from the first MS volume. When Pride and Prejudice was expanded from an antiCecilia, its theme developed from a contrast between sentimental and intuitive human behaviour in a given situation to a general examination II

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of a subject to which Jane Austen was certainly giving much thought at this time, the subject of marriage. We can always see where Miss Austen's interests and preoccupations lie in any novel by observing where the stress falls and where the deepest current of feeling flows. The conversations between Jane and Elizabeth about Charlotte's engagement to Mr Collins, about the disparity between the sexes in courtship and about the sisters' different outlooks on life, and between Elizabeth and Charlotte, and Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner, about marriage and courtship, are noticed by every reader, I suppose, as differing in tone from the rest of the novel. The obverse to the marriage of love in the face of family disapprobation is the marriage of convenience that is approved by worldly wisdom. This idea is used again later in Mansfield Park and in Persuasion, but it is not new in Jane Austen's writings even in Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte Lucas's situation, Mr Collins's, and his visit with unspecified matrimonial intent to Longbourn, had already been plotted out in an early story in the first MS volume. This story in letter form is called 'The Three Sisters'. The situation therein of the mother in the country with £500 a year and three daughters to marry was used later for Sense and Sensibility but the action of the story is that of the Collins-Bennet-Lucas intrigue. Mr Watts, a desirable parti but disagreeable and ridiculous, proposes like Mr Collins to ally himself with this family, the individual wife being a matter of indifference, and similarly applies first to the eldest daughter, Mary. None of the girls wishes to marry him, but the eldest is anxious to be married and is eventually persuaded by the other two (the second sister is the candid Jane Bennet, the youngest the lively and determined Elizabeth) to accept him for his establishment and from jealous fear that one of her sisters will if she won't. Mary's mamma, like Elizabeth's, engages in battle with her daughters, declaring, 'If Mary won't have him Sophy must, and if Sophy won't Georgiana shall.9 Like Mrs Bennet's, 'my Mother's resolution I am sorry to say is generally more strictly kept than rationally formed'. (Mrs Bennet's nerves and silliness, however, were a later inspiration.) More interesting still, there is a half-serious discussion between the younger sisters, like that between Jane and Elizabeth where Jane argues that Charlotte has a reasonable prospect of matrimonial happiness, and there is a primitive account of the case for and against a marriage of convenience. But Charlotte Lucas is not Mary Stanhope in disposition (her character is used up many years later as Mary Musgrove); though the situation is taken from ' The Three Sisters', her character comes from another early story, 'Lesley Castle', in the second MS volume. This original Charlotte (a family joke from The Sorrows of Werther) is another functional character, designed solely to set off by 12

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excessive insensibility the conventional delicacy of feeling of her sister Eloisa, the heroine (the contrasted pair provide the Elinor-Marianne relation later). Charlotte Lutterell is wholly taken up with cookery and domestic management (vestigial traits in Charlotte Lucas), the point of this being that, when her sister's betrothed dies suddenly, she is distressed by the waste of wedding-victuals but doesn't understand her sister's sufferings. She has for similar reasons excessively prosaic (though disinterested) views on marriage that naturally acquire an ugly cast when as Charlotte Lucas she puts her views into practice. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who has no necessary part in the plot, was obviously put in to illustrate the theme, and shows signs of having been written down in the final version; his relation to Elizabeth, like that of Wickham and Lydia, Darcy and Elizabeth, Jane and Bingley, Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas, and the marriages of convenience desired by their families between Georgiana and Bingley and between Darcy and Miss de Bourgh, are all illustrations of the theme of the book. What we have in Pride and Prejudice, then, is not simply a subject taken over for ridicule, or a realistic instead of a conventional treatment of a plot, nor is it the simple 'borrowing' for a slightly different purpose that is the only recognition its relation to Cecilia has received from Dr Chapman and other scholars. It is the central idea of Cecilia given an elaborate orchestration, as it were, sometimes guyed (when Lady Catherine and Miss Bingley stand for the dignified opposition of Delvile's family to his attachment), more often used as an opportunity for self-exploration on the author's part (Elizabeth's outbreak about Charlotte's marriage and her discussion of 'candour' with her sister are spots where the crust of objective comedy visibly cracks). But what I wish to stress here is the way in which the author has secured her materials for constructing a novel which has delighted so many readers, from the severest critics to the least critical. Her writing and reading and living up to the point of the final revision of Pride and Prejudice have all tended towards its creation, we might say, and the phases it passed through were necessary to its development into a serious work of art. Many times as much might be written in illustration if there were space, and similar accounts might be given of the other novels. But I have room here only for a short survey of the evolution of two other novels whose origins have been even less realized and which tell an even more interesting story of how miracles in literature are brought about.

It is not surprising that most of the few intelligent critical remarks that have been made about the Austen novels have proceeded from

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novelists. Mrs Woolf in The Common Reader looks with a novelist's eye at The Watsons and notes * The bareness of the first chapters proves that she was one of those writers who lay out their facts rather baldly in the first version... Hence we perceive she was no conjuror after all'; and remarks 'What suppressions and insertions and artful devices' would have been necessary to convert such a version into 'the miracle' of a finished novel of hers! We can, as it happens, study the conjuring in this very case because The Watsons became Emma by processes that I think can be traced. The story of The Watsons is partly written only, but it was not unfinished, it was only not copied out to the end; a tradition of the rest remained in the Austen family and has been made known. Mr Watson, a poor country clergyman, a widower and an invalid, has a family of two sons and four daughters. One son is a surgeon, the other, Robert, is an attorney in Croydon with a wife Jane and a child Augusta. The daughters are: Elizabeth, a sympathetic old maid, Penelope and Margaret, two unpleasant husband-hunters, and the heroine, Emma, who has returned home at the opening of the story after being brought up from childhood by an aunt, with expectations of being her heiress, which are now at an end owing to the aunt's remarriage. Emma goes to the assembly ball with the Edwards family and there, by her kindness in offering to dance with a little boy whose promised partner, Miss Osborne, throws him over, she gets acquainted with his uncle Mr Howard (a middle-aged cleric) and the rest of the Osborne Castle party. Returning home, Emma has to meet a family party from Croydon, returning with Margaret. During their visit the local lady-killer, the moneyed Tom Musgrave, drops in. There is a scene where Lord Osborne with Musgrave calls on the Watsons to see Emma, at the too early dinner-hour of that humble home. The story was intended to continue with the death of Mr Watson, Emma being thrown in consequence on the Croydon menage to act as governess to the young Augusta, and after rejecting Lord Osborne she was to marry the mature Mr Howard. As summarized this does not sound at all like Emma^ but The Watsons reads like Emma nevertheless. The likeness is in two respects: the tone of the setting, which is what makes each Austen novel distinct and unique, and the details of character and intrigue. Emma Watson is a refined and superior heroine, but her background is excessively commonplace and belittling—the details of narrow means and management in the story are those that appear in the Letters about the Steventon household and which visibly bothered or irritated the writer all along. The theory of the biographer in his Memoir is that his aunt abandoned The Watsons because she ' became aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low'; this is probably 14

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true, but what she did, in fact, was to make a fresh start with the same materials by shaking the kaleidoscope to make a new pattern. (We have seen her doing this with her materials before, and it can be accepted as one of the means which in combination produced the miracles.) A new Emma was required who should be free from the 'low' circumstances in her immediate person, so Emma Woodhouse becomes a real heiress; she is a more pronounced character—frank and decisive—to suit her altered circumstances, and, as we shall see, acquired this shape from life. For the same reason her relatives have to go too, but they are only removed from her home to its threshold— Highbury is Stan ton, Dorking and Reigate (though Hartfield is imported to elevate Emma) and the Watson family people the Woodhouse circle. Thus Emma Watson's eldest sister, the spinster Elizabeth, whose situation of old maid is discussed like Miss Bates's, with her simplicity and lack of elegance, her love of company and gossip, turns into Miss Bates (the flowering of her character from a functional one is due to fusing her role with the personality and conversational habits of a real Miss Milles who figures in detail in the Letters with the same mother as Miss Bates's). The cramped, barely genteel Watson home is relegated to the side of the story and becomes the Bateses', and the petty local society of surgeon-lawyer-country-town gentility of limited means and decided inelegance that distinguishes Emma from the other novels is first mapped in The Watsons—Mr Weston being developed from Mr Edwards with his whist club at the White Hart, for instance, his kindliness and sociality and seeking out fresh gossip. Tom Musgrave (who dates back in both name and character to the second manuscript volume) undergoes a characteristic change: to fit the new plot he becomes really easy and well-bred, instead of only aspiring to be so; while his attentions to Emma remain, his aimless gallantry is given a specific purpose (to conceal an understanding and secret engagement) and he becomes, in short, by an inevitable process, Frank Churchill, the original stigma still attached to his conduct and a suspicion of the original puppyishness and lack of nice feeling still attached to his character. Lifting Emma into wealth and refinement required many changes, but another kind of change can be observed which exemplifies what I have found to be a principle of reconstruction in the Austen novels. When drafting a new story this author's tendency is to repeat characters and situations she has already used, as we can clearly see in Sanditon, but in her rewritten version she effaces these repetitions and covers her tracks. Thus while Emma Watson's attorney brother Robert gets a lift in the world, from Croydon to Brunswick Square and attorney to gentleman lawyer, his character, which was that of John 15

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Dashwood, is abandoned for a new one, that of Mr John Knightley, which was composed to demonstrate part of the real argument of the new novel Emma and is a functional one therefore. Similarly, Emma Watson's sister Penelope, who is taken up with trying to marry a 'rich old Dr Harding', is only the outline of the elder Miss Steele again (who, anyway, was lifted from the eldest Miss Branghton in Evelina)^ so she goes too. The assembly ball in The Watsons is the first ball in Pride and Prejudice, and Lord Osborne is just as evidently Mr Darcy in many particulars of character and conduct and conversation. Obviously this would not do, and the Osborne females could only echo the Bingley sisters, since Lord Osborne was to become a suitor to Emma and Lady Osborne a rival of Emma's for Mr Howard, so the whole Osborne Castle party disappears, to the great improvement of the homogeneous atmosphere of Emma (Enscombe is too far away to be felt). The ball does remain, but it becomes a different ball, with all which had been used in Pride and Prejudice dropped out and only the new and original incident retained—the act of generosity of one character at the ball taking pity on another who is humiliated and left partnerless. Now this change is significant and beautifully illustrates the kind of revision Jane Austen made when working up her draft to the work of art that her novel eventually became. We may regret, with some critics, the loss of Emma Watson's generosity to little Charles at the ball; but we can console ourselves by noticing, as they have not, that it is rewritten into a much more subtle act of generosity of an artistically and morally superior nature: it becomes the exactly parallel action of Mr Knightley's delicate kindness in sinking his dislike for dancing (and Harriet) to partner her at that other ball where she is publicly slighted by Mr Elton in a far more humiliating way than Miss Osborne had slighted little Charles. The first gesture was invented only to get Emma acquainted with the Osborne-Howard set, and shows only that Emma was an impulsive kind-hearted girl; the second is more significant, rich in overtones, coming as it does when the plot is getting to a critical stage (it gives Harriet the excuse for thinking Mr Knightley means to marry her, with subsequent anguish for Emma that reveals Emma's feelings for Mr Knightley to herself), it reveals Mr Knightley as the moral superior of the world of the novel, and it exposes Mr Elton's character to Emma not only as mean beyond her imagination—the incident is also an ironic comment on Emma's self-deception about Mr Elton's character and about her design of marrying him to Harriet. This, then, like the carriage incident in Mansfield Park, is the kind of creation in which Jane Austen's genius manifests itself, not a miracle of inspiration but the maturity of artistic purpose that gives significant direction to a 16

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casual piece of social behaviour and co-ordinates it with a complex series of events and shapes of character. We can get a great deal more out of The Watsons yet. We have seen the novelist rejecting characters that were not new,1 adapting others from life and from her early stock of satiric or first-hand notes, and giving prominence to fresh characterization and intrigue. The original of one of the most acclaimed characters of Emma is Emma Watson's sister-in-law Jane, whose over-fine clothes, 'pert and conceited' personality, 'arch sallies', 'witty smile', consciousness of superiority (and daughter Augusta) become with no change but that of situation Augusta Elton. The origin of Mr Woodhouse is more interesting and illuminating. He came into being originally as a purely functional character: Mr Watson had to be an invalid (a real one) in order to keep his daughters at home from balls and to prevent his receiving company and paying calls (so that Lord Osborne's calling at Stan ton to see Emma is both an impertinence and an embarrassing event); he had to die in order that Emma might be thrown on the world, have to live with her brother, experience reverses, and refuse Lord Osborne, before happily marrying Mr Howard. Now Mr Woodhouse becomes a valetudinarian—by a brilliant stroke of invention from the point of view of the reader's amusement, but actually, I think, in obedience to an inner compulsion on the author's part that provided the theme of Emma, just as from being a specifically sensible and well-informed man he becomes an exasperating clog on his daughter, and his conversation drivel. He keeps his daughter at his side and himself from ordinary social life through imaginary invalidism; Mr Watson's basin of gruel is elaborated as Mr Woodhouse's character expands into extravagant fatuity (there is a certain savage heightening of his nuisance-aspect towards the end which suggests that his author enjoyed him less than her critics have done). Poor Isabella naturally follows, and there was 'a poor Honey' of a cousin's wife with Isabella-ish characteristics at the right time (1813) and also a sister-in-law who is described in the Letters of the same year taking her children to Southend for the seabathing and then paying just such a family visit to the Austens at Godmersham as the Knightleys did to Hartfield—thoughtfully provided by life to give, as Gilbert says, artistic verisimilitude to what might otherwise have been a bald and unconvincing narrative. The Letters show that life was often kind in this way, and no doubt the 1

The only instance of a character being repeated in a final rewrite is LadyBertram, who in her functional character and consequent characteristics, and even in some of her remarks, is of course the anti-chaperone Mrs Allen. But this use was justified since the author believed that Susan (or Catherine) would never be publishable when she was taking Mansfield Park through its last revision. 17

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even larger number of missing letters would show even more raw material of the novels. The genius lay not in creating but in using it. But just as everything was rejected or disguised that was old, so nothing was wasted that was new, a thriftiness characteristic of our author. Mr Woodhouse has to be kept alive to be a problem to his daughter, so Mrs Churchill is introduced to do the dying that alters the course of the plot and the heroine's life, and the story of the original Emma is in fact relegated with her humble circumstances and aunt instead of sister, to a subordinate heroine, Jane Fairfax (note the vestigial vicarage in the background of her family), with her superior upbringing of wealth and education but prospects only of governessing, her confined and trying home, and her exposure to the vulgar familiarity of Augusta Elton (this last not inevitable as in the earlier story, where she was Emma's sister-in-law and later hostess, and a good deal of argument is actually contrived between Emma, Mr Knightley and Mrs Weston solely to make it plausible). The character and position of Mrs Churchill, it may be noted, are remarkably like that of disagreeable Aunt Leigh Perrott in the Letters. Thus old and discrete elements were rearranged to make, after assimilation, a new close-knit pattern. One of the rearrangements, perhaps the most important in this case, is the replacing of the somewhat stock heroine (who belongs, as Professor Garrod would say contemptuously, to a land flowing with milk and water) by a faulty and in many ways unsympathetic young woman, who undergoes a steady process of chastening, while the original static heroine and her story are subordinated to contribute to this chastening; while to balance this subordinate story, both artistically and for the moral argument, another and antithetic story, that of Harriet Smith, was invented. Resuscitated rather than invented, in all probability, for, though we do not happen to have the original version of this last, it bears all the marks of an early origin in anti-romance of the kind we may study in the MS volumes and can see somewhat disguised in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibilityand Pride and Prejudice. The Harriet-Emma Woodhouse relation is actually taken from the early Lady Susan, though there both parties are sympathetic; linking that up with a burlesque was a characteristic procedure. (Lady Susan had just previously been finally rewritten as Mansfield Park, and the Harriet-Emma relation was the only feature of the early story that had not been used up.) The reader will wish to ask, how far was all this deliberate, or, rather, were such processes not unconscious and therefore the result of a kind of taste, an intuition for the right touch, the right character, and not a matter of cold-blooded arrangement and readjustment such as I have suggested? No doubt the artist's sense of what coheres and 18

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is in keeping with the general desired effect accounted for much of the very last rewriting, which must have been something like the changes we can see between the rejected chapter of Persuasion and the version finally published, and accounted also for the exclusions of material not suited to her stylization of life. But the very great difference that we find between an earlier draft of a story and its final form, such as between The Watsons and Emma, between Lady Susan and Mansfield Park (so elaborate a change that I cannot, after all, even summarize it here), and no doubt between First Impressions and Pride and Prejudice, among others, is a proof of the deliberate change of intention which must have impelled the novelist to a radical overhauling of her materials and to evolve in consequence a new technique for reassembling them on each occasion. While we can trace very largely the origin of these materials, at different times and in widely different circumstances, in quite different relations to reality or to literature, yet we can put our fingers in each case on a particular combination of motives that at a given time in her private history caused the novelist to undertake such a labour. As Mr Harding has suggested in his valuable essay1 on Jane Austen, we can often sense an outbreak of irritation or nervous tension in features of the novels, but in addition I believe we can in every novel see the writer exploring her own problems by dramatizing them, or in this way giving them relief. Thus, to take the case of Emma, whose metamorphosis we have been examining, the central figure and her problems were taken from the situation of Fanny Knight at the time the novel was recast from The Watsons. Fanny was left at fifteen by her mother's death the mistress of two large houses, with many younger brothers and sisters, in a position of authority and wealth that would develop the qualities of Miss Emma Woodhouse in an almost similar position, and we find her actually at the time Emma was undertaken corresponding privately with her aunt to ask for help. She was in the dilemma that was to be Emma Woodhouse's, of not understanding her own heart,* and this was probably not the first occasion; she was 1 2

Scrutiny-, March, 1940. Harriet fancying herself in love (but twice over) was taken in some detail from Fanny's account of her own mistaken affair, down to stimulating her imaginary feelings. See Letters, Nov. 18, 1814: 'Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively.—The dirty Shaving Rag was exquisite!—Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost.' It was not lost. It appeared in print as Harriet's piece of court-plaster and pencil-stub. Emma's fancying herself in love with Frank Churchill and then him with herself is also adapted from Fanny's confidences. That the dilemma, the heart-searchings and the self-deception should be divided in the novel between two characters is Jane Austen's characteristic process of making life fit for art. 19

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evidently a handsome, lively and charming young woman, but it would be unsound as well as unnecessary to assume that Fanny Knight also embodied Emma's peculiar kind of folly—that was the moral of the book, an intellectual invention, like the Pride and Prejudice, the Sense and Sensibility morals, all variations of the Reason versus Romance idea that Jane Austen never tired of (she was at it again on her death-bed in Sanditon). But besides the moral of the book, which is a mental concept like the motivating idea in a novel of Susan Ferrier's or Maria Edgeworth's, there is always a theme proceeding from much deeper sources of experience, which gives the Austen novels the resonance lacking in, for instance, Maria Edgeworth's, and often makes them in effect run counter to the * moral'. Mr Woodhouse's valetudinarianism is a useful symbol of the way he battens on Emma, thwarting her own healthy instinct for living; and discussions of his claims on Emma, her exaggerated belief in their validity, and an exasperated picture of what yielding to parental rights means (so that we feel she ought to have resisted them though she is commended for not doing so), account for the extravagance with which Mr Woodhouse is represented and in fact why he is thus substituted for the sensible if irritable, the conversible if unsocial, the intelligent if self-centred father of the first Emma. The Letters are full of tart accounts of family invalids who had to be borne with (Mrs Austen herself is one of them) and Jane Austen was not the first daughter who visibly suffered from having lived too long at home with mother. The internal strains and stresses inevitable in any family, however united, and especially if a large one, are more evident in the Letters than the novels, but only because undisguised in the former. Another part of the theme of Emma is embodied, as I have mentioned, in Mr John Knightley, whose functions are numerous but centre in his much-stressed reprehensible love of domestic privacy which refuses to admit even the reasonable claims of society. This was a standing problem in the Austen family, as we know from the biographies, where we are told that Jane was the member most conscious of the necessity for resisting the family's John Knightley tendency (of hostility to outsiders, and clannish selfsufficiency). It adds to the peripheral comedy that his dislike of going into or receiving mere society should contrast with Mr Weston's too hospitable ways, overflowing confidences and uncritical good mixing, but the contrast is conducted on too tense a note to have been contrived merely for purposes of comedy. Mr Weston is the opposite of his creator in his social character—'she likes people too easily', we remember of an acquaintance in the Letters, and the same criticism is made by Elizabeth Bennet of her sister Jane—and Mr John Knightley is conscience's reply to the Austens' conviction of righteousness in 20

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being aloof and despising the undiscriminating. This, like the fatherdaughter relation and its solution in Emma's relation to Mr Knightley, the moral arbiter of the book and her spiritual regulator who by becoming her husband solves her problems—this and such matters are what Emma is about. ' Ordination' is what Miss Austen said and no doubt thought was the subject of Mansfield Park, but what reader would have noticed the ordination theme unless told of it, or that an important contrast is intended between Dr Grant and Edmund Bertram as clerics, and that the arguments about ordination and the Church were meant to take stress? The reader sees only that the author's emotional capital was invested in the struggle in Mary Crawford's nature and in Fanny Price's sufferings over Edmund, and in the anti-Crawford feeling that animates the moral drama. We can answer the question: At what point in these rewritings does a novel become the novel? by saying with confidence that it is when the author changes her treatment so that from being outside she is to be found inside. A similar account of the origins, alterations and ultimate purpose of each novel can, I believe, be given, with the additional persuasiveness that space for illustration, comparison and detailed deduction allows. But before I give up this hopeless attempt to summarize in a few pages an undertaking that requires several hundred to make it coherent, I should like to give one brief illustration of the necessity for such a critical foundation as a preliminary to any profitable literary account of Jane Austen, to even the smallest and apparently most harmless kind of remarks. It will help to answer the reader's question, what is all this for? 'A woman of such sterling qualitities ought surely to have had daughters more attractive than Lady Middleton and Mrs Palmer,' one scholarly critic objects; and it is common to say with Bradley that the author * wrote herself into a good humour with Mrs Jennings'. These reveal a complete lack of understanding of the novelist's intention in composing Sense and Sensibility and the kind of relation to reality that her methods entail. Sense and Sensibility is so narrowly symmetrical in its construction, its stylization so artificial and its object so obtrusively evident that there is in the case of this novel, at least, no excuse for not approaching a work of art as such. Marianne is there, like Emma, to be chastened, and the drama leads us through her selfdeceptions to her recognition of error and her repentance. Originally, of course, she was the peg on which to hang a literary joke, like Catherine and Northanger Abbey, but though the * Sense versus Sensibility' idea was the moral animating Elinor and Marianne, we can see that the superimposed novel has a theme of deeper import. Marianne has lacked 'candour', that key word in Miss Austen's vocabulary, and 21

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her sin has consisted in an uncandid attitude to society and a refusal to take her part as a member of society. Mrs Jennings stands for a sample of the social average; we see her first with Marianne's distorted vision (as we first see Darcy through Elizabeth's eyes, and almost the whole of Emma through Emma's consciousness) but by the last part of the story the author has written not herself but us into a good humour with Mrs Jennings; it is a triumph of her art and not a flaw in it. We have been manoeuvred round from Marianne's original viewpoint to that which makes Marianne's solemn repentance after her illness called for. Mrs Jennings is indelicate in speech, and inelegant in manners, and unrefined in spirit, but from the time of the crisis (Marianne's finding herself deceived in Willoughby) Jane Austen contrives that the absence in Mrs Jennings of the qualities she valued most is seen to be offset by the presence of qualities that must, if only in theory, have been at least as much recommendation to her even when unsupported by elegance and distinction—an unfailingly good heart, a well-judging mind, a shrewd grasp of the essentials of character. It is from Mrs Jennings's mouth that the final verdicts on Willoughby, Mrs Ferrars and her daughter, and other leading characters proceed. Now the two daughters are not meant to be plausible persons; they have the function of providing contrasts favourable to their mother. Mrs Palmer is good-humoured like her mother without being vulgar, but she is consistently silly, so her mother's good sense stands out, not only in itself but serving as a kind of substitute for taste and delicacy. Lady Middleton has to have the manners and appearance and conversation of a well-bred woman, in contrast to her mother's lack of formality and social decorum (which Jane Austen valued), but her cold-heartedness and insipidity make her mother's lack of elegance seem desirable later on, as Lady Middleton's purely social values lead her from bad to worse (ending with a friendship for Fanny Dashwood and seeking the acquaintance of Mrs Willoughby). If Marianne was deceived in the romantic hero Willoughby, she was equally astray, we gather, in her estimate of the unattractive members of her circle. Once Marianne's judgment is righted, Mr Palmer behaves considerately, Sir John is seen to be not merely a sporting brute, even Mrs Palmer has something to be said for her. But Marianne 'in her new character of candour' goes so far as to reproach herself for injustice even to her relatives-in-law, John and Fanny, who have been exhibited as wholly detestable; this strikes the reader as excessive and betrays that the author is trying to convince herself as well as us that any instinctive dislike of people as individuals should be smothered in our obligation to fit in with society. There are plenty of other clues that she was arguing with herself as well as us, and at the end of her life she was to 22

Q. D. LEA VIS

write an anti-Sense and Sensibility called ' The Elliots' (which though it was not at her death ready for the press was published by her brother as Persuasion).

In short, by examining how she worked we can determine what kind of a novelist she was, by looking to see how she wrote a novel we can discover what her object was in writing it. Without such a preliminary no criticism of her novels can be just or even safe. A small instance of how far astray criticism may go is the treatment that has been given to the problem of the last chapter of Mansfield Park. Every reader is puzzled by something odd about it which is felt to jar on the mood created by the rest of the book, and critics have produced various justifying explanations, from aesthetic to psychological, which satisfy no one and are in fact misleading. Actually its ill-assorted tone is vestigial. Mansfield Park was written up from Lady Susan but much later in life and in a different convention, with a correspondingly different attitude to its material. The early form has a conclusion identical in tone and parallel in content with the concluding chapter of Mansfield Park, and in Lady Susan it is exactly in keeping with the nature of the original undertaking. It remains in Mansfield Park as the least assimilated and most discordant, therefore, of all the parts of that unsatisfactory but instructive novel. The novelist in the early draft was, as always at this stage, outside, and hostile to her material. Either from fatigue or pressure of work {Pride and Prejudice still on her hands, Emma already imminent), the original conclusion did not receive the necessary transposition. Its spirit remains that of * Lesley Castle' and Northanger Abbey, with the sardonic tone and impatient handling that characterize the earlier stages of her compositions, due to their prevailingly satiric origin.

A CRITICAL THEORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S WRITINGS (Ha) Q. D. LEAVIS ( l 9 4 l ) c

Lady Susan9 into <Mansfield Park9 (1)

Mansfield Park as we know it arrived, I believe, through (at least) three stages, and studying the process of its evolution will help the literary critic in several respects. It will give us an insight into the process of artistic creation, even when that has passed, as in Jane Austen's case, for a miraculous achievement; it will enable us to account for the 23

JANE AUSTEN

unsatisfactory effect and puzzling anomalies of Mansfield Park itself; and it will put us in possession of some interesting information about its author which may help us to understand better Jane Austen's other novels. Mansfield Park, though published with the later half of her novels and known to have been written well on in the maturer part of her writing life, is nevertheless generally felt (by those capable of feeling critically about the Austen novels) to be less satisfactory in many ways than any of the others—notably contrasting with a 'pure' work of art like its successor Emma. It has many puzzling features, the most pronounced perhaps being its vein of priggishness with outbreaks of a disconcerting kind of cynicism; for instance, characters who are for the most part advanced for our respectful admiration or esteem are also handled at moments with brutality or contempt. There is a marked unevenness in the tone of the narrative, and there is equally a difference in the style; while there is a good deal of the too easy irony oi Sense and Sensibility and of the lumpy Johnsonese of the two novels previous to Mansfield Park, yet here not merely phrases but whole passages are clothed in a new, a religious idiom: the state of mind that numbered Sunday travelling amongst Mr Elliot's vices appears for the first time and in the centre of the undertaking. There is some equivocation in the very heart of the book, in that part of the moral drama represented by Mary Crawford; there is a disparity between what she does and is represented as being, on the one hand, and what she is accused of, the basis for the feelings displayed towards her by the author, on the other—the author is evidently not in this case the detached and impartial presenter that she is elsewhere seen to be. There is a personal animus manifested against Mary Crawford, in fact, which seeps through the book as irritation trying to justify itself on the highest grounds: how does it happen that such an artist is in the power of such an emotion? Then again, Mansfield Park is the most upsetting novel to those who give the conventional account of Miss Austen and insist on describing the interest she excites in the usual crass terms.1 Some other anomalies should be mentioned here: the disparity between the expressed intention of writing the novel on the theme of ordination and the actual theme's turning out to be quite different was cited in the previous instalment of this article, along with the disconcerting last chapter. There is also something odd about the form of the novel altogether, with which I shall deal in its place, as 1

E.g., the account of her work in vol. in, edited by Professor Dobree, of Introductions to English Literature (1940): 'Unlike Scott she cared more for her art than its subject. . . She would change nothing and is content to enjoy. . . She knows more than her characters do but not so much as to make us feel that their shortcomings are not exhibited rather for our delight than for our edification.' 24

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well as an astonishing contrast in form and tone with Pride and Prejudice, with the composition of which it overlapped—the one so sparkling and dramatic, the other low in vitality, as it were, and depending very little on dramatic scenes in its narration. The priggishness of the book is of a special kind, not just the occasional schoolmarmy effects of Sense and Sensibility which there are only the result of artistic inexperience (for the same kind of points are made effectively in Persuasion without any impression of preaching); in Mansfield Park the morality is almost deliberately conventional and the moralizing unbelievably trite, yet there are also savage outbreaks against conventional moralizing and socially approved behaviour. Those who have read in the Life and Letters of the Austens' theatricals will have asked themselves why Jane should be so hot in Mansfield Park against amateur acting, and that, too, of a play at least as unexceptionable as some of those performed at Steventon Rectory. Another stumblingblock is the heroine Fanny Price; it has been frequently remarked that whereas all the other heroines of our author are young women of character, this one is the approved heroine of the novel of the time— with her ill health, delicate nerves, superstitious respect for authority and conventional moral squeamishness. Yet she is championed by the author as 'my Fanny', a personal relation not accorded even to Elizabeth Bennett or Anne Elliot. Lady Susan, untitled and undated, survives in manuscript, the paper on which it was written bearing a watermark of 1805. But, as Dr Chapman describes it, this is ' not a draft but a fair copy. It is beautifully written, almost free from correction or erasure'—very different, in fact, from the manuscript of Sanditon, which is certainly a first draft. There was apparently a family tradition that Lady Susan was a very early composition (mentioned both in the Memoir of Jane's nephew and the Life and Letters by her later relations), contemporary with First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne, though this may be merely a deduction from its being composed in letter form. But I think we can decide on internal evidence that it was founded on events of the years 1795 to 1797, and was certainly written before the end of 1797. The manuscript of 1805 or later was the usual revision after a period of years. This we may call the first stage. No explanation has been advanced, I believe, why Jane Austen, who destroyed First Impressions, Elinor and Marianne, and the earlier versions of the novel finally published as Northanger Abbey, preserved this manuscript, though she made no attempt at any time to publish it. I think we may conclude that it was of unique interest for her, like The Watsons and the three manuscript volumes of her early writings. No reference to it is to be

JANE AUSTEN

found in her letters, or anywhere else, but we can form a pretty accurate idea of its conception. Lady Susan has attracted little attention from the critics, who have been too uniformly repelled by what they have agreed to call its 'bitter' or ' cynical' tone to discover in it the matrix of Mansfield Park, though it was first published as early as 1871, appended to the second edition of James Austen-Leigh's Memoir. Chesterton seems merely to have voiced an unspoken consensus of opinion when he wrote in his Introduction to Love and Freindshipi 'I for one would willingly have left Lady Susan in the waste-paper basket.' The general reader has thus been headed off an interesting and frequently very entertaining piece of work. The unpleasant quality so painfully evident in the uneven Mansfield Park is actually not to be traced to Lady Susan, which is merely stamped (as we may be sure First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne were, and as Northanger Abbey still is even after three revisions) by a perceptible unsympathy with all the characters, an impatience to jot them down and rough out their roles and emotional relations so as to see if the desired total effect has been secured: like The Watsons, Lady Susan is a novelist's working draft and not meant for print, though, like that story, its deceptive appearance of completeness has encouraged its acceptance as an entity, and it has not even such very obvious links with its descendant as The Watsons has with Emma. A close knowledge of Lady Susan can hardly be assumed, therefore, so I will make no apology for a summary. The scene is between a great country-house, Churchill, the home of the Vernons, a wealthy and virtuous couple in the story-book mode, and London, the London of fashionable society in contrast. The link between the two is Lady Susan Vernon. The story is told entirely in. letters except for a concluding chapter where the epistolary convention is cast off with explicit satire (we recall the jibes at that convention in the first two MS volumes), and the story is wound up impatiently in the manner of the ends of Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. Lady Susan, in the first letter, is inviting herself to Churchill, where she is suspiciously received by her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon and that lady's young brother Reginald De Courcy. We have two sets of correspondence thenceforward, one between Catherine Vernon and her mother and the other between Lady Susan and her confidante in Town, the unpleasant Mrs Johnson. Lady Susan, recently widowed, with a daughter Frederica of sixteen, is a beautiful and well-bred Becky Sharp. Finding Reginald has been ' taught [with justice] to consider her a very distinguished Flirt', she sets about conquering him just as she has already imposed on Mr Vernon in spite of his wife; she attaches any man who comes her way on principle, in 26

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case he may come in useful, but she is first piqued by Reginald's hostility and then, after capturing him, thinks he may be worth marrying. Mrs Vernon's sisterly anguishes and laments (she is never for a moment taken in by Lady Susan's * bewitching powers') are most amusingly sent off to her mother, recording every turn in Reginald's relations with Lady Susan. These soon become involved as Frederica turns up at Churchill to her mother's discomfort, and has to be explained away as intractable and deficient. Actually Frederica is shy, gentle, tender-hearted, pretty in a style contrasting with her mother's beauty, * totally without accomplishment', but fond of books, and though she has always been neglected by her mother and left to servants is surprisingly endowed with Principles. She soon falls in love with the high-minded Reginald. A foolish young man of great estate, Sir James Martin, whom Lady Susan intends to force Frederica to marry, pursues them to Churchill. Frederica appeals by letter to Reginald to use his influence with her mother to save her from a wretched marriage, and in consequence Reginald has a temporary breach with Lady Susan, soon healed, however, by her artful explanations. She goes off to London, followed by Reginald, whom she has all along managed to persuade into believing her to be what he would like to think her. But she is in a fix. She can hardly make up her mind to sacrifice her liberty for marriage with a man she despises, who is, moreover, dependent on his father; besides, there is another man, Manwaring, with whom she is having an affair, but he is married a la Willoughby to Mr Johnson's rich ward, and she would prefer to marry him if only his wife could be disposed of (plaguing her to death from jealousy is the method Lady Susan is actually adopting). Reginald and Manwaring have of course to be kept out of each other's way, and this she manages, but, by an improbable coincidence when Reginald presents his introduction to Mrs Johnson, Mrs Manwaring forces her way in to confide her jealous suspicions of Lady Susan to her guardian. Even after this * provoking Eclaircissement' Lady Susan still hopes to argue Reginald into believing in her against appearances but, as he writes to her, his * Understanding is at length restored', and after a brilliant pair of letters to him from Lady Susan she is obliged to extricate herself from poverty and scandal by marrying Sir James Martin, throwing Frederica on the Vernons' hands. This leaves Reginald and Frederica to console each other after a suitable period, ironically looked forward to by the author in her conclusion in the first person. What are the essentials of the situation noted down in this convenient form for future use? There is first the contrast between London and Churchill, the one, represented by Lady Susan and her set, standing for heartlessness, interested marriages, hypocrisy and vice in 27

JANE AUSTEN

general, the other, represented by the Vernons and De Courcys, standing for honesty, heart, 'principles', Virtue of the conventional order of the age as exhibited with approval in Camilla and Belinda, Jane Austen's model novels. Lady Susan's daughter surprisingly belongs to the latter camp, and though as matters stand her possession at sixteen of' Principles... not to be injured even by her Mother, or all her Mother's friends' is preposterous, we note it as a convenience for signifying that Frederica is to contrast with her mother morally as well as to stand in rivalry with her for the hero's affections, to which she is to succeed. Next, there is roughed out the character of the principal. She is a woman of fashion who despises the country and expects to be bored there and who feels superior to country people with their rustic morality and simple minds; she is a widow still young and very attractive who lives on her charms and intends if possible to make a good marriage, though she values her recently acquired liberty and is in two minds about surrendering it. She is not at all a stock character, as the others are, who are merely indicated in relation to Lady Susan and her intrigues. Thirdly, there is the situation created by Lady Susan's irruption into the life of Churchill: the hero oscillating between doubts as to the reality of his idealization of Lady Susan, his self-deception, and his uncertainty of his mistress's affection for him, is watched by a sister in more than sisterly distress (with the added exasperation of a woman whose husband is being imposed on by a sister-in-law), and whose feelings are set down with more than the requisite exactness; parallel to this sister's, we have reported the feelings of the subordinate heroine, Frederica, who similarly watches the hero deceiving himself all round, but watches with the despair of a hopeless passion. Finally, there is the hero's undeception through a lucky accident, with consolation to hand. To preserve these fruitful notes was clearly the reason why Lady Susan was put together, with so much carelessness in regard to plausibility of action and so much care in some other respects. We must now turn to real life. The biography of Jane's exotic cousin Eliza Hancock received a good deal of space in the Life and Letters and it has often been conjectured that she gave some hints for the character of Lady Susan, whom she resembled in a delight in exercising her powers on the opposite sex; she married at the age of twenty the Comte de Feuillide, who was guillotined in 1794. Thereupon she returned to England and at the end of 1797 married Jane's favourite brother Henry, she being then thirty-six (Lady Susan was about thirty-five). The Life and Letters hints that Henry's engagement to 'his very pleasure-loving cousin' was unfavourably received by the Austens, particularly as she was ten years his senior (Lady Susan was 28

Q. D. LEAVIS

twelve years older than Reginald De Courcy) and had a son. But they were married immediately; the courtship, according to Eliza's letter to her godfather Warren Hastings, was of nearly as long standing as her widowhood, for she speaks of 'an acquiescence which I have withheld for more than two years'. (Lady Susan had been 'scarcely ten months a widow' when she captured Reginald.) Letters of hers exist showing that she had Lady Susan's (and Mary Crawford's) attitude to the country as opposed to town life, and that she found it hard to decide to surrender her liberty by remarrying. That she was, like Lady Susan, an adventuress or an unnatural mother or of bad character has never been suggested, and in fact Jane was a great favourite of hers in her girlhood, which suggests a mutual preference. But the situation of Eliza's flirtations with Jane's much-admired brother1 (family tradition suggests two brothers, that James Austen's second wife—whom he married in the same year as Eliza did Henry— never forgave Eliza in consequence) was evidently the occasion of the draft for a novel. Originally jotted down in the period of the courtship but before the marriage was decided on, I imagine, it was later preserved in the fair copy we know as Lady Susan. An extension of the family tradition on this matter has providentially been made known by a grandson of Jane's elder brother Francis. Incredible as it may seem, in 1928 Mr John F. Hubback writing in The Cornhill on 'Pen Portraits in Jane Austen's Novels' is able to record what he heard his mother and aunt tell of their favourite 'Aunt Jane', and the background of her life. He makes an important addition to the story of Eliza: that when she came to England in 1794 she returned to Steven ton as a place of refuge and 'it was not long before theatricals were resumed. Eliza's experiences at Versailles, and subsequent changes of fortune, had endowed her character with many new traits, sometimes almost clashing with each other. Their elder brother, Henry, was again Eliza's coadjutor in the play-acting, and the outcome was that he became her husband in 1797. It has been stated that her refusal of James Austen in her youth was on account of his being destined for the Church, but this may be merely family tradition. . .2 Henry Austen had also the wish to take orders before he fell in love with Eliza, but we hear no more of this until his actual ordination took place in 1816, three years after Eliza's life ended.' I may add that Henry became a divine of marked Evangelical outlook. 1

2

If not the favourite, like Charles, he was certainly the most congenial of her brothers, later managing her literary business. The Life and Letters states that there was *a special link' between Jane and Henry from infancy. As James Austen was only sixteen when Eliza married the Comte de Feuillide, there is evidently some confusion here. The period when James was possibly 2

9

JANE AUSTEN

To drag in biography like this is, of course, only justifiable in literary criticism either when it serves to illuminate strictly critical problems or when it helps to show how an artist works on raw material, and in this case biography seems to me to do both. Three of the four aspects of the Lady Susan story I have listed are comprised in the situation caused by the Comtesse de Feuillide's irruption into the tranquil life of Steventon Rectory, though the situation has been simplified and her character heightened. One guesses that the alterations were made in order both to avoid an emotional or personal treatment of a sore1 and delicate subject and to make effective in a brief space something that the still immature writer knew not how to consign to paper in other than bold outline and satiric terms. The authors of the Life and Letters remark that ' strictly speaking it [Lady Susan] is not a story but a study. . . [of] the one full-length, highly finished, wholly sinister figure which occupies the canvas, but which seems, with the completion of the study, to have disappeared entirely from the mind of its creator'. But as we have seen, such things did not disappear from the mind of their creator. Jane Austen simply put Lady Susan by until it could be used as part of a larger and subtler scheme. In 1808 she brought it out again and, just as The Watsons was later rewritten as Emma, as I have shown, she started to rewrite Lady Susan as Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park as we have it is known with some exactness to have been written between February 1811, and June or July 1813, on Jane's own statement, and I had better say at once that history does not record any previous draft. My supposition of such a version rests on two pieces of evidence. First, the dating of Mansfield Park is not that of the time it was * written', but answers to the years 1808 and 1809. Jane Austen did not construct her novels on a strict calendar basis for any reason but her own convenience (as Dr Chapman observes, the reader is not even expected to notice the clues to the precise dating in the novels) and no writer in these circumstances is going to hunt up old calendars to use when the current ones are handy and will answer equally well. Neither had she reason to bother about changing the date scheme when rewriting for publication. Secondly, there seems to me quite obviously an overlaid epistolary

1

Henry's rival for Eliza's hand was during her widowhood and when James was a widower, at which period James had long been in holy orders. But she may have been prejudiced against James on that account; he re-married earlier in the same year that saw Henry's long courtship rewarded, and his wife, Mary Lloyd, Anna's step-mother, seems to have borne Eliza an otherwise unaccountable ill will. ' I have never yet found that the advice of a Sister could prevent a young Man's being in love if he chose it'—Lady Susan,

3°

Q. D. LEAVIS

novel behind the version of Mansfield Park that we have. The dimmed and distant effect of much of this novel, the impression it gives of low spirits in its presentation, is due, I suggest, to its being retold from letters. A good deal of Mansfield Park reads like paraphrases of letters, and, once the action is launched with the young people grown up, a very great deal actually is letters or summaries of them, and bridgepassages between letters or summaries of letters. There are loose ends due to submerged confidants, confidants who were indispensable to the earlier novel conducted in letters. Among these we may probably class Mary Crawford's London friends Mrs Fraser and her sister Lady Stornaway (the descendants of Lady Susan's correspondent Mrs Johnson) and certainly Sir Thomas's 'old and most particular friend in London', Mr Harding, who is sprung upon the reader as the Mansfield source of information of the Rushworth-Crawford scandal. The flatness of breaking such an event in reports of two successive letters from a hitherto unknown character is such that no novelist could possibly have sat down and thought it up voluntarily, much less the author of Pride and Prejudice; it is a device necessitated by the epistolary novel that Mansfield Park had been. The same crisis is imparted separately to Fanny partly in a letter from Mary and partly in another letter from Edmund in addition to the paragraph Mr Price reads from his newspaper; nothing is gained from the author's point of view by telling it twice over, once to Mansfield and once to Portsmouth, but repeating a piece of news all round is another disadvantage entailed by writing a novel in letters, as we may see ad nauseam in Richardson. (We notice the same clumsiness in the two separate announcements, first of Lucy Steele's engagement to Edmund when it comes out, and then of her marriage to Robert; Sense and Sensibility, too, was originally composed in letters.) Sir Thomas then goes up to London himself and sends successive letters home about the affairs of Maria and Julia, duly repeated to Fanny in letters from Edmund. There are two accounts in letters of Henry's first meeting with Mrs Rushworth in Wimpole Street, but no dramatic scene between them at all. Nor is there anything of the other drama conducted in London between Edmund and Mary except retrospectively in Edmund's reports to Fanny. Characters are separated and distributed about the country for little other reason than that they may write to one another. Fanny's going to Portsmouth, which has been condemned by critics on aesthetic grounds as marring the unity of the novel, was, I believe, devised for the 1808-9 version as an opportunity for all the Bertram and Crawford complications to be cleared up in letters to and from Fanny, leaving only a Conclusion by the author to wind up, a conclusion differing from that of Lady Susan only in having more characters to polish off. And this is precisely

JANE AUSTEN

what we have in the last chapter of Mansfield Park, with the addition of some moral top-dressing in 1813, the irreverence and oddity of which chapter has always worried the more devout Austenites. We can in fact postulate an epistolary form of Mansfield Park on internal evidence alone, as we could not have deduced the existence of a similar precursor from Sense and Sensibility: yet even though we know such a precursor in letter form did exist, in Elinor and Marianne, we cannot make out what that was like, as we can make out an epistolary Mansfield Park. I hope I have established, at any rate, the existence of a precursor in letter form to Mansfield Park. But I have still to show that it was an intermediary between Lady Susan and Mansfield Park, stories whose plot, intrigues and characterization are superficially so different. I hope the reader will bear in mind the demonstration in the last number of Scrutiny of how The Watsons became Emma. Precisely the same process can be demonstrated here, though much more richly and subtly, but not always so consciously, in action. The quotation from Mr Hubback's important reminiscences links Eliza de Feuillide with Lady Susan as regards her personality and the situation she created in the Austen family, but, as the reader may have noticed, it also links Eliza with Mansfield Park by way of the theatricals and the ordination business. This, however, is only external and not evidence in the field of literary criticism. Let us now turn to the two documents, Lady Susan and Mansfield Park. We have the same antithesis between worldliness on the one hand, comprising deceit, heartlessness, and marriages of convenience, and backed by London and, on the other, Principles, unworldly sincerity and warmth of feeling. Mansfield stands for 'heart' to the worldly Miss Crawford, and though like Lady Susan she comes into the country as ^pis-aller expecting to be bored, she is impressed in spite of herself by the Mansfield virtues: 'You have all so much more heart among you, than one finds in the world at large. You all give me a feeling of being able to trust and confide in you; which, in common intercourse, one knows nothing of,' Mary Crawford confides to Fanny when about to return to her London friends. Lady Susan's set—'a very bad set'— is Mary Crawford's, the description by Edmund of Mrs Fraser and by Miss Crawford of Mr Fraser answering exactly to the accounts of Mr and Mrs Johnson in the earlier book, down to replacing Mrs Manwaring's sister-in-law Maria who was trying desperately to catch the baronet by Mrs Fraser's step-daughter Margaret who was wild to marry Henry. The noble match Sir James Martin, 'under par', 'no Solomon', 'a very weak young man', 'only a fool', becomes Mr Rushworth, both having the advantage of a good appearance and 32

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* person'. Sir Reginald De Courcy, who is represented by a strong paternal letter pointing out (too late) the folly of his son's falling in love with Lady Susan, provides the groundwork for Sir Thomas Bertram. ' You know your own rights, and that it is out of my power to prevent your inheriting the family Estate. My Ability of distressing you during my Life, would be a species of revenge to which I should hardly stoop under any circumstances. I honestly tell you my Sentiments and Intentions. I do not wish to work on your Fears, but on your Sense and Affection. It would destroy every comfort to my Life, to know that you were married to Lady Susan Vernon. It would be the death of that honest Pride, with which I have hitherto considered my son, I should blush to see him, to hear of him, to think of him.' We recognize the intonation of Sir Thomas blushing for his son Tom, the dignified accents of virtue consciously founded on good sense and right feeling. In addition to the principal situations carried over, which I have summarized earlier, there are many others adapted as we have seen Jane Austen adapting before. For instance, the guilt and vice in the centre of Lady Susan are removed to the edge with Maria, the wanton seduction of a married man, Manwaring, by Lady Susan being altered to Mrs Rushworth's seduction by Henry Crawford. Sir James's proposals are forced on Frederica by her mother as a good worldly match and his attentions encouraged against her will as Henry Crawford's are for Fanny by her uncle for the same reason; in both cases the same piece is used when the interested spectator (Mrs Vernon, Edmund) observes that the only possibility of encouragement in the girl's behaviour rests upon embarrassment and consciousness. But we will leave smaller likenesses1 to grapple with the central changes. I have said before that in general the point when Jane Austen's immature draft becomes in conception the novel as we know it is when the author changes her treatment so that from being outside, in a relation of satiric superiority to her characters and their involvements, she is to be found inside. What the critics have really meant in calling Lady Susan unpleasant is that a general callousness on the author's part, a belittling of all the actors in the drama, is apparent. The launching of Mansfield Park was when Jane Austen decided to move Lady Susan out of the centre of the picture and adopt the point of view on the drama of the passive Frederica, who had been exhibited only at second hand in other people's letters, a dummy not in the 1

Here is one of many in language. The Miss Manwaring who has designs on Sir James Martin is said to be 'absolutely on the catch for a husband'. Mrs Norris uses the same term, of which there is no other instance, I believe, in any of her novels, in connection with Mr Rushworth, who replaces Sir James—* there were girls enough on the catch for him*. 2

33

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original domestic drama of Steventon Rectory but invented for the novelist to illuminate and offset Lady Susan. We can see how this was inevitable. Instead of adopting the ironical external position of the author of anti-romance, she has to identify herself with the consciousness of a heroine (as she does in every novel but Northanger Abbey, which remains primarily a squib); it couldn't be the amoral Lady Susan's, so it must be either Mrs Vernon's (too entirely sisterly to be interesting) or Frederica's (too simple, she being only the consolation prize for the hero). What she did in fact was to combine the two. Frederica had to be the exact opposite to her mother; with her mild eyes and pensive countenance, her 'artless affection' for Reginald, her 'excellent disposition', her 'romantic tender-heartedness which will always ensure her misery enough', her shyness which prevents her 'ever doing justice to herself ('there cannot be a more gentle, affectionate heart, or more obliging manners, when acting without restraint'), her lack of accomplishments but love of books, and her Principles that Mrs Vernon surprisingly (considering her mother and her upbringing) finds to be her strong point, she is in essentials Fanny Price. But Fanny also inherits Mrs Vernon's position as Reginald's devoted sister who has to hear and see all his ups and downs of feeling, all his doubts and self-deceptions, and who sets down her reflections and forebodings and anger at Lady Susan for her mother's benefit, just as Fanny's reactions to Edmund's similar confidences about Miss Crawford are set down for us. The passive girl in love, with a successful rival always before her, and the exasperated sister are fused in Fanny, who is at once witness and confidante, sister and lover; it is through her sensibility that we feel what passes between Edmund and Mary Crawford, and she inherits from Mrs Vernon 'the perpetual irritation of knowing his [Edmund's] heart'. To make plausible the sisterly part (which is constantly stressed), the background in time was contrived that accounts for the more than cousinly relation between Edmund and Fanny and the peculiar bond of feeling between them. It was necessary for the complicated purposes of this novel to root the Fanny-Edmund relation more deeply than the casual throwing together of Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland or of Reginald De Courcy and Frederica that produces an immediate attachment on the girl's side that can hardly be taken very seriously, so we have the history of Fanny's childhood— the only childhood and growth of a heroine in Jane Austen's work— to account for her unusual position in Edmund's life that combines Mrs Vernon's interest and Frederica's. It is significant that the hero is saved from marrying the object of his infatuation in both stories, unlike life. We can see again Jane Austen expanding and enriching her draft by 34

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working in material from her early writings and her correspondence. Frederica was, in Lady Susan, a victim, abused by her mother; she attracts an earlier victim, the Maria Williams who wrote Letter the Third in * A Collection of Letters' in the second MS volume, which I described in the previous article. The down-trodden Maria Williams with her poor home combines with Frederica to produce Fanny Price,1 bringing with her, to do the victimizing, the bullying and nagging aspects of Lady Greville; we have in Mansfield Park not only Mrs Norris but the very carriage incident from that early Letter, rooted into the new work as I have shown. Fanny demands our sympathy not only on the grounds that Frederica did but also as being in the situation of Maria Williams. For Lady Susan was not available as a dragon. The girl of twenty or so who drafted the domestic drama into the crude story in letters had given place to a woman of six and thirty with conscious artistic powers. She was aiming at a record of that experience both truer and nearer to life, and we may see a return to the original source of the story in several important respects, notably in the figure of Mary Crawford, both a more usual and a more subtle character than Lady Susan.2 In accordance with a tendency we have noticed before in Jane Austen when rewriting, Lady Susan is split up into two characters. The deliberate vice in her character is transferred to Mary's brother— his past career is hinted like hers, with its satisfaction in going about breaking hearts—'the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity', used of Henry Crawford's conduct, is actually a perfect description of Lady Susan's occupations as we are shown them. Her powers of intrigue and ability to play a part are made over to Henry, while the description of the polished and insinuating Manwaring supplies his personality, combined with Henry Austen's temperament. But the function of Lady Susan, to beguile the hero and torment him, is made over to another version of Eliza de Feuillide and one both more sympathetic and more in keeping with history. From start to finish the courses of Mary 1

Price is the same order of name as Williams, and names meant a great deal to Jane Austen. She appears to have had a sort of private catalogue and dictionary of them, shared with her family, and most of those used in the MS volumes reappear in the novels, generally with similar associations. % Lady Susan as a mother is sometimes held, with great likelihood, to have come from a neighbour's family history, Jane's friends the Lloyds (two of whom married her brothers later) had had a grandmother, Mrs Craven, notorious for her unnatural behaviour to her daughters, who were forced to elope from their home. The cruel Mrs Craven was a beauty and moved in Society. Her story would be well known to the Austens, and could be amalgamated with Eliza's in the manner congenial to Jane when adapting from life. It is significant that Mrs Craven was thrown out again when in Mansfield Park she returned to the story of her brother and cousin as it had affected herself. 35

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Crawford and 'the captivating Lady Susan' are alike in their relation to the hero,1 except that Mary Crawford is blameless. Edmund is not the dupe of Miss Crawford in the sense that Reginald was the dupe of Lady Susan. Edmund—much more subtly presented—is the dupe only of his own wishes, and though like Reginald he refuses to see what is before him it is not because he has a clever hypocrite to blind him. * She is clever and agreeable, has all that knowledge of the world which makes conversation easy, and talks very well, with a happy command of language, which is too often used I believe to make Black appear White.' So might Fanny have written to her brother of Miss Crawford, for whom she has the same distrust from the start that Mrs Vernon had for Lady Susan, but it is actually Mrs Vernon's description when writing to her brother of her sister-in-law. Like Reginald, Edmund starts by suspicion and disapproval, but he is won over against his judgment to find himself in the same uneasy position of having to justify a prepossession of which he is ashamed by sophistry: 'But against reason, against conviction, to be so well pleased with her as I am sure he is, does really astonish me. . .when he has mentioned her of late, it has been in terms of more extraordinary praise, and yesterday he actually said, that he could not be surprised at any effect produced on the heart of Man by such loveliness and such abilities; and when I lamented in reply the badness of her disposition, he observed that whatever might have been her errors, they were to be imputed to her neglected education and that altogether she was a wonderful woman. This tendency to excuse her conduct, or to forget it in the warmth of admiration vexes m e . . . ' Thus Mrs Vernon lamented, but so might Fanny have done, and in similar terms she does actually feel and protest to Edmund. We are given identical glimpses of Fanny's feelings: 'But he was 1

For instance, Mary had originally intended to marry the eligible Tom, as Lady Susan had thought of marrying Sir James before turning him over to her daughter, and Lady Susan's explanation of her change of views—'but I must own myself rather romantic in that respect, and that Riches only will not satisfy me'—is what Mary's failure to satisfy herself with Tom Bertram amounts to. Again, Lady Susan's attention to Reginald, like Mary's flirtation with Edmund, is not at first meant by either lady to lead anywhere. The contest of wills, expressed in conflicting moral attitudes, remains the fundamental feature in the situation between hero and siren in both stories. It is Mary who says, referring to Edmund's change of attitude about the play-acting: 'His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh, it was sweet beyond expression,' but Lady Susan who had aimed explicitly at subjugating Reginald's will and who says: ' There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit,' etc. The clash between incompatible moral values is in both books the rock on which the relation between the two people founders. In life matters seem to have worked out happily enough, but a sister may be pardoned for having felt, like Fanny, 'He will marry her, and be poor and miserable. God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!'

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deceived in her; he gave her merits which she had not; her faults were what they had ever been, but he saw them no longer. Till she had shed many tears over this deception Fanny could not subdue her agitation. . .' Reginald follows Lady Susan to London, as Edmund goes there after Mary, whereupon his sister writes to their mother: 'The probability of their marrying is surely heightened. He is more securely hers than e v e r . . . I have done with Lamentation. I look upon the Event as so far decided, that I resign myself to it in despair. If he leaves you soon for London, everything will be concluded.' Fanny reflects: ' . . . the more deeply she recollected and observed, the more deeply was she convinced that everything was now in a fairer train for Miss Crawford's marrying Edmund that it had ever been before.—On his side, the inclination was stronger, on hers less equivocal. His objections, the scruples of his integrity, seemed all done away with—nobody could tell how. . .It could only be imputed to increasing attachment. . .He was to go to town.. .he talked of going, he loved to talk of it; and when once with her again, Fanny could not doubt the rest.—Her acceptance must be as certain as his offer; and yet there were feelings still remaining which made the prospect of it most sorrowful to her, independently—she believed independently, of self.' There are many such close parallels, and it is hardly necessary to point out that the changes show an increased psychological interest on the author's part, both the desire and the ability to probe deeper into feelings and motives and the reasonings of the heart. A similar change is shown in the denouement. Lady Susan is found out by a clumsy accident which depends on an unlikely combination of circumstances. Edmund is undeceived about Mary by the logical working out of the drama. It is Mary's brother who is guilty like Lady Susan, but in Edmund's eyes Mary is involved almost equally when he discovers she shares her brother's moral outlook; Edmund feels about the revelation of her character as Reginald did on finding out his mistress's, there is the same sense of 'seeing through' a beloved object and the same shame at having been taken in. Reginald writes to Lady Susan: 'The spell is removed. I see you as you are.' Edmund says: 'But the charm is broken. My eyes are opened.' Reginald wrote: ' . . .the most mortifying conviction of the Imposition I have been under and the absolute necessity of an immediate and eternal separation. ' Edmund s a i d : ' . . . most grievously convinced me that I had never understood her before, and that, as far as related to mind, it had been a creature of my own imagination, not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to dwell on for many months p a s t . . . How have I been deceived!' Both ladies reply with levity and contemptuous resentment instead of contrition. Mary had actually thought Edmund worth marrying only 37

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when his elder brother seemed likely to die; Lady Susan had only thought Reginald worth marrying if his father should die quickly. It has been objected that a quick-witted woman like Mary Crawford would not in writing to Fanny expose her desire that Tom should die so that Edmund will be eligible enough for her, but she does so because Lady Susan had debated in letters with her confidante whether Reginald's father's death would decide her to marry the heir. It is hardly necessary to show that Reginald became Edmund alike in situation and character. Reginald was already the ingenuous (and therefore easily imposed-on) youth required as the siren's victim, and in order to provide the moral drama he has to have a make-up antithetic to hers. Lady Susan writes to her friend of him: 'There is a sort of ridiculous delicacy about him which requires the fullest explanation of whatever he may have heard to my disadvantage, and is never satisfied till he thinks he has ascertained the beginning and end of everything.' She writes with contempt of ' the inquisitive and doubting Fancies of that Heart which always seems debating on the reasonableness of its Emotions', and with irritation of his 'spirit. . .resulting from a fancied sense of superior Integrity'. She has had, she writes, to 'subdue him entirely by sentiment and serious conversation, and made him I may venture to say at least half in Love with me, without the semblance of the most common-place flirtation'.1 He is, she complains, * comparatively deficient in the power of saying those delightful things which put one in good humour with oneself and the world \2 Edmund develops out of Reginald by the addition of the ordination theme, which will be mentioned later, but where did Reginald come from? If Mary Crawford was Eliza he ought to have been Henry 1

2

This idea was not wasted. Out of keeping with Mary's part, it was worked into Henry's in the last rewriting of the book. We actually have a scene (after dinner at Mansfield in Vol. Ill, Ch. 3) where we hear Henry endeavouring to subdue Fanny in the same way, and almost the same description is given as above: 'This would be the way to win Fanny. She was not to be won by all that gallantry and wit, and good nature together, could d o . . . without the assistance of sentiment and feeling, and seriousness on serious subjects.' As this scene is connected with the ordination subject, and is dramatic, it must have been written into the final version. With these last two quotations compare Ch. 7 of Mansfield Park: 'and to the credit of the lady it may be added that without his being a man of the world or an elder brother, without any of the arts of flattery or small talk, he began to be agreeable to her... he was not pleasant by any common rule, he talked no nonsense, he paid no compliments, his opinions were unbending, his attentions tranquil and simple. There was a charm, perhaps, in his sincerity, his steadiness, his integrity, which Miss Crawford might be equal to feel'. The hero, we observe, remains the same, but the lady's attitude to his qualities has been changed from contempt to unwilling respect. This is one of the many changes in the rewriting of Lady Susan away from melodrama to real insight.

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Austen, but what we know of the volatile Henry, the brilliant talker, the lively wit, the man of the world of the family, corresponds with the favourable aspects of Henry Crawford (the name is again a clue here1), and no one who reads Jane's letter about her brother on losing his wife Eliza (' Upon the whole his spirits are very much recovered. If I may so express myself his mind is not a mind for affliction; he is too busy, too active, too sanguine'2) can suppose him the original in any respect of Reginald-Edmund. Edmund, it is relevant to remark, has given universal dissatisfaction: he belongs to the least interesting of Jane Austen's classes of character, to which I have referred before. He is not, like Mr Knightley or William Price, probably studied from life and certainly offered as a lifelike person, nor is he, like Mr Collins or Mr Woodhouse, a vehicle constructed for conveying satiric humour or allied effects, but like Darcy he is derived from literature. A novel now unhappily almost unreadable but which from its publication in 1796 made an abiding impression on our author and is constantly alluded to directly or indirectly in her correspondence and fictions—I refer of course to Fanny Burney's Camilla—had appeared shortly before Lady Susan was, according to my theory, being precipitated from that family drama witnessed by our author to whom it was equally pregnant and painful. If Eliza had to be altered almost out of recognition before it could be safe to use her, it was at least as necessary to make her opposite number plainly not Henry. Edgar Mandlebert is the excessively fastidious hero, all delicacy and honour, who makes Fanny Burney's novels so tiresome, but in Camilla his speciality takes the form of doubts and hesitations as to whether the heroine is the superior being who alone will satisfy him; so high-minded is he that he drags the book out to five volumes. He is described in these terms to the unfortunate Camilla; 'Mandlebert is a creature whose whole composition is a pile of accumulated punctilios. He will spend his life refining away his own happiness.' The psychology of Edgar undoubtedly impressed Jane Austen, and there he was to hand when a similar kind of hero was needed for the disguised story of cousin Eliza's amours, but he remains quite unrealized and, like Fanny, is composed of conventional attributes. Edgar was spiritually curatic 1

2

We may note that the qualities Henry Crawford shares with Henry Tilney are those Henry Austen possessed, to judge by references in the Letters, where there are also significant allusions to the name Henry, which seems to denote for Jane and Cassandra a lively, talented man with brilliant conversational powers. These terms are repeatedly used in describing Henry Crawford; cf. 'It was a love which, operating on an active sanguine spirit, of more warmth than delicacy, made her affection appear of greater consequence because it was withheld' (Vol. Ill, Ch. 2). 39

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enough to serve even for the ordained Edmund in the revised version. Frederica's unaccountable Principles are also seen by the reader of Camilla to have their unmistakable origin in the argument of that novel, a moral lesson which in the more congenial atmosphere of the serious-minded Mansfield Park spread over large portions of the book. Thus the principled Fanny is made in the Burney manner to contrast with her female cousins whose education has lacked Principle (brought home to the responsible parent Sir Thomas at the end), and the neglect to instil Principles in females when young inevitably leads to elopements, guilt and misery, as all readers of later eighteenthcentury fiction well know.1 In Mansfield Park the idea of * principles' fills the place that * candour' had taken in the construction of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (though in the latter Principle had played a minor part also, with Lydia Bennet illustrating the same moral as Maria and Julia Bertram). The theory of 'principle', ineffectively dragged into Lady Susan, is developed from those notes with considerable subtlety. For instance, Sir Thomas and Mary Crawford are both worldly, but whereas Mary lacks principles Sir Thomas abounds in them, so he is shown to be a good (if erring) man in spite of his worldliness, whereas she is reprehensible in spite of her attractive qualities. Now in Lady Susan Sir Reginald De Courcy, as seen in his solitary letter to his son, was preposterously ^worldly as well as good (' To the Fortune of your wife, the goodness of my own, will make me indifferent' etc.). The clear-cut good-or-bad distinction on which the characters of the immature early story are divided is such a crude reduction of life that even there the author cannot take it seriously (hence the fun poked at the Vernons, all the brains allotted to the bad side and diffused scorn directed at the good people). Sir Thomas differs from Sir Reginald not only in being more plausible but in being a really subtle, sustained study of a type, the upright worldly man, whereas his original belongs to the too-good-to-be-true world of the conventional moral novel of the age. Just as instead of the unblenching villainess Lady Susan, exhibiting cold-blooded malignity, we have Mary Crawford's complex character always trembling in the balance. The theory of Principle is even more present, but it gives us this time, instead of a precis of a melodrama, an involved psychological study we must take with respect. But we can observe some confusion here. Mansfield, according to one theme, as I have shown, was to stand for right feeling, as opposed 1

That the theory was a current belief is proved by the * Opinions on Mansfield Park'' collected by our author, where her niece Fanny Knight is reported to object that she 'could not think it natural that Edmund should be so much attached to a woman without Principle like Mary C.'. 40

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to London; this is quite clear in Lady Susan, and remains so for the Crawfords (Henry learns a moral lesson at Mansfield from contemplating William and Fanny, as Mary does from associating with Sir Thomas, Edmund and Fanny, and her own sister, Mrs Grant). But Maria and Julia confuse the contrasted values. They ought to belong to the London set, who are heartless, unprincipled and end badly, instead of being Mansfield products. The fact is, they compose another strand of the novel, and one derived from quite another source. They come from an early piece of Jane's fiction, absorbed into Mansfield Park in the way we have seen her amalgamating extraneous matter in her other novels. In * Lesley Castle', in Volume the Second, the principal characters are a vain, worldly, 'dissipated* Susan, who marries Sir George Lesley, and her almost equally unpleasant step-daughters, Margaret and Matilda, who, however, are country-bred girls just enjoying their first taste of London society. No doubt our Lady Susan was derived in name from the earlier one, connected as they were by the worldliness and ill feeling common to them both, and both being, by description, extravagant and dissipated. By means of this link already existing, when the author was looking for more characters to fill out the new story Mansfield Park in 1808, the conceited Lesley step-daughters, with their mutual jealousy, would easily suggest themselves for the two sisters needed to work in with the Lady Susan, i.e. Crawford, part of the plot, bringing with them their rivalry in love and their delight in escaping from the country into Society. The Lesley sisters were tall, fine young women, in contrast to their * lively', 'pretty little Mother-in-law', the contrast being a source of spite on both sides, and here we have the origin of one of the characteristic bits of caustic insight into human nature of our author, even though it is gratuitous in Mansfield Park. It was too good a shaft to waste: Miss Crawford's beauty did her no disservice with the Miss Bertrams. They were too handsome themselves to dislike any woman for being so too, and were almost as much charmed as their brothers, with her lively dark eyes, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness. Had she been tall, full formed, and fair, it might have been more of a trial; but as it was, there could be no comparison, and she was most allowably a sweet pretty girl, while they were thefinestyoung women in the country. There has been a slight improvement (to judge by the first two sentences) in the author's opinion of feminine nature since 'Lesley Castle' was written. To expand the simple and consistent Lady Susan into a complex novel entailed the sacrifice of consistency in several other important respects. We have seen that the original function of Mansfield was in

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the end supported only by Fanny, Edmund and Sir Thomas, all of whom were represented in the original draft, Lady Susan. But even Sir Thomas has been refined into a study on his own, and his realistic character is partly at variance with his theoretical function. As we have also seen, the Bertram sisters, like Mrs Norris, come from different sources. While Mrs Norris, who is offered only in her original form, remains outside the drama, the Misses Bertram are welded into it, yet don't fit in with the original moral argument. They illustrate another of a conflicting and quite conventional kind. That it is conventional and not, like the story of Mary Crawford, deeply realized by the author, is shown by the relief with which she abandons it when she has done her duty by it; hence the much debated opening of the conclusion—'Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery' etc. There is still another inhabitant of Mansfield Park who has even less to do with 'heart', and we may well ask how she got there: Lady Bertram, I am afraid she comes under the head only of self-indulgence on Miss Austen's part, though she has probably given more pleasure to the reader than any other of the Austen 'characters' except Mr Woodhouse. Susan, the earlier form of a novel which became Catherine when revised for publication in 1816-17 (we know it as Northanger Abbey) had been refused publication and the author seems by the time of the 1811-13 revision of Mansfield Park to have given up hope of ever bringing out so dated a tale as an an ti-Go thick burlesque. Mrs Allen, the anti-chaperone, who had been conceived in the burlesque spirit for Catherine's anti-romantic debut was 'much too good to be lost', as her creator writes of another episode, and she could be used in relation to Fanny much as Mrs Allen had been used with Catherine. Hence the recurrence of pieces of the same kind as those in Northanger Abbey which illustrate Mrs Allen's concentration on her own dress and well-being, her moral and mental apathy, her omission to guard her ward's manners and conduct and to give moral advice. Everybody recollects the episode of sending Chapman too late to dress Fanny for the ball, but the reason for the following has perhaps been less evident: * No, my dear, I should not think of missing you, when such an offer as this comes your way. I could do very well without you, if you were married to a man of such good estate as Mr Crawford. And you must be aware, Fanny, that it is every young woman's duty to accept such a very unexceptionable offer as this.' This was almost the only rule of conduct, the only piece of advice, which Fanny had ever received from her aunt in the course of eight years and a half. 42

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This use of a character conceived in burlesque terms suggested, I believe, relating her with a typical Austen joke. In 1791 Mrs InchbaldV immensely popular novel, A Simple Story, appeared; there had been four editions by 1799, and a family of shameless novel-readers2 like the Steventon household would hardly have failed to get hold of it. It is, moreover, in the first half at any rate, one of the outstanding pieces of fiction of the later eighteenth century, remarkably well written and unusually subtle in its analysis of feelings, and built round a lively and witty heroine who might have suggested some hints for Elizabeth Bennet, (and like Pride and Prejudice it is wholly dramatic in form—Mrs Inchbald had been an actress). Unfortunately Mrs Inchbald felt obliged to support morality by tacking on two final volumes which show the heroine justly punished for her lack of * A PROPER EDUCATION' (the moral tag with which the story closes). Volume three opens with her flight from her home and child, briefly accounted for in these preposterous terms—that her husband, Lord Elmwood, after a few years of perfect matrimonial happiness, had to leave her * in order to rescue from the depredation of his own steward, his very large estates in the West Indies. His voyage was tedious; his residence there, from various accidents, prolonged from time to time'. In consequence, Lady Elmwood became dissipated:'at first only unhappy.. . she flew from the present tedious solitude to the dangerous society of one who', etc. The absurdity of this device to secure a moral was exactly in the Austen taste—there is much humour about similar absurdities in fiction in the Letters and the MS volumes. It may have been at first an independent joke, but for the reconstruction of Mansfield Park it was obviously useful to send Sir Thomas, like Lord Elmwood, on a prolonged voyage to the West Indies in order to have him out of the way of the young people, and the joke of the already apathetic Lady Bertram's extreme insensibility to his absence could be worked in as well. Thus it is referred to repeatedly, but well rubbed in on the occasion when Edmund remonstrates with Tom about the theatrical project: *... And as to my father's being absent, it is so far from an objection, that I consider it rather as a motive; for the expectation of his return must be a very anxious period to my mother, and if we can be the means of amusing that anxiety, and keeping up her spirits for the next few weeks, I shall think our time very well spent, and so I am sure will he.—It is a very anxious period for her,' As he said this, each looked towards their mother. Lady Bertram sunk 1 2

Mrs Inchbald, too, was already connected with Mansfield Park as the translator of Lovers' Vows. Letters, Dec. 18, 1798. 43

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back in one corner of the sofa, the picture of health, wealth, ease and tranquillity, was just falling into a gentle doze, while Fanny was getting through the few difficulties of her work for her. Edmund smiled and shook his head. 'By Jove! this won't do'—cried Tom, throwing himself into a chair with a hearty laugh. 'To be sure, my dear mother, your anxiety—I was unlucky there.' Lady Bertram, in fact, serves as a hold-all for burlesque purposes. Her epistolary style is another self-indulgence of the author, inserted first, perhaps, in the version of Mansfield Park in letters of 1808-9. The whole passage (in ch. 13 of vol. in) strikes a different note from all that precedes it and all that follows; it is in the same unfeeling tone as the spiteful descriptions of Mrs Allen and of Lady Middleton and of much in the early writings (for instance, it implies that the dangerous illness of her eldest son was a source of pleasure to his mother because it * was of a nature to promise occupation for the pen for many days to come'). It is only an opportunity to work in a satiric account of conventional letter-writing, and belongs with the early satiric letters, whence no doubt it was taken. . . . Lady Bertram rather shone in the epistolary line, having early in her marriage, from the want of other employment, and the circumstance of Sir Thomas's being in Parliament, got into the way of making and keeping correspondents, and formed for herself a very creditable, commonplace, amplifying style, so that a very little matter was enough for her... serves as a pretext for inserting a number of pieces in the style described. But the thinness of the device is exposed by the inconsistency it imposes on the character: no one can imagine the Lady Bertram described in every other part of the book taking the trouble to write such letters, when she requires a niece to manage her 'work' and write her notes for her and a son or husband to direct and seal her letters. It is not greater than the impossibility of a Sir Thomas ever marrying such a woman, but that glaring improbability is due to the author's self-indulgence in replacing the worthy and sensible Lady De Courcy by a burlesque character. Other expansions from the original Lady Susan can be accounted for in other ways with equal satisfaction to the critic, I think. Thus a stiffening of incident from real life was used, as in Emma: William Price has long been admitted by the Austen family to have been drawn from one of the sailor brothers in his youth, while Fanny's amber cross derives from the topaz cross and gold chain Charles bought for each of his sisters in 1801 with his prize-money— deprived of the chain for dramatic purposes naturally, but why converted from topaz to amber unless in accordance with a habit of al44

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tering on principle whatever she took from life for use in her work? A similar use of relevant copy which had some place in the author's emotional history is the linking up of Maria's elopement with that of an actual acquaintance. Maria's misconduct had originally, as we have seen, been introduced to illustrate a conventional moral theory, and would have been as insubstantial or remote from the author as Lydia's or Mrs Brandon's or Eliza Williams's 'fall' evidently was—there is no personal feeling betrayed in their case. But in June 1808 an acquaintance, Mrs Powlett, eloped with a peer, and Jane wrote to Cassandra: ' This is a sad story about Mrs Powlett. I should not have suspected her of such a thing.—She staid the Sacrament I remember the last time that you and I did.—A hint of it, with Initials, was in yesterday's Courier.9 The mixture of shock and disgust at a near acquaintance outraging one's moral code is a not unusual phenomenon in those who can accept violation in theory with equanimity or even amusement. The unpleasant feeling attached to Jane Austen's handling of the episode of Mrs Rushworth's infidelity, which has been so often adversely commented on, has its origin, I think, in her reaction to Mrs Powlett's history (occurring in 1808, it must have been a very recent shock), just as the account of the elopement read out by Mr Price to Fanny is based on the 'hint of it, with Initials, in yesterday's Courier'. Sotherton, I believe, was suggested by the visit Jane and her mother paid to the old mansion of Stoneleigh in 1806, when it descended to Mrs Austen's relatives. We notice that in the case of other great houses Jane thinks it sufficient to describe the mansion as handsome, modern, and well placed, having no particular seat in mind for Pemberley or Rosings or Mansfield Park or whatever it is, and these being the qualities she admired in a house, with iier thoroughly pre-Romantic taste. But there is a whole background to Sotherton. Now there is a letter extant from Mrs Austen while at Stoneleigh during this visit which describes just such a mansion and way of life as that described for Sotherton. We have no knowledge of any such basis for the Portsmouth household, but we may safely conclude that like the Watson household and the Bateses' home it is an exaggeration of the element in the author's surroundings that, as we see in her letters, irritated and depressed her at times, a nervous outlet for a life of trivial preoccupations due to narrow means contrasted, as Portsmouth was contrasted by Fanny with Mansfield, with the ideal life of elegant propriety based on ample means which, through the Letters, we see her pathetically savouring at Godmersham and other such places. The use of Lovers' Vows in the first volume is equally characteristic of her method of working. She uses it as a reference that the reader could be expected to follow, just as she elsewhere uses Evelina, Cecilia, 45

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The Romance of the Forest and Udolpho, and probably other contemporary writings. As Mr Reitzel says:1 'Jane Austen was intent, as she composed this section of her novel, on a fulness of meaning that is no longer entirely understood.' Lovers' Vows in fact, as Mr Reitzel demonstrates, was very well known at the beginning of the century, even performed a number of times at Bath while the Austens lived there, and had aroused hostile criticism by its 'advanced' Romantic morality. The subject was sufficiently in the air to suit her purpose, which was for personal reasons a narrowly moralistic one. The play, moreover, gave her an opportunity to justify her personal disapproval of amateur theatricals—it would occasion undesirable situations among the performers, such as acting love-making, which in her own family had led to Henry's engagement, and enough dubious matter both to expose Mary Crawford as lacking delicacy in being willing to act the part of Amelia and to justify that censure by Sir Thomas and Edmund of private play-acting which it is one of the author's purposes to proclaim. It is certainly as a hit at the new morality that we are to take Sir Thomas's 'That I should be cautious and quick-sighted, and feel many scruples which my children do not feel, is perfectly natural'. The theatricals got into Mansfield Park owing to the performances at Steventon, as Mr Hubback describes them. It is interesting that they are not even sketched in Lady Susan though apparently an important part of the total situation which inspired that story. Raking up the whole episode in 1808, when Lady Susan was first expanded, offered the now mature artist the opportunity to use material such as this which had before been beyond her scope. Lovers' Vows was handy and something more: like other literary pieces she had used in her previous novels, it provided a hint for pattern as well as a source of reference, though the reader can understand the novel quite well enough without a knowledge of Lovers' Vows, just as Pride and Prejudice can be enjoyed without a knowledge of Cecilia, though not perhaps fully understood in either case. All these varieties of fresh material have not successfully been fused with the old story, as we have seen, but Mansfield Park represents a much more ambitious undertaking than anything before, and shows new technical devices, a new kind of seriousness, and an attempt at a more sensitive, if less immediately successful, style of writing. We may explain this sudden access of ambition and confidence as an artist. By 1808 she had drafted five novels, and in the following year she was able to rewrite Sense and Sensibility for publication, which met with more success than she had expected. From then till the end her life was taken up with the overlapping production of novels for the press. 1

Review of English Studies, October 1933, * Mansfield Park and Lovers* Vows*. 46

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A sense of power as a writer must have possessed her at this period, and a sense also that her real life lay in the past—like her sister, she had lost her lover by death, she had deliberately rejected a conspicuously eligible offer in the following year, and had now long passed the age of twenty-seven, an age that in her novels is taken as marking a period, as she would say. She had lost her father and her early home and some of her closest friends. It is not surprising that the revision of Lady Susan at this date should produce a revival of painful memories and poignant feelings. But she again put the story aside, and returned for the third time to Sense and Sensibility, then to rewriting Pride and Prejudice, after which she devoted more time to turning the epistolary Mansfield Park into the narrative we know.

A CRITICAL THEORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S WRITINGS (lib) Q. D. LEAVIS (1942)

'Lady Susan9 into 'Mansfield Park9 (ii) What kind of change did she make beside that of form, that will account for the length of time she is said to have spent on the third version of this episode in Eliza's history? I have hitherto investigated the elements of character, plot and setting that went to constitute Mansfield Park, We must now examine it for evidence of another kind. When Pride and Prejudice appeared she wrote of it to her sister: The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had... The letter then goes off into characteristic humour, at the expense of the idea she has started, which need not prevent our seeing a serious self-criticism intended and no doubt long since made. For the week before (29 January 1813) she had written to her sister: 'Now I will try and write of something else; and it shall be a complete change of subject—ordination.' Since Mansfield Park was entirely finished by the summer of the same year, according to the received account, she had been at this final revision for two years (though it is evident that Pride and Prejudice, which was substantially rewritten between 1811 and 1812, must have made a hole in the first of these years at least). Yet mention of the subject in this way suggests that she must be 47

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breaking to Cassandra the fact of Mansfield Park's existence. With its treatment of an old family sore and its new serious tone and theme she perhaps feared it would be a shock to her sister as well as to admirers of Pride and Prejudice. (Actually, Mansfield Park, owing to its high moral tone, was more popular than its predecessor, even in her own circle—though not with her brothers.) But in this same letter she is enquiring of Cassandra * whether Northamptonshire is a country of hedgerows'. Mansfield is in Northamptonshire, and, according to tradition, she intended to employ in this novel a scene such as (with her thrifty habits) she used up later (Northamptonshire apparently not being a country, like her native Hampshire, of double hedgerows) in Persuasion. There Anne overhears the pregnant conversation between Captain Wentworth and Louisa in the hedge; Fanny was probably to overhear Edmund and Miss Crawford by means of the convenient hedgerow, instead of the less dramatic manner in which she gains all her knowledge of Edmund's progress in Miss Crawford's esteem. But what is interesting in this is that in January 1813 the novel was still apparently in a fluid state.1 May we not conjecture that it was merely being turned over in her mind while Pride and Prejudice was on the stocks, and at last rewritten from the epistolary version only in the spring and summer of 1813? I think we can find more evidence to this effect. Henry's wife Eliza, formerly the comtesse de Feuillide, died in April, 1813. The Austen-Leighs say: 'She had suffered from a long and painful illness, and the end was "a release at last".' The knowledge that Eliza was dying—Jane herself writes of 'her long and dreadful illness'—would revive all those earlier feelings about her disposition and conduct which make Mary Crawford at once so subtle and realistic a study and yet so loaded with the author's animus. And her death would make it permissible to publish such a novel, Henry not having any inconvenient delicacy and no other member of the family being recognizably in the text except the flattering portrait of Charles as William Price. The solemn circumstances of Eliza's wretched end, contrasting so markedly with the memory of her coquettish youth, must have helped to weigh down the treatment on the side of solemn moral and horror of worldliness, associating well with the artist's sense that Pride and Prejudice was a kind of success she would not care to repeat. I think the haste with which the novel must have been put together, assuming my theory that it was in effect' written' in the spring and summer of 1813, accounts for the disparities in style and tone and 1

As far as the hedgerow goes, it may be objected that she intended only a lightning alteration of a dull narrative piece into a dramatic scene, as she rewrote overnight the flat re-engagement of Captain Wentworth and Anne into the brilliant White Hart chapter. But the ordination idea is in another class from a local change of form.

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treatment mentioned at the beginning of this article. She had no time to assimilate all the elements we have noticed, as she had had in the novel which had just left her hands and was to have in the next; we may see the same kind of thing in Persuasion, where the business of Mrs Smith, so clumsily patched on, of Mrs Clay's unconvincing intrigue with Mr Elliot, and the episode of Dick Musgrove which sticks out so unpleasantly (it came from the life, if I have interpreted the Letters correctly) had not the chance, owing to her premature death, of getting worked in smoothly. For I think it evident that the epistolary version of 1808-9 differed very considerably from Mansfield Park as we know it. If the ordination theme was a final addition, then Dr Grant was too, for he is there to show what a priest ought not to be, in contrast with Edmund; and Tom's profligate debts and similar episodes must have been patched on at the same time. The discussions with Henry Crawford and Mary that Edmund has at different times on ordination, the conduct of church services, etc. could more easily have been written in, and Mary's original hesitations about accepting Edmund may have been due only to his not being the heir (as in Lady Susan). We may remark that all these conversations are dramatic, and what could hardly have been managed in letters. And the moral tone is equally seen to have been 'written in'. What is the natural, the instinctive tone, of the author? Is it not that felt in such passages as these ? I believe there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever agreeable man, than to have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations. She could not, though only eighteen, suppose Mr Crawford's attachment would hold out for ever; she could not but imagine that steady, unceasing discouragement from herself would put an end to it in time. How much time she might, in her own fancy, allot for its dominion, is another concern. It would not be fair to enquire into a young lady's exact estimate of her own perfections. Sir Thomas was most cordially anxious for the perfection of Mr Crawford's character in that point. He wished him to be a model of constancy; and fancied the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long. I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.—I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire. 49

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This is recognizably a similar tone, with its combination of acid amusement and cynical estimate of motive, to that of Sense and Sensibility and all the work up to and including Pride and Prejudice—we think at once of the picture of the united Ferrars family at the end of the last sentence of the same novel, of Edward's coming to Barton Cottage to propose to Elinor: . . .it is to be supposed, in spite of the jealousy with which he had once thought of Colonel Brandon, in spite of the modesty with which he rated his own deserts, and the politeness with which he talked of his doubts, he did not, upon the whole, expect a very cruel reception. It was his business, however, to say that he did, and he said it very prettily. What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives. And in fact the last quotation I have made above from Mansfield Park is in the whole tone of Lady Susan and particularly in that of the passage of which it is an echo: Frederica was therefore fixed in the family of her Uncle and Aunt, till such time as Reginald De Courcy could be talked, flattered and finessed into an affection for her—, which, allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her Mother, for his abjuring all future attachments and detesting the Sex, might be reasonably looked for in the course of a Twelvemonth. Three months might have done it in general, but Reginald's feelings were no less lasting than lively. It is from Lady Susan that the early habit of not taking too seriously the puppets' feelings is carried over into Mansfield Park. But there is a new habit of taking them very seriously indeed, at their own valuation, or rather with the conventional attitude to them, and the more subtle kind of irony in the book is bound up with this new attitude, occurring as a relief from it, slipping in in spite of the author. For the tone of the new Mansfield Park that belongs with the moralizing about the worldliness and lack of principle, is not to be found in Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice or any of the earlier stories or fragmentary writings, or in the letters that survive. I mean the passages of this kind: In their very last conversation, Miss Crawford. . .had still been Miss Crawford, still shewn a mind led astray and bewildering, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light. .. . the purity of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying, his life had (apparently) been. There are many such. We may compare Anne Elliot meditating on Mr Elliot's past life: 'How could it ever be ascertained that his mind 50

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was truly cleansed?' This is the language of a religious change of heart, and conflicts strikingly with the tone and implications of the delicate cynicism of In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished; but without presuming to look forward to a juster appointment hereafter, we may fairly consider a man of sense like Henry Crawford, to be providing for himself no small portion of vexation and regret. . . Such deeply felt passages contrast just as strongly with the perfunctory attention given to the conventional moral, as instanced by the famous 'Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery'. Now when did this change in the author occur? It was after the 1808-9 version of Mansfield Park had been made, because in 1809 there is a letter to her sister declaring she knows she will not like Hannah More's improving new novel, Cczlebs in Search of a Wife, that her disinclination for it which, before Cassandra's description, was affected is now real: 'I do not like the Evangelicals.' But in 1814 in the letter to Fanny Knight concerning the suitor her niece cannot make up her mind about, she defends him against Fanny's objection of his intolerable religious earnestness, saying: * I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling must be happiest and safest/ The choice of ordination as a theme, then, may be taken as indicating a conscious change about 1813. (There are unfortunately no letters of 1812.) Pride and Prejudice is a pagan work, so to speak, with its ridicule of Mr Collins's advice about the proper attitude towards the erring Lydia; I don't know how many readers notice that Sir Thomas actually adopts the Christian attitude to his fallen daughter that Mr Bennet rejected for himself, and that this time the author evidently thinks it the right one. This upset to the author's poise (associated no doubt with the subject of Eliza which goes back into her own youth) and which has shaken the sound moral taste she had hitherto possessed, is visible only in Mansfield Park. In Emma^ a year later, we see her at the climax of her art and in the completest possible state of control over her writing. The collapse of control at times in Mansfield Park is unprecedented in her literary career. A deeply religious outlook, even if concealed (and, with such a family code of unfailing jesting to live up to, her tendency would be to conceal it from her coevals as far as possible), would account for the castigation of worldliness in the novel, not only of the reprehensible kind but of varieties which in her previous novels she approves as worldly prudence. Though the noble match Sir James is pressed on Frederica by her mother, yet that is not part of the theme of Lady Susan^

JANE AUSTEN

though an antithesis between heartless ambition and artless affection is just indicated in the early story, for future use no doubt. But prudential marriage (made by Maria with disastrous results, discussed by Mary Crawford with illustrations from her London set, advocated for Fanny by everyone, and finally renounced by Sir Thomas for his son, with dust and ashes self-heaped on that worldly head) is decidedly part of the main theme of Mansfield Park. The most striking and technically remarkable part of the novel is that telling of Maria's engagement and wedding, something unprecedented in Jane Austen's art as a sustained effect. These are reported with the detachment of a looker-on, with a skilfully implied disgust at such a heartless mockery of courtship and marriage. But if these effects are sincerely achieved, there are others that ring dubiously. Everyone remembers the hollow moralizings of Fanny and Edmund. And for the first time in her writings Victorianism makes its appearance. The kind of thing I mean is what comes to a head in Edmund's horror at Mary's indelicacy: ' Guess what I must have felt. To hear the woman whom—no harsher name than folly given!—So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvass it! No reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say? no modest loathings!' This is quite unaccountable to the reader of the Letters, where there are certainly no modest loathings.1 There is an element of self-flagellation here. Loathing of one's former self may quite sincerely be overdone in the first heat of reaction; I do not think we need accuse Miss Austen of paying deliberate lip-service to the theory of feminine propriety. A very revealing instance of something related to this is the censure heaped on Mary Crawford for her freedom in speaking of her dissolute uncle and ill-tempered clerical brother-in-law. Mary's criticism is certainly justified, and harmless besides, yet we are told it denotes an improper way of thinking and speaking. But Mary merely exercises the same freedom in criticizing her relations as her creator manifests towards her own far less exceptionable relations in her correspondence. This attack on Mary seems to be due to a sense of guilt, and is inspired, I imagine, by a sense that it is that part of her earlier self which she had in common with her cousin Eliza. We know from her letters that Jane, too, flirted enthusiastically (it is a happy hit of Mr Forster's to have remarked that 'in the earlier letters Lydia 1

Cf. ' I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress... I fixed upon the right one from the first. . . She was highly rouged, and looked rather quietedly and contentedly silly than anything else.' Letters, May, 1801. Elinor had had no tremors in discussing Willoughby's relations with Eliza Williams, a few years before Mansfield Park, and shortly after Mansfield Park Emma Woodhouse concludes, as a matter of course, that Mrs Churchill's death may have brought to light the existence of half a dozen natural children of Mr Churchill's. 52

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Bennet is all-pervading'), talked lightly and joked censoriously. She displays impatience with her youth in the other novels prepared for the press about this time. The business of the theatricals is all in keeping with the theory I have advanced. Theatricals were not frowned on at Steventon as they were at Mansfield, the young Austens had their theatre in the barn; instead of Sir Thomas to ban there was Mrs Austen to encourage;1 and Lovers Vows was improper only on theoretical grounds, whereas Bon Ton and High Life Below Stairs and the farces in the Steventon repertoire were vulgar and possibly worse. Jane seems to have enjoyed the theatre without any qualms, if only with modified rapture, throughout her life. But amateur theatricals were connected for her with those that at Steventon culminated in her cousin's engagement to her brother. So her distaste for them is made out to be justified on moral grounds in the novel that embalms this early experience. She makes Tom's repentance include ^elfreproach arising from the deplorable event in Wimpole Street, to which he felt himself accessory by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre', and Sir Thomas condemns the acting as an 'unsafe amusement'.2 The censure Mary Crawford comes in for is so much heavier than there is any occasion for, as matters stand in Mansfield Park. She stands in Fanny's way chiefly, and the author has identified her interest with Fanny's, but she stands there innocently. She has done nothing deliberate to attract Edmund, but here mere attractiveness 1

2

A letter from Eliza to another cousin is quoted in the Life and Letters begging her (Philadelphia Walter) to come and stay at the rectory ' provided she could bring herself to act, " for my Aunt Austen declares ' she has not room for any idle young people'"'". Philadelphia seems to have been unable to bring herself to act on any terms—a hint for Fanny's situation in the casting of Lovers' Vows at Mansfield. The stress is always on the acting and not on the play itself. Hence I cannot agree with Miss E. M. Butler's case (Modern Language Review, July 1933, * Mansfield Park and Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows') that a moral protest against Kotzebue's lax moral standard is the source of Mansfield Park and that Jane Austen 'condemned it mercilessly and punished it savagely' in her novel. Miss Butler's article does at least confirm my account of the novel as giving the reader a sense of something strained in the moralizing and unnatural in the condemnation, for this, I imagine, is what she felt impelled to explain by contending that the plot of the novel is an inversion of the play. One agrees with Miss Husbands in her reply in the same journal (April 1934) that 'likenesses there certainly are, but they are by no means fitted to bear the weight which Miss Butler attaches to them*. The play, so useful in the first volume, probably influenced the novelist to a certain extent in adapting all her diverse materials to the revision of Lady Susan, without her being quite aware of the extent of its influence. And some deliberate reference was no doubt intended as well, as reference to Cecilia is, I believe, intended in Pride and Prejudice. 53

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somehow appears reprehensible. She does not make herself out to be other than she is—in fact she shocks him constantly by refusing to subscribe even by lip to his idealism and standards of propriety. Where Edmund is concerned she struggles between following the instincts of her heart and the promptings of ambition, and though it is no doubt reprehensible in her that the latter win, from Fanny's point of view this is all to the good. She is not, like Lady Susan, a siren, a hypocrite or a villainess of any kind, but she incurs about as much blame from the author. This is unjust morally and unsound enough artistically to strike the reader as a serious flaw. Why did not so acute a writer as Miss Austen notice this herself? The answer, as I have shown, is partly autobiographical and partly a matter of literary history. In rewriting any book it is hard to keep clear altogether of the spirit of the original: Lady Susan's culpability is carried over to her successor. Lady Susan, moreover, as Mrs Craven, was particularly culpable in her conduct towards her daughter, the original of Fanny, and though Miss Crawford has no obligation to Fanny the relation between them is the same mixture of fearfulness on the one side and cruelty (unconscious on Mary's part) on the other—there is a great deal of analysis, quite unnecessary to the plot, devoted to the nature of the intimacy between the two girls, something unknown to the English novel before and not paralleled anywhere else in this author's work. The subject must have deeply interested her. We may conjecture that Jane's attitude in her youth towards Eliza was the same mixture of personal fascination and moral repulsion that we find fixed in not merely Fanny's but also the author's attitude to Mary Crawford. The tone of Mary's ordinary conversation is seen to be something that the author cannot stomach. Though in the other novels the conversation of several characters is felt to be insufferably silly or vulgar or conceited or otherwise disagreeable, there is nothing that arouses the same sense of moral distaste as Mary Crawford's clever playfulness. Mary differs from Lady Susan in being something of the author herself as well as much that she was not. There is even a momentary defence put up for her wit, by Edmund, who is in love with her,—' The right of a lively mind, seizing whatever may contribute to its own amusement or that of others; perfectly allowable, when untinctured by ill humour or roughness.' This is certainly the defence the author of Pride and Prejudice would have advanced if her right to criticize had been questioned, and such a self-justification must have satisfied her up to the date of rewriting Mansfield Park for publication. Then, with so much else in herself, it came up for reconsideration. This unnatural censure, to be found only in this novel, of Jane Austen's own standards of judgment, of her independence of outlook 54

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and her own instinctive values, is what the discerning reader finds intolerable. To deny his own light is the worst offence of which an artist can be guilty. But we can now understand how it came about. It was the delightful but not admirable cousin, the friend of her girlhood but now, after a phase as comtesse at Versailles, revealing a character less congenial, who was leading the favourite brother into a wholly unsuitable marriage. Therefore what she admired in that cousin must also be wrong, even when it was something they had in common. Everything that Mary says, however witty or intelligent, and everything that she does, however kind it may at first appear, is exposed as unfeeling, selfish or worse.1 One recent critic2 has complained that Jane Austen is * incapable of appreciating such pleasant worldlings as Mary Crawford'. This is to accuse himself and not the author: she takes care that we shall have no excuse, if we read carefully and relate the scattered passages that are meant to be dovetailed, for finding the Crawfords pleasant. Lady Susan, in whom they first took shape, was an entirely unpleasant worldling; she has been toned down to match a setting of everyday life, that is all. We get a glimpse of the' knowledge of the world' that Eliza de Feuillide brought to the rustics at Steven ton, and which is so alien to the feeling and sentiment of Jane Austen's world, in Mary's speeches to Henry and Fanny about Henry's courtship : ' . . . I know you, I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women, and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of a gentleman.' 'But this I will say, that his fault, the liking to make girls a little in love with him, is not half so dangerous to a wife's happiness, as a tendency to fall in love himself, which he has never been addicted to. And I do seriously and truly believe that he is attached to you in a way that he never was to any woman before; that he loves you with all his heart, and will love you as nearly for ever as possible. If any man ever loved a woman for ever, I think Henry will do as much for you.' This style of talking, reasonable as it is and based as it is on knowledge of one order of life, is distasteful to our novelist; we are made to feel 1

2

E.g. the necklace episode. Edmund is charmed by Mary's kind, thoughtful attention to Fanny in offering her a necklace so that she may wear William's cross on it at the ball. He falls into a * reverie of fond reflection, uttering only now and then a few half-sentences of praise'. A hundred pages later Mary lets out that the idea of lending Fanny the necklace, a present from Henry to his sister, was entirely Henry's; we know then it was part of his scheme for insinuating himself into Fanny's affections at the time before his intentions became honourable: 'It was his own doing entirely, his own thought. I am ashamed to say, that it had never entered my head.' Mary had actually been helping her brother in his efforts to destroy Fanny's peace of mind, we realize. Lord David Cecil, Jane Austen.

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that she considers it offensive and revealing a shallow nature. She loathes the society where such wisdom is current, but she is not content to make it seem odious, she must claim moral sanctions for her instinctive distaste. She must prove it to be wicked as well as cheap. We are instructed to regard the world of the Crawfords with horror, not merely dislike. An assumption of the conventional outlook on morality and the sentimental commonplaces it carries with it too easily accompanies religious convictions and at that date perhaps was an inevitable accompaniment of them in a country lady. To this we may ascribe the passages where the acute observer of human nature, the shrewd analyst of motive, gives place to a Charlotte Yonge, for instance that piece, so sentimental and unrealistic, the moral explanation of Henry Crawford's falling in love with Fanny (Ch. 12, Vol. 2). How it contrasts with the flashes of genuine psychological understanding elsewhere in the book. But the old Adam breaks out from time to time, as in the piece about cant at the end of Ch. 13, Vol. 3, and the sly digs at the good Sir Thomas,1 where we see the author rounding on herself in spite of herself. This accounts for some of the most subtle bits of irony, changes of moral direction or abysses of cynicism opening under the reader's feet, which are thoroughly disconcerting if the reader has not this account of the novel's evolution in his possession. The author sometimes takes a holiday from trying to persuade herself that she feels as she believes she ought to feel. She reverts to her unregenerate youth, with the example of Lady Susan before her, no doubt. But she has sacrificed some of the advantages of the simple and consistent story with which she started. She has, of course, been led into inconsistencies of character—such as Henry Crawford falling in love with Fanny because that, however improbably, is necessary to balance the Mary-Edmund affair and to complicate Fanny's sufferings. Mary is so involved with the author's emotional and moral life that she is only made possible by abandoning the letter form of novel: we are deprived thus of Mary's confidence, and if we are left to conjecture for the most part the springs of her impulses—* she would try to be more ambitious than her heart would allow', for example—that suits 1

E.g. 'Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer. He felt that he ought not to have allowed the marriage, that his daughter's sentiments had been sufficiently known to him to render him culpable in authorizing it, that in doing so he had sacrificed the right to the expedient, and been governed by motives of selfishness and worldly wisdom. These were reflections that required some time to soften; but time will do almost every thing.' (My italics.) There is contempt here, not only for Sir Thomas but for the tendency of human nature generally to forgive itself too easily. 56

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the author; Mary does not have to be so consistent and logical as Lady Susan. But the author has sacrificed also a moral advantage; her hands in Mansfield Park are tied where in Lady Susan they were free, and in this respect the earlier story is more lively than the later novel. In the first version the virtuous people are presented from the devil's point of view, as well as from their own, and we are not meant to be shocked, as we are later with Edmund and Fanny; we are permitted to be exhilarated, for there is some truth in both accounts and we have a sort of wisdom offered us which in Mansfield Park is only allowed to flourish on the edges of the scene (as in the summing-up on Mr Rushworth). Vestiges of Lady Susan's refreshing outlook on the unco' good we have in Mary's levity, but it is allowed to play only upon the Admiral, Dr Grant, family prayers and such, and we are at once told by the author, speaking through Edmund, how to look upon even this mild irreverence. Mary is awed by Edmund's superiority as Lady Susan never is by the Vernons and De Courcys, and even Henry is never allowed to ridicule Edmund. But we see there is something to be said for Lady Susan's point of view—Mr Vernon is indeed foolishly credulous and the author herself has no patience with him nor much respect for Reginald; there is undeniably something in Lady Susan's ill-natured account of the interest Mrs Vernon has in Frederica: She is in high favour with her Aunt altogether—because she is so little like myself of course. She is exactly the companion for Mrs Vernon, who dearly loves to be first, and to have all the sense and all the Conversation to herself; Frederica will never eclipse her.1 Now in Mansfield Park the hatches have been battened down on the insight of the lower nature. Fanny is specifically protected by the author as 'my Fanny'; the author is aware that such protection from 1

This is not really true, but we are encouraged by the author's own attitude to feel that there may be something in it. The novelist's next step was to say: Suppose it were true. . . She then had at her disposal the identical relation described as that existing between Emma and Harriet Smith. Frederica is thus actually described by her mother in the same letter, in the same spirit of irritation: *I never saw a girl of her age bid fairer to be the sport of mankind. Her feelings are tolerably lively and she is so charmingly artless in their display, as to afford the most reasonable hope of her being ridiculed and despised by every Man who sees her' and as 'a born simpleton'. This was enough foundation for Harriet's disposition. Poor Frederica had only fallen in love with Reginald at first sight; Harriet was easily produced on this basis by multiplying her susceptibility; and artlessness combined with a propensity for falling in love without encouragement is more suitable for the heroine of a burlesque than for a sentimental heroine as Frederica was meant to be. This very limited kind of artistic imagination is exactly what is described by her nieces (quoted in J. E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir) as occasioning the endless stories she made up for them. 57

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criticism is necessary. Hence a certain uneasiness that one senses. Though Lady Susan was a remarkable feat, there is no sense of strain apparent in it anywhere. Lady Susan is the character in the story with the brains, and Jane Austen was not the woman to undervalue that distinction (Fanny has to be made out most unconvincingly to be Mary Crawford's * mental superior' to enforce her claims as heroine). The earlier story had the advantage of reproducing real life in this respect, where the fascinating worldly cousin had the field to herself. All the reality remains with Mary Crawford; and Fanny, like Edmund, has no substance, the good cousins are only a stance for moral disapproval. Yet, as we have seen, in spite of Jane Austen's determination to sponsor the conventional moral outlook, wisdom, the report of experience, will not be smothered: it breaks out in ways calculated to defeat her intentions. But to this very inconsistency we owe some of the most interesting portions of the later novel. The original theme of Mansfield (or Churchill) standing for 'heart', a simple one and not argued in the first book, merely assumed, is whittled down by the circumstances of the novel's evolution, as we have seen, until when the mature woman comes to consider it she cannot flourish it wholeheartedly as a banner, as she could in her youth. The Portsmouth episode corrects the theory by bringing it down to the touchstone of the practical test: what is valuable in Mansfield for Fanny turns out not to be 'heart'—strong instinctive feelings freely expressed—of which there is a crude superabundance in her Portsmouth home, but the virtues of civilized existence which, so Fanny discovers with Jane Austen's backing, are a preferable alternative even when 'heart' is mainly absent: Yet she thought it would not have been so at Mansfield. No, in her uncle's house there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propriety, an attention towards everybody which there was not here.. .At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; every body had their due importance; every body's feelings were consulted. If tenderness could ever be supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place. By the time Mansfield Park was rewritten, the author has to admit that either the original structure of the story was crude and unrealistic or that she herself has changed her outlook; she is too sincere an artist to allow it to stand, and, as in so many other respects, the later novel is more subtle, illuminating experience for us, though so often also contradictory and confusing. We see that at this period the kind of life that was organized to run smoothly was what seemed to her 58

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the best. Sense and Sensibility had been made into a plea, two years before, for that * candour' and 'address' without which society cannot function; the discussion between Edward, Elinor and Marianne on these lines, and the frequent admonitions to the reader to the same effect that stick out of the book, belong clearly to the final revision of Sense and Sensibility for publication in 1811: they are written in the same easy but serious colloquial style as the similar serious discussions in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, and have no equivalent in the early work, which is all satire and character-revealing dialogue. I make no apology for calling attention to what should be so obvious, since I have found that these are precisely the passages, with their important implications, that the devoted reader of the Austen novels overlooks. Apparently Mrs Norris and Lady Bertram are now generally felt to be the raison d'etre for Mansfield Park. This would have made its author feel that the novel was a failure, for they are only ornamental additions to the structure, and it is the structure that she laboured over so many years. Then, is the book a failure, into which Jane Austen had put so much of herself? Posterity has agreed to place it below Pride and Prejudice (though many of her contemporaries, like her own sister, preferred it to all her previous writings when it appeared), and this for her would have been failure, for she was trying to improve on Pride and Prejudice, as we have seen. She had most brilliantly written that novel out of a previous immature version1 by the use almost entirely of dramatic scenes. But Pride and Prejudice, for that and other reasons, leaves a taste of the stage; not only is the wit too uniform, especially in the dialogue, which is never without point, but the convention in which it is written has no place for the subtler and finer effects the author must have felt herself capable of when she embarked on the last version of Mansfield Park. There, as in Emma and Persuasion, we see her forgoing the immediate effect of witty rejoinder and humorous character to analyse motive and to build up total effects; in this new manner the human heart is investigated in a new way, every impulse noted and considered with respect, instead of inspiring the easy comments of the earlier automatic and rather unfeeling sprightliness. If the analysis in Mansfield Park annoys us by its ejaculatory and panting manner, we must bear in mind that it was the forerunner of a new technique, which made possible the sensitive reflection of the emotions of Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, and that even at its worst it offers us 1

In letters, I imagine, for she says of the final book: *I have lop't and crop't so successfully, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than Sense and Sensibility* —letters are a spacious way of narrating, and Pride and Prejudice has, like Mansfield Park> many signs of a previous epistolary form.

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something more interesting than the brief summaries of Elinor Dashwood's and Elizabeth Bennet's states of mind that we are presented with from time to time. In those conversations between Edmund and Fanny, those broken musings of Fanny's and her agitated communings with her heart, something deeper is being attempted than ever before. There is a real, difficult fidelity to experience. There is an internal glow that proceeds from those palpitating feelings, which is what is lacking in the cold formality of Sense and Sensibility and even in the hard bright light that illuminates the players in Pride and Prejudice. The irony that is characteristic of the later work is not underlined as in the earlier, it is part of the larger effects and can be quite easily overlooked. For instance, Edmund writing to Fanny at Portsmouth of his visit to Miss Crawford in London and the bad effect her friends there have on her character, is ready to give her up, but:' When I think of her great attachment to you, indeed, and the whole of her judicious, upright conduct as a sister, she appears a very different creature, and I am ready to blame myself. . .' etc. Her 'attachment' to Fanny is subtly shown in various passages to be worthless, and the judiciousness and uprightness of her conduct as a sister culminate in keeping Henry in London out of curiosity to see his meeting with Mrs Rushworth, which Fanny feels to be 'grossly unkind and ill-judged' and which in fact launches him on the fatal intrigue. The total difference between the early and the later work is that the classical account of her novels as Comedy does not apply to the last three. In this succession of novels Mansfield Park marks the turningpoint, and it is like most works of transition in an artist's career in that its most obvious quality is that of not succeeding. In deliberate opposition to its predecessor, it is exaggeratedly undramatic; the contrast to Pride and Prejudice is overdone. And though the author wishes to do something different and in a different medium, she is uncertain how to set about it. The letters in Mansfield Park are not even successful as letters on the whole, as those of the two earlier novels always are. This is evidently because she is trying to do many things through them, not merely the one simple thing which the letter of a Mr Collins or Lucy Steele does (reveal the character of the writer in a characteristic attitude) or the letter of a Mrs Gardiner or Darcy (put us in possession of some necessary information). The letters in Mansfield Park are made to serve as devices for forwarding plot and revealing character, as they must have done in the epistolary version, as they do in Lady Susan; but this is possible only when the characters are simply conceived and expressed in a bold convention, it becomes impossible if the author has a psychological preoccupation, and these letters are in addition overloaded by having to fill in background, 60

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report experiences, and convey the emotions of their writers in very complicated relationships. It is no wonder that Mary Crawford's letters to Fanny fail to be plausible even by the standards we apply to the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century. Yet we can see how these unsatisfactory letters made possible the wonderful achievement that Emma is, for it is the experiments made therein that taught their author how to convey through Emma's consciousness, without any but implicit criticism, the whole of that subtle and complicated work. Emma, if one thinks only of the English novels that preceded it, is a dazzling achievement. Its author, entirely on her own and without the benefit of theory or of the practice of others, is seen to have somehow discovered the technique of Henry James. In the evolution of Mansfield Park we can see her discovering it. Emma is the first of her novels not to have been drafted in letter form; after Mansfield Park this preliminary became unnecessary. Lady Susan was a tour de force, like Jonathan Wild, and its author was justly proud of it, as of the three volumes of earlier work she cherished, but Mansfield Park, with all its confusions, discrepancies and unevenness of tone and intention, is something more remarkable in English fiction. If Mansfield Park had been only the stodgy setting for the comic characters Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris, with lively patches where * those pleasant worldlings' the Crawfords make a diversion, and spoilt otherwise by an out-of-date morality, an account of the book which most readers would now subscribe to, I gather—if Mansfield Park were only this, Jane Austen would not be the great novelist she is. For what is the difference between her novels and those of the most accredited of the Bloomsbury novelists of the 'twenties? Is it only in a greater degree of accomplishment that her novels differ from those of David Garnett, from Lolly Willowes, Crome Yellow and so forth? I mention this because there was at one time noticeable, in the golden age of Bloomsbury, an attempt by Bloomsbury products to pass Jane Austen off as one of themselves. They alleged she possessed the same kind of witty outlook and the same sophisticated cynicism as they endeavoured to exhibit. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is, to take a much less flagrant instance of critical confusion, like classing South Wind and the imitations of Norman Douglas with the novels of Peacock. Peacock's entertaining surface and occasional frivolity proceed from a mind that is fundamentally responsible, that takes living and the problems of life and society seriously. The novel with no inside, so strikingly illustrated by The Sailor's Return and They Went, is something with which neither Peacock nor Jane Austen would have had the slightest sympathy. They do not have to put in Significance, it is implied in the nature of their undertakings. And their technique is something that 61

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grows out of their work, like their style. What is now generally felt to be Jane Austen's boring preoccupation with morals and propriety is nevertheless a prerequisite to that view of character which diverts the reader who dislikes its roots so much that he tries to allege that those delightful flowers have none. Jane Austen's novels cannot be assimilated to a taste for P. G. Wodehouse's, and the pretence that what is not humour can be disregarded will not stand investigation. The patronizing cult that has frequently accompanied this attitude is as offensive to the literary critic as it would have been to Miss Austen.1 If my account of how Jane Austen composed her novels is still felt to be unconvincing, I can only say that it seems to me not merely borne out by all kinds of evidence, and that it explains what is otherwise inexplicable, but is very much less improbable than the classical account of the Austen novels. It saves us from the contortions that aesthetic criticism (on the Craft of Fiction model) has to exhibit in discussing her novels. And it explains her contemptuous allusions to hasty work elsewhere—e.g. in the Letters, she says of Ida of Athens that it 'must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months'; to read the text-books you would think Pride and Prejudice was composed even more lightly. This account agrees, too, with a piece of evidence that has been quite overlooked, but is of the utmost value since it is the only document by a member of her own generation and by one who knew her literary life intimately: I refer to her brother Henry's Biographical Notice prefixed to the posthumous novels. He says: From this place (Chawton) she sent into the world those novels, which by many have been placed on the same shelf as the works of a D'Arblay and an Edgeworth. Some of these novels had been the gradual performances of her previous life...% It is not for nothing, though playfully, that in writing to her nephew she compares her manner of composing to brushwork ' so fine as to produce little effect after much labour'—the last three words are the 1

2

A good recent instance of this refusal to accept Jane Austen as anything but the creator of comic parts is Mr George Sampson's account of her work in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (1941) which ends: 'It is absurd to claim too much for a writer who claimed so little for herself [did she?] . . . The true lovers of Jane Austen are those who do not advertise their devotion, but are content to whisper "Dear Jane" as they pause at the grave in the ancient aisle of Winchester Cathedral.' Though there are some falsifications in the Biographical Notice, I see no reason why he should have invented the above. Henry was an Evangelical clergyman by this time, and we can see in his notice that doctoring of his sister's personality to suit a Victorian taste which is so evident in their nephew Edward's Memoir later, a tradition which has never been broken. 62

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clue, since we know she was actually very proud of her effects. Another corrective to the complacent account of her Comedy' is her complaint that her kinsman Egerton Brydges in his novel draws characters 'for the sake of delineation'. Her own aim, it is apparent, was to have no loose ends, no padding, no characterization for its own sake; she was the opposite kind of novelist to Scott, and had at any rate the intention of putting in nothing except for a clearly defined reason—to contribute to the plot, the drama of feelings, the moral structure, or the necessary psychology. Her own practice is meant to be in accordance with Cassandra's 'starched notions', and if these principles of composition are violated I conclude that it is reasonable to assume that there is some reason for this. And I have tried to show in many cases what the reasons were. There is unfortunately not room here to recapitulate those reasons and what they imply about her methods of composition. But I must guard against one misapprehension. I have been accused of trying to write a Road to Xanadu about the Austen novels. On the contrary. Jane Austen was not a poet, least of all a poet like Coleridge, she was a novelist like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who had a very high degree of awareness of the origin and adaptations of their material, and who took an intense interest in the deliberate shaping of their novels. What a preface to Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen could have written! Whereas all that Coleridge knew about Kubla Khan was that he had dreamt it. The change from the simple technique of Lady Susan to the final, complicated, laboriously achieved Mansfield Park was something she could have accounted for better than we can. The shift from composing with the separate points of view of Lady Susan and Mrs Vernon to producing the novel through Fanny's consciousness almost entirely, is a technical change quite in accordance with Henry James's theory and practice. I will not end therefore on a consideration of the failure of Mansfield Park, but on its achievement. I have appeared to contradict myself, to describe the creation of Mansfield Park as laborious but to advance a theory that it was in effect written in the spring and summer of 1813. But in view of her regular process of writing a novel in versions which grow like snowballs as they advance, gathering in earlier oddments and satiric experiments and sketches from the life already jotted down in correspondence, there is no inconsistency really. We may even generalize now about how the Austen novels came into print. Once all the necessary elements were present, the essentials of what material was to be used, how to use it, with what intention and through what form of treatment, and when life had presented her with the right centre of interest (Eliza's death-bed, Fanny Knight's love affairs, her own views and emotions about marriage at a critical time in her life), 63

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she could undoubtedly work at speed under pressure, perfecting details, inventing alternative situations and speeches where she felt it necessary for getting the right effect (as she rewrote overnight the scene of Captain Wentworth's proposal when dissatisfied with her first version of it in utterly different circumstances, having led up to this crisis slowly enough, no doubt). What originally was owing to accident in denying publication to her first three novels in their early forms, brought about a method of composition which enabled her to put all her powers into everything she published. Later in the century these first-stage stories like Lady Susan would have been prematurely rushed to the press for periodical publication, and the intricate process by which her immature conceptions and experiments became works of art of great value would have been destroyed half-way. Henry wrote in his notice, 'everything came finished from her pen', and we may see that this is true in one sense by reading her letters, which have on occasions as lively a surface as the novels and abound in happy expressions. But Henry's epigram needs interpreting if it is not to mislead. Almost everything did come out finished in the end (except a few botched jobs like Willoughby's past, Nurse Rooke and Mrs Smith), but the whole was not put on paper in one stroke. Any one of the novels took years to reach the finished stage, and many pens must have been worn out on that novel before it came finished from the last one. The final novel, Mansfield Park let us say, differs, then, from its earlier form or forms not simply in greater abundance of detail, richer plot and characterization and added finish of surface, as we should expect. It differs utterly in kind. The original material has not only been added to, but put to a different kind of use; the use of the carriage incident in Mansfield Park is representative. In Lady Susan and Mansfield Park, as in The Watsons and Emma and, no doubt, in First Impressions and Pride and Prejudice, we have an illustration of the difference between a low-level success and a high-level one, between the efficient and the unique in art. As an illustration of what I mean by this different use of the same material, the exposure scenes of All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure suggest themselves. The one play followed the other after a couple of years, and a comparison of the exposure scene in each, which elucidates the plot and winds up the play, shows that the dramatist used exactly the same pattern in the later as in the earlier play for this purpose, with a similar pair of women, the same situation, the same perplexing and teasing way of letting out the secret in bits and baffling or checking first one party and then the other. But All's Well is quite uninteresting, and the exposure scene might have come from any well-made play of the kind —we only feel about it that it does all that is required of it and rounds 64

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off the comedy neatly. But in using it again for the later play the dramatist has made it the culmination of the whole work, an epitome as well as an explication. All our bewildered feelings and doubts about what the dramatist has intended by the play till then, about what to think and how and whom to judge, are resolved for us, everything is revealed with marvellous economy and every phrase becomes pregnant (I assume the reader is in agreement with Professor Wilson Knight's interpretation of Measure for Measure in The Wheel of Fire, which alone makes sense of the play).1 Jane Austen's method of creating works of art is not unique, it has been practised by many poets, but it has never, I believe, been habitually practised by any other great writer as a regular method of composition. But if we think of the conditions in which she of necessity wrote—the lack of privacy of her life generally and the frequent visits and changes of house, the common sitting-room, the domestic duties, the callers against whom she was warned but not protected by the creaking door, the jottings on little slips of paper that could be concealed under a blotting-pad—we can see that only by such a method could she have translated the product of an intense and sustained private life into substantial works of art.

A CRITICAL THEORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S WRITINGS (III) Q. D. LEAVIS (1944)

The Letters The first thing to be said about Jane Austen's letters is that we have comparatively few of them and those certainly not the more personal ones. Cassandra her sister, to whom the bulk of the novelist's correspondence seems to have been addressed, destroyed all except those which seemed to her trivial,3 distributing among the family as mementoes what she did not burn. Some of a more intimate kind which were written to the sailor brothers and the favourite nieces and nephews, 1 a

[This had been written before the discussion of Measure for Measure contained in the same number of Scrutiny (Vol. X, 1942) proposed itself.—Ed.] Their nephew complained: 'Her nearest relatives, far from making provision for such a purpose (a biography), had actually destroyed many of the letters and papers by which it might have been facilitated. They were influenced, I believe, partly by an extreme distaste to publishing any private details.*— A Memoir ofJane Austen by J. E. Austen-Leigh. 3

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and to one or two close friends, survived independently. None of those has been found which were written to the peculiarly congenial brother, Henry, who managed her literary business, though this series of letters might well have been the most interesting of all to us. We have no letters before 1796, when she became twenty-one, none for 1797, when Cassandra's fiance died, nor any between 1801 and 1804, the period when a number of important events occurred in Jane's emotional history. It is therefore not surprising that they have generally been described as disappointing. Bradley alone praises them, declaring, 'I do not find the letters disappointing, [because] the Jane Austen who wrote the novels is in them. . . And the attitude of the letterwriter towards the world she lives in is the attitude of the novelwriter towards the world she creates.' This is very just but he does not really mean by this all he seems to say, for he had in front of him only Lord Brabourne's selected edition of the Letters, so edited that Bradley can reconcile his complacency in them with his statement that 'her novels make exceptionally peaceful reading. She troubles us neither with problems nor with painful emotions.' Quotations from her letters in the 1870 Memoir by Jane's nephew, the Rev. J. E. AustenLeigh, and in the Life and Letters published in 1913 by the next two generations of Austen-Leighs, were tactfully made in accordance with the Victorian feeling for presenting one's relative in the most favourable light in a biography, that is, as a conventionally estimable person. The same principle evidently decided Lord Brabourne to edit with a blue pencil the letters that he published in 1884—from his great-aunt Jane to his mother (when still Fanny Knight), to his mother's cousin Anna, and to his great-aunt Cassandra. The family biographies of Miss Austen, from her brother Henry's Biographical Notice onwards, show a similar bias. When Dr Chapman in 1932 printed for the first time in its entirety every letter of Jane Austen's he could find, the reaction of even Bloomsbury critics was one principally of shock and distaste (best seen in Abinger Harvest, where Mr E. M. Forster reprints his review); it looked for the moment as if there would be a similar slump in her reputation to that in Trollope's in consequence of the publication of his disillusioning Autobiography, which proved too much for an age committed to the romantic theory of artistic Inspiration. But Janeites rallied round, declaring that the objections rested only on two or three jokes, lapses of taste and ill humour such as we are all liable to in our correspondence,1 and that far from these representing the tone of the Austen household it was probable that Cassandra wrote back reproving Jane.2 The Austen stock recovered, 1 2

Jane Austen and her Arty by Mary M. Lascelles (1939). Jane Austen: A Biography, by Elizabeth Jenkins (1938).

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and the Victorian account of her character and personality were reinstated. Cassandra did not write back reprovingly, we may be sure, because it never occurred to her that such passages might be objectionable when she was censoring Jane's correspondence after her death or she would have destroyed such letters. Moreover, the jokes are only the most striking examples of a tone and an attitude regularly adopted in Jane's correspondence with her sister. The letters, far from suiting with the Victorian notion of the Austen novels and their author's character, finally destroy that myth. They are therefore of real value to the literary critic, confirming the impression of the author he deduces from the novels and the interpretations he makes of the novels as works of art. The Letters emphasize the underlying intentions of the novels that have been ignored by literary criticism; that they are not 'good' letters, as Mr Forster and others have decided, is beside the point. Great letter-writers are mostly great bores. The letters that the literary critic is interested in are those that reveal an interesting mind. Let us start with the simplest and most easily demonstrated point. Though no one any longer believes in the old account of her as a practically uneducated genius, yet the conventional account of Miss Austen as prim, demure, sedate, prudish and so on, the typical Victorian maiden lady, survives. This ignores the fact that she spent the first twenty-four years of her life in the eighteenth century and the rest in the Regency period. But the collected edition of the Letters brings this fact home to us, even if the novels have not done so already. Miss Austen is seen to have had no innate sense of propriety, as a clergyman's daughter of the next age could be expected to have. She jokes in the letters to her sister about having got tipsy last night, about fleas in the bed, about perspiring: What dreadful Hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance [1796]; about sexual relations: We plan having a steady Cook, and a young and giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter.—No children of course to be allowed on either side [1801]; and gives her sister a hint to see that the maid is kept from making advances to visiting nephews. The sisters still like to make the eighteenthcentury joke that any female acquaintance who has been ill must have been lying-in of an illegitimate child, and if a lady and gentleman are both absent from a party it is humorous to assume they are meeting 67

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secretly instead. The freedom of humour, in its separation of feeling from the occasion for a joke, is even reminiscent of Smollett, as in the well-known example that pained Mr Forster, though it scarcely stands out in the letters: Mrs Hall, of Sherbourne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband [1798]. The free play of her mind on whatever came to her notice constantly produces unpredictable results; for instance, in 1813 she calls on a friend's daughter at a London finishing school, and tells Cassandra: I was shewn upstairs into a drawing-room, where she came to me, and the appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like amused me very much; it was full of all the modern elegancies—and if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the Mantelpiece which must have been a fine study for Girls, one should never have smelt instruction. The sisters inherited from their mother what Mrs Austen herself described as her 'sprack wit', a mental liveliness that evidently went with a preference for outspokenness and a contempt for prudery. Thus Jane writes: Your Anne is dreadful. But nothing offends me so much as the absurdity of not being able to pronounce the word Shift. I could forgive her any follies in English, rather than the Mock Modesty of that French word [1817]. And she writes casually and characteristically of a sister-in-law who * neither looks nor feels well': * Little Embryo is troublesome, I suppose.' Obviously she was neither puritanical nor Victorian—she thought freely and knew no reason why she should conceal what she thought. The idea of Good Taste for ladies with its paralysing effects had not yet been invented. This is the more apparent when we remember that these letters were meant to be read aloud by the recipient to whatever branch of the family she was staying with, or to the home circle if the writer was on a visit; there are many indications that this was so in the text. Miss Austen's absence of squeamishness on such subjects as sex is not, however, the conscious uninhibitedness cultivated by twentiethcentury lady novelists. It evidently arose quite naturally from acquaintance with life in a large and proliferating family, where friends and sisters-in-law produced a child a year and not infrequently died of it.1 Life can only be taken as it comes and doesn't bear much 1

Of thefiveAusten brothers we know about (the sixth was * weak in intellect' and nothing else is known of him but his name), four married twice, while the 68

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thinking about. We get two good examples of this sobering knowledge of life in the Letters. The first is in 1798, when Jane, not yet twentythree, has visited a sister-in-law expecting her first baby: I went to see Mary, who is still plagued with rheumatism, which she would be very glad to get rid of, and still more glad to get rid of her child, of whom she is heartily tired... I believe I never told you that Mrs C. and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary with this news. The second is in 1817, when she writes advising her favourite niece Fanny against marrying someone she is not sure about: Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with you, pretty Dear, you do not want inclination. . .And then, by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits,figureand countenance, while Mrs — [of the same age] is growing old by confinements and nursing. .. Anna [another niece] has a bad cold, looks pale, and we fear something else. She has just weaned Julia.' Ten days later she writes again on the same subject to Fanny: 'Anna has not a chance of escape.. .Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.—I am very sorry for her.—Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children.—Mrs Benn has a thirteenth.' The advantage of seeing life unprotected by blinkers is apparent in the faculty it developed in her, that of taking stock of all kinds of experience and absorbing new kinds not only without being disconcerted or repelled but without having even to brace herself. We see her, for instance, taking even Don Giovanni in her stride when, up from the country on a visit to her brother Henry's household, she has been on a round of theatres including Covent Garden opera: The girls still prefer 'Don Juan'; and I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting character than that compound of cruelty and lust [1813]. Or she visits a prison: He went to inspect the gaol, as a visiting magistrate, and took me with him. I was gratified, and went through all the feelings which people must go through, I think, in visiting such a building. It is this poise that is behind the novels. What she can have found objectionable in The Spectator1 is beyond conjecture. 1

fifth remained a widower after the death of his wife—whom Jane deeply admired and loved—from bearing her eleventh child, when Jane was thirty-two. See Northanger Abbey, chapter v. 69

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Nor, after reading the Letters, can we fall into the common error of believing her to have lived the life of the country parsonage cut off from society and knowledge of the great world. Wherever she was she mixed with all kinds of society. She lived in Bath for four years besides paying earlier visits to her uncle resident there, she lived for two years in Southampton, and visited Lyme, Canterbury, Winchester and other frequented social centres as well as staying in London, where her brother Henry lived with his banking connections and whose wife, widow of a French count, collected round her a circle of French emigres and cultivated musical society. The Letters tell us a good deal about all this. Many, besides, are written from great houses in the country or mention visits to them, the establishments of relatives or connections; and visits in those days, as we see in her novels, were of some duration. There is no sign that she led what is called a sheltered life. She knew very well what went on behind the fagade of social decorum. The casual and indifferent references in the letters are more impressive evidence of this than greater stress on single incidents would be. Eccentric or merely immoral peers flit through the pages of these volumes—like their connection Lord Craven, whom Henry's wife reports on: She finds his manners very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a Mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him. [But they are all] on the most friendly terms [1801]. Calm notes on impropriety constantly appear: Mrs W. has another son, and Lord Lucan has taken a Mistress.. . [1808]. Mr S. is married again... the Lady was governess to Sir Robert S.'s natural children. . . [1808]. He is as raffish in his appearance as I would wish every Disciple of Godwin to be [1801]. I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for. . .1 fixed upon the right one from the first. .. She was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else. Mrs. B. and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs. B. thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene [1801]. There is the drama of Earle Harwood, R.N., one of the family of a neighbouring rector. He marries a low young woman of alleged improper life and * lives in the most private manner imaginable at Portsmouth, without keeping a servant of any kind. What a prodigious 70

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innate love of virtue she must have, to marry under such circumstances' [1798]. He then gets 'the appointment to a Prison ship at Portsmouth . . .he and his wife are to live on board for the future'. In 1799 Cassandra apparently sent Jane a description of Earle's wife, to which Jane replied: ' I cannot help thinking from your account of Mrs E. H. that Earle's vanity has tempted him to invent the account of her former way of Life, that his triumph in securing her might be greater: I daresay she was nothing but an innocent Country Girl in fact.' Next year, 'Earle Harwood has been again giving uneasiness to his family, and talk to the Neighbourhood' by shooting himself, but not fatally and it is hoped not on purpose. The world of the novels was not the world of Miss Austen's life but only a selection from it, made in order to facilitate certain intentions of the novelist; that is the interesting and indisputable fact that emerges from the Letters. In these letters people have executions in the house owing to failure in business, or leave the neighbourhood because they can't pay their bills; there are disputed wills and all kinds of lawsuits; women constantly die in childbed and when alive are shown to be preoccupied with nursing and educating their children, or, if spinsters, with helping to rear and teach their little relatives, assisting the poor, and nursing the sick and aged of their own family; the Austens are on intimate terms with people of all classes and are not snobbish; Jane herself is always anxious about money and the cares of a household where the strictest economy was necessary—' vulgar economy' she calls it, having to worry because the bread and tea are not lasting as long as they should, because the only cooks they can afford can't make a tolerable meal (Jane is ashamed because Capt.— who dropped in to dinner couldn't eat the underdone mutton), because the sweep is coming ('Depend upon my thinking of the chimney sweeper as soon as I wake tomorrow') or company, which means torment: I wanted a few days quiet, and exemption from the Thought and contrivances which any sort of company gives. . . how good Mrs West could have written such Books with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment to me! Composition seems to me Impossible with a Head full of Joints of Mutton and doses of rhubarb. In the letters there are many jottings of what might well have been material for novels, such as the story told above of Earle Harwood, or that of Mrs Gunthorpe: Miss Jackson is married to young Mr Gunthorpe, and is to be very unhappy. He swears, drinks, is cross, jealous, selfish and Brutal;—the match makes her family miserable, and has occasioned his being disinherited [1807]; 71

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but they are the kind of novels she did not choose to write (unless she used the extract above for the history of Mrs Price in Mansfield Park, where it is conspicuous and indeed unique in her work). In her life, too, there were many tragic or dramatic incidents. As children she and her sister nearly died of 'a putrid fever' and her aunt who caught it from them did die; her cousin and playmate Lady Williams, who had been married from Steventon Rectory, was killed six years later in a carriage accident; her beloved friend Mrs Lefroy, whose 'partial favour from my earliest years' Jane's touching verses four years after the disaster lovingly record, was thrown from her horse and killed on Jane's birthday; her sister's fiance died in the West Indies and Jane is conjectured1 to have suffered a similar bereavement herself; one night in her twenty-seventh year she accepted the proposal of the brother of her best friends, and in great agitation next morning broke off the engagement, though he was heir to a good estate; her favourite sister-in-law died leaving an enormous family of young children, four other brothers lost their wives, one after her 'long and painful illness'; her closest companions (later they became her sistersin-law) were grand-daughters of the famous beauty, ' the cruel Lady Craven', whose unnatural behaviour drove her daughters into eloping from their home; her rich aunt was the victim of a blackmailing charge of theft and spent nine months in custody awaiting trial, where Jane (aged twenty-three) and Cassandra might have joined her, it appears, if Mrs Leigh Perrot had not decided to refuse their mother's offer since she could not 'let those elegant young women be inmates in a prison'; her cousin Eliza, of Anglo-Indian origin, married a French count in 1781, and led a romantic life at the French court till the Revolution when she escaped to England and took refuge at Steventon Rectory while her husband was guillotined; three years later she married Henry Austen, against the wishes of his family. There was certainly plenty of incident in Jane Austen's life and many varieties of experience for her to draw on in her family. Besides her own travels in the south and west of England she knew Oxford and the university world from her two brothers who were Oxonians, as well as from other connections there; another brother had made the grand tour and there were several well-travelled relatives; an aunt came from the West Indies, and a cousin went there; another aunt went out to India as a girl and married there, returning with her little daughter to remain in close contact with the Austens and to connect them with the trial of her benefactor, Warren Hastings; one brother was a London banker, two were naval officers; and so on. 1

On the strength of a family tradition based on a circumstantial story of Cassandra's and recorded by their niece. 72

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None of this tempting subject-matter is used by the novelist, and this is all the more remarkable when we remember that our knowledge of all other women novelists shows that the strength of their stories lies solely in being personal and reminiscent of the lives they saw around them, often closely autobiographical. There was a century's tradition of women novelists to keep her in countenance if she had wanted to write novels around such subjects. And that she could write well on almost anything, the Letters prove. To ascribe the lack of dramatic incident in the novels to the author's humdrum experience and confined outlook is clearly wrong; the novels are limited in scope and subject by deliberate intention. The Letters therefore prove that Jane Austen was the kind of novelist she was because she was consciously restricting her work for a given purpose, in order to concentrate on what seemed to her most worth writing about, to convey her deepest interests, and to express some things that seemed to her important. There is a similar difference between the vocabulary and idiom of the Letters and that of the novels, which shows that the latter were not dashed off as gaily as is generally assumed. There is much greater freedom of expression in the correspondence, while the language of the novels, though depending a good deal on having speech forms behind it and making frequent use of colloquialisms, is always restrained—the ' trollopy-looking servant-girl' at Mrs Price's in Mansfield Park stands out as if an oversight, certainly it is the only such phrase in all the novels, though in the Letters it would not attract attention. The vivacity of the novels is controlled, it is art, whereas that of the letters is the careless high-spirits of conversation—as when she writes to her niece, urging her to reject a suitor: 'Think of his Principles, think of his Father's objections, of want of Money, of a coarse Mother, of Brothers and Sisters like Horses, of sheets sewn across,' etc. or of a disagreeable sister-in-law: 'But still she is in the main not a liberal-minded Woman, and as to this reversionary Property's amending that part of her Character, expect it not my dear Anne—too late, too late in the day.' She withheld from the novels the licence of language and prose style and the range and strength of feeling that we see her to have had at her disposal in her correspondence. Similarly we learn with surprise from the Letters that she had many interests which do not appear in the novels—for example, she was fond of history and even such subjects as military history and tactics. But the questions raised here must be left for consideration in a later essay. We must go on to enquire what the letter-writer and the novelist have in common. The letters, I said in the first of these essays, were an indispensable stage in the production of the novels. We see 73

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in the Letters the novelist writing steadily and for an audience, and an audience which had imposed a certain attitude and tone on the writer and which demanded certain kinds of information. When Jane Austen writes to the next generation, her nieces or nephews, she writes warmly, kindly and sympathetically: their reminiscences all agree that she was the ideal aunt, and her letters to them (though not all those about them) corroborate this. The letters to her friends are also ordinarily pleasant and imply an amiable outlook. Those to Cassandra and sometimes to her brothers are notably different. There is little affectionate sentiment—that was understood, no doubt, and left for personal intercourse; the letters, on which the not inconsiderable postage had to be paid by the recipient, were to convey information and it is information about social matters they wanted and received, about functions, family events, and personalities, especially new ones. Characterization of new acquaintances plays a prominent and obviously acceptable part in their letter-writing. In analysing the novels before, I showed that the characteristic vein of the writer is marked by acid comment on character and cynical estimate of motive. Now these give the distinguishing tone of the letters to Cassandra and the Steventon circle; no doubt it was the tone of family intercourse, arising in the schoolroom over the family jokes (as we can see in the manuscript volumes), and not surprising in a family conscious of unusual gifts1 and cherishing a clannish spirit.* Their sense of difference was intensified by their all being educated at home, by their highly critical and vigorous-minded mother,3 and by their pronounced taste for literature (to which two of the brothers added a scholarly-critical attitude to the use of language). The sisters, without husband or child to mitigate the adolescent hardness and sharpness of outlook, were still more conscious of being different and superior; they formed a clique within an elite.4 And Cassandra was the dominating character in this alliance. Their nephew wrote in his Memoir of Jane Austen: 1

2

3

4

Eliza de Feuillide, a sophisticated person, after eleven years of marriage and residence abroad, reported on visiting them that * Henry is certainly endowed with uncommon abilities, which indeed seem to have been bestowed, though in a different way, upon each member of this family'. Their nephew wrote: * There was so much that was agreeable and attractive in this family party that its members may be excused if they were inclined to live somewhat too exclusively within it.' Mrs Austen is described as 'shrewd and acute, high-minded and determined, with a strong sense of humour* and great energy. Her correspondence illustrates these qualities, and some of Jane's tastes and prejudices too, e.g. after a visit to London:' I was not so happy as to see my nephew Weaver—suppose he was hurried in time, as I think everyone is in town; 'tis a sad place, I would not live in it on any account, one has not time to do one's duty either to God or man.' Their niece Anna wrote of them: * They seemed to lead a life to themselves 74

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Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane's side with the feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this feeling always remained; and even in the maturity of her powers, and in the enjoyment of increasing success, she would still speak of Cassandra as of one wiser and better than herself. . . They were not exactly alike. Cassandra's was the colder and calmer disposition; she was always prudent and well-judging, but with less outward demonstration of feeling and less sunniness of temper than Jane possessed. His sister Anna contributed the information that Cassandra was the more equable while Jane, who could be very grave as well as uproariously funny, was given to ups and downs. None of Cassandra's letters to her sister are known, but it is suggestive that Jane writes in the one tone to her and that, acknowledging a letter from her sister, declares: * You are indeed the finest comic writer of the present age.' The letter Cassandra wrote on the second day after Jane's death, to their niece, reveals an extraordinary nature whose iron quality perhaps explains something in the younger sister's attitudes (e.g. 'I have lost such a treasure, such a sister, such a friend... I loved her only too well— not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to and negligent of others; and I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the Hand which has struck this blow. You know me too well to be at all afraid that I should suffer materially from my feelings. . . ' ) . The novelist's tone is seen, through the Letters, to be not simply the self-protection of the sensitive person against the world, but something shared and expected, a matter of common assumptions that could not be revised and that she could only escape in relations that started on a different basis, as those of an aunt to children or grown-up nieces. So much a habit was this tone and manner that she adopts it even when completely unsuitable, where only our knowledge of the facts from other sources shows that she intended to be playful merely or even to express gratitude or admiration in such an awkward convention as to convey the opposite sense. She was not unconscious of this and sometimes pulls herself up when she has fallen into it to an unsuitable recipient, as when in a letter to a brother at sea, after such a piece of characterization of a cousin's wife as would be natural in a letter to Cassandra, she adds, * This is an ill-natured sentiment to send all over the Baltic.' The assumptions were, first, that the outside world was inferior to Steventon Rectory and their circle. Contempt is freely implied for within the general family life which was shared only by each other. I will not say their true, but their full feelings and opinions were known only to themselves. They alone fully understood what each had suffered and felt and thought.' 75

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their neighbours' lack of intellectual interests, the latter's stupidity being always assumed: The C.s are at home, and are reduced to read. The Miss M.'s are as civil and as silly as usual. She has an idea of your being remarkably lively, therefore get ready the proper selection of adverbs and due scraps of Italian and French. Miss Beaty is good-humour itself, and does not seem much besides. . . .among so many readers or retainers of books as we have in Chawton . . . I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable... As to Agreeableness, she is much like other people. Inferiority of manners is constantly noted too, as implying something more radical: Mrs B. called here on Saturday. She is a large, ungenteel Woman, with self-satisfied and would-be elegant manners. They (male visitors) are very good-natured you know and civil and all that—but not particularly superfine. Like other young ladies she is considerably genteeler than her parents; she is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging. She seems to like people rather too easily. and, still more, inferiority of standards—other people are snobbish, ill-humoured, affected or insincere, purse-proud or mean about money, meddlesome or overbearing, effusive or heartless: I rather wish they may have the Curacy. It will be an amusement for Mary to superintend their Household management, and abuse them for expense. I would not give much for Mr Rice's chance of living at Deane: he builds his hope, I find, not upon anything that his mother has written, but upon the effect of what he has written himself. He must write a great deal better than those eyes indicate if he can persuade a perverse and narrow-minded woman to oblige those whom she does not love. If not guilty of any of these defects, then they fail to satisfy the Austens' high standard of cheerfulness and stoicism in the face of tribulation. The scrutiny the Letters show directed on outsiders (even on sistersin-law and aunts-by-marriage) is more than critical, it is hostile, disapproving, and incipiently contemptuous: My Aunt.. . looks about with great diligence and success for Inconvenience and Evil.

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Miss Holder and I adjourned after tea into the inner Drawing room to look over Prints and talk pathetically. She is very unreserved and very fond of talking of her deceased brother and sister, whose memories she cherishes with an enthusiasm which tho' perhaps a little affected is not unpleasing. are fair samples. Even a brother may degenerate under the influence of marriage, as Jane suggests in this reference to her brother James: I am sorry and angry that his Visit should not give one more pleasure; the company of so good and so clever a Man ought to be gratifying in itself;—but his Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied from his Wife's, and his time here is spent I think in walking about the House and banging the doors, or ringing the bell for a glass of water. The fact that outside her own circle there was immorality of various kinds fitted in here—being immoral was part of other people's inferiority. The unfeeling treatment of a Lydia Bennet or a Maria Rushworth that readers of the novels complain of is the result of the letter-writer's unsympathetic attitude to all who lapse from an implied standard of great severity. She could believe it a reasonable standard because it was shared by her own group. Inside that group she was evidently the lovable and sweet-natured person the family traditions agree in describing. Finally, the hostility of this world to the Austens and what they stand for is also assumed—the world is inferior and therefore malicious. We have probably all noticed that conversation is liable to be spiced with malice, especially in a confined society, and that it is a tendency of human nature to enjoy the misfortunes of others. Nevertheless, there are opposite impulses and counterbalancing virtues. It is not normal to believe only in a malicious and hostile attitude on the part of our immediate neighbours and of indifferent strangers alike. But this is an understanding between Jane Austen and her sister abundantly witnessed by the Letters\ Mrs Portman is not much admired in Dorsetshire; the good-natured world, as usual, extolled her beauty so highly, that all the neighbourhood have had the pleasure of being disappointed. Ch. Powlett gave a dance on Tuesday, to the great disturbance of all his neighbours, of course, who, you know, take a most lively interest in the state of his finances, and live in hopes of his being soon ruined. . . .his wife is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant. Whenever I fall into misfortune, how many jokes it ought to furnish to my acquaintance in general, or I shall die dreadfully in their debt for entertainment. 77

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Of her friends' father who is ill: Poor man! his life is so useful, his character so respectable and worthy, that I really believe there was a good deal of sincerity in the general concern expressed on his account. The lack of sincerity in ordinary social intercourse is clearly one of the sources of irritation in her relations with the outside world. New acquaintances are looked upon with suspicion and 'civility' is a term of pejorative implications because it is assumed to impose hypocrisy. For instance: In consequence of a civil note that morning from Mrs Clement, I went with her and her husband in their Tax-cart—civility on both sides; / would rather have walked, and no doubt they must have wished I had. Similarly she writes with characteristic irony of an acquaintance: 'We were all delight and cordiality of course.' This extract about callers in 1807 is representative of a good deal of the kind scattered throughout the Letters*. I suppose they must be acting by the orders of Mr — in this civility, as there seems no other reason for their coming near us. They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance. And the continual irony at cliches of feeling and expression, at conventional exaggerations, the impatience with anything that might be related to cant, is associated with this irritation.1 It is always coming up in the novels. In all these respects the Letters chime in with the novels. These feelings are the groundwork of the novels and after reading the Letters we can see more distinctly the part the Austen attitude played in making the novels what they are. The letters between the sisters show them to have had a sense of difference from the world outside their immediate family and few chosen friends; it was not that they 1

Cf. * I am glad you liked my lace, and so are you, and so is Martha, and we are all glad together. I have got your cloak home, which is quite delightful—as delightful at least as half the circumstances which are called so' (1799); * . . . in short, has a great many more than all the cardinal virtues (for the cardinal virtues in themselves have been so often possessed that they are no longer worth having)...' (1804); and her dislike of the Evangelical Movement. This extreme sensitiveness ranges from jokes like 'Miss X. and I are very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two' to the perfectly serious epitaph on a friend: 'Many a girl on early death has been praised into an Angel I believe, on slighter pretensions to Beauty, Sense and Merit than Marianne.' 78

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were ignorant of it or shy of it, but that they had too much penetration to be comfortable in society and knew too much about the people they had to live among. There was not enough elbow-room, they could leave home only to pay a visit to another home, and social decorum imposed intolerable restraints and hypocrisies on their intercourse with others, they felt. The blessedness of having a few people who endorse one's standards, speak one's language and can be counted on, the necessity for making one's own private society, was well understood by Jane Austen, and the Letters prove that in this respect she was happy. Her immediate family, Martha Lloyd, the favourite niece Fanny, when she grew up, the three Misses Bigg of Manydown formed such a refuge for her: In another week I shall be at home—and then, my having been at Godmersham will seem like a Dream—The Orange Wine will want our Care soon.—But in the meantime for Elegance and Ease and Luxury; the Hatters and Milles' dine here today—and I shall eat Ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar Economy. Luckily the pleasures of Friendship, of unreserved Conversation, of similarity of Taste and Opinions, will make good amends for Orange Wine [1808]. and five years later she writes to Cassandra: In a few hours you will be transported to Manydown and then for Candour and Comfort and Coffee and Cribbage. 'Candour', that key word in the novelist's vocabulary, is, strictly speaking, the opposite of censoriousness, putting the best interpretation on everything (it was to reverse its meaning by George Eliot's time). But in the Austen letters and novels it implies much more, it is an ideal that ordinary society is incapable of in its intercourse. To be candid is to be charitable, sincere and one's real or best self. In Jane Austen's scheme her elite of family and friends are the ideal of the society she belongs to, in which Candour and not malice is the regulating impulse, where warm affections reign (' Tenderness' is another key word) and good conversation is the chief pleasure; we remember Anne Elliot's definition of good society, to which her cousin objects: ' That is not good company—that is the best.' For the interesting point for literary criticism is that the letters led to the novels. Her taste for sharing her observations on human nature v/ith her family did not stop at letter-writing and conversation or even at the satires and parodies of the manuscript volumes and the early form of Northanger Abbey. And the kind of interest in people and life that the letters show did not even produce the kind of novels we should 79

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deduce from the Letters. She had this passion for examining people's lives and in every detail—as she notes in the Letters'. Mary and I went to the Liverpool Museum and the British Gallery and I had some amusement at each tho' my preference for Men and Women always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight [1811]. and a few years earlier, demanding exact details of some affair from her sister: You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me. Thus the Letters are full of character sketches made for their own sake and for the amusement of the home circle, but they often reappear in a recognizable form in the novels; such little studies as that of the M.P. she met on a visit in 1813: Now I must speak of him, and I like him very much. I am sure he is clever, and a man of taste. He got a volume of Milton last night, and spoke of it with warmth. He is quite an M.P., very smiling, with an exceeding good address and readiness of language. I am rather in love with him. I dare say he is ambitious and insincere. He has a wide smiling mouth, and very good teeth. which suggests Mr Walter Elliot, or Harriet Moore's husband, who suggests Mr John Knightley, or Miss Milles and her mother, who suggest Miss Bates and hers—the list is endless. This interest in how other people felt, behaved, passed their time, looked and spoke, what they thought and said about each other, was her great asset as a novelist. But when such an interest goes with a fundamental irritation with the social actuality and a habit of looking for its shortcomings only, we should expect works of fiction in the vein of Mr Somerset Maugham. That Jane Austen's novels are so thoroughly different from Mr Maugham's is a tribute to the congenial circle she was born into and gathered round her and to the strength of the positive standards they shared with her.

80

NOVELISTS REVIEWED Q. D. LEAVIS (1935)

Clear Hori^on^ by Dorothy Richardson (Dent and the Cresset Press) This is the eleventh and latest, but not last, volume of the novel-cycle Pilgrimage^ the first, Pointed Roofs•, having appeared in 191*, when it fell like a rock from a height into the literary waters. Since then each succeeding volume has made less of a splash, and the latest is likely to part the surface with scarcely a ripple. Reading the extravagant praises that were heaped on the early volumes by distinguished litterateurs it is hard now to understand how they could have aroused so much excitement and enthusiasm. But her contemporary reputation was not a bogus one, like Stephen Phillips's, nor did it spring from a genuine perennial bad taste, like Rupert Brooke's. Her volumes were certainly important at the time of their first appearance, though it looks now as though (if these metaphorical liberties may be allowed) they were less a torrent in themselves than straws showing the course of a current. Pilgrimage has evidently less intrinsic than historical value; the third generation from Dr Oliver Elton will have its author docketed for literary-history purposes as a 'precursor'. Miss Richardson was plainly an early if not very inspired employer of the ' stream of consciousness' method, and she was undoubtedly an influence of sorts on at least one far greater novelist. In the earlier work of Virginia Woolf before her mature style crystallized out, amid signs of incomplete assimilation of Joyce and Meredith there are occasionally to be found sentences that might have been written by Miss Richardson; certainly it looks as though the latter might have provided the matrix for the characteristic 'feminine' sentence which Mrs Woolf claims to have been consciously trying to evolve as the unit of her medium. The intrinsic interest of Pilgrimage is slight and best sampled in the first volume, which remains the strongest of the series. Thereafter it will be found to become increasingly small beer. For posterity, or such of it as studies literature for degrees, there will have to be an abridged edition like those of Miss Richardson's namesake for the same purpose. For the 'stream of consciousness' method, like any other method, is dependent finally on the quality of the sensibility behind it, and to use successfully this particular method, which excludes 81

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implicit criticism and the variety afforded by the play of mind from the outside onto the subject-matter, it is indispensable that it should be backed by a distinguished, rich and profound personality. That Miss Richardson's is not so has become painfully apparent by now, without of course in any degree lessening the historical value of her achievement. Her outlook is narrowly limited by class and sex factors, as indeed Charlotte Bronte's, among others, was, but lacks the force and vitality which can make such limitations interesting. For instance, her preoccupations date already as being those of a period when Woman—as distinct from individual women—was a matter for defiant assertion of interest; she seems by way of being nothing more than an expansion of the weaker side of Mrs Woolf, and the impression one accordingly gets is one of a failure to mature. In Mrs Woolf this weakness seems to be kept out of her best work, and never manifests itself at all in her novels as crudely as it does in A Room of Ones Own, for example, while in the early Night and Day it actually flowers into a valuable kind of sensitiveness. In Miss Richardson, however, it is a pervasive weakness, the feminine self-consciousness that has to find an outlet in some form of assertion or demand; at that time it was for the right to vote, and now seems to have found its level in the right to love (Marie Stopes) and the right to lead an uninhibited life (Ethel Mannin), at which level and temperature it may well be left. The demand for mass rights can only be a source of embarrassment to intelligent women, who can be counted on to prefer being considered as persons rather than as a kind, just as they will wish to work out individual solutions to their problems, if they have any; nor are they likely to have more sympathy with the implicit appeal to 'We women' than intelligent men have for the equivalent appeal to 'We men'. But apart from this kind of obsession, which demands a forbearance on historical grounds that it will take all the reader's patience to maintain, Miss Richardson's consciousness has little to offer. But she will be a gift to the research student of the two-thousands.

GISSING AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL Q. D. LEAVIS (1938)

Stories and Sketches, by George Gissing (Michael Joseph) These stories, which mistaken piety must have induced Mr A. C. Gissing to publish, will unfortunately persuade no one to read George Gissing who is not already interested in him. They exhibit chiefly 82

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his weaknesses and give no indication of his virtues. This is nothing like as interesting a volume of stories as the better of his other two collections, The House of Cobwebs-, which ought by now to have been put into one of the pocket libraries together with the interesting long 'Introductory Survey' Thomas Seccombe wrote for the 1906 edition. But if this new volume had persuaded reviewers to look up Gissing's novels, re-estimate his achievement, and demand for New Grub Street recognition as a classic, its publication would have been justified. There have been no such signs of a reviewer's conscience. It is odd that the Gissing vogue—subsequent to the Meredith vogue and much less widespread—has faded even out of literary history. This is discouraging, but let us disinter Gissing nevertheless. He wrote twenty-two long novels but only one that posterity would want to read, two books of reminiscence (one the extremely popular Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), two (now three) volumes of short stories, and the then best existing critical introduction to Dickens, in twentysix years of authorship (he died in 1903, aged only forty-six). He has already received adequate biographical and critical attention in George Gissing: A Critical Study by Frank Swinnerton, a capital piece of work which looks like remaining the last profitable word on Gissing as a man and a writer. (Nevertheless, academic theses have since been excogitated on the same subject in English, German and American.) Gissing's life and temperament, with the problems that they raise, are the key to both his many failures and his single success as an artist. He made a false start in life, it is true (a blasted academic career, a spell in prison, a spell in America, an impossible marriage), but on the literary side his sending a copy of his first novel ( Workers of the Dawn, 1880) to Frederic Harrison resulted much like Crabbe's application to Burke. Harrison recommended Gissing to Lord Morley, then editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, and engaged Gissing as classical tutor to his two elder sons, also helping him to get other pupils. He was thus, with the entree to the P.M.G. and as many pupils as he could teach, provided for congenially enough—that is, congenially enough for any other man of letters. But his unfortunate idea of what was suitable for the possessor of literary genius interfered with Harrison's benevolent arrangements. He refused to write more than one sketch for the P.M.G. on the ground that journalism was degrading work for an artist, and though Mr Austin Harrison says that from 1882 onwards Gissing had a living income from teaching which he could increase at will, he continued to live, if not actually in cellars and garrets on one meal a day as before, at least in near poverty, because, says Mr H. G. Wells, 'he grudged every moment taken by teaching from his literary purpose, and so taught as little as he could'. The interesting point here is not 83

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Gissing's romantic conception of what is due to genius, but that he continued to describe himself as the starving and unrecognized martyr of letters; he was for long neither well-to-do nor famous, but Mr Austin Harrison characterizes his accounts of his * continued struggles with abject poverty' as 'fiction of fiction'. Gissing apparently needed that fiction to support his self-esteem, his belief in his own genius, for actually he must have been well aware, like his wretched Edwin Reardon, that he had written mostly what was unworthy of his best abilities. He had to explain his failure by blaming material circumstances; and though his output was really enormous we find him in Ryecroft, in the year of his death, picturing himself as the writer obliged to earn his living uncongenially so that he could allow himself, ah but how rarely, the luxury of writing a novel at intervals of many years, and thus was his genius blighted. The facts, as we have seen, were otherwise. It was not lack of time or means that hampered him, nor yet his unhappy temperament. The latter was perhaps his chief asset, since it produced an absolutely personal way of responding to life and his fellow-men, and when a measure of ultimate success came to (as they say) 'mellow' him the results on his work, as seen in Ryecroft, were deplorable. It is instructive to compare the benevolent portrait in Ryecroft of the writer N., the successful author and good mixer, with the earlier study of the same type, Jasper Milvain, in New Grub Street (when any nineteenth-century novelist names a character Jasper I think we may safely conclude that that character is intended to be the villain). Apart from his temperament all the other qualities he brought to his novels—his scholarship, his bookishness, his enlightened interest in all the leading topics of his day (religious reform, politics, education, emancipation of woman, ethics, science, sociology. . . ) — bear witness to his being an exceptionally cultivated man and exceptionally alive in his age, yet apart from New Grub Street how those novels date, how unreadable they now are! (It is thus that I seem to hear the literary critic of Scrutiny, Vol. L, describing the novels of Mr Aldous Huxley, whom Gissing in some respects resembles.) But there was no interaction between his subject-matter and his sensibility, so the exhibition of life he gives us seems arbitrarily blighted by a novelist always functioning below par, as it were; Mr Swinnerton, to account for his unpopularity, says 'he was condemned by novelreaders as a writer who whimpered at life'. But when he took as the subject of a novel his most vital interest—the problem of how to live as a man of letters, the literary world being what it is,1 without sac1

It seems to have begun to be as we know it in Gissing's time. Jasper Milvain differs from Alroy Kear (Cakes and Ale) only in being a simpler psychological

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rificing your integrity of purpose—he produced his one permanent contribution to the English novel. I think it can be shown to be a major contribution. The subject was both inside and outside him. The best way to suggest his achievement is to say that put beside the other best treatments of the same subject—Maugham's Cakes and Ale and the many fine short stories on aspects of the literary life by Henry James which should be read as a whole—Gissing's New Grub Street is quite different, equally serious and equally successful as a piece of art. The Gissing temperament suitably colours the book, which, like Cakes and Ale, is consistently written in one tone, here an irony weighted with disgust. This strikes one as being the right outlook on the literary world ('such things were enough to make all literature appear a morbid excrescence upon human life,' the heroine reflects at one point), if less suited to life in general. However, life in general is here seen from the point of view of the slenderly talented Reardon who wants to support his family by his pen and yet at the same time write only novels and essays worthy of himself. We see him go under, weighed down by a wife who thinks social and material success the due of her beauty, by his lack of influential friends, most of all by his choosing to abide by the values of Dr Johnson in an age where the policy of Alroy Kear had become requisite for success. We see his acquaintance Jasper Milvain deliberately choosing literature as a profitable field for his unliterary talents and ending up more successful than even he had dared expect, his marriage with Reardon's widow (become an heiress) symbolically ending the story. Delicacy and fineness, the strongly noble and the devotedly disinterested elements in human nature, are not ignored or denied, they are presented with complete success—this is a measure of Gissing's total success here—in the persons of Marian Yule, whom Milvain jilts and leaves to wretchedness, study. Reviewing was much the same as now: 'The book met with rather severe treatment in critical columns; it could scarcely be ignored (the safest mode of attack when one's author has no expectant public)..." The struggle for existence among books is nowadays as severe as among men. If a writer has friends connected with the press, it is the plain duty of those friends to do their utmost to help him. What matter if they exaggerate, or even lie? The simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it's only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held."' Conditions governing material success were taking modern shape: * "Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. . . To have money is becoming of more and more importance in a literary career; principally because to have money is to have friends. Year by year, such influence grows of more account. . . Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature'"—(New Grub Street). 85

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and Reardon's friend Biffen, who is driven to remove himself from a world that has no use for his devoted labours. Such are shown doomed to misery and failure. The old-style man of letters, part hack and part stiff-necked enthusiast (Alfred Yule), is skilfully contrasted with the new-style man of straw (Whelpdale), successful because pliant in his complete lack of any literary conscience. There are many masterly studies of the emotions and conduct peculiar to those who live by literature and journalism, and in spite of a certain stiffness of style from which Gissing was never for long free the smallest touches are effective. The subject seems likely to remain of permanent interest and Gissing has raised crucial problems. The central problem, one ultimately of values, is put by Reardon to his wife thus: ' A year after I have published my last book, I shall be practically forgotten... And yet, of course it isn't only for the sake of reputation that one tries to do uncommon work. There's the shrinking from conscious insincerity of workmanship which most writers nowadays seem never to feel. " It's good enough for the market"; that satisfies them. And perhaps they are justified. I can't pretend that I rule my life by absolute ideals; I admit that everything is relative. There is no such thing as goodness or badness, in the absolute sense, of course. Perhaps I am absurdly inconsistent when—though knowing my work can't be first-rate—I strive to make it as good as possible. I don't say this in irony, Amy; I really meant it. It may very well be that I am just as foolish as the people I ridicule for moral and religious superstition. This habit of mine is superstitious. How well I can imagine the answer of some popular novelist if he heard me speak scornfully of his books. "My dear fellow," he might say, "do you suppose I am not aware that my books are rubbish? I know it just as well as you do. But my vocation is to live comfortably. I have a luxurious house, a wife and children who are happy and grateful to me for their happiness. If you choose to live in a garret, and, what's worse, make your wife and children share it with you, that's your concern.' Whether Milvain could have existed at that or any time has, by way of objection, been doubted, but Seccombe, who was in a position to speak with authority, says,' Jasper Milvain is, to my thinking, a perfectly fair portrait of an ambitious publicist or journalist of the day— destined by determination, skill, energy and social ambition to become an editor of a successful journal or review, and to lead the life of central London.' The original temper that the novel manifests is notable in every detail, e.g. Alfred Yule had made a recognizable name among the critical writers of the day; seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical, most people knew what to expect, but not a few forebore the cutting open of the pages he occupied. They had had three children; all were happily buried. 86

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*.. .but I was never snobbish. I care very little about titles; what I look to is intellectual distinction.' ' Combined with financial success.' 'Why, that is what distinction means.' Amy now looked her years to the full, but her type of beauty, as you know, was independent of youthfulness. You saw that at forty, at fifty, she would be one of the stateliest of dames. When she bent her head towards the person with whom she spoke, it was an act of queenly favour. Her words were uttered with just enough deliberation to give them the value of an opinion; she smiled with a delicious shade of irony; her glance intimated that nothing could be too subtle for her understanding. The last example is strikingly in the modern manner, and Gissing's best work, New Grub Street almost entirely, seems contemporary with us rather than with Meredith. As a general thing, the same outlook characterizes Gissing's other novels, but elsewhere it seems merely depressed and therefore depressing. Poor Gissing was sliding down the hill which Dickens and his robust contemporaries had climbed in such high spirits. Seccombe explains it well: 'In the old race, of which Dickens and Thackeray were representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of popularity coincided with a growing conviction that evil in the real world was steadily diminishing. . .In Gissing the misery inherent in the sharp contrasts of modern life was a far more deeply ingrained conviction. He cared little for the remedial aspect of the question. His idea was to analyse this misery as an artist and to express it to the world. One of the most impressive elements in the resulting novels is the witness they bear to prolonged and intense suffering, the suffering of a proud, reserved and oversensitive mind brought into constant contact with the coarse and brutal facts of life. The creator of Mr Biffen suffers all the torture of the fastidious, the delicately honourable, the scrupulously high-minded in daily contact with persons of blunt feelings, low ideals and base instincts.' Outside New Grub Street, however, you too often feel that the provocation is inadequate to the suffering. Gissing's susceptibilities are not all equally respectable and in some cases he seems only a querulous old maid, too easily provoked on such subjects as bad cooking, slovenly lodgings, ungenteel personal habits and lack of secondary school education. But in New Grub Street, just as what is elsewhere merely bookishness becomes transfused into a passionate concern for the state of literature, so his other minor feelings have turned into positive values, and he produced the one important novel in his long list. It occurs less than half-way down, so its unique success is not a matter of maturity or technical development. 87

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The difference between its technical efficiency and the incompetence of the rest is startling, too. It might have been written by a Frenchman rather than an Englishman of those days, and Gissing's interest in and admiration for the nineteenth-century Russian and French novelists is significant. He was never able to make use of them as consistently as did Henry James or Conrad, but he was conscious that the English novel tradition he had inherited would not do and he was groping for help where it seemed to offer. (He later met Meredith and must have studied The Egoist with a certain degree of profit. Literary historians ought to inspect Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), which obviously was conceived and treated in the spirit of The Egoist though without ceasing to be Gissing's.) Gissing is an example of how disastrous it may be for a writer whose talent is not of the first order to be born into a bad tradition. A score and more of novels painfully sweated out of his system, the exceptional system of an exceptionally intelligent and well-educated and devoted writer, and only one that amounted to something. The absence of what now enables anyone in Bloomsbury to write a readable novel made Gissing's efforts mostly futile. Mr Swinnerton justly talks of 'the wreckage of the Victorian tradition by which it [Gissing's best work] is now encumbered'. But in New Grub Street Gissing not only solved, if only temporarily, his own problems, he helped all later writers to solve theirs, and the recognition this novel at one time received from literary men is significant. It is probably an ancestor of the novel of our time. It is an important link in the line of novels from Jane Austen's to the present which an adult can read at his utmost stretch—as attentively, that is, as good poetry demands to be read—instead of having to make allowances for its being only a novel or written for a certain public or a certain purpose. In the nineteenth century, to take the highlights, Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Egoist, New Grub Street connect the best eighteenth-century tradition with the serious twentieth-century tradition that Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster, Joyce and Mrs Woolf have built up. There are inferior novels (e.g. The Way of All Flesh) in this tradition as well as good ones, and very minor successes (like Howard Sturgis's Belchamber) as well as major contributions, but they are all immediately recognizable as novels, distinct from what we may more usefully call fiction. It is time the history of the English novel was rewritten from the point of view of the twentieth century (it is always seen from the point of view of the mid-nineteenth), just as has been done for the history of English poetry. The student would undoubtedly be glad to be allowed to reorganize his approach and revise the list of novels he has to accept as worth attention; it would be a matter chiefly of 88

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leaving out but also of substitution, for the list consists only of conventional values. I don't know who will dare touch off the first charge to blow up those academic values. Mr Forster once made an attempt on Scott and the response in the academic world was most interesting; the subsequent Scott centenary was a rally of the good men and true to batten down the hatches on Mr Forster's wholesome efforts to have that reputation reconsidered. What is commonly accepted as the central tradition is most easily examined in the middling practitioner—such as Trollope or Charles Reade. The Cloister and the Hearth is a puerile example of what Esmond is a highly accomplished form of, but both are undeserving of serious attention and both are on the educational syllabus, at different ends; though I never knew anyone but the oldfashioned kind of schoolmaster who could bear the former, the latter's ventriloquial waxworks in period costume (prick them and do they not bleed red paint) are a direct ancestor of Sir Hugh Walpole's own trilogy, which will in time, who can doubt, get on the list too. It is time also that we sorted out the novels which form or enrich the real tradition of the English novel from those which (like Trollope's and Wells's) are rather contributions to the literary history of their time and to be read as material for the sociologist, from those which (like Scott's and R.L.S.'s and George Moore's) perpetrate or perpetuate bogus traditions, from those which (like Charlotte Bronte's) are the ill-used vehicles for expressing a point of view or, as in other novelists' hands (Aldous Huxley's), ideas; and from all the other kinds. As one step towards this desirable scheme I suggest that New Grub Street be made generally available by reissuing it in * Everyman' or 'The World's Classics' edition. Sir Humphrey Milford has already ventured to make some surprising additions to the world's classic novels on his own responsibility (Constance Holme's, for instance) and Messrs Dent have similarly helped Galsworthy and Priestley to get on Everyman's list of great novels, so they might do something for Gissing, whose best novel will soon be due for a half-centenary.

HOLLYWOODEN HERO W. H. MELLERS (1939)

The Fifth Column, by Ernest Hemingway (Cape) The ox, as a literary hero, is no longer a la mode, and Mr Hemingway himself has grown a little dusty. He has never again dazzled the literary skyline with another such rocket as A Farewell to Arms, and it would 89

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indeed be difficult to imagine a pyrotechnic display more cunningly engineered to elicit the goggle-eyed oohs and ahs of a wider diversity of ill-assorted spectators. The highbrows ahed knowingly because the book had, or seemed to have, an Original Technique; the lowbrows oohed excitedly because it was outspoken, a rattling war-cum-sex yarn, yet tragic too. And now the rocket has collapsed in ashes, nor has a reissue in the Penguin Library done more than feebly reanimate the relics with a tawdry glow. Yet if it was overpraised as a work of art, and if Mr Hemingway's growing reputation as Professional Clown and Tough Guy to the Great American Public has rather obscured his qualities as a writer,1 it does not follow that he has none, or that they are uninteresting. A Farewell to Arms still seems to me an accomplished book, for whether it is valuable and whether it is false are two distinct questions which are often treated as though they were one. In saying that it is accomplished I mean that it is competent with the slickness of the tougher type of Hollywood film. It is often said that Hollywood emotion is essentially synthetic but this, though true, is not the whole truth. It is wrong to assume that glycerine tears, because they are often inadequately motivated and always unsubtle, because they lack sensibility and hence any of the real passion that cannot exist apart from sensibility, have therefore no motivation at all; it is wrong to put all the blame on Hollywood for tapping the glycerine vats in people's hearts and none on people for possessing those vats waiting to be tapped at; and we must remember, too, that though there is much that is deliberately vicious in glycerine tears, yet a form of art or entertainment so popular and universal cannot exist without incarnating, even if fortuitously, some of the values which the people who patronize it honestly live by. Of course, to the intelligent and sensitive—to the Cultured Minority —toughness seems merely the most complacent form of stupidity, the reverse of being ' grown up', rather an emotional immaturity, an inability to handle situations and experiences except by denying their validity. Yet it is only the complexity and difficulty of emotional experience that toughness denies, not emotion itself, for at heart toughness battens on virtues extravagantly soft, extravagantly sad and rather foolish. One believes in the simplest kind of sexual love and in intoxication; one takes an exhibitionist delight in manifestations of mechanic skill, whether in driving a car or slaughtering an animal; one holds steadfastly by courage (in the face of bulls, lions, guns, 1

We in England find it difficult to understand or even to realize the nature of the peculiar mythology which America erects around its tame artists-cum-entertainers. In this connection a remarkable document recently published with much munificence under the title of The George Gershwin Memorial Volume deserves the closest scrutiny. 90

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gangsters, women scorned and people who do not play the game), by sacrifice, and by a primitive kind of honour. It is true that one must not mention honour or courage or sacrifice by their names: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time and I had seen nothing sacred and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury i t . . . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity; but to admit fear of them is to admit belief in their existence, and it is the essence of the code that one must not whine, must accept what life offers fatalistically ('So this is what it's going to be like. Well, this is what it's going to be like, then'. . .'No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.'). How simple and how extravagantly emotional the values of toughness really are is revealed not only in the love story of A Farewell to Arms but also in such quasi-satirical stories about the warping of natural desire as Mr and Mrs Elliot, A Canary for One and A Very Short Story; while it is stated explicitly in a passage from the first chapter of the book about bull-fighting: So far about morals, I know only one, that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bull-fight is very moral to me because I feel veryfinewhile it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine. Now you can consider this as amoral as you like, yet it is idiotic to say that for millions of people—though I do not mean specifically about bulls—it is, any more than the glycerine values of the cinema, false. Rather is it terrifyingly true, as true as the banal simplicity of Mr Hemingway's prose. The infantile repetitions of dialogue in the story Hills like White Elephants, with its pathetic-bathetic 'I feel fine' conclusion, indicates how it is precisely the banality of the greater part of human experience, especially when it seems most intense, that Mr Hemingway renders with such sinister acumen. And in this passage from A Farewell to Arms: If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not 91

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break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry— even the sly, the dexterous tug at the heart-strings in the rhythm of the penultimate clause is honest in the sense that it is true, for we are none of us quite honest in our emotions, quite free from a self-pity that warps, staging them with a theatrical and appealing gesture. Hollywood and Mr Hemingway's stories both genuinely represent an epoch in the history of human feeling—the situation in the last scene of Mr Hemingway's play The Fifth Column is itself one of Hollywood's ripest chestnuts except that of course Mr Hemingway does not tack on the usually quite fortuitous happy ending; but there is this great difference between Hollywood and Mr Hemingway, namely that whereas these values exist in the cinema only among much that is flabby, amorphous, infantile and adulterated, Mr Hemingway presents them with the neatness, the concentration of a true if limited artist. This is really all people mean when they talk about Mr Hemingway's gift for understatement. Every true artist has a 'gift for understatement' and if Mr Hemingway's statement seems peculiarly under, that is merely because he has such a very simple statement to start from. It is at least a sort of tribute if we can say of Mr Hemingway that, for the social historian, he makes Hollywood unnecessary.1 I have already indicated that the Hemingway values, as applied to human behaviour, are in the main negative—one does not whine, one does not give in, one does not betray one's trust: and that in so far as they are positive they depend almost entirely on sensation—on delight in food and drink and women, in high speed and mechanic skill, in clean leaves and cool sheets, in tactile impressions and the sharp precision of landscape, particularly landscapes that are sunlit and frosty and sharply defined (Mr Hemingway's 'reporter's eye' as an aspect of descriptive technique, of which I shall have more to say later, is here relevant). The reason for this is that the Hemingway values are not the sort of values on which human relationships could be based or by which 1

Mr Hemingway's own account of the 'understatement' of his art is given in a well-known passage from Death in the Afternoon-. 'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see that he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay.' 92

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a community could live for long. In this respect it is significant that the background to Mr Hemingway's stories is almost always one of war and sudden death, not because he has any delight in, let alone understanding of, the simple violent realities of life and death in themselves—the amiably grim journalistic irony of A Natural History of the Dead shows no concern for the problem of death or the passion and suffering entailed in it—but merely because his values are such that they can live only in the midst of destruction, being the values of a disintegrating society: in other words, they are a means of avoiding the complexity of human relations, of avoiding the necessity of living. I think there is probably—behind the grosser superficies, the more obvious symptoms of disintegration—a similar significance in the extreme simplicity of the values of the cinema; I am quite certain that it is the essence of the characteristic Hemingway situation. This situation is stated patently in many of the stories about soldiers —for instance, Soldiers* Home". Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and politics. . .he did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences... he would not go through all the talking. . .he had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Other values may perhaps be hinted at, values more satisfying and even superior, as in the stories about the Swiss or references to the Catholic tradition in the portrait of the priest in A Farewell to Arms, but it is always suggested that, however sympathetic, they are naive, unreal, helpless in a disintegrating world. Should Mr Hemingway ever indicate any conception of a better or happier life, it is merely an intensification of the 'good' things in the present one, the things that make you Feel Fine: it is conceived, that is, like the account of bull-fighting which I have quoted earlier, entirely in terms of sensation. One of Mr Hemingway's most perfect and most touching stories, A Clean Well-lighted Place, emphasizes this point. The 'very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity', the outcast cosmopolitan ('Last week he tried to commit suicide. Why? He was in despair. What about? Nothing. How do you know it was nothing? He has plenty of money.'); the waiter who would return to his wife; the other waiter who has only his insomnia to return to; these are all the stock Hemingway counters. 'We are of two different kinds,' the old waiter said...'It is not only a question of youth and confidence, although these things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.' 93

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'Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long/ 'You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. 'It is well lighted. The light is good, and also, now, there are the shadows of the leaves... It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order.' You see it is no accident that so many of Mr Hemingway's stories, if they do not take place in wars, have their setting in hotels, bars, or the waiting-rooms of railway stations. The inhabitants of the Hemingway world are all homeless, and though they have neither confidence nor youth of spirit they believe, sentimentally but with melancholy honesty, that these qualities are 'very beautiful'. They wish above all to accept their homelessness and disillusion 'with dignity' and a stiff upper lip, and to be able to do so they ask little more than an average allowance of sensory and material comfort and cleanness and order. Nearly all the best stories in this volume deal with resignation in face of the biffs life gives one or—and perhaps the two are hardly separable —in face of the failure of an excessively simple scale of values. The quiet conclusion of A Clean Well-lighted Place ('" After all," he said to himself, " it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."') is typical, as is the behaviour of the major (of the story In Another Country) whose young wife has suddenly died: He stood there, biting his lower lip. 'It is very difficult,' he said, 'I cannot resign myself.' He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry.' I am utterly unable to resign myself,' he said, and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door. The major did not come back to the hospital for three days. When he came back, there were large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been cured by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window. These things are typical and so is the peculiarly drab prose in which this resignation is incarnated. This is Mr Hemingway's contribution to 94

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literature and if too topical and local to be permanent I think it is none the less a real one. In trying to understand the means whereby Mr Hemingway effects this incarnation we have first to consider his * reporter's eye'. 'I was trying to write then', he says in Death in the Afternoon^(and I found the greatest difficulty aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action: what the actual things were that produced the emotion you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day: but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me, and I was working very hard to get it.' Here I think we can see the fundamentals of Mr Hemingway's method, and also we can see how different they are from those of William Faulkner, a writer with whom he is often considered comparable. Faulkner tries to give a scrupulously realistic account of commonplace or even subnormal experience, but throughout so artificially intensifies the experience that it becomes a dishonest perversion. It is not merely that life is not like that, that the casual circumstance is not pregnant with such violent electrical cross-currents, but the dishonesty takes the form of an attempt to pump tragic significance into a conception of life that is quite as banal as Hemingway's, and much more confused. Thus, not only is its experimental technique (mainly a matter of interspersing straightforward statements with unnecessary clauses) factitious, but also its imaginative conception is chaotic—it is written from all points of view and none. Mr Hemingway has his own brisk answer to this kind of Literature: No matter how good a phrase or a simile a writer may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over... This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough anyone can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defence. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge 95

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or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. I think it is a good answer if a simple one, and in its bluff way it really is consistent with Mr Hemingway's practice. For though his reporter's eye may not see very much it sees what it does see very clearly— clearly enough to make his * realism' not realistic but merely an acceptable literary convention. It is easy to see, in such a passage as this: We were in the garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then we potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over farther down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that... or in such tiny tales as On the Quai at Smyrna and The Revolutionist, how Mr Hemingway uses the description of facts and incidents in the simplest language and most banal rhythms as a personal convention reconcilable with the characteristic Hemingway virtues of resignation, fatalism, and fortitude in the face of physical and occasionally mental suffering; while in Old Man at the Bridge we see the process carried a step further—a piece of reporting transformed, by selection of detail and control of rhythm, into a Hemingway situation, into a kind of minor art. I think it is clear from this story that Hemingway's prose, however colloquial, is no more realistic than, and as conventional as, that of (say) Meredith. This, for instance, may be based on the movement of speech: There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing towards the Ebro. It was a grey overcast day with a low ceiling so that their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was the only good luck that old man would ever have: but essentially it is speech stylized for a specific end. So too, and much more obviously, is the private language, always consistent with the Hemingway virtues, which is spoken by Mr Hemingway's heroines, where the extreme limitation of the stylization is the condition of the intention being clearly realized (You'll kill him marvellously,' she said, ' I know you will. I'm awfully anxious to see it.'). Even when Mr Hemingway dabbles in the Steinian trick, as he does occasionally in order to express states of drunkenness, coition or hysteria, he does so strictly within the limits of his own convention, and not in a flatulent

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gallimaufry of everyone else's conventions that is supposed, as in Faulkner, to be realistic. You may think it awfully boring to be all the time making love and awfully brave and maybe awfully drunk, yet it's an awfully big thing and it's no use shutting your eyes to it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.. . I had read many books in which, when the author tried to convey it, he only produced a blur, and I decided that this was because either the author had never seen it clearly, or, at the moment of it, he had physically or mentally shut his eyes, as one might do if he saw a child he could not possibly reach or aid about to be struck by a train. It is Mr Hemingway's achievement that, in a fashion rather different from his intention, he really has presented us with the picture of a kind of death, and that he has done so without 'blur'. The death which is the Hemingway mentality is closer to us to-day than it has ever been, and it is stated in his art with the greatest possible neatness and condensation. We can take it or leave it; but we run the risk of being blurred ourselves if we try to be grateful to him and sad about him at one and the same time.

AFTER 'TO THE LIGHTHOUSE' F. R. LEAVIS (1942)

Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press) The design of making this book an occasion for reviewing Virginia Woolf's career has had to be abandoned, a war-time casualty; a stopgap pen has to undertake this note. Yet the book can hardly be reviewed by itself. But for the name on the cover, and the mannerisms associated with that name, no one could have supposed it to be by an author of distinction or achievement. Even its extraordinary vacancy and pointlessness, the apparent absence of concern for any appearance of grasp or point, would not have seemed a case for critical analysis. Knowing it to be by Virginia Woolf, we can say that this is where her famous preoccupation with the essential, with the significant, with 'life'has led. Here is what she wrote in the essay on 'Modern Fiction' in The Common Reader \ Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ' like this.' Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a 4

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myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible ? She is describing, she says, the preoccupation of' several young writers among whom Mr James Joyce is the most notable': They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Among the younger writers she is thinking of (in May 1919), there is one upon whom this account throws more light than upon Joyce. In fact we, who have in front of us not only the whole of Ulysses, but the whole body of Joyce's work, can say that of his aims (though she no doubt learnt something from him) her description conveys a very inadequate and misleading notion. It has, however, an obvious application to her own subsequent work; and even by itself it might prompt us to some questioning. To talk of the impressions the mind receives (not, we note, 'forms', the usual verb) as atoms falling upon it might hardly seem matter for comment in a writer who doesn't parade a psychological apparatus. But when Mrs Woolf's insistence on this way of putting it—and she does insist—issues in, 'Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern. . .', we can't help asking whether the order in which they fall is likely to be the kind of order that a pattern is. Clearly not, unless the mind has within it a very positive and active bent of interest—so positive and active that, had she been realizing this truth, Mrs Woolf could hardly have put things as she does. And to achieve the kind of order necessary to a good novel, the mind would have to have not only a strong positive 98

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bent of interest, but a kind of interest in the world 'out there' that Mrs Woolf's injunction to 'look within' for 'life', among the 'innumerable atoms' of' impressions', hardly suggests—suggests the less when she comes to calling this ' life', which it is the ' task of the novelist to convey.. .with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible', a 'luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end'. Mrs Woolf's best novel, it is pretty generally agreed, is To the Lighthouse^ to me, as to others, it is the only good one—the only one in which her talent fulfils itself in a satisfactory achievement. The substance of this novel was provided directly by life—in a more vulgar sense of the word than that given it above: we know enough about Leslie Stephen, the novelist's father, and his family to know that there is a large measure of direct transcription. We can see a clear relation between this fact and the unique success of To the Lighthouse among her novels. Mrs Woolf's decision to have 'no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style' was perhaps to this extent justified, that she hadn't interests rich and active enough to justify what she was rejecting; but neither, we have to conclude, had she interests adequate to the problem of supplying substitutes. By way of eliminating any unduly pejorative suggestions of 'accepted style' we may adduce the Conrad she admired—the great artist whose essential and successful concern was indisputably with that which Mr Bennett, 'with his magnificent apparatus for catching life', seemed to miss—'whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality'; the contrast brings out how little of human experience—how little of life—comes within Mrs Woolf's scope. The envelope enclosing her dramatized sensibilities may be 'semitransparent'; but it seems to shut out all the ranges of experience accompanying those kinds of preoccupation, volitional and moral, with an external world which are not felt primarily as preoccupation with one's consciousness of it. The preoccupation with intimating 'significance' in fine shades of consciousness, together with the unremitting play of visual imagery, the 'beautiful' writing and the lack of moral interest and interest in action, gives the effect of something closely akin to a sophisticated aestheticism. (There is also the Aesthetic brooding wistfulness about the passage of time.) Weaknesses of this kind (for weaknesses they are, though triumphs may be won out of them) have, we know, their fostering conditions in the relation of the artist to modern society. A sensitive mind whose main interests are not endorsed by the predominant interests of the world it lives in, and whose talent and professional skill seem to have no real public importance, is naturally apt to cultivate (if this is the 99

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right word) the 'bubble of the private consciousness'. Not that Mrs Woolf hadn't her congenial and applauding social-cultural milieu. She belonged, of course, to the original Bloomsbury, the Bloomsbury of Clive Bell's Civilisation and Lytton Strachey's wit (some of her essays are in his cheapest manner, and one can seldom feel quite safe from the communal note). A milieu that so often reminds us of its potency in the work of as distinguished a writer as E. M. Forster must be held accountable for a great deal in the development—or failure to develop —of Virginia Woolf. The general nature of its operation may be seen in the Preface and text of Orlando, the work that followed To the Lighthouse, and after which the discouraging signs multiplied steadily to the end. It is proper to conclude so patently un-self-sufficing a commentary by referring the reader to the fuller and very relevant criticism of Virginia Woolf that appeared in Scrutiny for June 1937, and September 1938.

HENRY JAMES: THE STORIES Q. D. LEAVIS (1947)

Fourteen Stories by Henry James, selected by David Garnett (Rupert Hart-Davis) Henry James's short stories and nouvelles are out of print, so any publisher willing to devote some of his meagre allotment of paper to giving us any of that unique body of literary treasures deserves our gratitude at once. But whether Mr David Garnett, who selects the volume just published, is equally praiseworthy, is another matter. We all have our personal favourites among the stories and no anthologist could satisfy everyone, of course, but it seems to me that the questions to raise in inspecting such a selection are: Will it help the reader new to this author to enjoy him and so want to explore the oeuvre for himself? or the uninitiated who is at sea among the novels—will it help him to find his bearings and get some insight into the nature and aims of this difficult art? I am afraid Mr Garnett's choice, backed by Mr Garnett's Introduction, will be more likely to put the novice off and certainly won't offer any critical hints to those who feel lost in a fog. In fact, you can see this is so from the press it has had, the lipservice paid to the genius of Henry James rarely being backed by first-hand judgment and genuine appreciation, even among our higher reviewers. 100

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Mr Garnett has based his anthology on the appeal of quantity instead of quality, restricting himself to the shortest stories in order to get so many in. This seems to me a mistake: instead of fourteen stories, half of which are not worth owning (some worth reading once, some not), surely eight or nine first-class specimens of greater length would have been preferable. It seems hard on an author to have some of his worst pieces thrust in the public eye simply because they are short. For Henry James undeniably wrote some poor, some silly, and some downright bad stories, and Mr Garnett has dug them up (though there are some very good very short ones, such as Greville Fane, which he has apparently overlooked). Thus of those he reprints, Paste is an adaptation of one of Maupassant's slickest stories, and is hardly less shallow than its model; Sir Edmund Orme is a feeble, uncharacteristic effort—written for The Yellow Book and not even up to inclusion there; The Private Life is an earlier exercise, I should say, for The Sacred Fount and is silly in the same way; The Tree of Knowledge is a bore; Maud-Evelyn seems to me unprofitably unpleasant in the same way as The Altar of the Dead and some of the other stories written at that period—morbid is the nearest word to describe them; The Diary of a Man of Fifty and The Marriages are fair specimens of a class in which his work offers many more interesting examples; Owen Wingrave is a respectable piece that fails to rise to its possibilities. Brooksmith is a whimsical expression of James's social ideal, and nothing more. The Pupil was worth reprinting if only to show that James can offer as lively and amusing a surface as any writer in the language: it is the only specimen in the anthology that introduces the author of The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians, the brilliantly witty novelist whose range and scope are so much wider than the conventional account of him, with its emphasis on The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors and so on, admits. Only The Real Thing, The Abasement of the Northmores and The Jolly Corner are selections from the best level of his work, and that reach down to its core. And dispersed as they are, what effect can they have on the reader who does not already know how to relate them to the body of James's significant writings? In the Introduction we can put our finger on the mistaken assumptions that have directed Mr Garnett's choice. What are we to make of this final exhortation to the reader? Henry James had no unusual understanding of psychology, no abnormal faculty of analysing the human soul. His characters are just as much alive as the people we meet in hotels or at the houses of our friends, but no more. They are not heroic or larger than life; characters whom to meet once is to know intimately for ever like. . . James's characters are ordinary people seen as indistinctly as we see people in real life; but the attitudes in which we meet IOI

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them are revealed in all their complexities, with all the possible implications, so that we can grasp the situation as we seldom can in life. Is this an attempt to make James acceptable to the great Boots public by assuring them that he 'creates' 'people in real life' just like Trollope and Priestley? Surely Mr Garnett must know it his duty to warn off the innocent reader of any attempt to take James as a naturalistic novelist. The briefest account of him should include mention of his descent from Hawthorne, that he is a novelist in the same tradition as Melville; should allude to his deliberate stylization of life; notice the techniques he devised for conveying his special interests, his recurrent symbols, his preoccupation with the ideal of social life and the function of the artist in it. How anyone professing to write about James could pen the first sentence of the paragraph I have quoted is beyond belief. The son and brother of psychologist-philosophers, James was of a highly introspective habit himself—nothing is plainer^—and he had the intuitive understanding of psychology that we find in all great literary artists. Such painful triumphs in morbid psychology as the short story Europe, the well-known Turn of the Screw, and the study of the relation of the heroines of The Bostonians leap to the mind, but the real refutation of Mr Garnett's unpardonable obtuseness is in the very texture of Henry James's best work. And what are the 'ghost' stories but expressions of his psychological bent?, the 'ghost' being a convenient symbol for the oppressive atmosphere of moral pressure, such as the family ghost that kills the hero of Owen Wingrave, or for the guilty conscience, as in Sir Eustace Orme (both reprinted here), or for some morbid state. In Mr Garnett's last choice, The Jolly Corner, the 'ghost' symbol is explicitly used to embody 'the other self of the hero, and so might have served to introduce the reader to one of this novelist's principal artistic devices. The value of The Jolly Corner would have been multiplied if beside it an anthologist had placed, say, The Lesson of the Master (a mere twenty-five thousand words, for which we would gladly have forgone Paste and suchlike). These stories are both attempts by James to justify to himself the line he took. The horror the expatriate sees in his New York mansion is the self that James felt he would have become if, instead of settling to live the life of a writer in Europe, he had taken his place as an American in the contemporary world of business and politics. James had no doubt that that would have been disastrous; but there was another alternative. The Master, Henry St George, so like the actual Henry James in name, talents and appearance ('beautifully correct in his tall black hat and his superior frock coat') is unlike him in two ways—he has made a financial success of novel-writing by deliberately writing below his own best level, and he has lived the 102

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normal life. 'I've had everything. In other words, I've missed everything,' says the Master to his disciple, who replies: 'You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys—all the domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be immensely suggestive, immensely amusing,' Paul anxiously submitted. 'Amusing?' ' For a strong man—yes.' 'They've given me subjects without number, if that's what you mean; but they've taken away at the same time the power to use them. I've touched a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned into gold ? The artist has to do only with that—he knows nothing of any baser metal. I've led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy conventional expensive materialized vulgarized brutalized life of London. We've got everything handsome, even a carriage—we're perfect Philistines and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we haven t got. It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists—come!' the Master wound up. 'You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!' This is the more interesting possibility than that treated in The Jolly Corner, and it produced a much finer and more complex story. The counterpoise to the mature and successful Henry St George is the young novelist Paul Overt (the author of Roderick Hudson, as it were); at the Master's urging he makes the sacrifice of the human goods. Both the Master and Overt are Henry James potentials, played off against each other. This story is not, like The Jolly Corner, a simple statement whose artistic effect depends entirely on playing on the reader's nerves; this is a drama, the tension arising from the uncertainty the reader is kept in and finally left in. The series of surprises in the structure are not the surprise of the trick plot of the well-made story of the Maupassant-Kipling-W. W. Jacobs type. The ambivalence, which is personal and inside James himself, conditions the structure: the uncertainty Henry James felt remains to the end and is expressed in the final ambiguity—what indeed was the lesson of the Master? It is one of the most remarkable works of art. Moreover, it exhibits one of James's favourite techniques, the structure built on alternative selves. It is a device for conducting psychological exploration in dramatic form. Even The Diary of a Man of Fifty, Mr Garnett's first choice, which he says has a charming flavour of Turgenev, is stamped as unmistakably James's, slight as it is, in the mathematical elegance with which its case is presented. The elderly soldier who is the diarist and had blighted his life by leaving the 103

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Italian countess, sees acted out by their younger selves, presented in the same relation—in the forms of the dead woman's daughter and a young Englishman—the opposite solution to the diarist's. I dwell on this technical device because it is a key one—it is a different thing from his use of the portrait as the idealized or dead or false self, which occurs in a great many novels and stories, starting with the very early nouvelle, Watch and Ward. It is not merely a device or literary formula, or, like the portrait, the symbol of an intellectual idea, but a method of artistic procedure. It enables an exploration of certain possibilities of life to be presented dramatically, with the tensions, the contrasts and the psychological surprises that make a work of art instead of a narrative. It is obvious that such a method implies a very considerable degree of stylization of the raw material of life, a very special approach to characterization. Henry James takes the trouble to make this clear in many different ways, most of all in his use of symbolic names (as Overt above; and the Death of the Lion takes place in the countryhouse named Prestidge)—the only one most readers seem to notice is that of the Princess Casamassima—and symbolic figures, such as the Figure in the Carpet, the Beast in the Jungle, the Golden Bowl. How unkind, then, of Mr Garnett to go out of his way to inform his readers that Henry James is not a different kind of novelist from the circulatinglibrary average. Can he have inspired the blurb which describes this selection as 'the best introduction to the work of "the old magician" for those who have not yet fallen victims to the enchantment'? Enchantment is the character of the appeal made by, say, Mr De la Mare's writings, but it seems to me a great injustice to Henry James to suggest that that is the nature of the interest his work has for us. His stature is that of Tolstoy, Conrad, the great international masters of the novel, and it is misleading to imply that he offers us, even in his short stories, anything less serious than a profound apprehension of life. Of course if you take random dips into the shortest stories, as in this volume, you risk overlooking everything vital. Mr Garnett has put none of the keys into his readers' hands. Who would suppose from The Abasement of the Northmores that Henry James had written a whole body of stories about the life of the writer and the novelist—the artist, as he more generally considers him—and that these contain some of his liveliest, wittiest and most deeply felt writing, besides embodying some of his fundamental ideas? The Author of'Behraffio', The Figure in the Carpet, The Lesson of the Master, even The Coxon Fund, John Delavoy, The Middle Years, The Next Time, The Death of the Master, are all more central than the one of the series reprinted; an introducer should at least have referred his readers to them. The Real Thing is 104

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fortunately here: it was an anecdote of Du Maurier's that provided James with a congenial theme—he made it a fable expressing his contempt as an artist for the English country-house culture and its social values. Characteristically, it is much deeper than it looks and will bear endless pondering. It links up with the novel The Tragic Muse, where he develops his theory of the function of artist and actress and their pre-eminence in a world of politics and society. The account Mr Garnett gives of James's development is also misleading. 'He began as a painstaking writer for American magazines and most of his early stories are singularly feeble. He did not, at first, know how to write and he contrived stories with little imagination or knowledge of human beings. He developed slowly. He was thirty-six years old before he published the first story included here. . . ' The author of No Love and The Sailor's Return has, naturally, a high standard. Still, I feel that the greenhorn should be told that before the date of the first story Mr Garnett thinks printable, James had published Roderick Hudson (1874), an accomplished and adult novel on a theme full of interest; The American (1875), a ' s o a novel showing considerable powers; and had got well on with The Portrait of a Lady, one of the finest novels in the language; that he had written many short stories of permanent literary value, of the highest interest in themselves and also of great importance to the understanding of his work—such as Madame de Mauves, Daisy Millet, An International Episode; and that, above all, he had written the remarkable nouvelle, The Europeans, whose perfection, seriousness and originality as a work of art are surpassed by nothing he composed later. Continuing with a sneer at James's debt to Hawthorne, Mr Garnett ends: ' It was from that sort of nonsense that he escaped the following year when he came to live in Europe. A year in Paris meeting Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant and Zola altered him.' Yet his correspondence shows that he was disappointed with these men of letters and disgusted with their milieu, that he thought their novels inferior to George Eliot's and soon decided to abandon France in favour of a permanent home in England. What he learnt from the French seems to have been mostly what to avoid, and what more valuable it was that George Eliot, for instance, could do. He was more in Dickens's debt than Turgenev's or Zola's, still more than anything else was he rooted in his native tradition (his volume on Hawthorne in the English Men of Letters Series shows how seriously he took his forerunner), a tradition which included Bunyan. No, I can't agree with Mr Garnett that his volume is 'the best introduction to reading James at all'. There was a more modest and much better one, published by Nelson in the fabulous days of the 105

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sixpennies and sevenpennies and which, in its indestructible blue binding and excellent print, could until recently still be found on second-hand stalls. It contained Daisy Miller, An International Episode and Four Meetings, stories stimulating, amusing and exquisite in themselves, which make sense together, and illustrate in the most apprehensible way James's principal subject, the International Theme. No one who picked up that volume could suppose James a discouraging author or form any false views about the nature of his art. And that reader would be launched painlessly on the right path—qualified to appreciate The Portrait of a Lady and to graduate to The Golden Bowl, to recognize the interest of such relevant works as Pandora, Lady Barbarina and The Reverberator. I remember Nelson's cheap reprint with gratitude, for it lay around the house when I was a child and was my own introduction to Henry James. Finally, I should like to register a protest against a gratuitous and worse than unjustifiable display of animus. Out of a four-page introduction Mr Garnett devotes two paragraphs to insulting American critics of Henry James in general. He says: * If American critics admire James they do so with a bad grace; they admire in spite of the fact that he learned to write in Europe, that he preferred to live in England, that he was '"snobbish*' and wrote, sometimes, about our upper classes, that he did not seize every opportunity to criticize the w o r l d . . . The theme of every American critic (even of Mr Van Wyck Brooks) is that Henry James abandoned his birthright and never became at home in England' etc. I suppose I have read as much writing on Henry James in books and periodicals as Mr Garnett, since it is a subject I take a particular interest in, and I can find no justice in his attack. Surely it was only Mr Van Wyck Brooks, among critics of any standing at all, who ever abused James as an expatriate, and the essentially international character of James's genius has long been a commonplace of American literary criticism. As for the other charges, I don't recollect any but extreme Left-wing writers taking that line, and if it comes to that we have equally to blush for Communist 'literary' criticism of the same stamp. No country is responsible for ideologically prompted critics. Pace Mr Garnett I should venture that, except what has appeared in the pages of Scrutiny, all the intelligent criticism of Henry James and all the hard work on him has been done in the land of his origin. Yvor Winters (in Maulers Curse), Edmund Wilson, Quentin Anderson, F. O. Matthiessen, among many others, have left us in no doubt of the high and able evaluation of James's art current in the United States. When The Hound and Horn, the former highbrow review of Harvard, produced a number in honour of James, though it is true some of it was not very inspired criticism, yet I distinctly 106

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remember that the only really offensive contribution was by our Mr Stephen Spender. And Mr Garnett does not exactly deserve a bouquet from James's admirers for his present effort.

THE INSTITUTION OF HENRY JAMES Q. D. LEAVIS (1947)

The Question of Henry James, edited by F. W. Dupee (Allan Wingate) This is a very welcome edition of an American book that appeared a year or two ago, an anthology of critical articles on Henry James collected from periodicals and of chapters culled from books. Perhaps it is not so well done as it might have been—its interest is less intrinsic than historical. We are given as a start an essay of 1879 ('Henry James, Jr.'), a fine specimen of complacent provincialism, and can see the various phases of James's reputation to date and the evolution of a serious critical approach to his art. In 1898, we are told, he was virtually unknown in America. In 1918 Mr Eliot began his memorial notice,'.. .James will probably continue to be regarded as the extraordinarily clever but negligible curiosity.' Whereas in 1943 Mr William Troy ends his essay ' . . . n o great wonder that more and more people are turning to Henry James'. Between the nadir of '98 and the zenith of the last decade journalistic criticism exposes itself more shamefully than over any other great writer. In 1912 intellectual brilliance was represented by Sir Max Beerbohm's 'parody', 1 reprinted from A Christmas Garland—this is the period when the idiosyncrasies of James's late style stuck in the public throat and any journalist could get a laugh by making gestures of crude intention behind James's back. The viciousness of such a 'parody' lies in its endorsing the vulgar account of James as unreadable, unprofitable and preposterous. Mr Dupee regrets that Wells's attack (in Boon, 1915) could not be reprinted too; contemporary with Beerbohm's piece, this illustrates the malice that the successful writers of the Wells-Bennett-Maugham era felt for the novelist who had devoted his life to his art, exercising incredible industry with no material reward (unless we reckon the 1

This alone should suffice to explode the 'incomparable Max* myth—an ideal of elegant triviality, the cult of which is historically explicable as a result of Oscar Wilde's impact on Oxford and the higher journalism; though Oxford, King's College Cambridge, and their Bloomsbury affiliations appear to be still culturally in the Wilde phase, the rest of England isn't, and 'Max' should have been politely pigeon-holed long ago instead of being sponsored by the B.B.C. as the G.O.M. of English letters. 107

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O.M. bestowed on his death-bed). On top of this he had to face vulgar unprovoked attacks in his old age by journalists like Wells. He minded deeply. No one can read unmoved his letters to Wells about Boon. (Mr Percy Lubbock comments with desolating fatuity, in his notes to The Letters of Henry James•, 'H.J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody.') The letters to Howells in 1888 and '95, to Howard Sturgis in '99, and to Gosse just before his death about the failure of the collected edition of works, show the impressive courage and dignity that James had developed to sustain him against the kind of treatment noted above.1 We see here how very different is the tone of pieces of the same period by Eliot and Conrad (and Pound, whose notices of 1918 were reprinted with later criticism in Make It New, and might very profitably have been drawn upon by Mr Dupee). It is encouraging to see that those creative writers who were also literary critics, as distinct from journalists and academics and social men of letters, were all along able to respond to James at his own level of seriousness. Conrad, for instance, in 1905, is here seen to have jumped the whole historical process with his note on James as * The Historian of Fine Consciences'. Similarly, Pound in The Little Review, 1918, could see that * there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he set in opposition within his work.. . His art was great art as opposed to over-elaborate or overrefined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays.' At the same date Mr Eliot was writing, * The real hero, in any of James's stories, is a social entity of which men and women are constituents. . . He is the most intelligent man of his generation.' Conversely, the journalists are still where they were—all the phases 1

* I have felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days—every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed [1895].' * I greatly applaud the tact with which you tell me that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an intention, or an artistic element or glimmer of any sort, of my book. I tell myself-—and the "reviews" tell me—such truths in much cruder fashion. But it's an old, old, story—and if I "minded" now as I once did, I should be well beneath the sod [1899].' 'I remain at my age (which you know [72]), and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. . . The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the* least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it—and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one [1915].' His closest friend, Edith Wharton, noted 'his sensitiveness to criticism or comment of any sort' and explains that it 'had nothing to do with vanity; it was caused by the great artist's deep consciousness of his powers, combined with a bitter, a life-long disappointment at his lack of popular recognition' (A Backward Glance). IO8

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of criticism of James that you find in this anthology are now simultaneously present in layers. The 1904 essay, 'In Darkest James', is just the kind of bright journalism you might find in the literary weeklies to-day; or Mr Van Wyck Brooks, who is shown in 1925 damning James because his characters are not true to (the man-in-thestreet's impression of) life and because Brooks cannot comprehend their motives—how often we still meet that! In 1927 Mr Pelham Edgar, in what is unfortunately a standard work but really a monument of misunderstanding, shows that he has missed the whole point of James's studies of the 'international situation' (p. 141 f.). We can feel that criticism has at any rate progressed if we compare the chapter from The Method of Henry James (1918) by Joseph Warren Beach, the pioneer critic of James's 'art', with the best work in the same field in recent years. Beach makes painstakingly one point after another about ' method', without ever seeming to get anywhere or to make the only kind of criticism that matters, that which adds to our ability to read the work: he does not understand the author's intention, he is not an interpreter. Nowadays, at the top level, critics of James, as Mr Dupee says in his Introduction, ' discourage any reading that takes a part of his effect for the whole'. Everyone will be glad to have Mr Eliot's hitherto inaccessible pieces on James. Popularly, Mr Eliot's contribution to James criticism has been limited to the famous sentence, now thirty years old, ' He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,' which has been a battleground ever since. Some said it means nothing, others that it supported their representation of James as an aesthete, and others that it is demonstrably untrue, since James's mind was in fact the prey of his father's eccentric system of ideas, to illustrate which Junior composed his novels. Now we can read the sentence in its context, where it seems to have been thrown out as an exasperated attempt to distinguish James from the Merediths and Chestertons who cluttered the foreground of literature at the time. The essay dates, and contains many odd judgments (e.g. 'Henry was not a literary critic'—who that has read even James's essay on Baudelaire in French Poets and Novelists would not demur?). It nevertheless puts its stresses in the right places; one I have already quoted, the other is contained in his title, 'The Hawthorne Aspect'. The essay of 1917 on 'The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James' introduces a familiar note: James's art is identified with Pater's. And wherever aestheticism is still prevalent, poor James is thus misconceived. The hangover from the 'nineties represented by Mr Cyril Connolly is still at the stage of seeing in James's prose no more than a Paterian surface: 109

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. . . the dialect of Pater, Proust and Henry James, the style that is common to mandarin academic circles given over to clique life and introspection. This dead literary English, with its long sentences, elaborate similes and clever epithets.. .[Introduction to The Rock Pool] James's late style (for he developed several styles in the course of his very long career though the journalists seem not to have observed this elementary fact), ridiculous to a 'Max' and elegantly decadent to a Connolly, is now felt by serious readers to be, like his other idiosyncrasies, a language we have learnt to take for granted—once we are at home in it it presents no difficulty but is felt to be as effective an instrument, and one as informed with life, as the language of Hopkins or Shakespeare. The serious, the vicious aspect of this assimilation of James to Proust and Pater is that James is assumed to have, like them, replaced moral values by aesthetic ones, to be, as one critic in this book accuses him of being, 'ugly with the absence of moral energy and action'. That it refutes this falsification of James's work is the value of the criticism that puts James back into his place in the New England tradition. While there is a good deal collected by Mr Dupee of purely American interest—contributed by those for whom the Question of Henry James was whether his art is American and therefore sound, or un-American and therefore decadent—even that has its point for the rest of us because it shows in sum, very convincingly, that, as the editor says, 'James turns out to be a continuator of the severe ethics of New England'. Unfortunately there is no extract from Mr Yvor Winters's book on the influence of the New England ethos on American literature, Maules Curse (1938), where the chapter devoted to James, called 'The Relation of Morals to Manners', still seems to me the best treatment of the subject. Another way of showing James's American roots is the essay here by Constance Rourke on 'The American', taken from her pioneer work American Humour (1931), where she made a study of the American folk-lore that fertilized American literature. After aestheticism, the hard-boiled 'twenties, cock-sure and shallow, are seen 'placing' James. Then was produced the formula that explained away his art as a purely mental production of the jig-saw order of achievement. The distinction of locus classicus is perhaps to be claimed for Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism (1925)—the passage is not reprinted here but echoed in more than one place: 'Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible.' TTO

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This was evidently a bright idea being handed round by frequenters of the smart literary circles. Gide must have picked it up there: . .. nothing really alive nourishes him, and James extracts only from his brain what he knows to be there, and what his intelligence alone has put there. . . The skilfully made network spun out by his intelligence captivates only the intelligence.. .James, in himself, is not interesting; he is only intelligent.. .all his characters are like the figures of a clock, and the story is finished when they have struck the curfew.. . [' From an unsent letter to Charles Du Bos', American publication, 1930]. There is no sign in his ' letter', reprinted here, that M. Gide has read anything of James whatever (Connolly has the grace to admit in The Condemned Playground that he could never manage to get through James's books). Evidently this kind of judgment was a formula for dismissing a novelist for whom such people could have no use, whom they could not make the effort to comprehend, and to whom they felt impelled to display superiority. Mr Matthiessen's mind seems also to have been formed in the Ricardian 'twenties:' James's novels', he tells us here, in the essay on The Ambassadors from his recent book (reviewed in Scrutiny', Spring 1947), 'are strictly novels of intelligence rather than full consciousness'. But even an academic nowadays breathes a livelier critical air than of old, and another way of proving that criticism achieves something is to compare the results of Matthiessen's industry with those of the Lubbocks and Pelham Edgars of the past. This brings us to the day before yesterday. Yesterday saw the reversal of Mr Matthiessen's dictum that in James's novels * there is none of the welling up of the darkly subconscious life that has characterized the novel since Freud'. Mr Edmund Wilson and Mr Stephen Spender find James's works a Freudian field-day. Of course every great writer is reinterpreted in the light of contemporary interests (and fashions), but how sound the more recent presentations of James will look tomorrow is still to be decided. Thus when Mr Spender finds that 'the monologues [of The Golden Bowl] dip into an abyss where they become part of the unconscious mind of Europe', and that 'his technical mastery has the perfection of frightful balance and frightful tension: beneath the stretched-out compositions there are abysses of despair and disbelief: Ulysses and The Waste Land9 (1936)—one may well raise an eyebrow. Mr Wilson, writing at the same date but keeping closer to the texts, has a surer poise. One may not agree with his interpretations, and in point of fact his account of The Turn of the Screw (as an hallucination of the neurotic governess who is narrator) has, I seem to remember, been shown not to hold water by several critics.1 1

The latest is Mr R.obert Liddell in A Treatise on the Novel (Cape). Ill

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But when he proceeds to build up a theory of an ambiguity in presentation by James very generally, he is certainly drawing attention to a feature of James's work that most people, preferring to simplify, find it convenient to overlook, and which culminates in his valuable point that 'the element of irony in Henry James is often underestimated by his readers'. Mr Wilson's criticism is tough as opposed to the 'aesthetic' apprehensions of Mr Matthiessen, but, being alive and disinterested, he succeeds in infusing a new sense of reality into James's works whereas the other's kind of attention seems to empty James's art of significance. Mr Wilson puts substance behind his final claim that James 'is in no respect second-rate, and he can be judged only in the company of the greatest'. As for the criticism of to-day, represented here by Mr William Troy's 'The Altar of Henry James' (1943), it seems to have been fertilized by the new school of Shakespearean criticism that followed on The Wheel of Fire, To see in a great part of James's novels and stories a body of work of the same nature as Shakespeare's is at least less misleading than to judge them as Victorian prose fictions which aim at imitating a social surface. While the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with few exceptions, were descended from Addison and Defoe, with some admixture of a debased stage comedy, there is quite another kind of novel, created by Emily Bronte, Melville, Conrad and Henry James, among others, which makes use of the technique of the dramatic poem. If Mr Troy seems to be laying too much stress on James's symbols, he has to correct a long tradition of crass insensitiveness to the whole intention of James's art. ' It is clear enough,' he writes, ' that to the present generation James means something more than to the generation of Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford or to the addled and intolerant generation of the 'thirties. Also clear is that what he means is something different.' 'As in any authentic artist,' he continues, 'the "meaning" in James is contained in the total arrangement and order of his symbols, and in the novel everything—people, events, and settings—are capable of being invested with symbolic value.' Excellent as is his theory, he does not seem to me to carry it out in the right way; he makes no such convincing and illuminating analyses as Mr Quentin Anderson in the essay on Henry James that appeared in The Kenyon Review for Autumn 1946. The weakness of the study of symbols is that the text tends to get less attention, instead of a fresh concentration of attention. Nevertheless, elementary and uncertain as is Mr Troy's handling of James's 'symbols', one can see how fruitful the approach might be. To recognize in James's novels and nouvelles art of the same nature as Measure for Measure, to see that they are in a tradition of mediaeval 112

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and Elizabethan drama transmitted through Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Bunyan (and so Hawthorne), is to make their meaning accessible, as it never can be if they are approached on the assumption that they are the same kind of thing as the writings of Trollope and Thackeray. This is to put James's work on a plane where the highest claims can be convincingly made for it. The editor prints also Mr Auden's poem At the Grave of Henry James, presumably as an illustration of the snob cult of James. Mr Zabel's contribution, 'The Poetics of Henry James' (1935), subscribes, in so far as it says anything, to the general conspiracy to find James's Prefaces profoundly illuminating, but fails to produce any paraphrasable explanation of why they should be held to be so. Mr Jacques Barzun's essay, 'Henry James, Melodramatist' (1943), an attempt to show that romantic and violent drama is a basic element in James's writings, has some point inasmuch as it takes the wind out of the sails of those who would dismiss James as 'the last refinement of the genteel tradition' (as in an essay reprinted by Mr Dupree on * Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture', 1930). But the superficiality of his thesis is apparent once he applies it to a specific work—Washington Square, which he interprets as crudely melodramatic: 'And its force is derived from the essentially melodramatic situation of a motherless daughter victimized by a subservient aunt and a selfish father—a being for whom the melodramatic epithet of "fiend in human form" is no longer sayable but still just.' This is to misrepresent James entirely and to do blatant injustice to the American Eugenie Grandeu James's triumph lies in doing without Balzac's sentimentality about the jeune fille and in creating an infinitely subtler situation than Mr Barzun credits him with presenting. The father is not a villain—James takes pains to secure sympathy and respect for him, it is significant that he is linked with the ' Republican simplicity' of the ethos of old New York, and he is introduced to us as 'a thoroughly honest man'. The suffering is shown to be on both sides, a tragedy of the relations between an exceptionally brilliant father and a commonplace but worthy daughter. The two are bound by natural affection, but the clever father, his history being what it is, can take only an ironic tone with his dull and inarticulate child. In the one crisis of her life this acts as an insuperable barrier between them. There is complete mutual misunderstanding, symbolized by the icy waste among the mountains, with night descending on them, where they find themselves at odds so painfully, in a memorable scene. He alienates her confidence while doing his best for her welfare, and though the fortune-hunting lover 'had trifled with her affections', it was her father who 'had broken its spring'. It is the father's tragedy too, for he has destroyed his only natural link with 113

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life. To ignore the complexity of a distinguished work of art like Washington Square and to assert instead that it is something crude and commonplace is to impoverish James's creation. That is the result of concocting a theory about a writer's work and then making a text square with it. It is the distinction of the essay of Mr R. P. Blackmur's here, * In the Country of the Blue' (1943), that it starts with the texts—James's tales about artists—and extracts a theory from them. Noting James's fondness for the theme of 'the artist in conflict with society' and making the point that 'the artist is only a special case of the man', Blackmur concludes: 'James made the theme of the artist a focus for the ultimate theme of human integrity.' It was James's own experience as an artist—the letters I quoted above are evidence—that qualified him to feel this struggle from the inside. Typically he dramatizes it in the choice between being a Henry St George, the Master who has succumbed to the temptations of a Philistine society and ruined himself as a novelist, and being a Paul Overt—or a Nick Dormer (in The Tragic Muse), or a Ray Limbert (in The Next Time), or a Neil Paraday (in The Death of the Lion)—a kind of ascetic, saint and martyr. But why, while admitting Conrad's accomplishment as novelist, did James complain to Ford Madox Ford that Conrad's works left a very disagreeable impression on him? Was it that Conrad rubs in so intolerably the inescapable isolation of every man?

THE APPRECIATION OF HENRY JAMES F. R. LEAVIS (1947)

Henry James: The Major Phase, by F. O. Matthiessen (O.U.P.) I start with the last section of Henry James: The Major Phase by way of assuring genuine admirers of James that Mr Matthiessen's book shouldn't go unhandled. The section is called 'The Painter's Sponge and Varnish Bottle', and it is devoted to illustrating in some detail how James improved The Portrait of a Lady in revising it. For in revising he does, for the most part, improve, much as one might have expected the contrary of any systematic meddling by the late James with the work of his early prime. We are not encouraged when the critic tells us that the 'writer's equivalent for the single flake of pigment is the single word', but the actual instances of revision given us are extremely interesting. We see James working happily for a vivider concreteness, a higher specificity, greater colloquial freedom 114

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and livelier point. Instead of'their multifarious colloquies' he writes * their plunge.. .into the deeps of talk'. Osmond in the first version 'hesitated a moment'; in the revised he 'just hung fire'. The Countess Gemini, who originally'cried.. .with a laugh', in the revision 'piped', which defines her idiosyncrasy more sharply, and, as Mr Matthiessen well puts it, condenses her sound and manner into one word. And here is another good instance: 'Originally Ralph had concluded, "Henrietta, however, is fragrant—Henrietta is decidedly fragrant!" This became a punch line: "Henrietta does smell of the future—it almost knocks one down!"' This leads us to a very significant kind of change in which the radical preoccupations implicit in James's sensibility assert themselves and his positives take on explicitness: Ralph's 'delights of observation* become 'joys of contemplation*. Warburton's sisters' 'want of vivacity' is sharpened to 'want of play of mind', just as Isabel's 'fine freedom of composition' becomes 'free play of intelligence'... It is equally characteristic that Isabel's 'feelings' become her 'consciousness', and that her 'absorbing happiness' in her first impressions of England becomes 'her fine, full consciousness'. She no longer feels that she is 'being entertained' by Osmond's conversation; rather she has 'what always gave her a very private thrill, the consciousness of a new relation'. This section of Mr Matthiessen's book, however, is offered only as a loosely attached appendix; it doesn't really belong. For The Portrait of a Lady doesn't belong to what he assumes to be James's 'Major Phase'. I say 'assumes', because I can't see that he does anything more critical than take over the conventional view that the great James is the late James—the James of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl ('his three major novels'). In the conventional way he reinforces his reliance on the unanimity of fashion with an appeal to James himself: I agree with James' own estimate that The Portrait of a Lady was his first masterpiece, but that thirty years later he began to do work of a greater depth and richness than any he had approached before. My understanding of his development has been increased by the rare opportunity of reading through the hundred and fifty thousand words of his unpublished working note-books, which, extending from 1878 to 1914, concentrate most heavily on his aims and ambitions during the crucial period of the eighteen-nineties. This last sentence gives us Mr Matthiessen's offer. He does with the note-books, however, nothing to give his offer substance; nothing that can be said to forward understanding of James's development or to justify the claim made for them. In fact, his use of them amounts to little more than a show, under cover of which some relaxed ruminations about the late novels have the air of being a serious contribution to 115

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criticism. Even if the note-books had contained more illumination than any we can divine from Mr Matthiessen's exemplifying, he would, to have brought them into enlightening relation to James's art, have had to be the active critic he doesn't show himself to be. He relies, I have said, so much on convention as to feel absolved from attempting to base his assumed valuations in criticism: the ' Major Phase' of his title remains an unargued postulate. The inertness of this reliance is made the more oddly apparent by his showing that he knows of strictures that have been passed on the works of the late period. I think this will be judged a fair way of putting it, since, though he formulates them as coming from himself, they make no difference to his attitude. He doesn't appear to realize their force as criticism, but rests quite unembarrassed on his donnee: the Major Phase is the Major Phase. When I myself in these pages (Vol. V, No. 4) criticized The Golden Bowl in terms that Mr Matthiessen may be said to summarize, my conclusion was that The Golden Bowl is not a great novel, and that still seems to me the inevitable conclusion. So with The Ambassadors: Mr Matthiessen concedes enough to dispose of that book as either a major creation or a successful work of art when (p. 37) he corroborates my own judgment that James utterly fails to justify the essential imputations of value that are involved in the offered theme of Strether's awakening to Life. True, we are given arguments for nevertheless persisting in a high estimate of the book. What gives this novel the stamina to survive the dated flavour of Strether's liberation is the quality that James admired most in Turgenieff, the ability to endow some of his characters with such vitality that they seem to take the plot into their own hands, or rather, to continue to live beyond its exigencies. The centre of that vitality here is the character not reckoned with in James's initial outline. For what pervades the final passages is Strether's unacknowledged love for Madame de Vionnet. James has succeeded in making her so attractive that, quite apart from the rigid requirement of his structure, there can really be no question of Strether's caring deeply for any other woman. The means that James used to evoke her whole way of life is a supreme instance of how he went about to give concrete embodiment to his values. The argument—one associates it with a familiar notion of criticizing fiction—itself is of a kind to promote mistrust; and it seems to me that the facts of the given case make it glaringly absurd here. If Madame de Vionnet is the centre of vitality, that doesn't say much for the book; for in my judgment she illustrates notably the characteristic weaknesses of the late James. The fussy subtleties and indirections of her presentment signal a lack of grasp, and a preoccupation with justifying an imputed value that, to a live sense of reality (such, indeed, 116

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as James's later manner can hardly be said to challenge with any insistence), appears ridiculous and sentimental. That a Strether's valuation of a Madame de Vionnet should be of the order that Mr Matthiessen defines for himself—one wouldn't mind that if only one hadn't to identify Strether as valuer with James, who asks us to see him and his predicament as invested with the dignity and weight of tragic irony. For the lady to be accepted by us as so miraculously transcending the familiar type and ethos, James would have had to do something more creative and convincing than the transmutation by atmospheric vagueness and Impressionist aestheticizing that he attempts. Such, indeed, is the ineffectiveness of his art and his general feebleness in The Ambassadors as to suggest senility—though one knows that the actual case is more interesting than that. (The peculiar thinness of the book is obviously related to the fact that he had, appropriately, intended to do the theme in a nouvelle; but, of course, we still have to ask why, in his late period, the substance of nouvelles should tend to be spun out by overtreatment into full-length Jamesian novels.) Mr Matthiessen singles out for praise the expeditionary force from Massachusetts:' The portrait of the Pococks—Sarah, Jim and Mamie— is one of James's triumphs in light-handed satire, in the manner he had mastered in Daisy Miller and had developed further, in that lesserknown but delightful jeu-d'esprit, The Reverberator.' —When I myself cast back in the comparative way I can only wonder at the abject feebleness that, in the treatment of one of his most congenial themes, can overtake the hand of a master. It is one judgment, of course, against another; but, reverting to the crucial matter of Madame de Vionnet, I suggest that the presumption lies against the appraisal that, exalting a figure as tragically impressive, elaborates itself in this mode: His [James's] one living tap-root to the past was through his appreciation of such an exquisite product of tradition as Madame de Vionnet. Yet, as he created her, she was the very essence of the aesthetic sensibility of his own day. Strether can hardly find enough comparison for her splendour. Her head is like that on 'an old precious medal of the Renaissance'. She is a 'goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud', or 'a sea-nymph waisthigh in the summer surge'. She is so 'various and multifold' that he hardly needs to mention Cleopatra. And though Mona Lisa is not mentioned, James is evoking something like Pater's spell... In the remaining novel of the 'major' trio Mr Matthiessen judges James to have done even better: 'Why it was that James could create women of much greater emotional substance than his men we can tell best by turning to The Wings of the Dove.9 117

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I agree that there is more strength in The Wings of the Dove than in the other two. It is to be found, I think, in the presentment of that squalid background to Kate Croy's life which represents the pressure driving her into unscrupulousness and entitling her to some of our sympathy, and in the presentment of Mrs Lowder (Aunt Maud), magnificent personification of Edwardian or late-Victorian vulgarity. But the book depends for success even more on the heroine, Milly Theale, than The Ambassadors does on Madame de Vionnet. And 'substance', it seems to me, is the last word to apply to Milly Theale. To my sense, she simply isn't there: the effect on me is one of being directed, with endless iteration and insistence, to feel emotional intensities about a blank; it is an effect of elaborated, boring and embarrassing sentimentality. Mr Matthiessen, on the other hand, judges that James created in Milly Theale 'the most resonant symbol for what he had to say about humanity'. Again it is one judgment against another. And again, as presumptive evidence in favour of mine, I cite Mr Matthiessen's own appreciative commentary. He says (p. 59) that 'despite James's past-masterly command over the details of realistic presentation, he is evoking essentially the mood of a fairy-tale'—which is an odd way (I quote from Mr Matthiessen's next sentence) of raising ' his international theme to its ultimate potentiality'. He describes as a 'spell' the method by which James tries to invest Milly with significance: 'James has completed his spell and transformed his heroine into a Renaissance princess.' In so far as it works, 'spell' is certainly the appropriate word for it; for what positive qualities does James even attribute to this supremely symbolic paragon? She is fabulously wealthy, that is all—unless one adds that she is American. She isn't shown to us as especially intelligent, as representing any tradition, or as herself interesting. Simply, she is (we are to understand) a fabulously wealthy American heiress, and as such has a right to expect enormously and vaguely of life, to receive homage as a Princess, and, because she is a Princess (American) to be pitied as a supremely tragic figure when her expectations are brought up against the prospect of death. There is more to be said for Isabel Archer as a tragic heroine; she is 'there', invested with convincing positive qualities, though James overvalues her. But the only ground offered for seeing a more significant and interesting pathos in Milly's case than in that of any one else who expects enormously and vaguely of life is that she is an American heiress; the suggestion of significance and spiritual intensity is wholly a matter of the 'spell'. If this worked for anyone it would be a success of illusion, depending on a fairy-tale abeyance of the adult mind—a triumph of mere suggestion. The reminder of James's devoted memories of Minnie Temple, the 118

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admired and idealized cousin who died young, has no critical bearing. It may help to explain why James should have been able to suppose that in sentimentalizing round a void he was defining a presence; but it doesn't make any difference to what we actually have. The weaknesses of that, as of the * major' works in general, are obviously correlated with an overdeveloped technical preoccupation; James, working at the problems he poses himself, fails to realize his themes sufficiently as life, with the result that he makes demands on us, for sympathy and evaluative response, that we can't satisfy. Mr Quentin Anderson's recent essay inThe Kenyon Review (Autumn 1947), in which he argues with a great deal of force that James gives proof in his work of taking very seriously his father's system, leads one to suppose that a preoccupation with symbolism may also have a good deal to do with the way in which, in framing his problems for himself, and handling his themes, he offends our sense of life and reality. But no amount of explaining how James came to do what he did makes what he did other than what we find it to be. I hope I haven't appeared to suggest that I lump the three novels together as equal in unsuccess. It goes with what I call the conventionality of Mr Matthiessen's approach that he does lump them together, failing to make the marked discrimination called for. The Ambassadors I judge to be an utter failure; it hasn't a theme capable of sustaining treatment at novel-length. In The Wings of the Dove the failure is at the centre of the conception, entailing what seem interminable dreary wastes; but the strong part is substantial and very impressive. It is good James that one remembers vividly and goes back to. The Golden Bowl has a magnificent theme, and the genius of the author is magnificently apparent in the handling. It is in the central valuations that the book goes wrong. It is my sense of James's greatness that makes me insist on my difference with Mr Matthiessen about the novels of what he calls the * Major Phase'. For his view is representative; at any rate, I hope it isn't offensive to say that it accords with a convention that has prevailed since about the time when Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction was first acclaimed, if not longer. And until that convention is put out of countenance there can be no hope of getting for James's genius and achievement the recognition due to them. Let it be understood that, by the consensus of the best people, it is the late James that must be admired, and the later James will (with, say, Percy Lubbock's help) by many be admired—though it won't be James's genius they are admiring, nor will they be enlightened or exhilarated. Others will know they are bored, and some will conclude critically. The effect in any case is not to encourage the exploration of James, the vastness of 119

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whose oeuvre must strike the conventionally initiated as peculiarly forbidding. There is a betraying and unfortunate conventionality about the things, other than Mr Matthiessen's 'major' three, that the conoscenti star. Why, for instance, should The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw get such disproportionate attention? They aren't, after all, the superlative products of the master's genius that the distinction accorded them suggests; many finer stories are left for the explorer to find for himself. And there are the really bad things that, having once been tipped, go on being. There is, for instance, The Altar of the Dead. The favour it enjoys goes back at least to the fervent paean of acclaim that will be found in Miss Rebecca West's little book. And now we find Mr Matthiessen (p. 9) including it, in a routine way, among the recognized masterpieces. Yet it is a piece of sentimentality so maudlin and rank that an admirer of James, one would have thought, would rather not be reminded of its existence. (Mr Matthiessen commends in the same sentence Owen Wingrave\ yet if—being challenged —he looks at it again, can he deny that it is one of James's feebler things?) On the other hand he can commit the injustice of this bracket: * the strained virtuosity of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount. . .' 'Strained virtuosity' is a kind phrase for The Sacred Fount, in which James doesn't even seem to know what he is trying to do, and the inexplicitnesses and ambiguities proliferate in a way that suggests a disease rather than a meaning. But, though one may concede that in The Awkward Age there is an excess of doing, nevertheless this is an almost incredibly brilliant work, about the intention and significance of which surely no genuine admirer of James can be in doubt (though, indeed, Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction describes it as a comedy). To be capable of backing the late period as 'major' and dismissing The Awkward Age—it certainly strikes me as odd. That is the work I should pick on as exemplifying, along with What Maisie Knew, a distinctively 'late' James who triumphantly justified himself. I have an impression that the critical writing of American academic intellectuals is on the whole decidedly more respectable than the corresponding English work, and I am disappointed not to be able to hail the book under review as a striking corroborative instance. Yet, at the cost of stressing the pejorative suggestion of 'academic', one can perhaps still find in the book a representative superiority. This is a point that one can't make at all forcefully without specifying an English case one has in mind. But everyone on this side of the Atlantic knows the type and could produce an example. There is that large 120

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display of familiarity with the latest thing in critical apparatus and idiom and fashion, and in the world of Culture generally; there is the absence in the book of any justifying purpose beyond the purpose of writing a book—of an impressively intellectual kind; and there are those disastrous give-aways, when, from time to time, the writer ventures too much on his own, or, in using his acquisitions, betrays patently that he is handling them from outside, with no real understanding. The book under review must be granted a marked superiority to the English product I have in mind. Yet in the opening paragraph of the Preface this meets us: The creative writers of my generation have recognized and assimilated his values. Auden and Spender, no matter how widely they have diverged from Eliot in politics and religion, have continued to agree with him that James is one of the few great masters of our modern literature. Practitioners of the novel who have taken its art seriously have long since responded to the high claims which Percy Lubbock made for James's technique in The Craft of Fiction [1921].

This, at the outset, with its confident offer of values so betrayingly assorted, suggests fairly the relation between pretension and intellectual quality that characterizes the book. Eliot, Auden and Spender—one can only suppose Day Lewis left out (after all, he has given the Clark Lectures) because he hasn't pronounced on James. And can anything better than academic commentary come from a writer on James who thinks that The Craft of Fiction offers anything better than an academic substitute for criticism, or that any novelist taking his art seriously (unless an Academy novelist) has ever supposed his practice to have been affected by the book? But Mr Matthiessen is right: The Craft of Fiction does enjoy a high reputation—which is a reason for being emphatic about the challenge. The passage quoted above is representative. This, for instance, is how we are shown that the contemporaneity of James can be made out to be practically unlimited, so that Anglo-Catholics and Communists alike can rope him in: His intense spiritual awareness, drifting into a world without moorings, has told others beside Eliot that if religion is to persist, it must be based again in coherent dogma. At the opposite pole, our novelists of social protest can still learn much, as Robert Cantwell has incisively argued, from James's scale of values. His gradation of characters according to their degree of consciousness may be validly translated into terms of social consciousness, and thus serve as a measure in a more dynamic world than James ever conceived of [p. 151]. 121

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Yet there is, after all, a respect in which James is not altogether contemporary. In his novels * there is none of the darkly subconscious life that has characterized the novel since Freud. James's novels are strictly novels of intelligence rather than of full consciousness. . .' (p. 23). To attempt to define the distinctive selections and emphases that mark James's treatment of experience—that might be a valuable undertaking. But Mr Matthiessen goes no further. He merely hands us the phrase * strictly novels of intelligence' as self-explanatory. In what sense are George Eliot's novels any less strictly ' novels of intelligence'? She, suffering, too, from the disadvantage of not having read Freud, is even less endowed (we gather) than James with the psychological resources that have enriched 'the novel since Freud': 'James occupies a curious border-line between the older psychologists like Hawthorne or George Eliot, whose concerns were primarily religious and ethical, and the post-Freudians' (p. 93). It would be as much to the point to tell us of Tolstoy by way of establishing his pre-Freudian limitations that his 'concerns were primarily religious and ethical'. George Eliot, even though a lesser genius, is Tolstoyan both in her insight into the obscurer workings of the psyche and in the art that renders the insight. But the academic commonplaces about her (they are to be found in Lord David Cecil's Early Victorian Novelists) perpetuate a blindness to the nature of her greatness, so that it is possible to adduce her (alternatively to the very different Hawthorne—who himself hardly fits Mr Matthiessen's intention) as representative of ' the older psychologists' who were ignorant of ' the darkly subconscious life'. (Mr Matthiessen is welcome to his immediate point, that she doesn't deal with Lesbianism, as James, in The Bostonians, does—'without having to give it a name'.) George Eliot was a peculiarly unlucky shot; but a critic, in any case, oughtn't to have been making such generalizations—and certainly oughtn't to have been giving Freud the place in literary history that Mr Matthiessen gives him. The unconscious and the subconscious didn't wait for Freud to let them into literature, and there are other novelists besides Tolstoy and George Eliot from whom this truth can be enforced. And Shakespeare—but Shakespeare, of course, didn't practise the novel. I will close with a difference about a work of James's I admire very much, Washington Square, I should have said that it didn't present the least difficulty to the reader, but if Mr Matthiessen is right in his account of it, then I in my reading have always been wrong: That book, despite its slightness, is so accurate in its human values that its omission from James's collected edition is the one most to be regretted. 122

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Those values are concentrated in the simple moral goodness of Catherine, in contrast to the cruel egotism of her father and the bare-faced venality of her suitor [p. 122]. I should have said that the whole point of the story depended upon the not obscurely presented datum that the father's ironic dryness covered something very different from 'cruel egotism'.

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3 HENRY JAMES'S HEIRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF EDITH WHARTON Q. D. LEAVIS (1938)

The unfinished posthumous novel of Edith Wharton just published1 should at least serve to bring up this author's name for evaluation. It is incidentally quite worth reading if you are an amateur of the period now in fashion again (the 'seventies). It would have been far more worth publishing if Mrs Wharton's literary executor had supplemented his appendix by a memoir and critical essay designed to introduce the present generation to her best work, scarcely ever read in England— for to the educated English public Mrs Wharton's novels are those of her last ten years and known vaguely as the kind of fiction which was published serially in Good Housekeeping. But her characteristic work was all done long before, early enough for one of her good novels to have been published in * The World's Classics' in 1936, more than thirty years after it was first printed. It was as the historian of New York society of the 'nineties that she first achieved character and eminence as a novelist, on the dual grounds, she said, that it was 'a field as yet unexploited by any novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of traditions and conventions' and had been 'tacitly regarded as unassailable'. In her rapid growth as combined social critic and historian she continued to strike roots outwards and downwards until she had included in her reach the lowest levels of rustic, urban and manufacturing life. And her work was no mere historical fictionizing, she was a serious novelist. She was also an extraordinarily acute and farsighted social critic; in this she was original and appears still more so when we think with what an effort this detachment must have been achieved by the child brought up to believe it her ambition to become, like her mother, the best-dressed woman in New York, and who was married young to an anti-intellectual society man. By a combination of circumstances she was peculiarly qualified to undertake such work. Her interesting autobiography2 documents her cultural origins for us. There we are told that the best people in New York, among whom she was born, had the traditions of a mercantile 1 2

The Buccaneers (Appleton Century). A Backward Glance (Appleton Century, 1934). 124

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middle class whose 'value lay in upholding two standards of importance in any community, that of education and good manners, and of scrupulous probity in business affairs'. This society was leisured, and satisfied with a moderate wealth—she never in her young days encountered the gold-fever in any form. It concentrated on the arts of living that radiate from home-making. It was resolutely English in culture (speaking 'pure English', importing tutors and governesses, reading the English classics and deploring contemporary American men of letters) and habitually travelled abroad (unlike Boston), though keeping aloof from the English Court and society. She grew up to see this society disintegrate from within, its values succumbing to spiritual anaemia—' the blind dread of innovation and the instinctive shrinking from responsibility' that she noted as its chief weaknesses and which left politics to be the prey of Business—even before its standards were overthrown by the invasion from without of the predatory new rich. Her quick intelligence made her aware of the import of changes that even an insider at the time could only have sensed, her literary ambition encouraged her to try to fix them in the novel, and her early environment and family traditions gave her a position from which to survey changes in the social scene, a code by which to judge the accompanying shifts in mceurs, and values by which to estimate the profit and loss. Her admiration of Henry James's work, later her great intimacy with him, provided her with a spring-board from which to take off as an artist. For her literary career began, as she said, 'in the days when Thomas Hardy, in order to bring out Jude the Obscure in a leading New York periodical, was compelled to turn the children of Jude and Sue into adopted orphans; when the most popular magazine in America excluded all stories containing any reference to "religion, love, politics, alcohol or fairies" (this is textual); the days when a well-known New York editor, offering me a large sum for the serial rights of a projected novel, stipulated only that no reference to "an unlawful attachment" should figure in it. . .and when the translator of Dante, Professor Eliot Norton, hearing (after the appearance of The House of Mirth) that I was preparing another "society" novel, wrote in alarm imploring me to remember that "no great work of the imagination has ever been based on illicit passion"!' It was equivalent to the literary England of Trollope's beginnings, yet Edith Wharton without any bravado assumed that because she did not depend on literature for her income she should ignore its 'incurable moral timidity' and the displeasure of her social group. ' The novelist's best safeguard is to write only for that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast', she wrote. The likeness to Jane Austen is revealed in that 125

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and borne out by her decision, after writing several dull psychological novels, to make a novel out of what she knew best, the fashionable New York of her early married life 'in all its flatness and futility'. In doing so she was taking up Henry James's work where he left it off with The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady. And in this novel she turned, as she noted, from an amateur into a professional novelist. The American novel grew up with Henry James and achieved a tradition with Mrs Wharton. He, she points out in a passage of great interest,1 was never at home in twentieth-century America—'he belonged irrevocably to the old America out of which I also came' and whose last traces, as she said, remained in Europe whither he fortunately went to seek them.' Henry James was essentially a novelist of manners, and the manners he was qualified by nature and situation to observe were those of the little vanishing group of people among whom he had grown up, or their more picturesque prototypes in older societies —he often bewailed to me his total inability to use the "material", financial and industrial, of modern American life.' And she instances James's failure to make plausible Mr Verver in The Golden Bowl or 'to relate either him or his native "American City" to any sort of concrete reality'. She might have instanced her own Mr Spragg and his Apex City in contrast, those fully realized symbols which make the later creations Babbitt and Main Street seem unnecessary as well as crude work. Unlike James, she rightly felt herself qualified to deal with the society that succeeded 'the old America' and she stayed to write its natural history, to write it in a form as shapely and with a surface as finished as if she had had a number of predecessors in her chosen task. These works had the advantage of being 'readable' as Jane Austen's and even George Eliot's were and as The Ambassadors was not. It is profitable to observe how, in The Custom of the Country, she makes use of James's technique, yet reaches a public unwilling or unable to wrestle with his formidable novels. She was early convinced that the virtue had gone out of' the old America' of her ancestors—'When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured.' So when she decided to make a novel out of the circle in which she lived she chose to depict it in terms of'the slow disintegration' of Lily Bart, one of the 'wasted human possibilities' who form, she declared, 'the underpinning [on which] such social groups (the shallow and the idle) always rest'. No doubt it was her own experience that enabled her to isolate the destructive element in such societies—'the quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. . . Lily's set had a force of 1

A Backward Glance, pp. 175-6. 126

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negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.' These explanations are from the subsequent introduction. In the novel {The House of Mirth, 1905) this analysis is present in solution—in terms of dialogue, dramatic situation and the process by which the exquisite Lily Bart slips down into annihilation. For in these novels Mrs Wharton never ceases to be first of all a novelist. Her social criticism is effected in the terms that produced Middlemarch society and the Dodsons in The Mill on the Floss, and often challenges comparison with analogous effects in Jane Austen: Mrs Gryce had a kind of impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their annual reports showed an impressive surplus. In her youth, girls had not been supposed to require close supervision. They were generally assumed to be taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and marriage, and interference in such affairs on the part of their natural guardians was considered as unwarrantable as a spectator's suddenly joining in a game. There had of course been 'fast* girls even in Mrs Peniston's early experience; but their fastness, at worst, was understood to be a mere excess of animal spirits, against which there could be no graver charge than that of being * unladylike*. The modern fastness appeared synonymous with immorality, and the mere idea of immorality was as offensive to Mrs Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room: it was one of the conceptions her mind refused to admit. [Of the much-divorced but *ineradicably innocent* beauty from the West] The lady's offences were always against taste rather than conduct; her divorce record seemed due to geographical rather than ethical conditions; and her worst laxities were likely to proceed from a wandering and extravagant good nature. The feature of most permanent interest in the book is the sytematic portrayal of the various groups in New York society. These are created with zest and an abundant life, surprisingly lacking animus; even distaste is lost in ironic appreciation. And no group or character is wantonly dragged in, each has an indispensable function in advancing the plot. They range from the timid millionaire of the old school, Percy Gryce: After attaining his majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr Gryce had made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large property passed into her son's hands, Mrs Gryce thought that what she called his 'interests' demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his mother's, spent all his week-days in the handsome Broad Street office, where a batch 127

HENRY JAMES S HEIRESS of pale men on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation— through the established 'good' society—smart Trenors, dowdy Van Osburghs, and their parasites like the divorcee Mrs Fisher—to the various social aspirants, such as the new-rich Gormans (' Mrs Fisher's unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from an inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gorman circle represented their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves'), the comic Wellington Brys and the financier Rosedale (not stock size), down to the outermost darkness of Mrs Norma Hatch from the West, 'rich, helpless, unplaced', living in the Emporium Hotel whence she endeavours to launch herself into the bosom of society. There is an invaluable pre-Sinclair-Lewis account of fashionable hotel life of the time: The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations. .. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo. Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing an outline... It was, in short, as the regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart's guidance was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted by the fact that Mrs Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write t o . . . Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine; and all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions. . . Mrs Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken. . . The difficulty was to find any point of contact between her ideals and Lily's. Such a combination of sustained anthropological interest with literary ability was hitherto unknown to fiction except in The Bostonians. 128

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Mrs Wharton had all the qualifications that Galsworthy so disastrously lacked; to place The Forsyte Saga beside one of her characteristic novels is to expose it. The Custom of the Country (1913) is undoubtedly her masterpiece. [It should have been obtainable in a cheap edition or 'Everyman' long ago.] Here the theme is explicitly 'social disintegration'. But now the 'good' New York society has shrunk to a sideshow, the centre is consciously occupied by the moneyed barbarians; they lack both a moral and a social code but are fast acquiring the latter by imitation. Whereas old New York (like Henry James's Boston) by keeping itself to itself had evolved an independent culture, new New York is shown trying to construct an imitation of European culture by copying its social surface, by acquiring it by marriage, by buying up its antiques and by reproducing its architectural masterpieces at home: Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perpective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated encircling the closepacked tables. During some forty years' perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature's passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation. As he sat watching the familiar faces swept towards him on the rising tide of arrival—for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not—he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom 'society', with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence. Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies.. . What Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what other countries know as society, as that between the Blois gargoyles on Peter Van Degen's roof and the skeleton walls supporting them. The writing is unbrokenly taut and incisive, with sustained local vitality. The hero reflects on his 'aboriginal family'—'Harriet Ray, 5

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sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her'; 'hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of signposts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude'. Instead of the downward drift characteristic of The House of Mirth we are initiated into the triumphant social and material progress of Undine Spragg, type of the new as Lily Bart was of the superseded. Thanks to an inborn lack of either moral sense or introspective qualms Undine hauls herself to the top of the ladder, trampling husbands, family decencies and social codes underfoot, perpetually violating in all unconsciousness even her own moral professions. Yet Undine is not a monster. She is felt to be less of one than Rosamund Vincy, George Eliot's masterpiece on the same pattern, and there is a stimulus to be derived from the display of her tactics. The pattern of this novel lends itself to a kind of irony congenial to Mrs Wharton—the latent irony that is to be discovered in certain kinds of situation: the clash between civilized and primitive mceurs, between pretence and actuality, intention and achievement. Her novels are rich in social comedy, displayed with something like Jane Austen's enjoyment, though the victory does not, as in the latter's works, go to the finer spirits. The next novel in this line is Twilight Sleep (1927), which displays the chaos that followed on the establishment of a society based on money without any kind of traditions. It is inferior to the earlier work in its tendency to come down on the side of the farcical in the study of Pauline Manford, whose optimistic progress through life is symbolized in the title. ' " O f course there ought to be no Pain. . .nothing but Beauty... It ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the world to have a baby," Mrs Manford declared, in that bright efficient voice which made loveliness and poetry sound like the attributes of an advanced industrialism, and babies something to be turned out in series like Fords.' Nevertheless, it compares favourably with Huxley's and other novels treating of the same kind of life. Pauline, whose millions were made in the Middle West from the manufacture of motors, appears intended to embody the crude virtues of the invaders of pioneer stock for, with all her innocence of culture and her belief in activity for its own sake and her muddled passion for universal spiritual progress—in spite of this, she is seen to have a respectable aspect too. For opposed to her is the next generation, represented by her daughter-in-law and her social group, whose insolent irresponsibility and empty vice set off whatever it was worth admiring (some moral positive or intuitive decency?) that at least kept the family from going to pieces—that Edith Wharton felt even a Pauline Manford retained but was then (in the 'twenties) melting away under her eyes: 130

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the last stage of the social disintgration she had analysed and chronicled and turned into art. She had lived, she felt, to see disappear 'the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners \ This sequence leads up to the fiction of Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Kay Boyle, among others, and without it their writings cannot be understood by the English reader. This school depicts (Faulkner and Kay Boyle with approval) a kind of life, without roots or responsibilities, where value is attributed only to drunkenness and allied states of excess. This phase of American culture is conveniently illustrated by the career of the late Harry Crosby. Mrs Wharton's autobiography contains a first-hand account of the earlier half of this cultural disintegration. Read in sequence, after The Education of Henry Adams and Henry James's A Small Boy and Others, and before Malcolm Cowley's Exile s Return, it provides the English student with part of this indispensable background to American literature—the cultural history of literary America which, if Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England had been executed by an able critic, would now be complete to date in five volumes. Later on she attempted to supplement her sequence by historical studies—The Age of Innocence (1920) and Old New York (1924)—of the static society of her grandparents' days. But the historical novel necessarily bears about the same relation to art as the waxwork, and in any case her talents found congenial only the contemporary and the changing. Here she has to reproduce 'the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood'". Nevertheless, there are good things in both books. One remembers the analysis of that terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything. His own exclamation: 'Women should be free—as free as we are,' struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent.' Nice' women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable convention that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs, as when... The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of 131

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nothing to be on her guard against... But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and deferences of an instinctive guile. After this sequence she ceased to write novels worthy of herself. Partly she was growing old, partly, as she wrote in her memoirs, she should have ceased to write because 'the world she had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914'. But her work is by no means so limited as this may have suggested, even though suggestions have been made that she turned Henry James's early work from a sport to the beginning of a tradition, that she was the nearest thing to an American Jane Austen, and the archetype of a Galsworthy. As far back as 1907 she had shown, in The Fruit of the Tree, her recognition of the general social problem and her refusal to limit her subject-matter to the moneyed or educated strata of Americans. Heaven knows where she got her knowledge of milltowns, but here, though the novel is uncertain in intention and now only readable in patches, she revealed the split between the capitalist ruling class and the oppressed mill-hands, the worthlessness of the lives of the one and the misery of the lives of the other. Nor do we know how she acquired the material for that moving study of the sufferings of the respectable poor, the short story Bunner Sisters. Mrs Wharton's presentation of the poor (of New York in the horse-car period in this story, of the hill-farm folk in Ethan Frome (1911), and of the New England rustics in Summer (1917)) is like George Eliot's in its sympathy and its freedom from sentimental evasions, but without the latter's large nobility that throws a softening light on all wretchedness. She is prone to end on a note of suspension in fierce irony that was not included in George Eliot's make-up. Mrs Wharton, with her unmannered style and impersonal presentation, solved the problem of tone by ignoring the reader altogether. These three nouvelles might well be issued in England in one volume, everyone interested in literature ought to read them at least once—they are works of art, and historically they have some importance. She was the first to outrage the accepted pretence of seeing the New England countryside idyllically. Hers was informed realism. * For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett. In those days the snow-bound villages of Western Massachusetts were still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest and slow mental and moral 132

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starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden housefronts. Ethan Frome was written after I had spent ten years in the hill-region where the scene is laid, during which years I had come to know well the aspect, dialect and mental and moral attitude of the hill-people.' In consequence Summer•, and the inferior but betterknown Ethan Frome, stand, along with the Scottish specimen, The House with the Green Shutters, in the Wuthering Heights category. Mrs Wharton's interest in the contempoary social scene, then, was deep and wide as well as acute and witty. Silas Marner is rightly considered a classic of our language, but except for the accidental advantage of having a more attractive social picture to reproduce—a mellower setting, less ungracious mceurs, a more comely dialect—it seems to me inferior to Summer. The village of North Dormer, ' abandoned of men, left apart by all the forces that link life to life in modern communities', where only those remain who can't get away or who have drifted back wrecked, completes Mrs Wharton's social survey. Outside North Dormer is the Mountain, the home of a colony of squatters, bad characters and outlaws, who represent the limits of degradation to which society can sink—they have neither material civilization nor moral tradition. Mrs Wharton declared that they were drawn in every detail from life. She was bold enough to seize on the Mountain for an unforgettable symbol that few novelists would have cared or dared to touch (it was received, she recorded, * with indignant denial by reviewers and readers'). And the understanding shown in these three stories of the workings of uneducated, rustic and similar inarticulate kinds of minds is more convincing than George Eliot's, even as hers is more plausible than Hardy's, both these last having a suspicious tendency to humorous effects and George Eliot besides being never quite free from a shade of superiority in her attitude to intellectual inferiors. Edith Wharton's value seems to me, therefore, not merely, as Mr Edmund Wilson said in a recent article ('Justice to Edith Wharton,' The New Republic, 29 June 1938) that she wrote 'in a period (190517) when there were few American writers worth reading'. I am convinced that anyone interested in the cultural basis of society, and anyone sensitive to quality in the novel, will find this selection of her writings I have made of permanent worth and unique in character. The final question then is, what order of novelist is she?—i.e., not how permanent but how good? She was, until her decay, a toughminded, robust artist, not the shrinking minor writer or the ladylike talent. It is characteristic that she should refer to 'that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast' of authors, and equally so that she should have considered the unencouraging atmosphere 133

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(indifference to her literary success and disapproval of her choosing to write) of her family and social circle, and the adverse reviews she received from outside, stimulating to talent, just as she accepted the severest professional criticism as valuable. This, she said, was better for fostering literary ability than * premature flattery and local celebrity' and having one's path smoothed; one contrasts this with Mrs Woolf's claims for the creative temperament. She was a born artist; of the work of her prime she could justly say, * My last page is latent in my first.' Of how many novels in the English language before hers can that be said? She had the advantage of being a solidly educated lady frequenting the most cultivated society of England and France. As an artist she had Henry James behind her work, whereas Sinclair Lewis, when he later attempted similarly to epitomize his environment in fiction, had only H. G. Wells behind his. She was remarkably intelligent; it is easy as well as more popular to be wise after the event (like Sinclair Lewis) but it takes a kind of genius to see your culture from the outside, to diagnose what is happening and plot its curves contemporaneously, as she did. Jane Austen never got outside (of course she could never have imagined doing so): her social criticism is all from the inside and remains indoors without so much as a glance out of the window. It is not only that in Jane Austen social forces never come up for comment or that she accepts the theory of the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate, but that she can mention the enclosure of the commons as the natural subject of conversation for the gentlemen at dinner—just that and no more. Yet there can be no question that Jane Austen was a great novelist while Edith Wharton's greatest admirer would not claim that title for her. What makes a great novelist? Apparently not intelligence or scope or a highly developed technique, though, other things being equal, they often give an advantage. But what, then, are the other things? Again, compare Edith Wharton with George Eliot. George Eliot was a simple-minded woman except where great sensitiveness of feeling gave her a subtle insight—even her learning was deployed with solemn simplicity. Undeniably Mrs Wharton had a more flexible mind, she was both socially and morally more experienced than George Eliot and therefore better able to enter into uncongenial states of feeling and to depict as an artist instead of a preacher distasteful kinds of behaviour. Her Undine Spragg is better sustained and handled than the other's Rosamund Vincy. Undine's sphere of action is dazzling and she always has a fresh surprise for us up her sleeve in the way of moral obtuseness; it was cleverer to make Undine end up at the top of the tree with her only disappointment that her last husband couldn't get made Ambassador (on account of having a divorced wife) than to

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involve herself in disasters like Rosamund: the manifold irony of worldly success is more profitable than any simple moral lesson and artistically how much richer! Mrs Wharton writes better than George Eliot, who, besides lacking grace, rarely achieves the economy of language that Mrs Wharton commands habitually. Her technique is absolutely right and from the works I have instanced it would be difficult to alter or omit without harm, for like Henry James she was the type of conscious artist writing to satisfy only her own inflexible literary conscience. Now George Eliot in general moves like a carthorse and too often takes the longest way round. But again it is George Eliot who is the great novelist. I think it eventually becomes a question of what the novelist has to offer us, either directly or by implication, in the way of positives. In Bunner Sisters, Summer, and some other places Mrs Wharton rests upon the simple goodness of the decent poor, as indeed George Eliot and Wordsworth both do in part, that is, the most widespread common factor of moral worth. But beyond that Mrs Wharton has only negatives, her values emerging, I suppose, as something other than what she exposes as worthless. This is not very nourishing, and it is on similar grounds that Flaubert, so long admired as the ideal artist of the novel, has begun to lose esteem. It seems to be the fault of the disintegrating and spiritually impoverished society she analyses. Her value is that she does analyse and is not content to reflect. We may contrast Jane Austen, who does not even analyse, but, having the good fortune to have been born into a flourishing culture, can take for granted its foundations and accept its standards, working within them on a basis of internal relations entirely. The common code of her society is a valuable one and she benefits from it as an artist. Mr Knightley's speech to Emma, reproving her for snubbing Miss Bates, is a useful instance: manners there are seen to be based on moral values. Mrs Wharton's worthy people are all primitives or archaic survivals. This inability to find any significance in the society that she spent her prime in, or ability to find * significance only through what its frivolity destroys', explains the absence of poetry in her disposition and of many kinds of valuable experience in her books. She has none of that natural piety, that richness of feeling and sense of a moral order, of experience as a process of growth, in which George Eliot's local criticisms are embedded and which give the latter her large stature. Between her conviction that the new society she grew up into was vicious and insecurely based on an ill-used working class, and her conviction that her inherited mode of living represented a dead end, she could find no foundation to build on. We may see where her real strength lay in the critical phrases she uses—' Her moral muscles had 135

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become atrophied' ('by buying off suffering with money, or denying its existence with words'); 'the superficial contradictions and accommodations of a conscience grown elastic from too much use'—and in the short story ' Autres T e m p s . . . ' a study of the change in moral codes she had witnessed since her youth. Here the divorced mother, who had for many years hidden her disgrace in Florence, returns to America to succour, as she thinks, her divorced and newly remarried daughter. At first, finding the absence of any prejudice against divorce in the new America, she is exalted, then she feels in her bewilderment, ' " I didn't take up much room before, but now where is there a corner for me? Where indeed in this crowded, topsy-turvey world, with its headlong changes and helter-skelter readjustments, its new tolerances and indifferences and accommodations, was there room for a character fashioned by slower sterner processes and a life broken under their inexorable pressure? " ' And, finally, depressed by what she feels to be the lack of any kind of moral taste, she loses her illusions about the real benefits of such a change, she finds it to be merely a change in social fashions and not a revolution bringing genuine enlightenment based on good feeling. She explains to an old friend:'" Traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.. .We're shut up in a little tight round of habit and association, just as we're shut up in this room. . .We're all imprisoned, of course—all of us middling people, who don't carry freedom in our brains. But we've accommodated ourselves to our different cells, and if we're moved suddenly into new ones we're likely to find a stone wall where we thought there was air, and to knock ourselves senseless against it."' She chooses to return to Florence, 'moving again among the grim edges of reality'. Mrs Wharton, if unfortunate in her environment, had a strength of character that made her superior to it. She was a remarkable novelist, if not a large-sized one, and while there are few great novelists there are not even so many remarkable ones that we can afford to let her be overlooked.

4 WORDSWORTH A PRELIMINARY SURVEY JAMES SMITH (1938)

I Wordsworth's poetry is not only an extensive, it is a difficult country; and therefore, before attempting to cross it, I have thought it worth while to summarize what I imagine I know about it. Much of this may be legend, and I put it forward without any confidence that it is anything more; but a summary of legend is useful if, by internal confusion or apparent improbability, it brings home the amount of labour necessary to attain the truth. II And, first, of the traps or pitfalls with which Wordsworth's poetry abounds. One of these is, I think, its mere amount, by which we should not allow ourselves to be unduly impressed. This may seem a slight temptation, but I am not sure that it is easy to avoid. Staying-power is a comparatively rare thing, and even the appearance of it moves at times to admiration. With Wordsworth it is an important question, how much of it is mere appearance; and an answer can be given only after going through a poem line by line, enquiring into the significance of each. It is not sufficient to listen for the general effect of a passage, which may be a sonorous cadence with a buzzing of meaning in the background. Wordsworth was skilled in sounding cadences, and with him as with any other poet meaning should be either more or less than a buzz. From the Prelude and the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads it is I think at least probable that he looked on poetry as a sort of natural product, like fruit and flowers; brought into being by nature rather than by man, or by man only as nature works in him. Thus from one point of view he might be said to shift responsibility for composition from his own shoulders on to nature; from another, to arrogate to himself the privilege of unrestrained fertility. As nature a hundred daisies for a single oak, so he throws up a hundred insignificant verses for one of substance. But towards them all, as towards the daisies and the oak, he 137

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feels the sort of reverence due to the manifestations of a higher power. He receives them into his collected works, and arranges them in a cunning order to ensure that all shall be read; and in that way he at least dissuades, if he does not intimidate, his critic from the task of discrimination. Ill Secondly, we must take care not to be dazzled by his rhetorical skill—'rhetorical' is a word with a number of senses, but I use it, I believe, in the best. It would be difficult to exaggerate this skill in Wordsworth, and the danger which results from it. Nature, he seems to have thought, produces only the bare essence of poetry, to which man must fit an outer garment of words and metre; therefore a poet, if he would not be mute, must set himself to acquire the knack of metre, as he would any other accomplishment. Wordsworth laboured early and long for this end. 'I have bestowed great care upon my style', he said, 'and yield to none in the love of my art.' From his use of the terms elsewhere, it seems probable that by 'art' and 'style' he means the power simultaneously to observe the rules for lucid and grammatical English, and for any verse-form in which he happened to be working. He practised and attained proficiency in a great many: in the sonnet, and in the forms of Spenser, Milton, Pope, Hamilton, Burns and Scott. The sort of merit which he thus brought within his reach, and which it is important to recognize and name lest, remarkable as it is, it be mistaken for something yet more remarkable, is fairly clearly illustrated by his poem Yew Trees. This is familiar, if for no other reason, for being often quoted as an example of the grand style outside Milton. It may be so; but I do not think we can call it anything more than an exercise in Miltonics. . . . those fraternal four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks!—and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved,— Nor uninformed with Phantasy... A brilliant exercise, but only brilliant. On re-reading I am sometimes halted by the line in which Time the Shadow, Death the Skeleton and the rest are said to 'meet at noontide'; there seems promise here of a complication of ideas; but if there is, it is soon untied. The ghostly company meet only for the unexpected purpose of united worship, or for the incongruous one of listening to the flood on Glaramara. The 138

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yew-trees themselves lack depth, and might as well be figures in tapestry. Wordsworth, I should say, is not much interested in his images or his ideas, except as they serve to support certain rhythms; it is these which claim the greater part of his attention, and which, as with a sterile art, he exploits for their own sake. Mastery over metre qualifies him to be a conversational poet—the sort of poet, that is, who flourished in a number of countries during the Renaissance, and in England in the early eighteenth century. At these places and periods a firm tradition of poetic performance permitted the treatment of an unusually wide variety of subjects at least as efficiently in verse as in prose, and often with the urgency and vividness of verse. A number of passages in The Prelude, like the description of his dame at Hawkshead or of the sights of London, reach a high level of excellence in this way. One of them, on the Terror, suggests that he might have maintained himself fairly consistently at the highest level, if he had been secure of an audience; for poetry of this kind, to persist, depends on a society whose members continually stimulate and restrain. But the audience was lacking, and for various reasons he gradually withdrew into a more and more remote exile. In consequence, some of his later verse, which has been praised for its technical perfection, is no more than scholarly; it is directed, that is, at a distant, almost a disembodied audience. And some of the rest suffers from a lack of focus, as though it were directed at two widely differing audiences at once. This is the fault of the didactic part of The Prelude, where Wordsworth seems unable to convince himself that what he has to say is of itself such as to interest the reader. Therefore, by means of orotundity and ornament he seeks to provide an elegant diversion, to combine, as it were, the roles of Lucretius and of Dyer in The Fleece. The result is a compromise which I find intensely irritating, though it has been praised. But The Prelude, because of a multitude of ingredients, deserves more than one paper to itself. IV A third kind of trap can be described in Wordsworth's own words. Readers of 'moral and religious inclinations,' he says, 'attaching so much importance to the truths which interest them.. .are prone to overrate the Authors by whom those truths are expressed and enforced. They come prepared to impart so much passion to the Poet's language that they remain unconscious how little, in fact, they receive from it.' The vocabulary is that of intellectualism; but what it expresses might serve as the basis for a distinction between more and less valuable responses to poetry. 139

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Wordsworth often wrote, not only about joy in widest commonality spread, but about common joys. His subjects in themselves, and apart from any treatment he may give, are such as to evoke memories or aspirations in which it is pleasant, if not always profitable or proper, to indulge. If the opportunity for indulgence were offered alone, it might be immediately rejected; but its nature is masked—and this is the gravest danger; perhaps the last two kinds of traps, which I have taken separately, should be considered together—its nature is masked by the accompanying rhetoric. It is easy to be affected by the subject and by the style or metre of one of Wordsworth's poems, as by two separate things: the one appearing to dignify the other, because of their accidental association; but neither modifying the other—neither the metre imposing itself upon and ordering the subject, nor the subject filling out the cavities of the metre. And at the same time it is easy to assume that the poem as a whole is effective when the truth may be that as an integrated whole the poem does not exist. The point is a difficult and, I think, an important one, which will justify one or two illustrations. Arnold's selection contains a number of not very striking poems; but the one of least merit is possibly that which begins: Pansies, lilies, kingcups, daisies, Let them live upon their praises; Long as there's a sun that sets, Primroses will have their glory; Long as there are violets, They will have a place in story: There's a flower that shall be mine, 'Tis the little Celandine. The lilt, the tone, is that of a music-hall ditty; it is difficult to imagine how anyone with an ear sensitive to rhythm, with a feeling for more than the surfaces of words can have written it. As Wordsworth had both, the explanation may be the abdication of responsibility to which I have already referrred. But how has the poem come to be approved? For it figures in other anthologies besides Arnold's—for example, in the Oxford Book of Regency Verse. In the first place, the language is clear, the metre gives no occasion for stumbling; it has at least the negative virtues. And, secondly, the subject, or a large part of the subject, is humility, which is a popular quality; it inculcates the popular opinion that to be humble is to be happy, even to be merry; and finally, it harmonizes with the absentee or vacation cult of nature which was a force in English society and in English poetry from the middle of last century onwards. There was nothing that, in his better moments, 140

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Wordsworth despised more than he did this cult; there was nothing about which he wrote more lamely—or rather, when he can be taken to be writing about it, he is always at his lamest. Yet his choice of subjects is such, and his unfailing rhetorical skill, that he has imposed himself upon the cult, and figured as its canonized poet. In a similar way he has been the canonized poet of English and of Anglican institutions; and as recently as 1915, with the publication of Professor Dicey's Statesmanship of Wordsworth, he was hailed with renewed conviction as the poet of patriotism. His sentiments on that topic are of course unexceptionable; and he dresses them out in a language which the percipient can take to be that of inner compulsion, of inspiration. Yet some of these patriotic effusions, as Mr Leavis has said, are no more than claptrap; the best probably should not rank as high as what I have called his conversational successes. It seems that patriotism, like religion, is not a safe theme for poetry; and that, for the reason quoted from Wordsworth, it is at least as difficult to read as to compose. The isolated appeal of the subject in passages like the above is no doubt too obvious for it nowadays to form a trap. But it was on account of their obviousness I chose them; it seemed to me they might help in a further discussion, of which the conclusion is not obvious at all. To what extent are we justified in acknowledging Wordsworth as a mystical poet, as is often done? Are we being deceived somewhat in the manner described—that is, are we responding to the subject by itself, and to certain tricks of style by themselves, rather than to a poem in which both are in alliance and unison? By 'mystical poet* I do not mean one who has intense experiences on the occasion of natural phenomena, nor one who is convinced of the importance of spirit in the life of man and in the affairs of this world. This is perhaps not an unusual meaning for the term, but I employ it in a narrower and, I hope, more helpful sense. I mean by it a poet who has the sort of experience Wordsworth claims in one or two passages of The Prelude—that of a communion or a community with something outside and above the world, with a divine soul or with the highest truth. The possibility that in these passages the subject may make an isolated appeal arises from the flattering nature of the belief that such communion is possible to a fellow-man; and from certain comfortable consequences which seem to follow. Wordsworth may play upon these rather than convey the experience upon which, if the belief is true, it must ultimately be based. I take as an example the passage in which he seeks to tell what happened to him when, writing an account of his experiences, he realized that once he had crossed the Alps. 141

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And now recovering, to my soul I say I recognize thy glory; in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shown to us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our nature and our home Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort and expectation and desire, And something evermore about to be. Let me first note about this passage the ample warrant it provides for all that has been said about Wordsworth's skill in rhetoric. Like Milton, he knows how to draw out the sense variously from verse to verse; or, as he put it to Klopstock, to secure 'an apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs'. Secondly, the occasion seems not unsuitable for the display of such skill: an attempt, it seems, is to be made to communicate something by its nature difficult, if not incapable, of communication, upon which therefore only a number of sallies can be made. If each is doomed to be ineffectual, all of them together, and the variety of their points of departure and return, may be not wholly without effect. 'Strength of usurpation' and 'visitings of awful promise' corroborate each other; and if it is not clear exactly how, inevitable lack of clarity is part of what is to be conveyed. The figure of an invisible world made visible by a flash of light which thereby extinguishes itself, as though by a supreme effort, recommends for acceptance a difficulty for which, even when accepted, there can be no hope of solution. And as the passage goes on, a solution begins to appear less and less necessary: the metre becomes more regular, the difficulty is not at all impossible, it is even exhilarating to live with. The line' With hope it is, hope that can never die' encourages to aspiration; 'Effort and expectation and desire' suggests an unremitting eagerness in the soul. The last line, 'And something evermore about to be', is the most regular of all. The trouble is that it is too regular—too regular to be smooth. There is no peace about it, but a merciless beat; and with infinitude there should surely be peace. When we have reached this line the suspicion arises, I think, that Wordsworth is not in fact where a mystic should be—with infinitude, outside or above the world; but, rather, well within it. And, if so, some of the preceding lines need to be reconsidered, and our opinion on them to be revised. Aspiration can be unreservedly welcome only where, as with infinitude, there is certainty 142

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that it will be fulfilled; elsewhere 'hope that can never die' is but a euphemism for hope that has never lived. And elsewhere than with infinitude effort and expectation and desire are grim companions: that eagerness is unremitting is no guarantee that, in this world, it will not be baffled. If we turn our attention from the sound to the sense of the last line we see it to have the minimum of meaning: there is nothing in the future to which it will not apply. So far as we can talk of a future in eternity it is of a piece with the present and prophecy cannot arouse mistrust; but to a creature in time the mere idea of futurity cannot bring consolation, and confidence based upon it and nothing more is a poor thing. Loudly to proclaim such a confidence is a still poorer thing. If we read over the passage with these and similar reflections in mind we discover I think that the rhetoric is not only skilful, it is too obviously skilful: it has no natural movement which, if we admire, we admire as concrete in the substance which moves; but rather a mechanical, to admire which we must abstract and even oppose it to the substance. ' How subtle the play of the levers!' we say, and all the time are thinking of the unexpectedness of such subtlety in dead matter. The poem is not alive, but an extremely cleverly constructed simulacrum; a robot put together, no doubt, for high purposes; but still not a poem. It is sometimes said that, to judge with any security of a mystical verse, one should be a mystic oneself. That would, however, reduce the number of judges to such an extent that it is hardly likely to be true. It may be suggested that the questions whether Wordsworth succeeded in conveying a mystical experience, and whether he had it, are two different questions, the one falling under biography, the other under criticism; and that the answers to them are not necessarily identical. Not that biography is irrelevant to criticism, to which it can give valuable if extra-technical aid; and the biographical question, it is true, might profitably be raised here. But it would require much time and space: to analyse (among other things) the biographical element in The Prelude, to compare it with the similar element in Tintern (from which it seems to differ in not unimportant ways; as though Wordsworth altered his views about his own experiences as he grew older), and, finally, to compare that biography, according to whatever view prove more acceptable, with the history of a mystic or mystics who are fairly widely acknowledged to be such. In default of such aid, it is perhaps advisable to consider somewhat closely a second passage. I will choose the lines about the Simplon Pass, as the most difficult ones I know to criticize satisfactorily. If, as is only too likely, I cannot make clear my point about them and their J

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kind, perhaps I can at least make the difficulty clear; and that is a sufficiently important matter. The lines are as follows: . . . the brook and road Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds, and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same race, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first and last, and midst, and without end. I had better say at once, to prevent misunderstanding as far as I am able, that I think the greater part of this passage is very impressive indeed. I think it so impressive that I am disappointed perhaps more than I should be with the rest; but this, I think, distracts and divides the attention although it is short. It may also influence unfavourably the style of the whole. In these lines Wordsworth, it seems to me, is trying to do not one thing but two; or rather, having done one thing and done it well, he goes on to another which perhaps by its nature cannot be so well done. Down to the last three lines he is concerned to express a feeling of surprise, almost vexation: like the thwarting winds he is bewildered and forlorn; while the woods, the waterfalls and the rocks about him threaten ruin and decay, they seem fixed for ever. They threaten destruction to one another, and even to the spectator—there are sick sights and giddy prospects—nevertheless there is and there will be no annihilation, only persistence. He finds escape from this bewilderment by, so to speak, living into the phenomena by which it is caused: in all of them he finds the working of a * single mind', with which he can identify himself, or of which he can become a part. And then he sees that the stresses which they exert upon one another and upon 144

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himself, all of which he experiences in himself, serve only for their mutual support. This notion of immobility resulting where action and change might be expected occurs elsewhere in Wordsworth's best poetry, of some of which it is almost a mark; but in such work he rests in the notion as the only satisfaction which the circumstances can afford. Here, however, he takes a step further, and seeks a satisfaction which, so far from springing from the circumstances, seems only to discount them. The bewilderment yields to or is transformed into a revelation, an apocalypse, and the ground for it is removed by degrading the woods, the waterfalls and the rocks from being themselves eternal into types and symbols of eternity. And this eternity, rather than charged with a greater significance than what are said to be its symbols, seems empty of everything: it is dismissed in flat pentameter, the only content of which is the highest common factor of the many associations hanging about a scrap from the liturgy. In other words Wordsworth (I think) finally adopts an answer which has no particular relevance to, and is therefore an escape from, his immediate problem; which, as it might answer any problem, answers none, and is provided for him rather by talk about mysticism than by mysticism itself— by religiosity rather than religion: at least by a deadening, not a vivifying force. Perhaps I exaggerate: but I think it is a danger that these last few lines, connected with their predecessors by the sweep of the metre, and offering the reader an alternative against which, in the context, he is least on his guard, may hinder him from entering into the full and difficult meaning of that context; and they may do so even when the alternative is rejected. How Wordsworth came to write in this mixed and broken way, if, as I think, he did do so, is obviously a serious problem; it would almost seem that acute perception was something of which he had learnt to be afraid. Elsewhere there are traces of a similar fear; of which, of course, it would be a gross impertinence to speak in any tone of censure, not of regret. Perhaps also the phenomenon may be not unconnected with what has already been described as an abdication of responsibility in composition. V From a summary account of what may be the traps—the marshy lowlands, the hidden gulfs—in Wordsworth's poetry, I pass to an account which must be yet more summary of what seem to be its highlands. From a distance it is no less possible to be mistaken about these than about the former; and as they are of wider significance, I speak with greater diffidence. 145

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It is, I think, a useful question to ask how Wordsworth first came to believe that he was a poet; a man, that is, in whom nature works so as to produce poetry. As he thought that nature, instead of repeating herself, provides for a development of the spirit or a gradual revelation of truth, it must have been because he felt he had something new within him. Part of it was a peculiar sensibility to nature, or a novel intimacy with her and her manifestations. When he was fourteen, he says, he became conscious ' of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by poets of any age and country', and resolved 'to supply in some degree the deficiency'. But he was more than an observer: the other childhood experience must be remembered, that he sometimes felt himself slipping into 'an abyss of idealism'. He was part of what he saw, or what he saw was part of him. And as early as the Descriptive Sketches he speaks of 'abandoning the cold rules of painting' to consult both 'nature and his feelings'. From that date onwards he gives no mere lists of natural appearances, but groupings of them as they served to prompt a dominant emotion. As long as what he calls the idealism persisted, or whenever it reasserted itself, this emotion was some degree of joy; for there was nothing other than himself by which he might be thwarted. It marks various well-known passages in The Prelude: The sea was laughing at a distance; all The solid mountains were as bright as clouds, Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds, Was all the sweetness of a common dawn, Dews, vapours and the melody of birds, And labourers going forth into the fields. It is at its most exuberant in the spring poems of the Lyrical Ballads: Love, now a universal birth From heart to heart is stealing, From earth to man, from man to earth; —It is the hour of feeling. One moment now may give us more Than years of toiling reason: Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season. But exaggerations of this kind are themselves a criticism of the mood: as by its nature it is fleeting, it can be maintained for any length of time only by self-deception, to which one means is a loud boasting. 146

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Already in his childhood Wordsworth had made such a criticism: 'idealism' he had recognized as an 'abyss', and to save himself had put out his hand. In doing so he was not repeating the Johnsonian experiment: his intention was not to refute a metaphysic, but to repeat a type of experience, that of being resisted, which for a time he had forgotten. Resistance, thwarting, comes from things outside himself, other than himself: and the second new thing about his poetry is, I think, its preoccupation with other things as other. In various ways they threaten his equanimity, disturb his peace. In his early years there seems to have been a rapid oscillation between the sense of joyous union and one of divorce from the external world; the latter giving rise to unhappiness, and at times to fear. A mountain pursued him 'with measured motion, like a living thing'; and 'after he had seen that spectacle'—these are his words: . . . for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes Of hourly objects... But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through the mind By day and were a trouble to my dreams. From time to time he returns to this notion of opposition, of enmity— not only between himself, but between other people and the external world; and at times, as in the Simplon Pass, between the external occupants of the world. But it does not long remain the centre of his interest. Conceived of as enemies, other things are in a measure like himself, and in that measure reconciliation with them might be possible; it is in the measure in which they are unlike himself, in which they are other, that the fascination they exert is unescapable. Are they real? he seems compelled to ask. They are so different, that there is no quality, however abstract, he might split off from himself —not even the bare quality of being—in which they might partake. Either they exist exactly as he does, and are himself—but that is impossible; or they do not exist at all—but they obviously do. And as though to convince himself of the latter fact in a subtler manner than by clutching at a wall, he considers repeatedly in his verse the sort of realities which maintain themselves under apparently impossible conditions. . . . the lifeless arch of stones in air Suspended, the cerulean firmament 147

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And what it is; the river that flows on Perpetually, whence comes it, whither tends, Going and never gone; the fish that moves And lives as in an element of death. A rainbow he saw near Coniston, 'the substance thin as dreams', nevertheless stood unmoved through the uproar of a storm, Sustained itself through many minutes' space, As if it were pinned down by adamant. And reflections in water occupy his attention either because of the instability of the element on which they are traced—like that of Peele Castle, which * trembled, but it never passed away'; or because of their apparent identity with the object reflected, from which, nevertheless, they are other. Mr de Selincourt quotes an early version of some lines in the Excursion: Once coming to a bridge that overlooked A mountain torrent, where it was becalmed By a flat meadow, at a glance I saw A twofold image; on the grassy bank A snow-white ram, and in the peaceful flood Another and the same; most beautiful The breathing creature; nor less beautiful Beneath him, was his shadowy counterpart: Each had his glowing mountains, each his sky, And each seemed centre of his own fair world. A stray temptation seized me to dissolve The vision—but I could not. He had picked up a pebble, but dropped it unthrown. The passage has many defects, but I quote it for one or two phrases—'another and the same', 'each had his glowing mountains',—and for the conclusion. This suggests that the habit of contemplating things which exist when and in a way in which existence seems impossible has led to a respect for them which is almost superstitious. When other things are fleeting they are capable of being destroyed; but that they are fleeting is a vindication of their reality as other, and this forbids destruction like a desecration. Reflections in water retain form and colour; and, carrying analysis as far as it can go, Wordsworth seeks to know what they have which makes them to be other than their objects. What are the principles which render possible a multiplicity of things? which separate him from the external world, as objects in the external world are separated from one another? The ultimate answer he gives is time and place, deration and extension: it is because the reflection of the ram is else148

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where than the ram itself that, apparently identical in all other respects, it is yet obviously different from the ram. And it is upon duration and extension, which, highly abstract as they are, yet seem the soil and sap of other reality, that the superstitious respect just noted finally bears. However confused his account of the experience when he realized that he had crossed the Alps, the experience was of an impressive kind; and, stripping the account of its reference to eternal destiny, we see the experience to have consisted merely in the realization that, whereas he had been on one side of the Alps, he was now on the other. Or we might say that, as he does not contrast the two sides in respect of any of their qualities—their orientation, their contour or their covering— he realized there is diversity of place. It is this, and this alone, that * wrapt him in a cloud'. That a mountain barrier rose between two particular places—that they were the sides of a mountain—was not his concern, for there rose between them another barrier which, if more ideal, is more impassable. It was erected by the very notion of space, of which the parts are by definition external one to another; each, for the rest, an other. The experience is perhaps more easily discerned behind a second passage from The Prelude, which describes an entry into London. At the time Wordsworth was not occupied by any ideas of the capital as a storehouse of tradition or magnificence, and his immediate surroundings did not invite attention—there were * vulgar men' about him, and 'mean shapes on every side'. His senses and his memory were unheeded or asleep. But he was awake to the notion of the boundary, the imaginary line which sets up place against place, and by crossing which, from having been without London, he would find himself within. The very moment that I seem'd to know The threshold now is overpass'd. . . A weight of Ages did at once descend Upon my heart. By a sort of intellectual vision he saw himself as having been there and now being here, and this was sufficient to move him deeply. Duration is marked and made manifest by events; and there are passages in some of Wordsworth's poems which are perhaps only too well known, in which the sole purpose seems to be to record that something, no matter what, has happened. Throughout a number of stanzas the metre is supported by little more than expletives, repetitions and tautologies; our attention is claimed, it seems, only that it may be cheated of an object—for the stanzas contain neither narration nor description, and very little reflection. The reader is exacerbated or wearied, though Wordsworth, presumably, is full of excitement: so 149

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that when something finally happens, if only the prevarication of a child or an old man's tears, it is hailed with relief. Passages of this kind are little more than biographical or psychological curiosities: in them, Wordsworth is so fully occupied with abstractions that he forgets the concrete business of living. But when he returns he is the better qualified to face its problems, having a keener eye for their elements. The external world, for example, he sees quite clearly is not to be subdued or placated like an enemy; in so far as it is external, it is there while we are here, then while we are now: it is irreducibly other than ourselves, so that to stand in any relation to it, to affect it, even to be aware of it, seems to imply a contradiction. If we wish to give any account of it, we can employ only adjectives which are the opposites of those which we apply to ourselves: if we are active then it is immobile; if we are alive then it is dead, as points in space are dead. Yet it is in such a world that he finds himself, and with which he must come to terms, on pain of a sense of desertion blanker than that to which he was first summoned by the pursuing mountain. His solution seems to be something like the following. He imagines —but imagine is a weak word; he creates and it is part of his own experience—a kind of being in which both the external world and himself can share. It combines the characters of both: internally it is active and striving, as he is, but looked at from outside it is immobile like the world. While for himself, that is, he renounces the possibility of action upon other things, he need not on that account feel cut off from them. They and he are united by the common possession of a hidden activity, in the knowledge of which he can feel, while among them, at home and at peace. If his spirit is sealed, so is that of the dead Lucy, so are rocks and stones and trees; and with dead things he has a sort of sympathy. The universe as thus apprehended has no very remote resemblance to the Simplon Pass: if it cannot quite properly be spoken of as a balance of stresses, it yet contains a number of stresses which, though they are active, produce no alteration. At these moments of apprehension Wordsworth describes himself as 'seeing into the life of things' or, elsewhere, as seeing 'the very pulse of the machine'. The word 'machine' is important, for it gives that sense of change within stability which I am trying to suggest. And the pulse is conveyed in verses, some of which are among the best he wrote, which describe ambiguous creatures like the horse that stood Alone upon a little breast of ground With a clear silver moonlight sky behind. With one leg from the ground the creature stood Insensible and still—breath, motion gone, 150

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Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath; we paused awhile In pleasure of the sight, and left him there With all his functions silently sealed up, Like an amphibious work of Nature's hand, A Borderer dwelling betwixt life and death. The horse has one foot off the ground, and that it is clear he might move is one of the reasons for the pleasure which he gives; the other reason is that he is restrained from moving, or that he restrains himself. Similar to the horse in this way are the solitary beings whom Wordsworth met at night, or in almost permanently lonely places: like the discharged soldier, who remained 'fix'd to his place', 'at his feet His shadow lay, and moved not'. 'I wish'd to see him move,' exclaims Wordsworth, that he might be assured of the reality of the soldier; but when at last the soldier did so I beheld With ill-suppress'd astonishment his tall And ghastly figure moving at my side. Most carefully drawn of them all is the Leech-gatherer, who is compared both to a 'huge stone', and to a 'sea-beast'—that is, he is capable of locomotion, but will not engage upon it. He is Motionless as a cloud... That heareth not the loud winds when they call —he does not hear, not in the sense that he is deaf, but that he will not And moveth all together, if it move at all. I do not know whether Wordsworth was acquainted with the doctrine of the school that all motion is by parts; whether or no, something of the kind has a share in the effect which is intended here. ' The cloud must move all together'—that is, it cannot be imagined to move, for if it did one part would be seen to take precedence of another; and yet it may move, for otherwise it would not have a share in being, in reality. VI So far as I know, Wordsworth was quite new, and has remained unique, in concerning himself in this way with 'being as such': the old phrase is convenient, in spite or because of its habit of bearing now the minimum, now the maximum of meaning. He explored the significance, or examined the experience, of being for other things, and this

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modified the experience of being for himself. It would be a mistake, I think, to see in this any influence of contemporary German thought: there is a difficulty about the dates. Wordsworth was not sympathetic to German thinkers, and the whole course of his dealing with the problem suggests that it was posed for him by what he lived through, rather than by what he read or what he heard in Coleridgean conversation. And as the achievement in this matter was his own, he used it as the starting-point for a new enterprise. The problem of suffering, if he awoke to it later than to that of the external world, came in early manhood to occupy him no less continually. The notion of being at which he arrived seemed to offer promise of a solution. For if suffering arises from thwarted effort, either to affect other things or to avoid being affected by them, it is a consequence of a creature's desire to operate beyond itself. And if this is renounced, as Wordsworth conceived it might and should be, suffering as the occasion of rebellion or complaint will cease. But is it humanly possible to carry renunciation to the point which may be necessary? It is conceivable that other things should close in to such an extent upon a creature that, if he yields to them, any inner activity left is too insignificant to be called human. There are three poems which are perhaps especially important by the answers they return to this question. They are The Leech-gatheret", The Lesser Celandine, and Michael. It will be possible to notice them only briefly. When he comes across the leech-gatherer Wordsworth is a man of moods, and he generalizes from himself to the human race: As high as we have mounted in delight, In our dejection do we sink as low. But the leech-gatherer, like the stone to which he is compared, knows no moods; he has few hopes, and such disappointments as come his way do not disturb him. Though the stock of leeches has dwindled, and they are to be found only by wandering alone about the weary moors, Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may. He preserves a courteous and cheerful demeanour, even ' stately in the main'. Wordsworth marvels there should be 'in that decrepit man so firm a mind'; and contrasting the firmness with his own levity, which is at the mercy of other things, he accepts the implied rebuke. The Lesser Celandine usually closes its petals against the foul weather : But lately, one rough day, this Flower I passed And recognized it, though an altered form, 152

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Now standing forth an offering to the blast, And buffeted at will by rain and storm. I stopped and said with inly-muttered voice, 'It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold: This neither is its courage nor its choice, But necessity in being old. The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew, It cannot help itself in its decay.' Other things have compelled the Celandine to forfeit the last scrap of independence and dignity; therefore it can administer no rebuke—it cannot be admired, but only deplored. Nevertheless, it has had what might be considered its due of glory: if it falls a victim, it is only to the forces of time and senility about which, as nothing escapes them, there seems something equitable. In Michael the shepherd and his family are involved in a similar fate while still in their prime—for the old man is 'strong and hale'—and although they have taken every measure to avoid it. Like the leechgatherer they make few claims on life: Our lot is a hard lot; the sun himself Has scarcely been more diligent than I; they are ' neither gay perhaps, nor cheerful'; and if they have objects and hopes, it is for 'a life of eager industry', for the continued performance of the tasks which their ancestors performed before them. Their only pleasure is ' the pleasure which there is in life itself, that which is necessary to the pulse and implied in the spark of consciousness. They are submissive to the natural course of things, of which their tasks are almost a part; and, had circumstances permitted, it might have been said of them as of their ancestors, that when At length their time was come, they were not loth To give their bodies to the family mould. They seek to preserve a submissiveness even to their abnormal afflictions; and the hopes and fears which these cannot but provoke, if wild, are immediately curbed. Each watches the other for signs of strain: , _«, _, , the Old Man paused, And Isabel sat silent. .. .. .her face brightened. The Old Man was glad. At night Isabel Heard him, how he was troubled in his sleep: And when they rose at morning she could see That all his hopes were gone. 153

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Here it is the ready confidence of the son which redresses the balance: She said to Luke, while they two by themselves Were sitting at the door, ' Thou must not g o . . . For if thou leave thy Father he will die.' The youth made answer with a jocund voice; And Isabel, when she had told her fears, Recovered heart. But Luke, too, has his misgivings; and, when setting on his journey he reaches the public way, he finds it necessary to * put on a bold face'. All is in vain; Luke is driven into exile, and Michael survives hardly as a man but as an animal—by his brute strength. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength is the first thing we are told about him, and almost the last. He is, moreover, a sick animal, able to perform some but not all of his instinctive tasks. When he visited the site of the projected sheepfold, He never lifted up a single stone. The verse of the poem is a delicate thing. It has almost ceased to beat, and seems maintained only by the flutter of tenuous hopes and sickening fears. the unlooked-for claim At the first hearing for a moment took More hope out of his life than he supposed That any old man ever could have lost. Wordsworth, who was so often an imitator, here speaks with his own voice; and the verse is the contribution he makes to prosody. He uses it rarely—elsewhere than in Michael, only, I think, in Margaret and occasionally in The Brothers; but it should be taken as a measure of his work. Against it the verse of the Simplon Pass, though very different in intention, reveals itself as forced and harsh. As I believe I suggested, what is noble in the Simplon Pass is in a measure debased by the immediate context. VII From Michael it appeared that the extinction of suffering is the extinction of humanity. To be sure of this lesson, it had been necessary for Wordsworth to experience suffering in an exquisite form, unadulterated in any way, as, for example, with the satisfaction of playing 154

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either to himself or to an audience. There is no audience in Michael, except shepherds too close to the hero to do anything but 'feel pity in their heart'. I do not know that any other poet has done quite the same thing; I do not think that Wordsworth did it either before or since. It is as though he exposed a nerve which, as it was too sensitive for the impressions it could not but receive, must immediately be deadened. The conclusions of both The Leech-gatherer and The Lesser Celandine suggest that something like this happened. Though both are less intense than Michael, neither maintains such intensity as it possesses to the end: suddenly both run down with a sickening whir—or, to change the metaphor, the music in both poems is broken by a discord. After the discovery of firmness in the leech-gatherer, Wordsworth does not prepare himself for any rigorous self-discipline: he 'laughs himself to scorn': 'God', said I, 'be my help and stay secure; I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!' In this jauntiness there is no relevance to his circumstances. It is as though he had become oblivious of these; as though they were now presented to the deadened nerve: and the jauntiness had opportunity to supervene from a disconnected part of his consciousness. In The Lesser Celandine the break is even more noticeable. It happens in the last line of a stanza: The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew; It cannot help itself in its decay; Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue. And in my spleen, I smiled that it was gray. To be a Prodigal's Favourite—then, worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner—behold our lot! O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed not! The word ' spleen' has a multitude of meanings, one of which might be suitable to the poem; but there is no reason, other than a complete abandonment of seriousness, why Wordsworth should smile. And this would explain the final stanza, which is the sort of platitude with which we dismiss an argument when we have not solved it, and when it has come to weary us; or the copy-book maxim with which we hand over a vexing problem of conduct to chance for its decision. Wordsworth's maxim is not so much irrelevant to his problem as a denial of the conditions which it presupposes. The Celandine cannot help itself in its decay'—* if only it could!' observes the final stanza. 155

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But, as though foreseeing the outcome of the solution attempted in Michael, already in Margaret Wordsworth had prepared for another way of dealing with suffering. Unlike Michael, Margaret plays to an audience, who are the author and the Wanderer; and like all spectators of tragedy, in so far as mere spectators, they are in the role of tertius gaudens. Evil to the actor is good to them. Some of the better poems of the middle years—up to Peele Castle and beyond—are devoted in part at least to affirming the belief that evil is in addition and in some way good. The belief may be true, or may be necessary; but as, without revelation or an augmentation of the faculties, it cannot be comprehended without at least partly neglecting evil, the poems, if they can be looked down on from no mean height, can certainly be looked down on from Michael. Others of Wordsworth's occupations were, with the help of the optimistic Hartley, refashioning his memories of the past so that they might support the belief (and hence The Prelude, in passages like the two we have examined, is of the nature of a palimpsest); or inditing scholarly poems and less disinterested ones on behalf of patriotism, Anglicanism and the like. Some of these have already received summary notice. But an exploratory paper is no occasion to draw the lower contours of Wordsworth's poetry. It is enough to indicate the high peaks; for even about these—I hope I may be forgiven this last repetition—a distant observer is likely to be mistaken.

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5 ON METAPHYSICAL POETRY JAMES SMITH (1933)

In literary criticism the adjective metaphysical, like the noun metaphysics in philosophy, has had a busy life. It has assumed new meanings before casting off the old, and the separation of old from new is not at all easy. I believe that such a separation is nevertheless desirable: for, though we may not be saying much when we say that a poem is metaphysical, it is as well to know exactly (if we can) what the little is we are saying. Hobbes in philosophy dismissed new meanings as merely nonsense: 'the term signifieth as much as the books written, or placed after, Aristotle's Physics9. Such a proceeding, however tempting, is no longer possible; not, at any rate, in criticism. For nowadays, I think, there is felt to be about the adjective metaphysical a peculiar fitness for the description of a certain kind of poetry, of which the norm is Donne's; and, whatever this fitness may be, it is not to be discovered by an investigation of origins. It was perceived neither by Johnson when he popularized the adjective as a critical term nor by Dryden when he suggested it. Johnson had little metaphysics, and much of what he called metaphysical poetry we should now immediately dispose of under other names. We shall glance at it later; here it need not delay us. Dryden, on the other hand, was more cultured, and noticed that in Donne metaphysical propositions are to be found. In this he saw rather a reason for chiding, than for praise: Donne, he says, 'perplexes the mind of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love'. It would be strange if a term were felt peculiarly apt for the description of a major poet when it described, not a source of his strength, but his weakness. Not all, however, would agree with Dryden that there is a weakness here; and a simpler reflection will suffice. It is that metaphysical propositions occur, not only in the poetry of Donne, but in that of (say) Parmenides and Lucretius among the ancients; in Guinizelli, Dante and Petrarch among the mediaevals; in Elizabethans like Sir John Davies and Chapman; even in Romantics like Shelley and Wordsworth. Some critics have used the term metaphysical with as wide a reference as this; some, I believe, have 157

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said that all great poetry is metaphysical. But that is the abuse of a term. To say that Donne is metaphysical is not to say that he is great. It is an endeavour to distinguish the way in which he is great, if he is so, from other forms of greatness. It is, however, an unsuccessful endeavour if it is the same as saying that in his work metaphysical propositions are to be found. For it is not thereby he is distinguished from poets like Parmenides, Petrarch and Shelley. The phrase metaphysical proposition is a wide one: to some people it may suggest the ejaculation of a theosophist, to others an axiom from Principia Mathematica. If it is made more definite, may it not provide us with the means of distinction we require? Dante and Lucretius, for example, are poets in whom metaphysical propositions abound, and they have frequently been held to be very like Donne—to be, in fact, metaphysical poets par excellence. May not they, and Donne, use a particular type of metaphysical proposition which distinguishes them from Parmenides and Shelley? This, I believe, is an opinion which has frequently been held; but I know of no one who has succeeded in the isolation which it demands of a type of metaphysical proposition. Such a task is one upon which any man may well be reluctant to engage. And I doubt whether it would even be profitable to do so. For to me Dante and Lucretius, together with the lesser lights of the dolce stil nuovo, together even with Chapman, seem not very like, but very different from, Donne. Later I will endeavour to make clear what seems to me the nature of this difference; here, as we are discussing metaphysical propositions in poetry, I will only refer to an observation, which I think is just, already made by Professor Praz. It is, that if metaphysical propositions occur in Lucretius, in Dante and in Donne, they occur in Donne in a peculiar way. Whereas Dante and Lucretius take seriously the propositions they quote, Donne does not do so: he quotes them, not as themselves true, but as possibly useful for inducing a belief in something else which he believes is true. His concern is not with the incorruptibility of pure substances, but with the union of his soul with his mistress's: it is of this that he is convinced, and of this alone does he wish to convince his reader. Professor Praz states his distinction in terms that seem to me not wholly fortunate—they suggest a frivolous attitude to important matters, which I do not find in Donne—nevertheless, I heartily approve of the distinction being made. Dante and Lucretius, it is true, devote themselves to the exposition of a metaphysical system, or of parts of it; and Donne does not. That being so, it becomes at least an open question whether a search for a type or types of proposition common to them all can be of any value, even if it is successful. The use to which they are to

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put this type or types, when found, would seem to demand at least a prior study. Even that, however, I do not propose to make. For one thing— and this is a confession which, out of deference to what I think is a widely held superstition, I have postponed as long as I may—it seems to me that the number of quotations Donne makes from the metaphysicians has been exaggerated. Further—this is a more important, though more contentious, point—there has also been exaggeration of the significance of such quotations as he does make for the poems in which they occur. I cannot hope to prove this now; to do so must be the task of what remains of my paper. My third point, however, should be immediately clear: it is, that if the use made by Donne of such propositions as he does quote at all resembles that which Professor Praz says it is, it cannot be of importance to our present investigation. This starts from the assumption that Donne is felt to be very aptly called metaphysical. A man who pulls down houses, as such, is not felt to be aptly called an architect. If Donne merely plays ducks and drakes with metaphysics, we may as well abandon our investigation; we shall find a perfectly satisfactory account of him in Johnson. I am therefore forced upon my own resources. This is unfortunate, for the country I have to cross is very extensive, and it is already marked with a multitude of tracks made for any purpose but my own. I will do what I can to follow one track but, if I make unnecessary detours, I must beg my reader's indulgence. My problem at the moment is to know which track to choose to set out on. Perhaps the safest is in opening that discussion I have already proposed, of the differences between Dante and Lucretius, on the one hand, and Donne on the other. Mr Herbert Read, in a paper on the nature of metaphysical poetry— in which, I must admit, he supported a thesis contradictory of my own —said of Dante: 'the world was not a problem to him'. Nor was the world a problem to Lucretius. To Donne, the world is full of problems. And this remains true, though the world with which Donne is concerned is that of flesh and blood; while Lucretius is familiar with atoms, with the vacuum, with gods, and Dante with heaven and hell. To Donne the most important things that exist are himself and his mistress, the most important relation between them the everyday one of love. Lucretius's atoms fall through space, swerve, combine fortuitously to a universe, mind appears and disappears again; Dante finds excellence in hell, cruelty is exerted by the supreme love, heaven is extended and has no extent. Yet it is Donne's verse that is disturbed, and his lines that are the battleground between the difficulty of belief and the reluctance to doubt. Lucretius is bellicose, Dante submissive; 159

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but both have an assured peace. This is a gross contrast between the poets; but, for the moment, I leave it as such. It provides me with the starting-point I was seeking. For I think it can be said, of both Dante and Lucretius, that they were not so much themselves metaphysicians, as the disciples of metaphysicians; and disciples have a way of being more certain than their masters. There is, for example, an obvious contrast between Thomism as one meets it in Dante, and as one finds it in Thomas himself. To the lips of those who know Thomas only through Dante, or through compendiums devised for the study of the Commedia, there rises inevitably one adjective for the description of his work: the adjective 'neat'. There is, of course, a neatness about Thomas: one of language, which has scarcely, if ever, been rivalled. But his thought, or any fragment of that thought, is rich, suggestive and haunting. It has a thousand ramifications, of all of which the mind is to some degree aware, few of which it can clearly grasp and follow, and these perhaps not to their very end; further, they are fine and interpenetrating, so that they seem to be alive. When encountered for the tenth or perhaps the twentieth time, they do not impair the unity of Thomas's work: but that unity is still rather felt, than displayed before one and seen. It is the unity of a vast and not simultaneously demonstrable whole; persuasive in its way, but demanding almost any other adjective for its description than neat. To say this is not, I think, to say anything to Thomas's discredit. For, if it is discredit, then he shares it with all the great metaphysicians. In their work, there is the pursuit rather than the attainment of truth; and such value as their work possesses seems to depend wholly on the pursuit. Or, to vary the metaphor (since pursuit without at least the hope of attainment does not seem very intelligible), the value depends on what is held in suspension in their thought, rather than on what is precipitated. Once precipitation takes place, it loses in value; nor has the precipitate a value which makes up for the loss. Yet it is this precipitate that the disciples collect, and of it they make their 'neat' display. I am aware that at first sight there does not seem to be a great resemblance between Donne's turbulence, springing from his being full of problems, and what we may call Thomas's subtlety or elusiveness. Later I shall suggest that both spring from the same cause; and that the difference between the two, great as it is, is no greater than one would expect, given the very different aims that Donne and Thomas pursue. Here, leaving aside for the moment profounder speculation, I wish to establish one point merely: that turbulence in Donne, elusiveness in Thomas—both are signs of something very different from the certainty to be found in Dante and Lucretius. Lacking such a certainty, 160

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Donne resembles Dante's master much more than does Dante himself; in one respect at least, therefore, he is, more properly than Dante, called metaphysical. The question rises, whether this respect is important enough to merit consideration. And I think it is. For I am not suggesting a resemblance between Donne and Thomas in the possession of a negative quality merely. I do not believe that anyone who lacks certainty, who is puzzled and therefore in his account of his studies puzzling—for instance, the crossword fanatic or the half-wit— is for that reason to be called metaphysical. Metaphysics is 'puzzling', if I may retain the homely word, in a peculiar way. It is not that, to the matters it studies, there is an abundance of clues, so that the mind is lost among them; or that there is a shortage of clues, so that the mind is left hesitant; but rather that such clues as there are, while equally trustworthy, are contradictory. And, again, I do not mean that they are contradictory as are, say, pleas in a law-court. A judge is puzzled if he has before him two chains of evidence, one tending to prove that a certain person was in a certain spot at a certain time, the other that he was not. In cases like this, the contradiction rests upon accidents merely: it is compatible with the nature of the person whose movements are being considered, either that he was, or that he was not, at the given spot. The contradictions in metaphysics, on the other hand, spring from essence. The very nature of things brings them forth. It seems impossible that the nature of things should possess either the one or the other of a pair of qualities; it seems impossible that it should possess both together: it seems impossible that it should not possess both. Concern with problems of this kind gives a quite peculiar air of being puzzled; it is only in possession of this air, and not of any other, that I wish to say Donne and Thomas resemble each other. I should like to give this air a name—say, the metaphysical note; describe it generally, as that it is a note of tension, or strain; and merely affirm that it is to be found in Donne. The note is so distinctive that, once it is perceived, it is impossible not to recognize it again; and I am willing to trust my own judgment in the matter. But others would not; and fortunately there is, I think, other and more obviously firmer ground on which I can rest my case. This is an enumeration of the subjects of Donne's greater poems. For problems of the kind mentioned in the last paragraph are not infinite in number or variety. It has been held, indeed, that there is only one of them: the problem of the Many and the One, as old as Plato, but still, the argument goes, the concern of metaphysics. This is probably true; but whether true or not does not much affect my case. For, whether the problems discussed by metaphysics in its long history are or are not derived from that of the Many and the One, they resemble it in the nature of their 6

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difficulty, and they are restricted in number. At times the individual has fought against, and depended upon, its fellow individual, much as multiplicity unity; or the individual has fought against the universal; or against the universe, or against God. Or the here-now has risen up against its natural ally the then-there, and both have risen up against eternity. Or the spirit, partaking of the universal, has had nothing to do with the flesh; and the flesh, primed with the certainty of the here-now, has dismissed the spirit as a fable. And so on. I do not wish to give, nor indeed am I capable of giving, a complete list. The existence of problems of this kind is well known, their general nature, I hope, clear. Should anyone, however, make such a list, I am sure that in it would be found every one of the subjects of Donne's greater poems. Donne does not write about many things: he is content with the identity of lovers as lovers, and their diversity as the human beings in which love manifests itself; the stability and self-sufficiency of love, contrasted with the mutability and dependence of human beings; with the presence of lovers to each other, their physical unity, though they are separated by travel, and by death; the spirit demanding the succour of the flesh, the flesh hampering the spirit; the shortcomings of this life, summarized by decay and death, contrasted with the divine to which it aspires. Donne's choice of subjects may, of course, have been dictated by chance, and a quality they have in common may be no sign of a quality common in his poetry. But I prefer to ignore this possibility; and, taking my courage in my hands, to venture upon my own definition of metaphysical verse. It is, that verse properly called metaphysical is that to which the impulse is given by an overwhelming concern with metaphysical problems; with problems either deriving from or closely resembling, in the nature of their difficulty, the problem of the Many and the One. The definition sounds spare, but that I do not look upon as a defect. It is at any rate fairly clear. I would point out that it is by no means improbable, but rather the reverse, that poetry of the kind postulated by the definition should exist. For metaphysics, while highly abstract, is by the very reason of its high degree of abstraction intimately concerned with the concrete. It concerns everything, because it studies reality, not in this or that thing, but in everything or, as the phrase goes, 'in itself. It is impossible to take a single step in any direction without brushing against metaphysics. Now reality is a word of great emotional significance. Before a thing can completely command a man's attention, he must be assured at least of this about it, that it is real. To most people, of course, this assurance is not difficult to obtain; others, aware of a difficulty, do not find their daily life disturbed thereby. They are the metaphysicians, who like any 162

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other scientist, distinguish clearly the problem to which they devote their professional hours from the immediate problems of living. It is conceivable, however, that there should be a few who, aware of the difficulty of metaphysical problems, see them lurking behind any action, however trivial, they propose. Such people will be in a state of great disturbance or at least excitement. Such excitement may well be an impulse to poetry, and the poetry it generates be metaphysical. Such a course of events, I repeat, is at least possible. From the example of Donne I am convinced not only that it is possible, but that it has occurred. A definition, if a sound one, enables the student to give more satisfactory accounts of the things it purports to define. It has been led up to by the study of such things; but, once arrived at, leads back to them and illuminates them. The definition I have proposed does this, I think, with the poems of Donne. Take for example The Good Morrow, which now usually stands at the head of the Songs and Sonnets. I am relieved, in the accounts I give of it to myself, to feel myself no longer obliged to attach prime importance to the last three lines, where the mention of a metaphysical doctrine—the incorruptibility of pure substances—occurs. The doctrine seems to me more or less extraneous to the poem, hanging on to it as a grace, perhaps not in the best fashion; and it is brought in so late—the poem, in my opinion, being for most purposes over before the last three lines are reached. What stands in the foreground of my attention are the two hemispheres in the lovers' eyes, dependent on each other, and together making up a world; the conceit of the little room, which is 'an everywhere'; or that dim time of forebeing, which is nevertheless so real that in it the lovers snorted in their den. And behind all these I see most clearly the metaphysical problem of the lovers who are two, and yet one; who are mortals, and yet have no fear; who are circumscribed beings, and yet a universe. This problem dictates the very plan of a poem. In the first stanza the past is considered, the time before that of Donne's love: it comes up for consideration because that love, to all appearances an earthly phenomenon, must have antecedents. Confronted with the present, however, the past cannot claim an equal reality: it must sink to the level of a fancy or a dream, that is, to a level consistent with its deriving such reality as it possesses wholly from the present. Note, however, that at the same time it is an infancy, with its gross pleasures, and an adult sleep, with its grosser manifestations. When we come later to study the conceit, we shall see that it is an essential property of Donne and his like to maintain as even as possible the balance between two rival claimants to reality. In the second stanza there is a shift from time to space: the present itself is 163

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considered, and in the present, while there is no question of a before, there is one of an elsewhere. Donne and his lover are themselves the world; but also they are in 'one little room', and outside that room there is a vigorously active world—one that, as a result of voyages of discovery, is even expanding. Yet it too, like the past into the present, is absorbed into the little room, which becomes an everywhere. In the last stanza the future is glanced at, but no more than glanced at. For those who have the convictions of the first two stanzas the future can hold no terrors. It is in connection with the future that metaphysical dogma is brought in, but brought in, now I think obviously, not to establish a conclusion, but to lend what support it can to a conclusion that is already established. Or take A Valediction, forbidding Mourning. That the oddity of the image of the compasses has nothing to do with the poem's being metaphysical, it is perhaps not necessary to insist; that, however, it is very important to the poem still seems to be widely believed. Comparisons between Donne and Browning, on the ground that both use images that are unusual or at first sight unpoetical, are still common—Professor Praz, for instance, makes them. Why Browning drags the everyday and the familiar into his poetry is not always easy to see: I suspect it is the debauchee's device, of gaining interest for the habitual by giving it a new setting. In Donne the reason is always clear. The subject of this poem, for example, is again a metaphysical problem: that of the union of the lovers even when they are separated. The union is not such as would have satisfied a Romantic, in thought merely or imagination: Donne, as Courthope says, 'works by abstraction', and is not interested in a solution of his problem resting on the fallacy of the accident. It is in the very respect in which they are separated, that he wishes to show his lovers are united. Their souls are one substance, which has the invisibility of air, but also the obvious unity of a lump of gold. It is to stress this last point that the compasses are brought in. For gold, though originally solid enough, falls under suspicion of being likely to vanish away, once it has been compared to air. Compasses do not vanish: they have not the remotest connection either with physical or metaphysical subtlety. Hence, once the needful subtlety has been expounded, they close the poem and symbolize it—not, however, by their oddity. Or take, finally, the two Anniversaries. Of these Professor Praz made a confessedly unfavourable criticism. 'Had Donne always written in this style,' he says, 'he would not rank much higher than Marino.' I think that, because of his lack of suitable definition or, perhaps, because of his belief in an unfortunate one, Professor Praz is failing to see wood for the leaves. Everywhere in Donne there is much that is not metaphysical—that is connected with his activity as a satirist or as a mere 164

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wit, or that adheres to him from commerce with his age. In the Anniversaries, perhaps, there is a greater proportion of it than elsewhere. Read without due preparation, they seem, perhaps, only bags of ingenious tricks. Read, however, with an adequate notion of the metaphysical in mind, they reveal themselves, I think, as highly serious and tragic, as discussions of the dependence of the human on the divine, and of the chasm between the two. This indeed is what most critics have held them to be. Four poems, especially when dismissed as curtly as I have dismissed these, are not, I know, sufficient evidence in favour of a new theory. But I do not propose to examine any more: partly because it is something that the reader, if he wishes, may do for himself; partly, also, because the definition should serve more purposes than the illumination of individual poems. If it is at all adequate, there should be deducible from it some of the characters of metaphysical poetry in general. The isolation of such characters, if possible, will be very useful; and it will be the most searching test to which the definition could be put. One quality, at any rate, is, I think, deducible from it. This is the notorious one, that metaphysical poetry is one of conceits. First, however, I must make a distinction. The term conceit is freely used to cover any extravagant hyperbole, any far-fetched comparison: , V1 A . , . , r and like Antipodes in shoes Have shod their heads in their canoes, Immortal Maid, who though thou would'st refuse The name of Mother, be unto my Muse A Father... or She, whose face, like clouds, turns the day to night, Who, mightier than the sea, makes Moors seem white. This is not the sort of conceit whose presence in metaphysical poetry I am anxious to establish. I do not think it need occur in such poetry, or that poetry in which it occurs need be—though it sometimes is— metaphysical. I wish to distinguish it sharply from another type of conceit which, for convenience sake, I will call the metaphysical conceit. (I hope the name will not give the impression that I am moving in a circle: it will, I believe, reveal itself as appropriate, but for the time being should be taken as no more than a conventional mark.) Examples of this type are Marvell's 'green thought in a green shade', or the lines from The Second Anniversary: her pure, and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say, her body thought. 165

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Or, from The Sun Rising: She is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is, and the apostrophe to the sun, later in the same stanza: Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere. From The Canoniiation: You... Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors and such spies That they did all to you epitomize) Countries, towns, courts... From A Nocturnal on St. Lucys Day: But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) Of the first Nothing, the elixir grown. Or from A Fever: O wrangling schools, that search what fire Shall burn this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire, That this her fever might be it ? Let us take the simplest of them, MarvelPs 'green thought'. This is a metaphor, whose elements are thought and extension; one of them is substituted for the other, so that thought, instead of extension, becomes the ground of colour. They have been held to be contradictorily opposed —all things falling either under extension or under thought, but none under both—so that the metaphor is more than usually startling. So, too, is that by which Elizabeth Drury's body thinks, or her blood is eloquent or works as does an artificer; or that by which a lady's fever consumes the universe; or that by which a bed becomes the world, and the walls enclosing it the solar sphere. Within them all there is high strain or tension, due to the sharpness with which their elements are opposed. So, however, is there within the conceits of the first group I quoted. That Antipodes should shoe their heads, or that a spotless virgin should become of all things a father, is not less but, if anything, more startling than that a thought should be green. I imagine this is why all conceits are usually spoken of as a kind: their strangeness, so to speak, dazzles the eye to any other qualities they may possess. But, 166

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putting together the lines in which Elizabeth Drury's body is said to think, and those in which she is invited to become a father, it is surely impossible not to become aware of an important difference between the two. The first image, like the second, is startling; but also it is plausible, satisfying, natural or—the contradiction forces itself upon me and should perhaps not be resisted—not startling. I mean this: that while the elements of the second figure, female virginity and fatherhood, come together only for a moment, at that moment cause surprise and perhaps pleasure, and then immediately fly apart; body and thought, coming together, remain together. Once made, the figure does not disintegrate; it offers something unified and 'solid' for our contemplation which, the longer we contemplate, only grows the more solid. Similarly, I think, the mind accepts and dwells on with pleasure the conceit of a 'green thought', or any other that I listed along with it; while it rejects immediately the Antipodes who walk with their heads. And this also should be noticed: the mind's usual way of accepting metaphors is to kill them. Language is richly stocked with metaphors taken over for daily use, which are now stone dead. If, even under such use, they do not disintegrate, that is because, within them, there is no longer any tension which might cause them to do so. Within the metaphysical conceit, however, even when it is being dwelt on by the mind, tension between the elements continues. That is the most striking thing about it. As I said, it is at the same time startling and not startling. I do not like to use language of this kind; but, for the purpose of describing the metaphysical conceit, I do not see that any other could be used. Some explanation obviously must be found. It might be suggested that, in these conceits, Donne once again, and this time Marvell with him, is 'working by abstraction': that they remove from the two elements they wish to unite, all associations that might embarrass the union, which therefore endures. I do not think such an explanation will do. It does not account for the initial possibility of the union; nor does it bear in mind all the evidence. A bed, for example, has many and varied associations, yet Donne does not hesitate to link it with the universe; and, on the other hand, deprive fatherhood of all associations which might embarrass, and no conceit at all remains in the three lines on Elizabeth Drury. That an immortal maid should beget a poem in the sense of inspiring it is no metaphor; or, at least, is one that has been long dead. So far as I can see, a satisfactory explanation can rest only upon the nature of the elements of the conceit. These must be such that they can enter into a solid union and, at the same time, maintain their separate and warring identity. Are such things to be found? Only if reality is of a peculiar kind. But metaphysics suggests

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it is of this kind; for metaphysical problems rise out of pairs ofopposites that behave almost exactly as do the elements of a metaphysical conceit. Take the multiplicity and unity of reality, for example: the multiplicity submits to the unity for its coherence, and at the same time preserves itself as multiplicity; while the unity, without ceasing to be unity, receives from multiplicity its significance. The two support and complete, and at the same time deny, each other. Consider now 'her body thought'. Here body accepts the attribute of thought, without ceasing to be body; and thought, persisting as such, immerses itself in body. And both gain thereby: for they appear no longer as abstractions, but as a reality that requires nothing further for its completion. Elizabeth Drury seems to us a moment of our own experience. Similarly, the green of Marvell's garden inheres in an unwonted substrate, thought; his thought acquires a hitherto unaccustomed quality: in consequence, his experience in that garden is with us in all its fulness and freshness. If any conceit is taken, of the kind I have called metaphysical, I think it will be found that its elements are either a pair of opposites long known to metaphysics, or reducible to such a pair. In the few which I quoted there occurred, in The Garden, extension and thought; in The Anniversary', body and spirit; in The Sun Rising and The Canonisation, the individual and the universe; in The Nocturnal, privation and actuality. If that is so, the quality of the metaphysical conceit which, at the close of the last paragraph, gave us pause, need no longer appear strange; or rather, it need no longer appear unique in its strangeness. Such strangeness as it has is only that of the world in which it is embedded. And that it should behave as it does is but to be expected from the nature of its parts. It is no association of things on account of a similarity due to an accident, as that a canoe for a moment rested upon a head; but of things that, though hostile, in reality cry out for association with each other. If this, then, is the metaphysical conceit, its connection with metaphysical poetry as I defined it is obvious. The two are built up out of the same materials. However, it is not yet fully obvious that metaphysical poetry must deal with these materials as does the conceit; that, to deal with them all, it must have recourse to the conceit. But that becomes obvious, I think, once the method of metaphysicians themselves is considered. These abhor metaphor, for their one aim is to make reality as transparent to the intellect as possible, and metaphor is opaque to the intellect. Nevertheless, dealing with the materials with which the metaphysical poet deals, they cannot escape metaphor as their ultimate resource. That they do so is a commonplace of the history of philosophy: it is the accusation that Aristotle made against Plato, and that has been made against Aristotle many times since. It is 168

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the reproach that Thomas sought to avoid by the 'elusiveness' of which I spoke, weaving web after subtle web of propositions to veil a contradiction he inherited from Aristotle, but never quite succeeding. That metaphors employed by the metaphysicians must be metaphysical conceits needs, I think, only to be mentioned to be established. For they must have the character of such a conceit: within them, that is, there must be tension, while at the same time they satisfy in the unity they set up. There must be the tension, if distinctions painfully elaborated in other parts of the system are to be preserved. They must be satisfying, for the sole reason of their invention is that they should satisfy. If, then, the metaphysician, in spite of his prejudices in favour of the intellect, cannot avoid the conceit; no more can the metaphysical poet. As a matter of fact, the conceit is what he seizes on straight away, for his sole purpose is to grasp reality, and intellect or sense is indifferent to him. As I said earlier of Donne, it is possible to be a metaphysical poet and to have nothing or very little to do with metaphysical propositions. From this point it would be profitable to go on and show how, with the aid of the metaphysical conceit, metaphysical poetry can be distinguished from the other types of poetry that have, at various times, been confused with it. Baroque poetry, for example, or the poetry which Johnson called 'metaphysical', has merely the baroque conceit: which, like Marvell's figure of the Antipodes, tends to fall apart like trumpery. Neither has it any function in its poem other than that of mere ornamentation; whereas the metaphysical conceit, stating impartially and at the same time solving the problem of its context, controls and unifies that context. Or Romantic poetry: in this, the sharp opposition necessary for the metaphysical conceit is rarely attained or, if attained, soon blunted. Opposites, if mentioned, are not united in a conceit, but hastily identified one with another; as in Shelley where, 'by a law divine all things mix and mingle'. Reality, losing its complexity, gives place to a dream. The Elizabethans start with an opposition between the intellect and the senses, fail to keep a balance between them, and come down heavily on the side of the senses. Hence they tend to exuberance or to a stolid quality; whereas metaphysical poetry is always alert, and is rarely exuberant, but rather elegiac. Contrast, for example, the wooing in The Duchess of Malfi with that in the Extasy. But all these distinctions are in themselves subjects for papers; and I prefer to devote what little remains of this one to the group from a discussion of which it started. I mean Dante and Lucretius, with whom (for many purposes) I class Chapman. These, I said, wrote metaphysics in poetry, rather than metaphysical poetry. The statement can do with a little clarification. 169

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Dante, Lucretius and Chapman are disciples rather than metaphysicians themselves; that is, they make no independent approach to reality, but only through another man's work. This work has impressed them because it seemed to provide them with certainty; but it could do so only because in their enthusiasm they overlooked such caution as it contained. The final metaphor, for example, which expressed at once the master's failure and the peculiar nature of his triumph—this they ignore. Or rather, they ignore it in so far as it is a metaphor: for, as needs must, they take over the words in which it is couched. But the words for them have become a simple statement—astonishing perhaps, but still not to be questioned. The metaphor is dead. The statement they believe like any other in the system, if for no better reason, then quia impossible. To Dante, for example: Chiaro mi fu allor com* ogni dove In cielo e Paradise It is clear to him, or rather was so in Heaven; and he is unconscious of a similar problem facing him in this life, on earth. At the centre of his universe, there is a conflation of substances and accidents. This is a mere conflation: neither substance nor accident puts up a fight for its continued existence as such. But perhaps what I am trying to say is best made clear by putting side by side passages from Dante and from Donne, in which they both touch upon the same difficulty. Dante, speaking of his and Beatrice's instantaneous ascent from star to star, ^ *

del salire non m'accors'io, se non com* uom s'accorge anzi il primo pensier, del suo venire. E Beatrice quella che si scorge di bene in meglio, si subitamente che l'atto suo per tempo non si sporge.

Donne, on the other hand, says of the flight of Elizabeth Drury's soul to heaven: And as these stars were but so many beads Strung on one string, speed undistinguisht leads Her through those Spheres, as through the beads, a string, Whose quick succession makes it still one thing. Dante presents us with the fait accompli: he and Beatrice are at the end of their mystic journey, and it does not trouble him how. Donne, on the other hand, tries to follow Elizabeth Drury point by point: the problem of how the journey was possible interests him at least as much as the fact that it was made. In short, there is in Donne, there is not in Dante, the metaphysical conceit. 170

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Metaphysical poetry, springing from a concern with problems with which the universe must always present mankind, is not confined to either one age or country. Yet the conditions in which it can be produced are by their nature somewhat rare in occurrence. Metaphysical distinctions must have been made; further, these distinctions must be so familiar that they are no longer felt merely as a challenge to the intellect. They must rouse an altogether different emotional reaction, tinged, perhaps, with a certain scepticism. It appears, therefore, only at high points of civilization; perhaps only when that civilization is halting for a moment, or is beginning to decay. I find traces of it, I think, in Virgil; in Tasso of the Aminta^ not of the Gerusalemme; but most of all, outside England, in the Spain of the Philips. There metaphysics was to be breathed in at the nostrils. In consequence, in some of the plays of Calderon, not the language merely, but the action is a metaphysical conceit: it is at once fleshly and spiritual, and the one, it seems, because the other. In his autos he developed a form of allegory—if that name indeed is appropriate—which would well repay examination. For in them it is not, for example, a beautiful woman who dies, nor is it Beauty that ceases to manifest itself on the earth; but Beauty itself, incredible as it seems, that dies. I mention this, because it appears to me that, in his approach to allegory, Calderon has much in common with Herbert. Herbert, Marvell and Donne, I would say, are the three English metaphysical poets.

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JAMES SMITH (1940)

It is a commonplace that Jaques and Hamlet are akin. But it is also a commonplace that Jaques is an intruder into As You Like It, so that in spite of the kinship the plays are not usually held to have much connection. I have begun to doubt whether not only As You Like It and Hamlet, but almost all the comedies and the tragedies as a whole are not closely connected, and in a way which may be quite important. Recent criticism of Shakespeare has directed itself with profit upon the tragedies, the 'problem plays', and certain of the histories. The early comedies, on the other hand, have either been disparaged or entirely overlooked. Yet the same criticism owes part of its success to a notion of what it calls Shakespeare's 'integrity'; his manifold interests, it has maintained, being co-ordinated so as rarely to thwart, regularly to strengthen one another. Hence he was alert and active as few have been, while his writing commanded not part but the whole of his resources. Such a notion seems sound and proves useful. Belief in an author's integrity, however, ought to forbid the dismissal of any part of his work, at least its hasty dismissal. The comedies, to which he gave a number of years of his life, are no insignificant part of Shakespeare's. If it is true that they shed no light on the tragedies nor the tragedies on them, it would seem he deserves credit for a unique dissipation rather than concentration of his powers. It is of course comprehensible that the comedies should be shunned. To some readers they are less inviting than the tragedies, to all they are more wearisome when their study is begun. Not only are the texts in a state of comparative impurity, the form itself is impure. Being less serious than tragedy—this, I am aware, is disputed, but I would suggest that the word has a number of meanings—being less serious than tragedy, comedy admits of interludes and sideshows; further, the material for the sideshows is not infrequently such that it might be material for the comedy itself. Decision is important but not always easy whether or not it should be disregarded. The desultory nature of the following notes may, I hope, be forgiven, 1

The substance of a paper read to the Cambridge English Club. 172

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partly because of complications such as these, partly because of contemporary distractions which leave no time for elaboration. I start with Jaques's melancholy, in respect of which alone he has been likened to Hamlet. It is, I think, most accessible to study in his encounter with Rosalind at the beginning of Act IV. Having abundant leisure he needs a companion to while it away. 'I prethee, pretty youth,' he says, 'let me be better acquainted with thee.' But Rosalind, who has heard unfavourable reports, is by no means eager to comply: 'They say you are a melancholy fellow.' As for that, replies Jaques, his melancholy is at least sincere, for it is as pleasing to him as jollity to other men: 'I doe love it better then laughing.' But sincerity is irrelevant unless to deepen his offence. As there is an excess of laughter, so there is of sadness, which should not be pleasing to anybody: Those that are in extremity of either, are abhominable fellowes, and betray themselves to every moderne censure, worse then drunkards. The rebuke is no more than a rebuke of common sense. Your melancholy, objects Rosalind, is not justifiable merely because it is your melancholy, for it may be one of the things which, though they exist, ought not to do so. But the rebuke is none the less pertinent, common sense implying a minimum of alertness and Jaques being afflicted with languor. Either as cause or as consequence of his state he is blind and fails to see, or is stupid and fails to ponder, obvious truths. The force of the rebuke is to be noticed. From Shakespeare, mediaeval rather than modern in this as other matters, drunkards receive no more than temporary tolerance: Falstaff is in the end cast off, Sir Toby beat about the coxcomb. And the respect which they receive is not even temporary. Wine and wassail make . . . Memorie, the Warder of the Braine . . . a Fume, and the Receit of Reason A Lymbeck only; the sleep they produce is 'swinish', by them nature is 'drenched'. A drunkard as such forfeits not only his manhood but his humanity. Nor does Rosalind's' modern' mean what the word does now,' modish' or what has been invented of late. Rather it is that which has always been the mode, and which stands plain to reason so that there never was need to invent it. In this play, for example, the justice is described as Full of wise sawes and moderne instances —of instances which belong to proverbial wisdom, apt and sound so that they have become trite. What Rosalind is saying is that Jaques 173

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by his melancholy is turned into a beast, and that an old woman would be less ignorant, less pitiable than he. Taken aback, for the moment he can think of nothing but to reaffirm his liking: * Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.' Crudely, however, so that he lays himself open to the crude retort: * Why then, 'tis good to be a poste.' And it would seem to be this which finally rouses him to a defence. His melancholy, he begins, is not like others Rosalind has heard of: I have neither the Schollers melancholy, which is emulation: nor the Musitians, which is fantasticall; nor the Courtiers, which is proud; nor the Souldiers, which is ambitious... and so on. Jaques's melancholy has its source not in private hopes, anxieties and disappointments but in what is of wider importance as it is in the world outside. 'It is a melancholy', he continues, 'of mine owne'—one, that is, which he is the first to discover—'compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects.' Or in other words it is ' the sundrie contemplation of my travells, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadnesse'. Jaques's meaning may not be quite clear, and I do not think it is or can be, but his intention would seem to be so. By boasting of originality, breadth and freshness of information he hopes to impress, perhaps to intimidate, the youthful Rosalind. But she mistakes, and I suspect purposely, his drift: as she is intelligent enough to distrust originality, she is subtle enough to challenge it in this way. Seizing on the word 'travels' she exclaims: A traveller: by my faith you have great reason to be sad; I feare you have sold your owne lands, to see other mens; then to have seene much, and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poore hands. She ventures after all, that is, to assimilate his melancholy to other people's, suggesting that it may be due to poverty, which is a private anxiety. But Jaques rejects with scorn the notion that his travels have on a balance brought him anything but profit: 'I have gain'd', he insists, 'my experience.' Once more he is implying that something, because it exists, has a title to do so; that his experience, as it has been gained, was necessarily worth the gaining. Once more, therefore, and if possible more vigorously this time, she appeals to common sense for his condemnation. Whatever profit he imagines he has brought back from his travels, there is something which the merest stay-at-home could tell him is a loss: 174

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Jaques: I have gain'd my experience. Rosalind: And your experience makes you sad: I had rather have a foole to make me merrie, then experience to make me sad, and to travaile for it too. Whether or not Rosalind is aware of it, this second rebuke is of peculiar force as addressed to Jaques. Of all the characters it is he alone who, in previous scenes, has expressed complete satisfaction in the company of Touchstone, the fool. He has gone even further, and claimed that nowhere but in folly ought satisfaction to be found: Oh noble foole, A worthy foole: Motley's the onely weare. O that I were a foole, I am ambitious for a motley coat. Yet now he has to be reminded that there is an office which fools can perform. About his conduct it seems there is a grave inconsistency, for at one time he countenances factitious gaiety, at another equally factitious gloom. If it stood alone, such an inconsistency might be puzzling; but it has a companion, which also serves to explain it. In claiming in his interchange with Rosalind that all experience is worth while, Jaques is claiming in effect that no experience is worth anything at all. In asserting that, in the present, there are no reasons why he should do one thing rather than another—why, for example, he should be merry rather than mope—he is shutting his eyes to reasons why, in the future, one thing rather than another should be done. In other words he is posing as a sceptic, and scepticism is an inconsistent doctrine. Though a belief itself, it denies the possibility of belief; it denies to man the possibility of action, though by his nature he cannot refrain from acting. And it is because Jaques, in his more alert moments, is aware of this second inconsistency that he commits the first. He seeks shelter in the motley to persuade himself that, though he acts and cannot help doing so, he nevertheless does nothing. For if his actions are mere folly they are of no account, and as good as nothing at all. It is, however, only at rare moments, as, for example, when stirred by a first meeting with Touchstone, that Jaques is alert. For the greater part of his time he is characterized by the languor already referred to: which keeps him from making sustained efforts, even that which (as he is not wholly unintelligent) being a fool requires. Instead of concerning himself to justify his scepticism, he quietly submits to it; and his submission is his melancholy, his 'sadness'. A man in whose eyes the world contains nothing of value cannot be spurred to action either 175

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by the sight of objects he wishes to obtain or by the thought of ideals he hopes to realize. The only action open to him—and as he is human, he cannot remain wholly inert—no more than half deserves the name, for in it he is as much passive as active. He needs, so to speak, to be betrayed into action—to be propelled into it from behind, by agencies of which he is not completely aware. Such agencies are the mechanism of habit or a conspiracy of circumstance. In comedy, where characters are not relentlessly harassed by circumstance, they are able continually to yield to habit. The travels to which Jaques refers the origin of his scepticism are equally likely to have been its consequence, for travel and exploration degenerate into habit. When the senses are dazzled by a ceaseless and rapid change of objects, the intellect has no time to discriminate between them, the will no occasion for choice, so that in the end a man becomes capable of neither. The habit is then a necessity to life, which at the same time and to the same extent has slackened, become languid. It concerns itself only with the surface of objects while their substance is neglected. Jaques's decision in Act IV proceeds from a habit of this kind: The Duke hath put on a Religious life... To him will I. His pretext is that out of these convertites There is much matter to be heard, and learn'd. But his reason, rather than to learn, is to avoid learning. He quits the court for the monastery much as amateur students, threatened with the labour of mastering a subject, abandon it for the preliminaries of another—usually as different as possible. If, during the course of the play, Jaques does not engage on travel, it should be remembered that he frequently changes, not his surroundings, but his interlocutor. He indulges the habit of gossip, which is that of a traveller immobilized. That he has abundant leisure for gossip is only natural: time hangs heavy on a sceptic's hands, for whom the world contains nothing that can take it off. It hangs heavy on Hamlet's, and this is the most obvious point of resemblance between him and Jaques. 'I have of late', Hamlet complains, 'lost all my mirth, forgone all custome of exercise'; and he goes on to give general reasons. They imply scepticism of a kind: the earth and sky, he says, seem but a ' foule and pestilent congregation of vapours', such as do not encourage enterprise: man himself has come to appear but the 'quintessence of dust', with whom he would 176

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not willingly have commerce. In the same way, to refer to another tragedy, time hangs heavy on Macbeth's hands, at least as he draws near his end. Neither sight nor sound can rouse his interest, nor could it be roused by any conceivable sight or sound. He finds himself incapable of believing in the reality even of his wife's death: the report of it, he suggests, should be kept from him until tomorrow. But at the same time he knows that tomorrow will find him as insensible, as incredulous as today. Scepticism of a kind: but it is immediately obvious that Hamlet speaks with a disgust or an impatience, Macbeth with a weariness, which to Jaques are unknown. Even in this matter in which alone they are similar, their dissimilarity is yet greater. Anticipating a little, it might be said that Macbeth and Hamlet lead a fuller, a more complete life than Jaques; they are, that is, more conscious of themselves, and rather than languid are continuously, perhaps, feverishly alert. One consequence is that they cannot easily be betrayed into action. Whereas Jaques looks back without regret, even with complacency, on his travels, it is only with reluctance that Macbeth lapses into the habit of fighting for fighting's sake: Why should I play the Roman Foole, and dye On mine owne sword ? whiles I see lives, the gashes Do better upon them. Sentiment and rhythm are flat to extinction, Macbeth is speaking sullenly. What he is about to do may be better than nothing, it is all he can do; nevertheless it is no more than might be done by a common bully, by an animal. For them it might be a full life; for himself, Macbeth admits, it can be no more than the slackened half-life of habit. Similarly, the 'custome of exercise* and all custom have lost their hold on Hamlet; for him to act, he needs to be surprised by extraordinary circumstance. Nevertheless, as has been said, neither he nor Macbeth is idle. The energy which their state of mind forbids they should employ on the world, they employ on the state of mind itself; so that not only the inconsistency, the evil (what Rosalind meant by the 'beastliness') of scepticism is continually before them. They see it is not the solution to a problem, but rather a problem which presses to be solved; not the tempering of feeling and the invigoration of thought, but the denial of both. They not only reject Jaques's flight into folly, which was to preserve scepticism; they agonize over the sort of reflections with which, in both languid and alert moments, Jaques is lulled. 'And all our yesterdayes', exclaims Macbeth in despair at what forces itself upon him as the nothingness of man, 177

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And all our yesterdayes have lighted Fooles The way to dusty death; * 'tis but an hour agoe,' observes Jaques with satisfaction, 'Tis but an hour agoe, since it was nine, And after one houre more, 'twill be eleven, And so from houre to houre, we ripe, and ripe, And then from houre to houre, we rot, and rot... or rather Touchstone observes this, from whom Jaques is quoting. Touchstone is by profession and conviction a fool, the seriousness of whose statements will come up for consideration later; Jaques is as little serious as, in a quotation, it is possible to be. He is echoing more sound than sense; the latter he has not plumbed (the movement, the rhythm show it), and the statement he has made no more than half his own—fitting accompaniment and expression of a half-life of habit. Elsewhere he compares human life to a theatrical performance as though, in harmony with his scepticism, to stress its unreality; but very soon, in harmony with his languor, the theatre begins to appear a substantial, for all he cares, a permanent structure. Performances in it last a long time, so that it is possible to make a full display of talent: one man in his time playes many parts, His Acts being seven ages. And then Jaques recites the ages, diverting himself with objects separated on this occasion not in space but in time. When the same comparison occurs to Macbeth he is so overwhelmed with the notion of unreality that he does not allow even the actor to act: the latter 'struts and frets. . .upon the Stage', struts and frets not for a full performance but only for 'his houre.. .and then is heard no more'. In Macbeth's verse the comparison flares up and extinguishes itself in indignation at what it implies of man's lot: It is a Tale Told by an Ideot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. That of Jaques continues to demean itself elegantly even when describing in detail man's end, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Once again the rhythm and the movement show that Jaques is meaning little of what he says; that, a true traveller once more, he is occupied with the surface only, not the substance, of objects before him.

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If I may look aside or ahead for a moment, I would venture to suggest that the essential difference between comedy and tragedy may perhaps be this sort of difference: not one of kind, I mean, but of degree. As far as I can see, it is possible and even probable that tragedy and comedy—Shakespearean comedy at any rate—treat of the same problems, comedy doing so (to repeat the word) less seriously. And by 'less seriously', I may now explain, I mean that the problems are not forced to an issue: a lucky happening, a lucky trait of character (or what for the purposes of the play appears lucky) allowing them to be evaded. As, for example, conditions in Arden and conditions of his own temper preserve Jaques from fully realizing the nature and consequences of his scepticism: to Rosalind, to the reader, it is obvious that his interests are restricted, his vigour lessened, but he is never put to the test. Hamlet, on the other hand, in a similar spiritual state, is called upon to avenge a father, foil an uncle and govern a kingdom. And when at last chance forces him into action it is not only that he may slaughter but also that he may be slaughtered: in other words, not that in spite of his disability he may achieve his end, but that because of it he may fail. In Othello hardly an accident happens which does not lend plausibility to Iago's deceit, so that the problem posed by human malice on the one hand, human ignorance on the other, cannot but be faced; in Much Ado there is a final accident—and a very obvious one, for its name is Dogberry—which unmasks Don John. In Lear accident of the wildest form unites with malice and with the elements to convince a human being of his imbecility; in The Winter's Tale accident equally wild serves to hide that imbecility, if not from Leontes (who is however encouraged to forget it), at least from Florizel. In comedy the materials for tragedy are procured, in some cases heaped up; but they are not, so to speak, attended to, certainly not closely examined. And so what might have caused grief causes only a smile, or at worst a grimace. I apologize for speculations of this kind, which can only remain gratuitous until it is known more exactly what comedy, more especially what As You Like It, is about. At least one other resemblance, possibly an important one, between it and the tragedies calls, I think, for attention. As Hamlet's melancholy is caused by the sin of others and Macbeth's by sin of his own, so Jaques—if the Duke is to be trusted— has not only travelled but been a Libertine, As sensuall as the brutish sting itself. And the cure for all three, according to each of the three plays, is very much the same. Fortinbras reproaches Hamlet, and Hamlet 179

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reproaches himself, with lacking a 'hue of resolution', which, as it is 'native', is a defect he should not possess; Macbeth contrasts the division of counsels within him, suspending activity, with the strong monarchy or 'single state' enjoyed in the healthy man by the reason. Similarly Rosalind confronts Jaques with the desirability of what she calls merriment or mirth: from her remark already quoted it is obvious she does not mean laughter, not at any rate laughter without measure, and therefore not laughter in the first place. For the confusion of Jaques it is necessary she should speak emphatically, in a conversation which irks her she is to be excused if she is brief. Were the occasion other, or were she given to reflection, she might perhaps describe this 'mirth' more closely—as something similar to her own 'alertness' which has already drawn attention: the prerequisite of common sense, and what in more recent times, according to the sympathies and perspicacity of the speaker, has been known either as 'vitality' or 'faith'. The meaning of 'mirth' in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century devotional books should be borne in mind, and its meaning on the lips of, say, St Thomas More. Hamlet, it will be remembered, noted as first among his distressing symptoms that he had 'lost all his mirth'. This scene at the beginning of Act IV sheds light, I do not think it would be too much to claim, on all that Jaques says or does. If so, it is important to a not inconsiderable part of the play, and in that at least Jaques cannot be an intruder. For his quips and monologues, however loose in their immediate context, have a dependence on this dialogue to which he is indispensable. He is so not only by what he says, but also by what he causes to be said to him. I am going to suggest that, in spite of the familiar verdict, he is no more of an intruder anywhere. For the rest of the play consists largely of situations which, if he is taken as primary melancholic, might be described as modelled on that in which he finds himself with Rosalind. Either she or a temporary ally or deputy of hers—frequently Corin the Old Shepherd—faces and condemns a succession of characters who, like Jaques, are incapable of or indisposed to action. Silvius, Touchstone, Orlando, the Duke, each has a melancholy of his own; and so too has Rosalind, in so far as she is in love with Orlando. But not even that escapes her judgment, since she can judge it disguised as someone other than herself. Add that the minor characters occasionally condemn or at least reprove one another, and it is possible to gain some notion of the pattern which Shakespeare seems to have intended for As You Like It. A single motif is repeated, giving unity to the whole; but at the same time it varies continually, so that the whole is complex. Such, I think, was Shakespeare's intended pattern: unfortunately it has been either obscured by revision, or incomplete revision has failed 180

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to impress it clearly on the play. The theory of the New Cambridge editors must no doubt be accepted, that there are at least two strata of text, an early and a late. This is a difficulty of the kind referred to, that a student must expect from textual impurities in a comedy. But certain portions of the pattern are sufficiently clear to give, to a careful reader, some idea of the whole. Take for example the relations obtaining between the Old Shepherd, on the one hand, and Jaques and Touchstone on the other. The latter has been much sentimentalized, partly because of his wit, partly because of a supposed loyalty to Celia. But his wit has been treated as though it were a mere interlude, a diversion for the reader as well as for the Duke; whereas little else would seem more closely knit into the play. And, as will be suggested, this is the reverse of sentimental. As for Touchstone's loyalty, it would seem to be mentioned only in Celia's line, He'll go along o'er the wide world with mee. It may have had importance in an earlier version, but in that which has survived Shakespeare is no more concerned with how the characters arrive in Arden—whether under Touchstone's convoy or not—than how they are extricated from it. Touchstone's loyalty is about as interesting to him, and should be as interesting to the reader, as Oliver's green and gold snake. What is interesting is a disingenuous reply which Touchstone gives to the question: 'And how like you this shepherds life?' He pretends to make distinctions where it is impossible there should be any: Truely.. .in respect of it selfe, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepheards life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it verie well: but in respect that it is private, it is a very vild life... A shepherd's life, no more than other things, can be distinguished from itself, nor can what is solitary be other than private. What Touchstone is saying is that he neither likes nor dislikes the shepherd's life, while at the same time he does both; or, in other words, that towards the shepherd's life he has no feelings whatever. And in truth, towards almost all things, if not quite all, Touchstone is as apathetic as Jaques. He too has his melancholy, as has been said: and, naturally resembling Jaques more than Hamlet or Macbeth, he too accepts distraction from a habit. It is not the ceaseless search for novelty or gossip, but what he calls 'philosophy' or the barren intercourse of a mind with itself. He multiplies distinctions like the above, or pursues similarities based solely on sound or letter, neglecting the meaning of a word. The result is scepticism in a very practical sense, such as 181

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unchecked would destroy language and all possibility of thought. Even the old Shepherd is not slow to realize this, for his sole reply to the blunt question 'Has't any Philosophic in t h e e . . . ? ' is to recite a number of obvious truths: I know the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is: and that hee that wants money, meanes, and content, is without three good friends. That the propertie of raine is to wet, and fire to burne and so on. However obvious, they are at least truths, at least significant; and he concludes: hee that hath learned no wit by Nature, nor Art, may complaine of dull breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred. In other words: he who cannot behave in a more responsible way than Touchstone is an idiot. But 'idiot is what I mean by a philosopher'— Such a one is a naturall philosopher, rejoins Touchstone, indifferent enough to his diversion not to claim that it is more than it is. He proceeds to indulge in it at length. The Shepherd, he says, is damned because he has not been to Court, Court manners being good and what is not good being wicked. Too patiently the Shepherd replies with a distinction which, as it is he and not Touchstone makes it, is of primary importance: those that are good manners at the Court, are asridiculousin the Countrey, as the behaviour of the Countrie is most mockeable at the Court. But this is brushed aside, and Touchstone emphasizes his perversity by changing the order in which court and country are ranked. Henceforward, he decrees, they shall be on a level, or rather the court shall be the more wicked. In despair the Shepherd retires from a conversation in which words, as they have so variable a meaning, have as good as no meaning at all: You have too Courtly a wit, for mee, lie rest. Had he said 'too philosophical a wit' his point might have been more immediately clear; but for him, no doubt as for Touchstone, court and 'philosophy' are closely allied. To justify himself he adds the following description: Sir, I am a true Labourer, I earne that I eate: get that I weare; owe no man hate, envie no mans happinesse; glad of other mens good {,) content with my harme: and the greatest of my pride, is to see my Ewes graze, and my Lambes sucke. 182

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Of himself, that is, he claims to go about his own affairs, and to go about them with the mirth or minimum of serenity demanded by Rosalind. He has no need of * incision'—whatever that may mean—or of any other remedy to conduct himself like an adult being; whereas Touchstone, who suggests the remedy, has at the moment no affairs, appears to be able to conceive of no affairs to go about at all. For Shepherd and audience the conversation is over. To them it seems that Touchstone is defeated beyond recovery; not, however, to Touchstone himself. He insists on adding a last word, and in doing so hints at one of the things to which he is not yet wholly indifferent, in respect of which therefore he parts company with Jaques. Mention of ewes and sucking lambs spurs him on to the following: That is another simple sinne in you, to bring the Ewes and the Rammes together, and to offer to get our living by the copulation of Cattle, to be bawd to a Belwether, and to betray a shee-Lambe of a twelvemonth to a crooked-pated olde Cuckoldly Ramme, out of all reasonable match. If thou bee'st not damn'd for this, the divell himselfe will have no shepherds, I cannot see how else thou shouldst escape. About this there are two things to be noticed: first that it is nasty, and secondly that it is the nastier because it falls outside the conversation. Touchstone is no longer endeavouring to prove anything about country and court, whether sound or fantastic: he assimilates the sexual life of men to that of beasts solely because it seems of itself worth while to do so. Yet this should not cause surprise: if in this passage he appears to exalt the latter, elsewhere in deeds as well as words he is diligent to degrade the former. Upon their first arrival in Arden, when he and Rosalind overhear Silvius's complaint, Rosalind sighs: Jove, Jove, this Shepherds passion Is much upon my fashion. 'And mine,' exclaims Touchstone, adding, however, immediately, 'but it growes somewhat stale with mee.' That is, he is impatient of the elaborations and accretions received by the sexual desire when a persistent subject in an otherwise healthy mind. His next appearance is as the wooer of Audrey, a country wench who thanks the gods that she is 'foul', and whom no elaborations have been necessary to win. Her desire to be a 'woman of the world', in other words a married woman, is ingenuous and no more a secret from Touchstone than from anyone else. It is by no means to her discredit, nor would it be to Touchstone's, if, gratifying her desire, he thereby eased his own and was thankful. But the opposite is true. He is neither eased, nor does he spare an

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occasion, public or private, of pouring ridicule on the ingenuousness of which he has taken advantage. It is as though, aware that he can no longer hope for desire to be restrained, he sought to humiliate it with the least attractive object, then proceeded to revenge himself upon the object for his own lack of restraint. Audrey protests that she is 'honest,5 or chaste; but that, he answers, has had no share in drawing his attentions: Audrey: Would you not have me honest ? Touchsu: No truly, unlesse thou wert hard favoured... Audrey: Well, I am not faire, and therefore I pray the Gods make me honest. Touchsu: Truly, to cast away honesty upon a foule slut, were to put good meate in an uncleane dish. . .But be it, as it may bee, I wil marrie thee... To a large extent this conversation, like most of Touchstone's, is mere playing with words; but in so far as it has any meaning, it is that the word 'honesty' deserves only to be played with. And when at last he brings himself to mention honesty with an air of seriousness, it is not that she but that he himself may be praised: a poore virgin sir, an il-favor'd thing sir, but mine owne, a poore humour of mine sir, to take that that no man else will: rich honestie dwels like a miser sir, in a poore house, as your Pearle in your foule oyster. He is presenting her to the Duke as his intended: and since her exterior has nothing to explain his choice, hints that an explanation is to be found within. That is, he is claiming for himself the credit due to perspicacity. Unfortunately he puts forward at the same time a claim to modesty, thus showing with how little seriousness he is continuing to speak. Did he value honesty at all, he would not represent the choice of it as a sacrifice; nor would he describe Audrey, its exemplar, as a 'poor thing'. His modesty, it should further be noticed, itself suggests confusion or deceit, for not only does it permit of advertisement, it is advertised not at Touchstone's expense but at someone else's. He does not in one respect decry himself so that he may be exalted in another; rather, in order to exalt himself, he decries his future wife. The first would in any case be tiresome, as is all inverted vanity; but the second, as a hypocritical form of selfishness, is contemptible. Given that Touchstone is a man of sense, a performance like this can be due only to his attempting two things at once, and two things not very compatible one with another. As usual he is seeking to ridicule Audrey; but at the same time, I think, to recommend himself to the Duke. While sharing all Jaques's objections to purposeful 184

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activity, he is without Jaques's income: he must provide himself with a living or must starve. And scepticism and melancholy being essentially unnatural, no one starves for their sake. At Touchstone's entry on the stage it was hinted that the Duke might be willing to appoint a jester: Good my Lord, bid him welcome: This is the Motley-minded Gentleman, that I have so often met in the Forrest: he hath bin a Courtier he sweares... Good my Lord, like this fellow. And the Duke is well known to be, in Jaques's word, 'disputatious'. It is solely to please him that Touchstone, among his other preoccupations, does what he can to handle the notions 'honesty' and 'modesty'; were he speaking to a crony or to himself they would not enter his head, no more than the Euphuistic apologue about oysters with which he ends. A similar reason is to be advanced for his string of court witticisms which follow, about the causes of a quarrel and the degrees of a lie. So long as to be tiresome, the modern reader is tempted to dismiss it as an interlude; it is not, however, wholly without dramatic excuse. At the stage reached by his candidature, Touchstone thinks it proper to give an exhibition of professional skill. And that, too, he makes subserve his sexual passion: having drawn all eyes to himself, for a moment he directs them to Audrey: Upon a lye, seven times removed: (beare your bodie more seeming Audrey)... and so she is ridiculed once more. It seems likely he obtains his appointment: at any rate he makes the impression he desires.' He is very swift and sententious,' says the Duke, he uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit. Which of course is just what the real Touchstone never does, in spite of what the critics say. The judgment of the Old Shepherd is sounder, that Touchstone's folly has no purpose at all or, if any, only that of discrediting and ruining purpose. And so is Jaques sounder, when he recognizes in Touchstone's folly the cover for his scepticism. It is interesting, and significant of the subtle pattern which Shakespeare intends to weave—a pattern not only of intrigue but of ideas— that the Duke who is thus easily gulled when Touchstone assumes a virtue protests immediately when required to accept as a virtue Touchstone's vice. Jaques describes to him, and asks for himself, the liberty of railing which Touchstone enjoys: 185

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weed your better judgements Of all opinion that grows ranke in them, That I am wise. I must have liberty Withall, as large a Charter as the winde, To blow on whom I please, for so fooles have... Invest me in my motley: Give me leave To speake my mind. Such impunity, the Duke sees, can have no results of the kind Jaques promises: 1,11 1 I will through and through Cleanse the foule bodie of th' infected world... but only evil for himself and others: Fie on thee. I can tell what thou wouldst d o . . . Most mischeevous foule sin. And he proceeds to diagnose it correctly. Only a man ruined by evil, he suggests, confines himself to the correction of evil; for this implies not that evil finds him peculiarly sensitive, but that he is insensitive both to evil and to good. To good because he neglects and therefore runs the risk of destroying it; to evil because he seeks no relief from what should stifle and nauseate. Brutalized to this degree, Jaques can see no reason why others should not be brutalized too: . . . all th* imbossed sores, and headed evils, That thou with license of free foot hast caught, Would'st thou disgorge into the generall world. The portrait is drawn in high colours, but Hamlet would recognize it. Jaques presumably does not, being, as has been said, less alert, and therefore less perspicacious; but here unfortunately there is a cut in the text of As You Like It. Further instances of this Shakespearean subtlety are two scenes in which Jaques and Touchstone, usually allies, are brought, if not into conflict, into contrast. As Touchstone is as acutely sensitive to the brutish sting as ever Jaques may have been in the past, in the present he can on occasion be resolute as Jaques is not. In response to the sting he can make conquest of Audrey, browbeat William for her possession: Abandon the society of this Female, or Clowne thou perishest... I will kill thee a hundred and fifty wayes, therefore tremble and depart. William obediently trembles. But it is Jaques, of all characters, whom Shakespeare chooses to administer a rebuke to Touchstone for this; as though to make it clear that, if he condemns inertia, he does not, with a crudeness familiar in more recent times, advocate precipitancy; 186

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if he deplores apathy, he does not commend brute appetite. When Touchstone contemplates a hedge-marriage so that he might have 'a good excuse hereafter' to leave his wife, it is Jaques prevents him: And will you (being a man of your breeding) be married under a bush like a beggar? Get you to church... And at the final leave-taking it is Jaques who foretells to Touchstone a future of wrangling, a 'loving voyage. . .but for two moneths victualed'. At the opposite pole to the characters hitherto considered, tolerating no elaboration in love, stand Silvius and Phebe, who seek to conform their lives to the pastoral convention, one of the fullest elaborations known. The scenes in which they appear are perhaps too short to have the effect intended, now that the convention, if not forgotten, is no longer familiar. But to an Elizabethan the sentiments and the verse—the former largely echoes, external as well as internal to the play: the latter easy, yet mannered—would suffice to evoke a wealthy tradition. A modern judges of this perhaps most readily by the apostrophe to Marlowe: Dead Shepheard, now I (f )ind thy saw of might, Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight? No incongruity is intended or feared from his introduction with fleece and crook: the tradition being rich enough to absorb him, vigorous enough to assert even beside him its actuality. And also the apostrophe may serve to dispel some of the mist which has hung about pastoral in England since the seventeenth century, and notably since the attack of Johnson. Though actual, pastoral need not be realistic; and to apply to it realistic canons, as he did, is to misconceive it entirely. It is not an attempt to portray a shepherd's life: but in its purity—though frequently, of course, it is impure—to portray a life in which physical misery is reduced to a minimum or has disappeared. Traditionally such a life is called a shepherd's: in which, therefore, man is held to enjoy every happiness if only his desires will let him. But, as becomes clear with the progress of the pastoral, his desires will not. Removed from the danger of physical pain those of the intellect and the imagination become acuter; in particular, the passion of love, with neither social pressure nor economic necessity inclining it in any direction, becomes incalculable in its vagaries. It remains an ever open source of calamity. A tragic note or undertone is thus inseparable from pastoral, and if subdued is only the more insistent. It is in permanent contrast with the composure or gaiety of the rest of the score.

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By their share in a tradition of this kind, the Silvius and Phebe scenes have a claim to be effective out of all proportion to their length; and the effect they are intended to produce is in the first place a serious, not a comic one. That there is a close connection between Shakespearean tragedy and comedy, I have already stated, is one of my assumptions in this paper. As the Old Shepherd is contrasted with Touchstone, so he is with Silvius. When the latter pours out his complaints, Corin's attitude is far from one of incomprehension: Oh Conn, that thou knew'st how I do love her. —I partly guesse; for I have lov'd ere now. Far also from impatience, for the complaints are not of the briefest; far, however, from approval. To put the matter at its crudest, Silvius is not prudent in his conduct: That is the way to make her scorne you still. And however charitably Corin listens to the recital of another's extravagances, he has no regret that now he is rid of his own: How many actions most ridiculous Hast thou been drawne to by thy fantasie ? —Into a thousand that I have forgotten. His attitude seems to be that Silvius's extravagances will pass with time as his own have passed; meanwhile they may at least be tolerated, for they are decent. Touchstone's reaction to the meeting with Silvius has already been noticed. Rosalind's is somewhat more complicated: Alas poor Shepheard searching of (thy wound), I have by hard adventure found my own. She approves of the premises on which the pastoral convention is based, both that the wound of love is genuine, and that it is sharp and serious. But the assumption that therefore it is deserving of sole attention, or that by receiving such attention it can in any way be cured, she criticizes as does Corin, and less patiently. It conflicts with the common sense for which she is everywhere advocate, and which requires either as condition or as symptom of health a wide awareness of opportunity, a generous assumption of responsibility. By confining his attention to love Silvius is restricting both, frustrating his energies like the other melancholies. That Rosalind should be less patient than Corin is natural, as she is younger: she cannot trust the action of time 188

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upon Silvius, when as yet she is not certain what it will be upon herself. For she, too, is tempted by love, and in danger of the pastoral convention. Though she rebukes Silvius and Phebe from the outset, she does so in language more nearly approaching theirs than ever she approached Jaques's. But the luck of comedy which (it has been suggested) stifles problems is on her side, causing Phebe to fall in love with her. She needs only to reveal herself as a woman, and the folly of pastoralism—as a convention which allows freedom to fancy or desire—comes crashing to the ground. Taught by such an example and by it teaching others, she pronounces the judgment that if Silvius and Phebe persist in love, yet would remain rational creatures, they must get married. It is the same judgment she pronounces on all lovers in the play. Of the four who are left, two only call for separate consideration: herself and Orlando. Orlando has achieved an extravagance but, unlike Silvius, not a decent one: his verse, even in Touchstone's ears, is the * right Butterwomens ranke to Market'. As Touchstone is concerned only to destroy, he finds criticism easy, but specimens of the verse prove he is not wholly unreliable. And therefore Rosalind chooses to deal with Orlando in prose: These are all lies, men have died from time to time, and wormes have eaten them, but not for love. —I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind, for I protest her frowne might kill me. —By this hand, it will not kill a flie. Her purpose once again is to disabuse her interlocutor about the supposed supreme importance of love. And to do so effectively she makes use at times of a coarseness almost rivalling Touchstone's: What would you say to me now, and I were your verie, verie Rosalind ? —I would kisse before I spoke. —Nay, you were better speak first, and when you were gravel'd, for lacke of matter, you might take occasion to kisse; verie good Orators when they are out, they will spit, and for lovers, lacking (God warne us) matter, the cleanliest shift is to kisse. Not that she agrees with Touchstone, except materially. She may say very much the same as he says, but her purpose is different. It is not to deny that desire, no more than other things, has value; but to assess its proper value, by no means so high as Orlando thinks. She can undertake to do so with some sureness, and command some 189

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confidence from the reader, because she herself has first-hand acquaintance with desire. All criticisms passed on others are also criticisms on herself, and she is aware of this (or if not, as on one occasion, Celia is at hand to remind her). The consequences for the play are manifold. First the criticisms, which as applying to other persons might seem scattered, are bound together as applying to her: over the pattern of the repeating motif] such as has been already described, she superposes, as it were, another pattern, or encloses it in a frame. Then the final criticism or judgment, which resumes them all, is seen to issue from the body of the play itself, not to be imposed on it by author or authority from without. Finally, a breadth and a sanity in the judgment are guaranteed. If Rosalind freely acknowledges in herself the absurdities she rebukes in others—'lie tell thee Aliena^ she says, 'I cannot be out of sight of Orlando: He goe find a shadow, and sigh till he come'—in return she transfers to others her own seriousness and suffering: O coz, coz, coz; my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deepe I am in love: but it cannot bee sounded: my affection hath an unknowne bottome, like the Bay of Portugall. Or in a phrase which has a foretaste or reminiscence of Donne: One inch of delay more, is a South-sea of discoverie. I pre'three tell me, who it is quickely, and speake apace. The final judgment would seem to run somewhat as follows. As Rosalind says to Orlando at their first meeting: 'Love is purely a madnesse, and I tel you, deserves wel a darke house, and a whip, as madmen do;' it is, however, a madness which, owing to the number of victims, there are only two ways of controlling. One is to 'forsweare the ful stream of the world, and to live in a nooke merely Monasticke' —and this way does not generally recommend itself. The second, then, must be adopted, which is marriage. Above all, whines and cries such as combine to a chorus in Act V must be prevented: Tell this youth what 'tis to love. —It is to be all made of sighes and teares, And so am I for Phebe. —And I for Ganimed. —And I for Rosalind. —And I for no woman. —It is to be all made of faith and service, And so am I for Phebe... da capo three times. Rosalind, though as lover she joined in, as critic and judge rejects it as 'the howling of Irish wolves against the Moone'. 190

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To it the alacrity of Oliver and Celia is to be preferred: 'They are in the verie wrath of love, and they will together. Clubbes cannot part them.' If once again this seems reminiscent of Touchstone, and of Touchstone at his worst, the distinction already drawn should be remembered. The same words can mean different things on Touchstone's lips and on Rosalind's. She is not inciting her fellow characters to marriages which shall hold only until the * blood breaks', but to 'high wedlock', which is 'great Juno's crown', and a 'blessed bond'—the masquing song, though possibly not by Shakespeare, aptly summarizes certain of the play's sentiments. Further, that Rosalind and Touchstone agree on a single topic, even a topic so important as the qualities of desire, does not mean that one of them is not superior to the other. Rosalind is very obviously the superior: not, however, in respect of the topic on which she and Touchstone agree. She is distinguished and privileged beyond him, not because she knows desire—rather that confounds both him and her—but because she is, whereas he is not, at the same time many things besides. She is not only a capable manager of her own life, but a powerful influence for good on the lives of others. And, finally, a word may be put in for Touchstone himself. If Shakespeare, as has been said, does not condemn apathy in order to commend lust, neither does he disapprove of lust in order to advocate Puritanism. Touchstone is on the way to tragedy because he has allowed desire to get out of control; had he controlled it, he would have built up a life more satisfactory than do those who, while living in the world, neglect desire altogether or overmuch. And therefore he remains a positive critic even in his failure, and to some extent because of it; it is proper not only that he himself should rebuke Orlando, but also that Rosalind, taking, it would seem, words from his lips, should rebuke large groups of people. If As You Like It is planned at all in the way I have suggested, the least title it deserves is, I think, 'unsentimental'. But for common practice I would go further and call it 'unromantic'; and suggest that, to get the measure of its unromanticism, no more is necessary than to read it alongside its source, Lodge's Rosalynde. And the title 'unromantic' would possibly be confirmed by an investigation of the Duke's melancholy, which in this paper it has not been possible to investigate. There is little time to return to the topic from which the paper started, the relation, namely, between the tragedies and the comedies. But perhaps it is obvious that, conceived as unromantic, the early comedies are a fitting preparation for the 'problem plays', while from these to the tragedies is but a step. 191

7 REVALUATION: JOHN WEBSTER W.A.EDWARDS (1933)

The effervescent enthusiasm of Romantic critics for Elizabethan drama is suspect to-day just as most Romantic poetry is suspect. Lamb and Swinburne and their imitators have been responsible for a great deal of cant and nonsense. In praise and dispraise they are fulsome, hyperbolical, often hysterical. Lamb is often positively embarrassing— witness his note on Act IV, sc. iv, of The Revenger's Tragedy^ and he is always getting between us and the author (for many people his note on the torturing of the Duchess of Malfi has become almost part of the play). Swinburne, like some Soviet shock-trooper exhorting feeble comrades, batters and bullies us into thinking every playwright a demi-god, yet he leaves us tired and bewildered, no better fitted to read these playwrights with more informed enjoyment. Some kind of reaction against this uncritical adulation was bound to set in and William Archer's lively attack must have been welcomed by many readers just because it did attack. Yet The Old Drama and the New is deplorably beside the mark. In drama Ibsen has no absolute value and to demonstrate that Elizabethan plays bear no resemblance to his plays tells us little about their merits or defects. For Archer, drama is * the faithful reproduction of the surfaces of life and of individual refinements of character—we can recognize as good, in harmony with an inevitable tendency, any abandonment of exaggerative, in favour of soberly imitative, methods. The task that reason prescribes to the dramatic artist is to exhibit character by the same means by which it manifests itself in real life.' But Elizabethan drama, as he rightly noted, is far nearer to opera and to ballet than to 'a sober and faithful imitation of actuality'. His mistake was to assume that poetic drama was nothing more than a substratum of correct reporting with poetry and rhetoric added as an ornament—'conversational and heterogeneous adjuncts', he calls them. These heterogeneous adjuncts might very well be good literature, but good literature was not the same thing as good drama. A good drama, in fact, might be poor as literature. Lamb and Swinburne concur with Archer in assuming the truth of this disastrous distinction between drama and literature. Archer of course prefers good drama; Lamb and Swinburne plump for good literature, and for the sake of a few lines of fine verse willingly put up with any 192

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amount of dramatic ineptitude. Yet both they and Archer should have recognized that verse is itself an unnaturalistic convention and that the mere use of it leads to the adoption of other conventions of presentation equally unnaturalistic. Among the pre-war critics W. B. Yeats insisted on these truths in essay after essay, and from him at least Archer might have learned to put Ibsen's aims and methods out of mind when reading Elizabethan plays. Since the publication of The Wheel of Fire there is little excuse for anyone approaching the Elizabethans with Archer's particular preconceptions: We should not look for perfect versimilitude to life but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor, by means of which the original vision has been projected into forms roughly correspondent with actuality, conforming thereto with greater or less exactitude according to the demands of its nature. .. The persons, ultimately, are not human at all but purely symbols of a poetic vision.1 Webster's tragedies are to be read, then, as dramatic poems, not as historical documents, police-court evidence, or detective stories. If we read them in this way we shall be less inclined to fulminate against the reprobate and astonishingly inconsistent characters and may even forget the Duchess of Malfi's eldest son. Webster's affinities with the mannered prose of the characterwriters are evident in his verse as well as in his prose and it is not surprising to find that he belonged to the Overbury circle. The young wits about town who formed this circle carry on a tradition of elegant writing which derives from Sidney and Lyly, persists in the epigrams and elegies of the '90s {Paradoxes and Problems is a typical product of this period) and develops into a new form the Theophrastan charactersketch. As satirists they have abandoned the grand style of Juvenal, and concern themselves with ridiculing the foibles and social lapses of polite society in London. (In France, the equivalent is the salon of Madame Rambouillet and the preciosite of Voiture.) Their aim is to give witty and elegant form to their observations of character and manners. Fashions in elegant writing had altered since the days of Sidney and Lyly. Euphuistic wits had striven after elaborate formalism in sentence construction and had garnished their discourse with curious and learned similes from handbooks of mythology and from the bestiaries. This newer generation concentrates on epigrammatic prose and cultivates the sententious maxim. Its conceits depend on word-play and run to extravagant hyperbole, and for their wit they depend very largely on the use of images from low life, common experience, and 1

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the sciences. Like Falstaff and Prince Henry they play at collecting 'unsavoury similes', and often use them for satiric purposes in a way reminiscent of Swift and Pope—to see that' the same reason that make a vicar go to law for a tithe-pig and undo his neighbours, makes them (princes) spoil a whole province, and batter down goodly cities with the cannon' is to anticipate Swift's favourite trick of 'deflation', and they delighted in comparisons which are singularly apt though they shock us by the heterogeneity of the objects yoked together—Flamineo's description of the Spanish ambassador will serve as an illustration: 'he looks like the claw of a blackbird, first salted, and then broiled in a candle.' In their elaborate periphrases they often remind us of riddles—'Vengeance, thou murder's quit-rent', and a good many of their fantastic comparisons suggest the riddle reversed —'The opinion of wisdom is a foul tetter that runs all over a man's body' (i.e, it's a plague). Again, Bosola having complained that for the returned soldiers there are no rewards, 'nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation', 'Geometry!' exclaims Delio. 'Ay,' comes the answer, 'to hang in a pair of slings, take his latter swing upon an honourable pair of crutches, from hospital to hospital.' Another marked feature of the writing of these wits, most of them admirers and imitators of Donne, is the persistent hankering after oxymoron—'superstition is godless religion, devout impiety'. Tourneur is particularly fond of it—'royal lecher', 'good coward', 'withered grace'; and in Webster we have the bodies of the Duke and Cardinal referred to as 'these wretched eminent things'. Webster obviously belongs to this group of conceited and fantastic writers. In his tragedies there are several set 'characters'— Flamineo's thumb-nail sketches of the ambassadors, Antonio's descriptions of Bosola, the Duke, the Cardinal, and the Duchess, and the Cardinal's set piece on The Whore; and several discourses eminently characteristic of the satirical essayists—Flamineo's notes on lovers' oaths, corruption, flattery, great men's reputations, and Bosola's little tirades about painted women. Flamineo and Bosola overflow with stock satirical matter and unburden their sage sentences, anecdotes and fables at the least provocation, and in a style which is every whit as precious as the essayist's: As ships seem very great upon the river, which show very little upon the sea, so some men i' the court seem colossuses in a chamber, who if they came into the field would appear pitiful pigmies. Webster is adept at manufacturing fantastic hyperboles— 'I am studying the art of patience... To drive six snails before me from 194

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this town to Moscow; neither use goad nor whip to them, but let them take their own time.' Like the claw of a blackbird—characteristically amplified to * first salted, then broiled in a candle', wit is valued for its own sake—conceit follows conceit as in a poem by a Metaphysical poet. Flamineo, like Vendice in The Revenger's Tragedy^ or like Nashe, is a self-conscious virtuoso—how he enjoys himself—guying Camillo while ostensibly pushing his case; how he revels in adding fantastic details to his caricature of the poisoner, Dr Julio: He will shoot pills into a man's guts shall make them have more ventages than a cornet or a lamprey; he will poison a kiss; and was once minded, for his master-piece, because Ireland breeds no poison, to have prepared a deadly vapour in a Spaniard's fart, that should have poisoned all Dublin. There is the same delight in virtuosity in Vendice, the author of a * witty' revenge (The Revenger's Tragedy). The Duke's corpse has been dressed in the clothes of Piato (Piato was Vendice in disguise). Vendice has been commissioned to assassinate the villain, Piato, who must have killed the Duke. Vendice is talking to his brother— * Brother, that's I, that sits for me: do you mark it? And I must stand ready here to make away with myself yonder. I must sit to be killed, and stand to kill myself. I could vary it not so little as thrice over again; 't has some eight returns, like a Michaelmas term.' The same exuberance is characteristic of Nashe, whose grotesque comparisons and semi-burlesque exaggerations are recalled by the 'flyting' scene between Lodovico and Flamineo (The White Devil, Act III, sc. i). Vendice in admiring his verbal dexterity is apt to forget his main purpose. Flamineo's garrulity is equally superfluous on a great many occasions. Like Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller he stands between us and the action interposing his comments, nowhere more so than in the quarrel between Brachiano and Vittoria in the penitent house. There are times indeed when he reminds us forcibly of old Polonius unloading his store of maxims without bothering to find out whether they are needed. It is not that his pregnant observations lack point, so much as that they are somehow not entirely relevant at the moment —Hamlet's bitterness about woman's painting springs out of the immediate situation and in turn affects it, and his macabre reflections on mortality have a different ring from the same sentiments in a homily. Flamineo and Bosola seem primed up to deliver their notes whether any one listens to them or not, like bores who imagine themselves raconteurs. Why need Bosola swoop down on an old woman to unload his notes on cosmetics, for instance? Webster's commonplace195

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book must have been packed with sentences, images and anecdotes, but when it comes to introducing them into the right dramatic situation he is often a bungler, and tends to make the situation for the sake of his image or essay. For the greater part of The White Devil Flamineo is no more than a lay figure, a mouthpiece. Many readers must have felt equally suspicious of the flashes of 'pure poetry'. They remember Tennyson's habit of pinning dead butterflies to his poems—Cyril's handwriting like the wind in the corn—and cannot see any reason for letting Brachiano rather than any other of those about to die have the lines on death, or why Zanche should not perceive her soul driven like a ship in a black storm. The great moments indeed surprise us as excrescences. The style of the conceited character-writer has obvious defects when it comes to dramatic writing. It is the style of an objective, rather cynical observer, commenting and reflecting upon men and actions, and constantly invites admiration for the elegance of its manner. It tends towards epigram and maxim, and uses simile rather than metaphor—Bacon's Essays represent it at its best. For dramatic utterance such a style of writing is too formal, too far from speech idiom. We need only contrast the Cardinal's character of a whore with Ulysses' reaction towards Cressida. The Cardinal's definitions are neat and apt; they delight us by their ingenuity; but his sketch is a series of disconnected observations. We are left thinking of the last epigram and trying vainly to recollect the others. At the end of his speech we lack any clear conception of the whore, and are conscious only of an admiration for the Cardinal's talent as a wit. In the phrase and in the single image Webster is often superb, yet he scarcely ever succeeds in writing a successful passage of verse, still less a whole scene. As in Bacon, we meet with the same shortwindedness everywhere, the full stop of the aphorism, the suggestion of a penny-in-the-slot machine. He assembles three or four images in a passage and they remain discrete components, do not enforce or modify each other: pray observe me. We see that undermining more prevails Than doth the cannon. Bear your wrongs concealed, And, patient as the tortoise, let this camel Stalk o'er your back unbruised: sleep with the lion And let this brood of secure foolish mice Play with your nostrils, till the time be ripe For the bloody audit and the fatal gripe: Aim like a cunning fowler, close one eye That you the better may your game espy. (The White Devil, III, ii) 196

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In more than one particular this passage suggests Lyly—the same bestiary comparisons, the same non-progressive circling round a single idea, and the same undramatic interest, one feels, in finding still another analogy. Compare it with this paragraph from Euphues: Couldst thou, Euphues, for the love of a fruitless pleasure, violate the league of faithful friendship? If thou didst determine with thyself at the first to be false why didst thou swear to be true? if to be true, why art thou false?.. .Dost thou not know that a perfect friend should be like a glow-worm, which shinest most bright in the dark? or like the pure frankincense, which smelleth more sweet when it is in the fire? or at the least not unlike the damask rose which is sweeter in the still than on the stalk? But thou, Euphues, dost rather resemble the swallow, which in the summer creepeth under the eaves of every house, and in the winter leaveth nothing but dirt behind, or the bumble-bee, which having sucked honey out of the fair flower doth leave it and loathe it, or the spider, which in the finest web doth hang the fairest fly. Webster's inability to write a sustained passage of verse finds its counterpart in his incompetent plotting. On the plane of action neither tragedy is worth much consideration. They could be taken as an illustration of Bosola's summing-up of life: Their life a general mist of error Their death a hideous storm of terror (and the terror largely of the waxwork type). Mr Lucas is willing to blame Webster's public for his melodramatic interests and effects: For the men who crowded the Phoenix and the Red Bull lived both in the theatre and outside it far more in the moment for the moment's sake than the cultured classes of to-day; accordingly it was a succession of great moments they wanted on the stage, not a well-made play. They did not at each instant look forward to what was coming or what had been. If a dramatist gave them great situations, ablaze with passion and poetry, it would have seemed to them a chilly sort of pedantry that peered too closely into the machinery by which they were produced. They did not want their fire-works analysed. They were in fact very like a modern cinema audience, with the vast difference that they had also an appetite for poetry. But this is a poor explanation. The same public was equipped in the main with a grammar-school education which concentrated on a training in the use of language; it listened to speeches and sermons which to-day can be read only with difficulty; and it applauded plays as close-knit as The Alchemist and Volpone^ and plays which made demands on its capacity to appreciate poetry and the patterns and symbols used in poetic drama—the tragedies of Shakespeare, for instance. 197

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A far more plausible suggestion is that Webster wrote melodrama because he had a taste for it, and that in writing his tragedies he was concerned as a popular playwright to turn out plays which would please every kind of play-goer. He starts from a story packed with incidents well suited to melodrama, and alters it very little. At times one suspects he wrote with his tongue in his cheek; Flamineo's interview with the Ghost of Brachiano, at least, suggests this. The Ghost is a genuine ghost—Flamineo the sceptic is hardly the man to suffer from 'vain imaginings', and it carries a flower-pot—not even a harassed man would imagine a flower-pot. Flamineo seems his normal self—the curious observer, the investigator, the busy prying mind. Like a good journalist he keeps his head and interviews: Brachiano's views on the other world, the truth of churchmen's theories about communication with the dead, the best religion to die in, how long he may expect to live. After the Ghost has gone Flamineo runs over the events of the day, methodically listing his misfortunes: the disgrace The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight Of my dead brother: and my mother's dotage; And last this terrible vision— That word 'terrible* rouses our suspicions. Flamineo seems to have been not in the least upset, but we see that the audience ought to have been thrilled, and are told so. One supposes that the crude irony of Camillo locking himself up while the Duke cuckolds him is also a concession, though one cannot be sure, since the same trick is used again in The Duchess of Malfi, and it is no more indefensible than Cornelia's hanging about behind her curtain saving up her curse until it can chime in at the most melodramatic moment. The famous echo scene and all the apparatus of dead hands, wax images, dancing madmen and dirge-singing tombmakers in The Duchess of Malfi are equally suspect. Webster hardly goes out of his way to provide pornographic interest—it is endemic throughout his plays. In The White Devil— adultery, a brother pandar to his sister and witty about it, an old gull comically cuckolded, and later made game of by his ducal master; a breezy trial for murder and incontinency, plain speaking on both sides; a lovers' quarrel in a house for penitent whores; a precocious young prince (even more a stock figure than the old cuckold); and a great deal of miscellaneous satire from professed malcontents. Some of Flamineo's jests and observations are witty, of course, witty in the style of the character-writers and youthful makers of epigrams, and in an old tradition of indiscriminate abuse. In most of his satire Webster 198

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is a decidedly literary gentleman, and need be taken no more seriously than most of his contemporaries. With few exceptions they get unnecessarily excited about vice and display their cynicism with a little too much bravado—like the Donne of Songs and Sonnets, so that in their bawdry they are just as tiresome as in their chivalric sonnets and romances. Webster's audience was in this respect—despite Rupert Brooke's assertion to the contrary—as prurient and immature as the modern cinema-goer. The White Devil almost exhausts the stock resources of the contemporary tragedy of blood. A full equipment of Italian despots, desperate and cunning secretaries, assassins, magicians, poisoning doctors, sinister prelates, disguised avengers (how the Italian cunning fails when it's time to be killed off!), private executioners, a haunting curse, some fine stoic speeches, and of course a couple of lunatics, one pathetic, the other terrifying, and two or three scenes most affecting in their pathos. Add to this fine gallimaufry a number of spirited set-to verbal encounters (Webster excels in these dog-fights) and miscellaneous essays on alchemists, and the criminal underworld, and how incredible it seems that such an entertainment should fail in the theatre. Mr Lucas is compensated by 'great poetry* and by the noble bitterness of Webster the satirist. If anything can hold our interest through The White Devil, it is indeed this expression of the dominant moods and ideas of Flamineo, the small-minded malcontent, the pocket Montaigne. Webster's obsession with * wormy circumstance* strikes every reader. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a sinister turn—as thus: You speak as if a man should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat afore you cut it open. When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders* Pleasure of life! what is't it ? Only the good hours of an ague! I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting. This fascinated brooding over the morbid and sinister almost imposes some kind of unity of tone. The obsession is too much an obsession to be made the basis of any comprehensive vision of life, yet it is an obsession common in his time; Webster has value for us as a writer who gives powerful expression to a predominant mood of his age. The same morbidity finds expression in the satires of Donne and Marston, in the tragedies of Shakespeare and Tourneur, in comedies like Measure for Measure, The Widow's Tears, and Volpone, Jonson's 199

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comedies perhaps being the most savage and bitter of all. And because this savage bitterness is so characteristic of the age we must be careful before crediting Webster with the supreme expression of it. We are apt to forget or at least underestimate the strength of the satiric traditions current during the life-time of Webster. From the later middle ages the Elizabethans inherited methods and topics which served them in good stead in their controversial writing. Popular satire was particularly vigorous. It carried on from mediaeval flytings and fabliaux, from the fraternities of fools and knaves and drunkards, from the Dance of Death and the Masque of the Deadly Sins, from the mock testaments and litanies, and satumalian buffoonery of the Feast of Fools, and of course from the invective and satire of the mediaeval preacher. Popular satire fed by religious controversy developed many new forms in the hands of pamphleteers and writers of comedy, and, while they catered for the vulgar, the new poets and dramatists developed the epigram and the Juvenalian satire for the educated public, and indulged in abusive personal controversy for the delight of the reader. We shall probably never determine how much of the melancholy and disillusion of the great dramatists reflects the general mood of the time, and how much it may spring from more purely personal sources. It is even more difficult to say how much of Webster's bitterness is personal, how much is derived from his reading, and his following of literary fashions, and how much is due to the times being out of joint. So much of Flamineo and Bosola suggests the urbane and precious satire of the character-writers rather than the terrible passages in King Lear, and is plainly 'literary' in its inspiration, conventional in style and matter. And there is a good deal too much evident pleasure in exposing the rottenness and corruption behind appearances for us to feel quite sure of his seriousness as a satirist. Mr Lucas comments with justice that one suspects him of indulging his satiric vein because he found he had a pretty hand with the lash, and the fact that the satiric passages are distributed so equably through the play, and so often take the form of diversions, asides and general comment, as in an essay, increases our suspicion that Webster the satirist had no hand in planning the action. His most brilliant invective is not satire like Swift's, which makes us feel how loathsome human beings are, but the furious expressions of personal hatred which occur in quarrel scenes. As spectators we stand above the fray and are untouched by the vituperation; it has no objective validity, and only tells us that Bosola, for instance, hates a certain Cardinal. Nothing can disguise the oppressive monotony of the tragedies, despite Webster's untiring efforts to shock and thrill us to the end. 'Virtue in this disordered world is merely wasted, honour bears no 200

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issue, nobleness dies unto itself', so completely and methodically that it is impossible to keep interested in it or to keep our disbelief suspended. It seems to tell us a good deal about Webster, but not much about actuality. If in Hamlet the court of Denmark looks mean, selfseeking, hypocritical and vicious, it is because it contains Hamlet, who serves as a measure of its lack of grace. In Webster's tragedies there is no such internal scale to measure depravity. Nor is there any possibility of perceiving any progress in depravity as the play goes on. His figures are never aware of themselves to the point of perceiving change—they live below the level of thinking creatures, make no attempt to foresee the probable result of any course of action, are troubled by no scruples, doubts or fears, or too much thinking on the event, suffer from no remorse, and apparently never learn anything from experience. As near as may be, they are creatures of the moment, acting from animal impulse. In Shakespeare or in Racine or in Henry James the characters can be trusted to make the right comment on themselves and their actions; sooner or later there comes a moment of reflection when they realize their own essential baseness or worth. There are no moments of profound self-knowledge in Webster, and inside the play there is no adequate comment, for Flamineo's comments are everywhere superficial and second-hand, and his sense of reality is rudimentary—things just happen in the general mist of error, events are not within control nor are our human desires; let's snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of tight corners, and meet the end without squealing. A world peopled by such sub-moral figures and presented without comment might be taken as an implied satire on the actual world, but there are signs that Webster himself shares the belief of Flamineo and Bosola in dying gamely despite the general mist of error. For Mr Lucas this belief means tragedy, and Webster is one of the masters. His puppets are always conscious of 'a sense of human destiny—not mere playing with skulls and cross-bones, but a noble thing'. In his tragedies we find an exposure of bitter reality, a salutary exposure which ranks him with Swift, but we are left with 'the feeling that for all the agony of transience, all the disillusion of hopes in vain fulfilled, there are no consolations but the bitter beauty of the Universe and the frail human pride that confronts it for a moment undismayed'. And it seems that Webster gave supreme utterance to the prevailing disillusion of the time. In this high estimate we think Mr Lucas is mistaken, though he has the mass of readers on his side. One can only ask them in conclusion to re-read their Swift, their Jonson and their Shakespeare and with these touchstones of excellence consider Webster's contributions again. 201

8 THE ENGLISH TRADITION LIVES AND WORKS OF RICHARD JEFFERIES Q. D. LEAVIS (1938)

Jefferies9 England—Nature Essays by Richard Jefferies, edited with an Introduction by S. J. Looker (Constable) Richard Jefferies, Selections of his Work, with details of his Life and Circumstance, his Death and Immortality, by Henry Williamson (Faber and Faber) Hodge and His Masters, by Richard Jefferies, revised by Henry Williamson (Methuen) Mention Richard Jefferies to anyone under thirty-five and he or she will almost certainly say, * Do you mean The Story of My Heart man? I never read it'; and they may recollect having read Bevis when young. An uninviting title and a boy's classic seem to be all that remains for the majority of a once considerable reputation. It is excellent therefore that selections from his works should be issued now to bring him before a new public, calling attention to the variety of his genius, with critical essays by the editors enouncing its nature. Unfortunately, these selections have been undertaken by the wrong people or in the wrong spirit. It is not true, as some of the reviewers alleged, that they have chosen almost identical extracts—only two pieces are in fact duplicated—but neither book is likely to do Jefferies much good in the way of inducing the intelligentsia to give his entire ceuvre a trial. Mr Williamson's selection is much the more attractive and more just in its representative variety, but unhappily so strongly does the editor's personality interleave the pages and so possessive is his attitude to his victim ('My Jefferies' he calls him, and apostrophizes and converses with him with complacent impertinence1) that many readers who will decide or have long ago decided that they can't stomach the author of The Village Book will not realize that Jefferies is quite another kind of writer on 1

Someone ought to register a protest against this kind of vulgarity, from which no dead writer seems to be safe. Posterity will think the twentieth-century literati had no spiritual manners. Jefferies has been one of the worst sufferers— cf. Guy N. Pocock's introduction to the Everyman Bevis and the last life, an indefensible piece of book-making, by Reginald Arkell, RichardJefferies (Rich and Cowan, 1933). 202

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rural themes. It would be a pity if Jefferies should become the property of Mr Williamson, as Cobbett became the property of G. K. Chesterton. Jefferies was one of those comprehensive geniuses from whose work you can take what you are inclined to find. Mr Looker selects to sell us a noble Victorian Jefferies (the mystic, the nature philosopher, etc.) and not unintentionally: 'It is the purpose of this book to show the real Jefferies.. .It celebrates the author of The Story of My Heart... [where] Knowledge has given place to Wisdom.' This is scarcely an aspect that will appeal to the contemporary public, and reviewers indeed found Mr Looker's Jefferies dull. From the other selection, which while keeping the same principle (of chronological representation) might have been made far more intelligently, you would conclude that Jefferies had written a much larger proportion of weak, ephemeral or eccentric stuff than is the case, and you are deprived of most of his strongest, finest and characteristic things.1 Disinterested campaigning for Jefferies would rather ask Messrs Hutchinson to reprint Edward Thomas's Richard Jefferies, His Life and Work (1908) (preferably in the cheap pocket edition); since second-hand booksellers ask a guinea for this Life, there must be a long-felt want. This book should be recognized as a classic in critical biography, to stand with Lockhart's Scott and Mrs Gaskell's Bronte in point of intrinsic interest, and containing better literary criticism than many critical works. The well-known fact that Thomas did hackwork for publishers has probably prevented recognition of this book, which he did voluntarily and evidently took much trouble to perfect. Since subsequent writers on Jefferies take all their facts from him as well as his careful bibliography, generally without acknowledgment, and since there is nothing more to be found out about Jefferies (the old inhabitants who knew him having passed away and Thomas anyhow observing, ' Of the man himself we know, and apparently can know, very little'), to reprint Thomas's work would automatically render further book-making unnecessary. His is a model biography. The author is recognized as being present only by the sympathy that informs the narrative and the intelligence that directs the criticism and determines the selections. The selections from Jefferies' works there are so abundant and well chosen that Thomas's Life of itself will send the reader to their sources. Another good piece of Jefferies criticism is an introduction to one of the novels, Amaryllis at the Fair, by Edward Garnett, prefixed to the New Readers Library edition.2 1 2

Though not all—there are two good long selections from Amaryllis at the Fair which ought to send people to the novel. Now o. p. 203

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Garnett exposes the silliness of the Saintsbury kind of critique of Jefferies and declares, with a supporting argument that is at least as necessary now as it was then, that 'in his judgment Amaryllis is one of the very few later-day novels of English country life that are worth putting on one's shelf, and that to make room for it [he] would turn out certain highly praised novels by Hardy which the critics and the public, with touching unanimity, have voted to be of high rank'. In fact Jefferies was a many-sided and comprehensive genius, not merely a peculiarly English genius but one whose interests, ideas, and temperament associate him with other peculiarly English geniuses: he recalls or embodies now Cobbett, now D. H. Lawrence, now Dickens, now Edward Thomas himself, and he has a sensuous nature akin to but more robust than Keats's; he has, too, a strikingly contemporary aspect as social satirist, and he is in the central and most important tradition of English prose style. No selection can do him justice that does not present and even stress these aspects of a writer who has been too generally represented merely as a word-painter of natural beauties, a sort of early Keats in prose. Perhaps a few quotations from a mass of similar material will illustrate his characteristic vein of vigorous feeling. Up in the north they say there is a district where the labourers spend their idle hours in cutting out and sticking together fiddles. I do not care twopence for afiddleas afiddle;but still I think if a labouring man coming home from plough, and exposure to rough wind, and living on coarse fare, can still have spirit enough left to sit down and patiently carve out bits of maple wood and fit them together into a complete and tunable fiddle, then he must have within him some of the true idea of art, and thatfiddleis in itself a work of art. [The Dewy Morn.] He minded when that sharp old Miss — was always coming round with tracts and blankets, like taking some straw to a lot of pigs, and lecturing his missis about economy. What a fuss she made, and scolded his wife as if she was a thief for having her fifteenth boy! His missis turned on her at last and said: 'Lor' miss, that's all the pleasure me an' my old man got.' [Toilers of the Field.] In this book some notes have been made of the former state of things before it passes away entirely. But I would not have it therefore thought that I wish it to continue or return. My sympathies and hopes are with the light of the future, only I should like it to come from nature. The clock should be read by the sunshine, not the sun timed by the clock. The latter is indeed impossible, for though all the clocks in the world should declare the hour of dawn to be midnight, the sun will presently rise just the same. [Round About a Great Estate.] 204

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As himself of noble birth, Felix had hitherto seen things only from the point of view of his own class. Now he associated with grooms, he began to see society from their point of view, and recognized how feebly it was held together by brute force, intrigue, cord and axe, and woman's flattery. But a push seemed needed to overthrow it. [After London.] To me it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I hope they never will be. [Field and Hedgerow.] There were parsons then, as now, in every rural parish preaching and teaching something they called the Gospel. Why did they they not rise as one man and denounce this ghastly iniquity [hanging for sheep-stealing], and demand its abolition? They did nothing of the sort; they enjoyed their pipes and grog very comfortably. . . The gallows at the cross-roads is gone, but the workhouse stands. . . that blot on our civilization, the workhouse. [Field and Hedgerow^]

Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth—thus writing, as it were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost remaking the soul. It seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn. Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a moral life. [Field and Hedgerow.] And even from Bevis, which its editors tell you is an idealization of his boyhood: Loo said they were all hungry, but Samson was most hungry. He cried almost all day and all night, and woke himself up crying in the morning. Very often she left him, and went a long way down the hedge because she did not like to hear him. 'But', objected Bevis, 'my Governor pays your father money, and I'm sure my mamma sends you things'. . .Bevis became much agitated, he said he would tell the Governor, he would tell dear mamma, Samson should not cry any more. Now Bevis had always been in contact almost with these folk, but yet he had never seen; you and I live in the midst of things, but never look beneath the surface. His face became quite white; he was thoroughly upset. It was his first glance at the hard roadside of life. He said he would do all sorts of things; Loo listened pleased but dimly doubtful, she could not have explained herself, but she nevertheless knew that it was beyond Bevis's power to alter these circumstances. In his own time interest was drawn off at his death in disputations about * Did Richard Jefferies die a Christian? 9I and when such questions ceased to burn Jefferies was practically relegated with them to limbo. 1

See Thomas's Life and Bibliography. 205

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There has always been a garden-suburb cult of The Story of My Heart which has assisted in discrediting him. It is an unfortunate title, and the book itself unless read in its place with the whole body of his writings will do him no good. Jefferies was not a 'thinker' whose thinking is of any use to us without the re-creation of the experience that occasioned it, and his 'message' is more successfully conveyed in such relations, not in the prose poem which he attempted. The other factor that pushed Jefferies out of sight for the post-war generation was the Bloomsbury cult of W. H. Hudson. The impression that left was that Hudson did everything Jefferies did, only much better because he was an artist, a great stylist, and the other a clumsy amateur who wrote journalism. It is hard now to understand how anyone could have had patience with the precious style Hudson affected or have been interested in his Victorian Utopias. We did not venture to disagree openly with Mrs Woolf and Mr Herbert Read and Mr Murry and the Athenceum, but we privately found Hudson a bore and, in his sentimentalization of human life, embarrassing. No one had the strength of mind of the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, and by the time Hudson had ceased to be read Jefferies had dropped back out of sight. It took the red blood of Mr A. G. Street and the happy ingenuousness of Mr Adrian Bell to get country life back into the circulating library. It is generally difficult to persuade people to persevere with A Shepherd's Life, the best of Hudson's country books, so discouraging are the first two chapters, yet it is well worth reading: but how strained, how literary, how unconvincing compared with the mounting life that informs Round About a Great Estate, to take only one out of a pile of Jefferies' good things. And how Hudson dates! while his predecessor is still a modern. To secure Jefferies his right to be read, several points could be made. One is the intrinsic value as literature of the rural life of much of his work. The large public that enjoyed Farmer's Glory and Corduroy would equally enjoy in the existing cheap editions The Amateur Poacher, Wild Life in a Southern County and Round About a Great Estate (one of the most delighful books in the English language). Those who have found Change in the Village and Change in the Farm relevant to their interest in social history will be glad that Hodge and His Masters is again in print (a handsome edition, but a cheaper one would have reached a larger public) and will be impelled by that to search Jefferies for more documentation; since three of the least useful chapters have been chosen for the Faber anthology the reprint will be even more welcome. It is characteristic of Jefferies that he expressed regret that Gilbert White ' did not leave a natural history of the people of his day'. The element in Jefferies' writings represented by the in206

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terest that Gilbert White lacked is the decisive one; some of his best work can be described as such a natural history—for instance 'The Country Sunday' among other essays in Field and Hedgerow, and pieces throughout his other volumes of collected essays, Nature Near London, The Life of the Fields, The Toilers of the Field. But it also led him to collect folk-lore, rustic idiom and dialect words, and to note dying crafts and changing ways of living at a time when these subjects were little considered. To a far larger section of the intelligentsia an impressive case could be made for bringing Jefferies to their notice as an approved social thinker. His case-history would make useful propaganda; one of those Left journalists who turn out biographies showing that writers like Dickens were really just the same kind of writer as Mr Alec Brown ought to be instructed to do Jefferies. Starting as a member of the yeoman-farmer class with all its Conservative prejudices and habits of social conformism he emancipated himself by nothing but the force of daily experience and sensitive reflection to a position of daring freedom from the ideas of his class, his age and his country (he died in 1887). It would be noted in such a Life that he planned to write (and may even have written but never published) works called 'The New Pilgrim's Progress; or, A Christian's Painful Progress from the Town of Middle Class to the Golden City' and' The Proletariate: The Power of the Future'; that he hated the Church as an oppressor, calling it 'a huge octopus' and noting with pleasure that 'the pickaxe is already laid to the foundations of the Church tower'; that he wrote of 'laws made by the rich for the rich'—'Most certainly the laws ought to be altered and must be altered'; that he protested, in reference to projects for the cultural elevation of the villagers, ' For the enjoyment of art it is first of all necessary to have a full belly'; that he never had the smallest hankering after the Merrie Englande past1 but wanted the latest mechanism for agriculture and ' the light railway to call at the farmyard gate' and protested that the village had church and chapel but no cottage hospital, library, or lecture system to put the country folk in touch with the mental life of the time—villages should own themselves and have the right by Act of Parliament, like the railways, to buy land back from the landowners at a reasonable price—'in the course of time, as the people take possession of the earth on which they stand... * he writes; that he never idyllicized country life or rested for long content with the sensuous beauties of nature—' I am simply describing the realities of rural life behind the scenes,' he says 1

* Dearly as I love the open air, I cannot regret the mediaeval days. I do not wish them back again, I would sooner fight in the foremost ranks of Time.'— 'Outside London*. 207

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in 'One of the New Voters' and it might often serve as his epigraph; that he was acutely conscious of the class war and the monetary basis of modern society—After London; or, Wild England, which is always written of as though it were of the News from Nowhere or A Crystal Age type of pretty day-dream, impresses as contemporary not with Morris or Hudson but with The Wild Goose Chase (it seems to me to be a consistent satire on the system Jefferies found himself living under and to be in great part autobiographical).1 Jefferies hated the class distinctions which exacted servility from tenants and farm-hands, kept a hold over the morals of the cottager, and strangled his independence; and the fierce attacks on this aspect of rural life should make The Dewy Morn,2 his most considerable novel, a Left Book. I have quoted a significant passage from Bevis, and even Wood Magic, a story-book for little children, has every claim to be admitted to the socialist nursery. Edward Thomas notes that though Jefferies was aloof and' not a talker', yet he ' talked with ease and vigour on his own subjects, most eagerly on the Labour Question'.3 These notes, which might be multiplied if space allowed, could feed a new biography which would make Jefferies appear alive and congenial to our younger generation as neither Mr Looker's lofty thinker nor Mr Williamson's alter ego can be. And it would have the merit of being nearer to the truth—the truth of Jefferies' character, that core of his varied writings that unites them and gives them significance. But of course as an account of his work and its importance for posterity it would be ludicrously inadequate, for these facts and quotations only impress when given prominence by extraction and accumulation. Jefferies' 'message' is so much more complex and deep-rooted that the total impression made by anything he wrote is not of this simple order. For instance, his instinctive humanity and indignant expression of it are controlled by a characteristic irony—that irony of Jefferies' which is so disconcerting that Mr Looker preferred to ignore it. Nor has After London any trace of the crude propaganding and spiritual vulgarity of The Wild Goose Chase with which I have suggested a comparison. 1 2

3

No selection from it is given in either anthology but it is fortunately still in print in the New Readers Library and should make a popular class-room text. O.p. Nothing from it is given by either editor. Jefferies requested the publisher not to give the MS to a Tory reader, who would be certain to reject it. Jefferies refused help from the Royal Literary Fund, which might have prolonged his life, because ' he believed that the fund was maintained by dukes and marquises instead of authors and journalists'. Here is an interesting passage from the posthumous * Thoughts on the Labour Question': 'Then, for Heaven's sake, let us all have a fair chance: do not make its possession dependent upon morality, virtue, genius, personal stature, nobility of mind, self-sacrifice, or such rubbish.' 208

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For Jefferies was an artist, though not of the Hudson genre. His writing never reaches after effect and seems unconscious of achieving any; he is therefore the best possible model and for this reason alone should be in common possession, as Addison once was. He might indeed, if a judicious selection were made, supersede The Coverley Papers (which have got to be a bore in schools), not to speak of those positively vicious models of Style and The Essay that children's taste is officially formed on. Thomas's account of his prose cannot be improved: 'These words call no attention to themselves. There is not an uncommon word, nor a word in an uncommon sense, all through Jefferies' books. There are styles which are noticeable for their very lucidity and naturalness; JefFeries is not noticeable even to this extent . . . His style was not a garment in which he clothed everything indiscriminately . . . He did not make great phrases, and hardly a single sentence would prove him a master... Though he had read much, it was without having played the sedulous ape that he found himself in the great tradition.' He did not make great phrases. Anyone in Bloomsbury can make a phrase, but JefFeries' effects are cumulative. They express a play of character and an original outlook, so that in their context the simplest groups of words are pregnant, as when he writes in 'Bevis's Zodiac'; 'The sparkle of Orion's stars brought to him a remnant of the immense vigour of the young world' or, to take something widely different, in 'The Country Sunday', when describing the villagers going to chapel in their best clothes 'all out of drawing, and without a touch that could be construed into a national costume—the cheap shoddy shop in the country lane'. The curious anticipations of D. H. Lawrence here are widespread in his mature work and suggest both how original his outlook was and what direction his gifts might have taken had he lived (he died at thirty-eight). Nothing came to him through literature, he is as unliterary as Cobbett though of greater personal cultivation and finer native sensibility; a contemporary suggested, says Thomas, that he avoided literary society deliberately in order to preserve his native endowments. And he is an artist in another sense, that compared with his works his life has little interest—all of him that holds value for us exists complete in his writings. He left no revealing letters, he did not mix in any kind of society, his domestic life was happy and normal. Why he has not got into the literary histories (Elton does not mention him, Saintsbury is fatuous, subsequent historians have followed one or the other) and the university courses in literature is a mystery, but reason seems to have no hand in deciding these things. Yet as a source of evidence for 'background' courses he is surely more reliable as well as more original than the novelists, as an essayist he 209

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has surely more claim to be studied as literature than all these Lambs and Paters, and as a novelist himself he cannot be ignored where Hardy is studied (unless on quantitative grounds). Jefferies wrote four novels of permanent worth as well as some negligible ones. I have mentioned After London, which is written in Jefferies' mature style— the superb opening describing 'The Relapse Into Barbarism' as the wild supplanted the cities should be a well-known piece. Greene Feme Farm is the best of his early novels, comparable with the Hardy of Under the Greenwood Tree, while the most ambitious and novel-like of his later attempts, The Dewy Morn, reaches out towards D. H. Lawrence. The contrast between the maturity and originality of the content and Jefferies' clumsiness in manipulating the devices of the novel form is striking and may put off many readers. But the clumsiness is merely indifference, and when in Amaryllis at the Fair (another unfortunate title) he found a form that could convey all he was interested in treating without obliging him to satisfy the conventional demands on the novelist, he produced a masterpiece. But both Greene Feme Farm and The Dewy Morn are too good to be let stay out of print. The Victorian features of these novels bulk at least as largely in Hardy's novels, but it is only in Jefferies' that the vitality and genuineness of the rest make that conventional idiom appear ludicrous; most people seem able to read The Return of the Native with its 'Do you brave me, madam's?' without any feeling of incongruity between the melodrama of the parts and the total 'tragic' effect. But in Jefferies' novels the best parts are better and more mature than the best parts of most of Hardy's. The portrayer of rustic life who notes the village woman telling the welfare-worker who scolds her for her fecundity; * That's all the pleasure me an' my old man got' and describes (in Greene Feme Farm) old Andrew Fisher with his Wuthering Heights past receiving the clerical suitor for his grand-daughter's hand thus: 'Jim! Bill! Jock!' shouted the old man, starting out of his chair, purple in the face. 'Drow this veller out! Douse un in th'hog vault! Thee nimitypimity odd-me-dod! I warn thee'd like my money! Drot thee and thee wench! * is not a novelist who could conventionalize his villagers for purposes of humorous relief as Hardy does. In The Dewy Morn he goes further than any Victorian novelist towards the modern novel—I mean the novel that seems to have significance for us other than as a mirror of manners and morals; I should describe it as one of the few real novels between Wuthering Heights and Sons and Lovers. The final justification for asking the twentieth century to read Jefferies is, in Edward Thomas's fine words, that' his own character, and the characters of his men and 210

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women, fortify us in our intention to live'. And we are more in need of fortification now than when those words were written. We are now waiting for some sensible publisher to launch the Wiltshire Edition of Jefferies' Collected Works—Jefferies must be more or less out of copyright now—with Jefferies' wood-anemoneleaf signature stamped on the covers. It should lead off with Thomas's Life, follow with Greene Ferne Farm and Amaryllis in one volume, third The Dewy Morn, then the other out-of-prints (Toilers of the Field, Red Deer, The Hills and the Vale), then those not available in cheap editions {Hodge, Field and Hedgerow), then all the rest. Those essays that have never been reprinted might be dug up from the nineteenth-century magazines he wrote for, and collected for us, perhaps by Mr Adrian Bell. Mr Williamson is not to be allowed, as two publishers have here allowed him, to print his barn-owl device with Jefferies' wood-anemone on the title-pages (though he says 'I know you [Jefferies] won't mind'); he or anyone else is to have no finger in it. Jefferies needs no editor to stand between us and him and to interpret him by the light of petty egotism; he needs only to be available entire in a cheap and attractive form together with Edward Thomas's book. I am sure this publisher would not lose his money.

ENGLISH TRADITION AND IDIOM ADRIAN BELL (1933)

* Hullo, here's a bit of long-meadow oak,' exclaimed one of the men who were helping to lay down the stage for our local play. That plank alone happened not to be of oak—but of poplar. His remark was a riddle to which all present held the clue (a favourite conversational method). It implied an intimate knowledge of local geography among his hearers. The interpretation is this. The immediate neighbourhood consists of arable land undulating in low ridges. Along each depression runs a brook taking the water from the fields, and along either side of these brooks lies almost the only pasturage in the district—a double chain of long narrow meadows. Oak trees are not characteristic of these long meadows, but poplars. Thus 'long-meadow oak' equals poplar. This is a random example of how closely the countryman's life and language run together; they are like flesh and bone. He only speaks when he feels, and feeling and humour choose always an expression which is a picture of life before the bare word. (Thus, too, one who 'looks as though she's been a-stone-picking all her life' for 'a 2TI

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bent old woman'.) The invention and multiplication of such phrases is never-ending and can be guaranteed for the illiterate mind as long as one day differs from another. The one straight line in the landscape is the plough's furrow, obtained only with mental and muscular preoccupation. Even then (as standards of precision go) it is only the roughest optical generalization, as it were, of straightness. Thus it is that agriculture and its tradition have resisted so stubbornly the age of the formula. Like an ash-pole hammered into the clay for a fence, it still buds. In a sense the soil has been 'rationalized' for centuries, but the bird that alights on it, the storm-cloud that impends, are as incalculable as ever. It is the infinite variation of extraneous circumstance, the guerrilla multitude of wild life that man still only holds at bay, that is the genius alive in country tradition. This genius now has its own battle to fight with modern 'awareness,' for possession of the countryman's soul. To be employed in agriculture is like living in the shadow of a tidal wave. Rural 'timelessness' is an urban illusion—time flies swifter to the farmer than to anyone. There is always urgency, only the tempo of the life is so different, that to the modern citizen the countryman's haste seems like leisure, and his phrases 'poetical'. Demagogy has taken the latter ready-made and exploited them. Platform politicians who have never wielded anything heavier than their own fists are always putting their hands to the plough, sowing and reaping and threshing and winnowing. Cartoonists picture agriculture for their parables. Divorced from the earth-life, the traditional processes thus become cliches and mental symbols merely. To understand how language is still reborn out of tradition in the unlettered mind (I refer to the older men), it is necessary to be immersed in the life till one thinks as well as talks, in local usage. A thousand natural chances of the day come to provide jest, illustration, simile. It is something even to find oneself at liberty (talking to the countryman) to use the emphatic 'that do' for our correct 'it does'; to say 'for everlasting o f instead of'a great many'. This, possibly, is why rural speech is 'picturesque'. The countryman kindles as he speaks, assumes the authority of one rooted in his life, and that emotional quickening is the same in essence as the artist's—creative. In the glow of it he coins words. Linguistically there is a kind of half-light in his brain, and on the impulse of an emotion words get confused with one another and fused into something new—a new shade of meaning is expressed. 'I'm squaggled' or 'that squaggle me' (of a too-tight collar or a too-thick coat in hot weather). ' A spuffling sort of chap' is one who boasts and bustles about importantly. To be 'strandled' is to be both baffled and stranded. 'Rafty' is both raw and misty. 212

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These, I say, are not traditional words, but words born of momentary need out of tradition. Traditional idiom is founded on the Bible, that having been (luckily) the one book read in farm and cottage for centuries. 'And she went and came and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging to B o a z . . . ' might have been spoken by any old countryman to-day. Thus to one whom I had passed in a car some way from home, I said,' I saw you at — yesterday', and he replied, 'Yes, master, and I had knowledge of you.9 There is an associative naivete in the application of words which is another reason for the freshness achieved by a limited vocabulary. A single illustration will serve. The same old man had been staying away from home, and it had been windy March weather.' I had to get back,' he said,' for I knew my mills would all be down.' This puzzled me for a minute, knowing that he was no miller, but a cottager, and knowing of only one mill in the parish, and that derelict. But when he added, 'And when I got home I found for everlasting of birds about the garden,' I realized he meant the revolving bird-scarers he had made, with four feathers for sails. The countryman's speech is only roundabout to that superficial view which regards a poem as going a long way round to say what could be conveyed in a few words. Sustainedly, the emotional and muscular content of his idiom is almost equal to that of poetry, for he possesses that same instinct by which the poet places words in striking propinquity; the urgency of his feeling causing his mind to leap intermediate associations, coining many a 'quaint' phrase, imaginatively just, though superficially bizarre. Local idiom is actually terse, inventing ellipses of its own. 'They won't come to-day—DO ( = but if they should) it won't be till late.' Water pours out of a pipe 6fullhole'. Another local peculiarity is the transposition of a physical sensation to the thing that causes it. A gardener will say that the smell of a hyacinth or lilac is ' faint,' meaning, not that it is slight, but so pungent as to make him feel faint. Comparatively, the illiterate man has few words; language is new to him; but a power within him insists on getting said what he has to say. He has to wrestle with his angel. He must feel the word almost physically, it must be born alive out of his lips. His metaphors are like flashes of lightning. 'Dark as iron.' He doesn't care a jot for grammar, but only that what needs must be said, gets said somehow. Words as such don't matter to him. He enjoys and uses quite ruthlessly his freedom from class or academic restrictions. 'Not a mucher' (not much good); 'Lessest' (least); 'Snew' (snowed). Pronunciation is altered to suit his convenience: 'Ellum' (elm); 'Flim' (film); 'Meece' 213

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(mice). His need is for emphasis, for his surroundings are his perpetual wonder. Fires, floods, freezings—spring in winter—winter in summer —there is always something prodigious to be told of. The dark source is very present to him just beyond the screen of visible phenomena. Nature to him is always a masked face. The mask changes; it is grim or gay, but the face behind it is always unseen. His very phrase 'in good heart' senses the being latent in the soil. And he has an infinite sensibility of the moods of the weather. His rain vocabulary alone is considerable; it may be merely 'smeary,' or again 'a tidy mizzle', or 'rain pourin', or 'heavens hard'. What is the outlook to-day? We have been standing a long time making up our minds to ford a river. Some started, others followed, and now that most are well in, it is found to be deeper and more difficult than was at first realized. 'Just a little learning—just a little acquisition of knowledge,' we said, 'and look, we shall be across and standing at the gates of the celestial city.' But now, rinding ourselves in difficulties, we cry out to those still on the bank, 'Don't attempt it—you are much better off where you are.' Too late. We are all for it now. The country fathers are the only relics of that illiterate class which (finding it almost extinct) we realize now has ever been the source and renewal of our literature. The educated person, if he comes in contact with an old man who can neither read nor write, although his surface-mind feels superior, feels in his heart an involuntary respect, sensing that the old man has in his own personal way a knowledge and understanding somehow outside his own. If he can get that old man to 'talk' he rejoices in having touched life at a fresh aspect. Isn't it a boast among 'intelligent' people that you got such and such an old country fellow to 'talk'? He is one of those who had that ruthless-faery way with the educated man's own terms, humanizing his 'polyanthus' into Polly Ann. Only the other day I heard one referring to a hard-drinking man as being afflicted with 'delirious trembles'. The young men have no such whimsies. The first taste of education and standard English has had the effect of making them acutely selfconscious. They realize (and agricultural depression helps in this) not that they stand supreme in a fundamental way of life, but that they are the last left on a sinking ship. No one decries civilization who has not experienced it ad nauseam. Modernity offers dim but infinite possibilities to the young countryman if only he can rid his boots of this impeding clay. Pylons, petrol pumps and other 'defacements' are to him symbols of a noble power. The motor-bus, motor-bicycle, wireless, are that power's beckonings. But he is late, he is held hapless in a ruining countryside, everyone else is laughing at him, he feels; at his 214

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heavy boots, his rough ways. Doesn't the daily paper laugh at him, and the magazine? Look at the 'comic' country articles, the illustrated jokes. The old men had their defence. They knew what they knew. But he can't stay where they are. The contentment of it is gone. Naturally he seizes on the most obvious and spurious symbols of culture first; he wants to wear low shoes and get a job behind a counter. Not but that, even to-day, with all the cliches of popular journalism, language just breathes of itself. We invest our machines with personalities. There are words such as 'wangle', 'stunt*, coined by the times to express new shades of meaning, and old meanings resuscitated, such as 'stall* in regard to the aeroplane. But England still compromises between the old and new, choking the old source language, yet hanging on to cliches long unrelated to current life. We must go to America for a modern counterpart of the old idiomatic vigour of common speech. American slang may be ugly and unpleasant, but it has the fascination of abounding vitality, hectic and spurious though that may be. It presupposes knowledge of a thousand sophistications, of intimacy with the life of a modern city, just as the traditional idiom presupposed a familiarity with nature and the processes of agriculture. But no urban idiom, however ingenious, could ever be regarded as compensating for that founded on the traditional order. It must always be sharp, cerebrated and opportunist. It is an excitement that feeds on itself, having no root in fundamentals. In place of abstract knowledge, the illiterate countryman has a genius, an intuitive and associative consciousness similar to that of the child. At the other end of the scale, the poet (in the widest sense of the word), as an example of high culture, is nearer the illiterate labourer than all the grades that go between. Culture moves slowly, but in a circle. But modern conditions have put their spoke in the wheel. Elementary education's first effect is to supersede that genius. That sense of abundant satisfaction in being dies from our words. They are robots, purely functional; we consciously make them out of bits of Latin and Greek. They serve their one purpose, and suggest nothing. The mass of acquired facts, imposed technicalities, cultural summaries, make a flutter on the pool whose dark depth was our primitive genius. We are all surface to-day; all being talked to like children by the few technical masters, or bawled at by industrial and newspaper magnates attempting a psychological tyranny. 'Back to earth' is a trite enough phrase; but the implications of it in the sense of a return, somewhere in the social scale, to a faith in intuitive values are no such simple matter.

THE ENGLISH TRADITION

BEATRICE WEBB IN PARTNERSHIP F. R. LEA VIS (1949)

Our Partnership, by Beatrice Webb (Longmans) This belated notice the present reviewer sees as primarily an occasion for an appeal to the publisher to reprint My Apprenticeship, which has been unobtainable for years. That work, as I have argued earlier, should be recognized as an English classic that has a special value for the reader whose interests are in the first place * literary', and for the 'director of English studies' who is seriously preoccupied with the problem of humane education. The admirer of My Apprenticeship will have gone on eagerly to Our Partnership and have read it with great interest. But, in the nature of the case, the later work couldn't be expected to achieve anything like the classical quality of the earlier. The partnership established, Beatrice Webb's formative years were over; My Apprenticeship written, the classical story of personal development and quest for a vocation— a story involving a background of representative family life and family history—had been told. Our Partnership records the exacting and enormous labours to which the Webbs together gave their lives; its interest is primarily political-historical—an interest that must of course be great for all educated readers, though it is not of a kind to rank the later book in English literature with My Apprenticeship. Beatrice Webb clearly had remarkable gifts for the work to which she devoted herself—and in which she felt herself fulfilled. For the Maggie Tulliver of My Apprenticeship miraculously realized her dream and aspiration: love identified with devotion to an inspiring and exalting duty—and found her vocation in labours more akin to those of the intellectual who sub-edited The Westminster Review and translated Spinoza and Feuerbach than to those of the great novelist who wrote Middlemarch. The qualities in which Beatrice Potter so strikingly resembles George Eliot are there, of course, in Our Partnership. We have them in the appraisals of character and personality in which, incidentally to the exposition of the main themes, the book is rich. We have them in the admiring sympathy (characteristically qualified) with which she contemplates the Samurai of the Salvation Army (pp. 401-2): In respect to personal character, all these men and women constitute a Samurai caste, that is, they are men and women selected for their power of subordinating themselves to their cause, most assuredly a remarkable type of ecclesiastic: remarkable, because there is no inequality between man and 216

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woman, because home life and married life are combined with a complete dedication of the individual to spiritual service. A beautiful spirit of love and personal service, of content and joy, permeates the service; there is a persistent note of courtesy to others and openmindedness to the world. The men, and some of the women, are far more cultivated than is usual with persons of the same social status—one can talk to them quite freely—far more freely than you could talk to an elementary school teacher, or trade union official.. . But the intensely compelling nature of the appeal to become converted made tonight by Brigadier Jackson and his wife, I confess, somewhat frightened me off recommending that the Salvation Army should be state- or rate-aided in this work of proselytising persons committed to their care for secular reasons! Is it right to submit men, weakened by suffering, to this religious pressure exercised by the very persons who command their labour? Or take these observations provoked by The Madras House and Misalliance (pp. 447-8): G.B.S. is brilliant but disgusting; Granville-Barker is intellectual but dull. They both harp on the mere physical attractions of men to women, and women to men, coupled with the insignificance of the female for any other purpose but sex attraction, with tiresome iteration. That is not the world I live in, or indeed, think to exist outside a limited circle... Where I think G.B.S., Granville-Barker, H. G. Wells and many other of the most modern authors go wrong, from the standpoint of realism in its best sense, is their complete ignoring of religion. By religion, I mean the communion of the soul with some righteousness felt to be outside and above itself. This may take the conscious form of prayer: or the unconscious form of ever-present and persisting aspirations—a faith, a hope and a devotion to a wholly disinterested purpose. It is this unconscious form of religion which lies at the base of all Sidney's activity. It is this profound seriousness which shows itself in her penetrating evaluations of personality—the quick intelligence with which she appraises the politicians, Civil Servants, intellectuals, public figures and the others with whom she has to do. An anthology of these personal notes would make lively and very impressive reading: Asquith, Balfour, Sir Edward Grey, Milner, Haldane, Churchill, John Burns, Edward VII—the full list would be long. The literary reader finds a special interest in her comments on intellectuals and authors. That she could be radically critical of the old and intimate Fabian comrade, Shaw, comes out in a passage quoted above. With a naivety a little disconcerting in one so intelligent, she is enormously impressed by Man and Superman. But Major Barbara precipitates the firm placing judgment (p. 314): G.B.S.'s play turned out to be a dance of devils—amazingly clever, grimly powerful in the second act—but ending, as all his plays end (or at any rate most of them), in an intellectual and moral morass. 217

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. . . G.B.S. is gambling with ideas and emotions in a way that distresses slow-minded prigs like Sidney and me, and hurts those with any fastidiousness. But the stupid public will stand a good deal from one who is acclaimed as an unrivalled wit by the great ones of the world. As a critic of his plays she had had the advantage (had that been necessary) of having witnessed his vanity, irresponsibility and obtuse and utter irreverence in the field of action: G.B.S. badly beaten; elsewhere the Progressives romping back with practically undiminished numbers. As to the first event, we are not wholly grieved... He certainly showed himself hopelessly intractable during the election.. .Insisted that he was an atheist; that, though a teetotaller, he would force every citizen to imbibe a quartern of rum to cure any tendency to intoxication; laughed at the Nonconformist conscience; chaffed the Catholics about transubstantiation; abused the Liberals, and contemptuously patronized the Conservatives... Bertrand Russell is another friend, at first warmly admired, of whom she becomes profoundly critical, till, provoked by the Free Mans Worships she makes the drastic comment to be found on p. 278. To the present reviewer one of the most poignantly significant things in the book is the footnote on p. 415 to this mention of Rupert Brooke: 'The other five were, I think, commonplace—Schloss, Strachey, Brooke (a poetic beauty)'.. .The footnote runs: 'This was the afterwards famous Rupert Brooke who put me off the track of his distinction by delivering a super-conceited lecture on the relation of the university man to the common herd of democracy. Also I am poetry blind like some persons are colour blind.' If Beatrice Webb was 'poetry blind', it is impossible to believe that she was congenitally so—indeed, she hadn't supposed herself to be so in the formative years. More generally and positively, there is strong reason for holding that she was potentially a good literary critic, so that there is a significant irony in her being able to allege 'incapacity' in order to explain away the quick and sure report of her intelligence on Brooke. By her own account (she is explicit) she needed to be a competent reader of literature. And early in Our Partnership (p. 16) she says: 'We accordingly devoted ourselves as scientists to the study of social institutions, from trade unions to Cabinets, from family relations to churches, from economics to literature—a field itself so extensive that we have never been able to compass more than a few selected fragments of it.' The dilemma of the age of specialization is given us here—for 'fragments', of course, doesn't adequately express the inadequacy these scientists could not escape. And we cannot help seeing a sig218

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nificant relation between the development of Maggie Tulliver into the intellectual of Soviet Russia: a New Civilisation, and such autobiographical notes as this (p. 292): 'What is utterly lacking [in the intellectual society that the Partners kept] is art, literature for its own sake, and music—whilst physical science only creeps up as analogous and illustrative matter; history appears in much the same aspect.'

A CURE FOR AMNESIA DENYS THOMPSON (1933)

The English have been unfortunate in writers about their country. Gibbs's A Cotswold Village (Cape) is representative, a sticky confection, the literary effort of a clubman down among the rustics, a Nature Lover fond of cricket, beer, and blood sports. A gentleman in his view is a person who sends in no bill to the Hunt for a loss of fifty fowls, and in praise of the villagers he can only produce a smug approval of their morals. Almost every page is littered with cliches floating in Ruskinese, and quotations from Horace are liberally applied. The author was at Eton. After the war we have Mr Henry Williamson. Upon reading The Village Book (Cape) anyone could have foretold that his next effort, The Labouring Life (Cape), would be a Book Society runner, for in these two books of mainly pointless anecdotes there is nothing to disquiet the comfortable. In the former there is an interesting note (p. 68) on idiom, and in the latter there are one or two pages on the same subject. If Mr Williamson had been brought up on Sturt's books, he might have produced some useful observations: as it is, they are conventional and superficial, if not grossly indulgent in feeling, like Gibbs. From neither writer does one gather that any particularly significant change has happened to English life in the last hundred years; and books like these discredit those who have something to say. That the power age destroyed the agricultural basis of life and thereby the best soil for a satisfactory civilization should be a generalization trite enough. D. H. Lawrence realized this and its implications for us more acutely than any—see Twilight in Italy, p. 217, Mornings in Mexico, p. 145, and Letters, passim—but he had not the opportunities for particular, local observation that fell to George Sturt (he wrote as * Bourne') whose percipience is comparable only to Lawrence's. It was very lucky that there should have been an observer as intelligent and aware as Sturt to record the dying, and some of the life, 219

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of the English rural culture; how fine it was, how fertile for individual living, does not seem to be known. He beautifully elucidates this popular civilization, and a reading of his work should save a good deal of misapprehension among critics of Scrutiny. In the best of his available books, Change in the Village, Sturt describes the peasant system: The * peasant' tradition in its vigour amounted to nothing less than a form of civilization—the home-made civilization of the rural English. To the exigent problems of life it furnished solutions of its own.. . People could find in it not only a method of getting a living, but also an encouragement and a help to live well. Besides employment there was an interest for them in the country customs. There was scope for modest ambition too. Best of all, these customs provided a rough guide as to conduct—an unwritten code to which, though we forget it, England owes much. It seems singular to think of it now; but the very labourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nor trouble about "raising" himself into some other class, so long as he could live on peasant lines. And it is in the virtual disappearance of this civilization that the main change in the village consists. [See the whole chapter, The Peasant System.] But to notice his work is to quote it: one can only summarize inadequately. The lives of the peasants were fulfilled, their relation to each other and their environment adjusted, in a way now unattainable by anyone. They subsisted upon what their industry could produce from the soil, they lived in touch with the seasonal rhythm, and with it they inherited a 'religious sentiment, pagan, not Christian'. There was delight in their work itself, however arduous, daylong and lifelong; it was interesting and varied, for men and women were learned in numerous exciting crafts, and before the enclosure of their commons the peasants were independent of wages, enjoying a comparative prosperity. Even after the enclosures, the country work for the labourer was interesting, almost worth doing for its own sake, 'when it still called for much old-world skill and knowledge, and when the praises of the master were the praises of an expert who well knew what he was talking about. On these terms it was no mean pleasure that the able labouring men had in their labour. They took a pride in i t . . .And master and man were not greatly out of touch in the matter of civilization. It made a vast difference to the labourer's comfort.' He was in touch with the ideas and purposes of his employer, and as the demand for labour was steady, 'they enjoyed what their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom from anxiety'. And as the farmers were the inheritors of a set of rural traditions nearly akin to those of the peasants, the townsmen too 'were extremely countrified in character'. 220

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Where work was the staple of living, leisure was little valued. But with the modern labourer's employment 'the money-valuation of it is the prime consideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn; and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living.' The problem raised by this passage is central and urgent; when work is adjusted to needs and reduced to four hours a day or less, men may forget that they are men. The modern worker, factoryhand or millionaire, is unfitted by the nature of his work to make use of his leisure for any real recreation: they destroy themselves in commercially purveyed recreations. And (pp. 206-8) Sturt compares two cases, typical of the old and new systems; first, of the impoverished versatile jobbing labourer, proficient in a dozen crafts, rich in folk wisdom, he says: He is a man who seems to enjoy his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful if the working hours afford to nine out of ten modern and even 'educated' men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as Turner's hours bring to him. And then he shows how the contrasting case miserably fails to provide any kind of living. Again of Turner Sturt notes: At the outset he saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished, carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount of traditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for ages supported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems with recollections of all this industry.. . And throughout he insists that at the core of this beautifully sufficient culture there throve a life-giving tradition. The Village he describes was not representative of the English popular civilization; the Villagers were descendants of 18th century squatters, and in other places, he suggests, the tradition could put forth its 'fairer, gentler features', offer still better opportunities for living. But the measure of satisfaction they enjoyed they owed to tradition; 'they had a civilization to support them,' and they would not have adapted themselves so successfully, had there not been' at the back of them a time-honoured tradition teaching them how to go on'. But the tradition was not static, taken over like a bank-balance. 'You must obtain it by great 221

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labour/ as Mr Eliot has remarked in Tradition and the Individual Talent, and this truth is finely exemplified by many passages in Lucy Bettesworth (a book worthy of its author, especially the latter chapters), in the chapter on Our Primitive Knowledge, for instance, where he says of traditional knowledge not to be picked up in schools: But after all, it is only a preparation. Skill cannot act upon knowledge, nor the adaptation be made, nor the struggling beauty begin to appear and fascinate us, until the owner of this knowledge adds judgment to it.. .It is by judgment—that product of personal experience; that skill of the intelligence; that incommunicable knowledge which every workman must acquire afresh for himself because none can impart it to him—that the final judgments are perfected [p. 218; cf. p. 129 seqq., p. 183 seqq.]. Sturt's work is admirably adapted to education, and specially for a literary training it offers precise elucidations and analogies for literary tradition and criticism. And all of this note is meant to bear on literature. The tradition which Sturt recorded has much to do with the success of The Pilgrim s Progress and with that of Hardy and Mr T. F. Powys; the pleasure derived from reading Hardy's novels results not, as is commonly assumed, from literary art—his literary technique is naive and clumsy—but from contact with the rich traditional country round of life. An understanding of this life will help to explain how Shakespeare's use of language differs from Milton's, in what way the idiom of newspaper and best-seller and advertising is destructive of fine language and of fine living, and why, since English traditional culture is dead, it is of the first importance that tradition should be sustained through literature. And the education to be had from Sturt would put to better ends the naive enthusiasm of the later Georgian or pylon poets. To revert, the expressive rural speech was related to rich and decent living, and contrasts with our mechanical suburban idiom, the evidence of shallow, insignificant existence. Sturt's villagers had a fine social life: the English middle classes (i.e. most people) have to-day no personal life, are incapable of relations with each other. Instead we have the imitation of such a life described in Stardust in Hollywood (see the account of the Breakfast Club and compare English Rotary and similar associations and the pathetic attempts to recreate a genuine social club in the garden suburb or city). It was fortunate again that Sturt should have been in a position to give an insight into one of the folk arts of the rural civilization in its flourishing state. Not much of The Wheelwright's Shop can be quoted; it is out of print and hard to obtain; and long passages of it have been used in a recent book. But it is likely to be considered a great 222

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book by anyone who agrees that Change in the Village is a work of rare importance. Sturt himself learned the craft from * the men, eight friends of the family'—they were not * hands' on the same footing as dock facilities and electric power, and before Sturt's time a skilled man was known as 'Master' So-and-so. Learning the art (a matter of years) was a complete education, compared to which the most expensive school education obtainable nowadays seems a sterilization; the same integrity which prevented the men from taking advantage of their young employer's inexperience made them ashamed 'to have to work twice over because the original material had been faulty'— any piece of work had to last for years. Nor was this integrity peculiar: I should soon have been bankrupt in business in 1884 if the public temper then had been like it is now—grasping, hustling, competitive. But then no competitor seems to have tried to hurt me. To the best of my remembrance people took a sort of benevolent interest in my doings, put no difficulties in my way, were slow to take advantage of my ignorance. Nobody asked for an estimate—indeed there was a fixed price for all the new work that was done [p. 53]. And commercial travellers treated him well; one could hardly be persuaded to take a large order lest his client should be overstocked. The men, though overworked and underpaid, enjoyed life; they were fulfilled in their work, and their work was totally useful. The traditional ways of life were destroyed by being ground in with the commercial machine, but no higher standard of living can compensate for the loss: Although throughout their long years they have worked continually for a profit of which they have been as continually relieved by others, country labourers are still able to carry with them into old age a set of feelings, of tastes, developed in them by the nature of country industry. In the labourmarket no one is able to strip away from them that one possession. They are connoisseurs of local handiwork; they know from the inside the meaning and attractiveness of simple outdoor crafts; in the texture of materials— timber, stone, lime, brick-earth, thatching-straw—there is something that goes familiarly home to their senses; and so there is in the shape of tools, such as they themselves have handled. The fields, the meadows, the woods, the quarries, have never been to them a form of riches, but have always been an interesting theatre for the play of their strength and skill and knowledge; and the intimacies of the village are theirs too—the village where talk has even to-day so much of the folk tinge, and where men's habits are so self-reliant and so little used to inspection and organized routine [Lucy Bettesworth, p. 109].

And finally, to summarize the loss, the reason for the accomplished efficiency of this English culture: 'The coherent and self-explanatory 223

THE ENGLISH TRADITION

village life had given place to a half-blind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economic processes.' To repeat a phrase used earlier in Scrutiny, the organic community has dissolved, and with it 'the only basis for a genuine national culture'. An organic community existed in Sturt's village—a society, engaged in pursuits satisfying in themselves and relevant to human ends, whose members were finely adjusted in their relations to each other and to their environment. England consisted of such communities: 'Although Farnham fancied itself a little town, its business was being conducted in the spirit of the village.. . Men worked to oblige one another.' Any idea that theirs was a merely stupid or brute contentment could not survive a reading of Sturt's books; and it could hardly occur to anyone who is aware of the manifestations of traditional rural art, for instance in pottery, furniture, churches and tombstones, which often exemplify what tradition could do for local talent, what vitality it imparted and what variety it allowed—for the peasant was not standardized, as someone suggested to me. For amplifying the point, see J. E. Barton's Purpose and Admiration (Christopher), a most useful book to anyone engaged in education; there are very few books on art so apt for training sensibility. Its undue optimism need not impair its value. Three other books by Sturt—A Farmer's Life; Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer; William Smith, Potter and Farmer—are complementary to those already named; the persons they describe (to say they are shrewd, tough, self-reliant and extremely well educated is not enough) are excellent advertisements for the tradition which produced them and Sturt himself. He is comparably more intelligent and more important than the conventional classics. Tone and feeling (except perhaps in the early Bettesworth Boole) are impeccable, over a tract where there have been disasters, and he is as potently evocative of what we have lost as Lawrence; the writings of the two supplement each other. That Sturt has further affinities with Lawrence is hinted at by the extracts from his unpublished journal given by Arnold Bennett in his back-slapping introduction to A Small Boy in the Sixties, a not very interesting book. There must be a number of books on the various forms of the culture that Sturt describes. Immediately notable are England's Green and Pleasant Land, an angular and salutary book, A Shepherd's Life, of which the opening chapters are poor and not representative, and Small Talk at Wreyland (that the author is unintelligent and artless strengthens his testimony to the life of a flourishing community). Instead of continuous organic life, we have organization—machine technology with a malignant impetus of its own, progressing away from human ends. Where before a man had a place in a desirable 224

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scheme, now as worker he is an easily replaceable component, and as consumer, a mere goose to be fed with a force-pump—no way has yet been found of eliminating man as the circulator of the necessary monetary lubricant. In the past, satisfying ways of living have grown out of the struggle with the natural environment for the means of subsistence; now men are pitted against each other in a squalid fight for survival in which art, religion and morality go by the board. The power age was founded on a cypher (the decimal) and it is ending in cyphers, on bank balances. If the wheelwright's shop was representative of the old, its destroyer and successor, the car, symbolizes the new civilization. It is the foundation of American prosperity, and typical of the stimulated pleasures to which machine workers are adapted; and in America, according to Middletown, it has destroyed the family, reduced religion and radically altered social custom. It is one of the chief and most demoralizing insulators from the sources of vitality; and with its intentionally rapid rate of obsolescence it is typical of the mass-produced commodity which has to have a demand created for it. The wheelwright's training constituted an excellent education and his work a full and humanly sufficient life: the garage-hand's apprenticeship is usually a course in petty deceit. The contrast between the wheelwright's shop and the motorcar trade as a specimen of amoral big business will bear a great deal of working out in detail. (See e.g. p. 29 of The Nemesis of American Business,} One sometimes meets a touching faith that the machine will produce a culture of its own, as right as those of pre-power civilizations. But we are already, here and now, in the midst of any * culture' the machine is likely to produce spontaneously, and contemptibly inadequate it is. Our suburban (no matter where you dwell) civilization is already well adapted to the machine, and likely to become more so as the memory of something more sufficient withers, and in it humanity is uprooted and atrophied in an unprecedented way and on an unprecedented scale. Mass production demands sales, sales need advertising. So the decisive factor is the 'adman', and what we derive from him; and what more we are to expect may be found out from the book which was the occasion of the note Advertising God in Scrutiny Vol. I, No. 3; the extent to which the 'adman's' civilization is in operation is less adquately realized than most problems. That the menace recorded in that note was not an extravagant Americanism, but part of the atmosphere of this country, is enforced by the February issue of the Advertising World (16 Plough Court, Fetter Lane, E.C.4). It is a frightening document, the evidence of a hostile world, organized, solid, effective (see the article 8

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Getting Culture through Advertising). It is an apt educational tool, and it also disposes of the contention that the 'adman' does not after all exhibit a very high degree of cunning: the diagram on p. 96, showing a tree of'human urges' branching out of the 'urge to race continuance', is not reassuring. 'The unremitting, pervasive, masturbatory manipulations of "scientific" Publicity' degrade man into an unpleasant kind of ape; 'modern youth' is as the advertiser would have it, cheaply sophisticated but vacuous, cocksure but easily coerced by suggestion, inoculated, in fact, against living. ' Coerced' is not the right word; for as the wheelwright and the peasant gained a complete education from their environment, so the young to-day absorb their ideas and attitudes from the formative advertising environment. Two quotations from Vol. I should show why it is part of Scrutiny's policy to make Sturt's work known, and how it implements any serious education: The memory of the old order, the old ways of life, must be the chief hint for, the directing incitement towards, a new, if ever there is to be a new. It is the memory of a human normality or naturalness (one may recognize it as such without ignoring what has been gained in hygiene, public humanity and comfort) [p. 178]. To revive or replace a decayed tradition is a desperate undertaking; the attempt may seem futile. But perhaps some readers of Scrutiny will agree that no social or political movement unrelated to such an attempt could engage one's faith and energy. The more immediate conclusions would seem to bear upon education [p. 31]. The danger is that a new generation may accept the present desiccating environment as normal, that when every artisan is on the twocar standard it may be forgotten that there are more human ways of occupying leisure than valeting machines. If any education can obviate this, the kind of education needed is to be found in Sturt. You cannot nowadays grow Sturts like potatoes—the soil produces Rotarians; and it should be one of our chief concerns to bring it home that the present plight of civilization is abnormal, to combat the poisoning acedia which declares that it's all happened before. Detailed suggestions for the use of Sturt's works in the teaching of English and other subjects have been made in Culture and Environment; so one need only repeat here, in the hope of being taken literally, that they are valuable educational tools. They provide what the 'fortifying classical curriculum' is supposed to provide, but actually impedes. Or to use another idiom, they are admirably adapted 'to preserve the individual from the sole centrifugal impulse of heresy, to make him capable of judging for himself and at the same time capable of judging and understanding the judgments of the experience of the race'. 226

DENYS THOMPSON SOURCES The Wheelwright's Shop, by George Sturt (C.U.P.). Change in the Village, by George Bourne (Duckworth). Lucy Bettesworth, by George Bourne (Duckworth). William Smith, Potter and Farmer, by George Bourne (Chatto and Windus). A Farmer's Life, by George Bourne (Cape). Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, by George Bourne (Duckworth). England's Green and Pleasant Land (Cape). Small Talk at Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (C.U.P.). A Shepherd's Life, by W. H. Hudson (Methuen). The Nemesis of American Business, by Stuart Chase (Allen and Unwin). This American World, by E. A. Mowrer (Faber). Fiction and the Reading Public, by Q. D. Leavis (Chatto and Windus). Words and Idioms, by Logan Pearsall Smith (Constable). Rustic Speech and Folklore, by E. M. Wright (O.U.P.). The Grass Roof, by Younghill Kang (Scribner's). Mexico, by Stuart Chase (The Bodley Head). Scrutiny, Vol. I, pp. 31, 178, 208, 315 seqq.

REVALUATION: 'THE VISION OF PIERS PLOWMAN' D. A. TRAVERSl (1936)

The recent publication of a modernized version of Piers Plowman1 suggests that a revaluation would be opportune. There are signs that Langland is at last coming into appreciation. Mr Wells's translation is only one of them; it was preceded by Mr Coghill's important article in Medium Aevum, which showed conclusively that Langland's poem was not, as it had been held to be, an example of mediaeval anarchy, redeemed only for the persevering philologist and the hardy student of social conditions. Nevill Coghill was followed by Christopher Dawson, who pointed out the need for a popular edition of the poem. Yet, without being ungrateful for all this, we may affirm that much remains to be done. Coghill's work is rather a prelude to criticism 1

The Vision of Piers Plowman. Translated into modern English by Henry W.Weils. With an Introduction by Nevill Coghill. (London, 1935, Sheed and Ward.) 227

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than an attempt at criticism itself, and Dawson's essay was a little disappointing by contrast with the rest of the book1 in which it appeared. It revealed the sociological, rather than the critical, outlook of its author, and tended to confuse high moral intentions with literary merit—a fault too common in contemporary Catholic criticism. As for the present rendering of the poem, Mr Wells would not claim that it constitutes any substitute for the original; it is unfortunate that obvious practical difficulties make a reasonably cheap and attractive edition of the original, delivered from the shadow of Skeat and his notes, a very remote possibility. A contrast between Wells's version and the original may serve to introduce some of the issues involved in an understanding of Langland. The following lines, taken from Passus C XX, run thus in the modern dress: These three things that I tell you are interpreted as follows. The wife is our wicked flesh that will not be chastened; For nature cleaves to us continually and is contrary to the spirit. When it falls it finds excuses that its frailty is inherent, And for that is lightly forgiven and the evil forgotten, Where men ask mercy and purpose amendment. The rain that rains on restless evenings, Is the sickness and the sorrow that we suffer often. But what Langland wrote was this: These thre that ich telle of thus beoth to vnderstonde; The wif is oure wikkede fleshe that wol nat be chasted, For kynde clyueth on hym evere to contrarie the soule. And though he falle, he fynt skyles that frelete hit made; And that is lyghtliche for-gyue and for-gute bothe To man, that mercy asketh and amende thenketh. Ac the reyn that reyneth ther we reste sholde, Beoth syknesses and other sorwes that we suffren ofte. This comparison is not set forth to disparage the work of Mr Wells. It is an effort to point out an important change in the value and significance of English words since the days of Langland. The first thing to notice is the continual tendency of the modern version to tone down the immediacy of personal experience, to erect a barrier of diplomatic generalization between the original emotion and its poetic expression. Already in the third line, 'spirit' is a distinct weakening of the definite Christian dogmatic implications of 'soule', and a vaguely aphoristic 'us' is substituted for the direct reference to the flesh implied by 1

Medieval Religion. 228

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' h y m \ In the following line, the rendering of 'that frelete hit made' by 'its fraily is inherent' is more serious; it involves a depersonalized moralizing, an instinct to escape from the direct statement, that has followed everywhere in the track of the looser varieties of Protestantism. Passing over some lesser points, we are struck by the alteration of to

Ac the reyn that reyneth

ther we reste sholde,

The rain that rains on restless evenings,

where the sense of personal effort and weariness implied by the original is sacrificed for an irrelevant romantic trimming. The weakening of the new words is accompanied by a weakening of metre. Langland may not have been aware of the metrical subtleties of Anglo-Saxon, but he realized that the break at the centre of each alliterative line was the key to the whole effect; his lines rise up to the pause, and fall as definitely away from it, and are so preserved from the dangers of a mere invertebrate flow. This is not so with Mr Wells, whose lines are lacking in contrast and whose caesura shifts uneasily from syllable to syllable and finds no certain resting-place. I hope I shall not be accused of quibbling. My aim is not to attack this translation, but to show how a change of language operating over several centuries has made Mr Wells's complete success an impossibility. In this case, too, a study of linguistic qualities enables us to 'place' Langland in the tradition of English poetry. The chief quality of his language, we have suggested, is its immediacy, its power of suggesting without adornment direct personal emotion. But this quality is not a personal creation of the poet; it is the product of a long and mainly anonymous process in which the preacher's natural tendency to abstraction was wedded to the popular instinct for realistic description to produce the great tradition of English allegory. The preacher came to the pulpit armed with the Church's abstract survey of human failings in the shape of the Seven Deadly Sins, but he had to put them vividly before an audience who were accustomed to translate everything into terms of their own experience. Their sermons, in fact, were what we might call proverbial, for the proverb is nothing more than the translation of general law in terms of a particular knowledge.1 They are full of such direct proverbs as 'Pore be hanged bi the necke; a rich man bi the purs', or 'Trendle the appel nevere so far, he conyes fro what tree he cam'. From these it was only a natural step to bring the well-worn virtues and vices to life, to give each of them an easily recognizable and vivid embodiment. As time passed, these in their 1

On the whole of this question, see Owst's Literature and Pulpit in Mediaeval England. 229

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turn assumed more or less conventional shapes, and were handed from preacher to preacher until they became part of the common stock from which a writer like Langland could easily draw. That he did draw upon them is easily proved. I need not quote the famous incident in which Gloton set out for church and ended in the tavern; it has a long and clearly established ancestry in mediaeval preaching. Here is one preacher enlarging upon the theme of drunkenness: Thow a now se thre candels, ye, thre mones ther a nother man seth but on, yit I seye he is blynd. How truliche a may nat se what is good and what is evel!.. . I pray the, is nat this a grete blindnes, thynkis te, whan a man hath sete ate nale hows or ate taverne alday, ye, nat onliche alday, but also muche of the nith therto—and ate laste cumth horn as drunke as a dosil,1 and chit his wyf, reprevith his children, bet his meyne, ye, unnethe a kan go to bedde but as a his browth therto with his servauntes hondis! All the elements of Langland's description are there, used by the preacher to gain a vivid effect and even to rouse a certain amount of laughter in order to bring his point home. The poetic qualities of which this tradition made Langland master can readily be shown in quotation; I select his picture of Covetyse in Passus C VII as typical: Thenne cam Couetyse ich can nat hym discryue, So hongerliche and so holw Heruey hym-self lokede. He was bytelbrowed and baberlupped with two blery eyen, And as a letherene pors lollid hus chekus, Wei sydder than hys chyn ychiueled for elde: As bondemenne bacon hus berd was yshaue, With hus hod on his heued and hus hatte bothe; In a toren tabarde of twelue wynter age. The qualitities of this passage are clearly visual qualities, and their ancestry is obvious. It derives from centuries of effort on the part of the preacher to bring home the great and common vices of his time to his audience. Even the alliteration is as much a device of the speaker as a traditional poetic technique; note how it falls again and again upon the descriptive epithets which are the key to the whole effect. And the words chosen are precisely those which a preacher could be certain of sharing with his audience, intense, but in no way 'poetic', if by poetic we mean a refined decoration of not too pressing emotions. These merits, once we admit them, are soon seen to be more than personal, more even than the qualities of Langland's own particular tradition; 1

Owst says that this apparently means 'the spigot of a barrel'; in this case, we should note as typical the vividness and unlikeliness of the phrase. 230

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they are a general characteristic of the best English poetry. They are based upon an extraordinary ability to describe personal experience in terms of a common idiom, founded in this case on the simple but fundamental activities of a society closely connected with the land. It is unnecessary to prove Langland's close contact with rural life, for it is clear on every page of his poem. It opens with the wanderings of a shepherd on the Malvern Hills and never moves far from them in spirit. Piers Plowman, its hero, is merely a universalizing of the normal English life, the life which all readers of the poem would understand and in terms of which they could establish a common idiom with their poet. To realize how such a symbol could be given a universal significance, we have only to see how Piers appears successively as a 'fine and honest farmer',1 as the expounder of Charity and the Holy Trinity, as the Good Samaritan, and as Jesus himself. We are becoming increasingly aware of the way in which honest and active emotional responses can be fostered in people whose close contact with the soil and with traditional ways of living and working have not been undermined by the deadening forces of modern industrialism. If this can be so, even to-day, it is not surprising that this common social basis provided the vital idiom for the greatest English poetry. Langland, in fact, was a great poet, and his greatness throws some light upon the nature of the English contribution to poetry. The great English poets have always been those who have rescued English from scholarship run to seed; the genius of the language has always resisted false systems and false conventions. One should not, at this date, have to quote extensively to prove this point. Shakespeare and Donne, in their turn, were great poets because they freed English from the bondage of a dead scholarship and restored to it expressiveness and idiomatic strength. That was what Shakespeare was doing when he wrote: who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life. .. ? These two verbs, so expressive in their evocation of common physical effort, should not have pleased those who followed logically the precepts of the Humanists. Nor should the sharp effect by which the 'bare bodkin' is doubly driven in by contrast with the Latin of 'quietus', so that it comes upon us with a definite effect of physical shock. Hopkins, too, was in his day the bearer to English of this new linguistic life, and his praise of Dryden for stressing 'the naked thew and sinew of the English language' is only a critical formulation of Shakespeare's practice. And their idiom was similar to that of Langland, whose language was vital English, and the alliterative metre into which 1

Coghill's Introduction. 23I

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it naturally fell the vital vehicle for it. Driven underground after the Norman Conquest by heavy versifiers who could neither make a foreign medium live nor retain the life of the old, it revived in the fourteenth century as a natural framework for the English language. I am not forgetting Chaucer, and the foreign influences upon his work. Over two centuries of reversals and foreign domination had adversely affected what we may call the English tradition. More especially, they had divorced that tradition from healthy contact with important sources of self-consciousness and intelligence; there are places where the allegory of Piers Plowman drops into heaviness and unwieldy personification, and these are precisely the faults that Chaucer, who was himself no less English than Langland, succeeded in avoiding. But the full alliterative metre represents values more important than those of the Chaucerian version of The Romaunt of the Rose, and by virtue of these values its meaning survives in later English literature. In particular, Langland's verse achieves a peculiar relation of rhythm to feeling, the same relation which allowed Shakespeare to play sense and stress against the restraining influence of the traditional blank verse. An application of the principles to the opening lines of Piers Plowman will make my meaning clear: In a somere seyson whan soft was the sonne, Y shop me in-to shrobbis as y a shepherd were, In abit as an ermite vnholy of werkes, Ich went forth in the worlde wonders to hure, And sawe many cellis and selcouthe thynges. Ac on a may morwening on Maluerne hulles Me byfel for to slepe for weyrynesse of wandryng; And in a launde as ich lay lenede ich and slepte, And merueylously me mette as ich may yowe telle; Al the welthe of this worlde and the woo bothe, Wynkyng as it were wyterly ich saw hyt, Of tryuthe and of tricherye of tresoun and of gyle, Al ich saw slepynge as ich shal yowe telle. The advantages of scansion by stress rather than by mechanical counting are obvious here. The exigencies of the language dictate the position of the stresses, and these in turn are determined by what D. H. Lawrence described as 'the ebbing and lifting emotion*. The break in the middle of the line may serve to give point to a balanced contrast, or to emphasize a significant parenthesis in the flow of the narrative. Langland's metre, in fact, was the natural setting of a living language. The Victorian mechanism of scansion, with its cumbrous names and hieroglyphic signs, is only possible for a medium that has 232

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become ossified and lost contact with genuine feeling. Langland's language, as we have seen, was vital because the hideous modern plastering of the emotional life had not yet come to make men incapable of physical, mental or spiritual feeling. To adapt a phrase from Lady Chatterleys Lover, man's continuity with his past and with his own environment was still not mechanical, but organic. One very important indication of this was the fact that Langland, in the passage just quoted, showed that he could do what very few modern poets have been able to accomplish—that is, to handle a plain unadorned narrative, bringing out its full implications, without interrupting its natural flow. He succeeded in telling us that his poem was to be a complete survey of human life under the aspect of good and evil (for he saw—* Al the welthe of this worlde and the woo bothe'), without in any way distracting us from the preliminary statement of the circumstances of the poem. And, since we could trust very few of even the greatest of our Romantic poets to do this, we must conclude that it was in itself a considerable achievement. These considerations will serve, I hope, to point out how Langland is great. They will now help us to grasp the essence and value of his experience, which I propose to estimate by a comparison with the other great allegorist of English poetry—I mean Spenser. Spenser's language is clearly a different instrument from Langland's. Even at its simplest, in Mother Hubberd's Tale and other poems which derive from traditional sources, the divergence is obvious. In so far as his inspiration is English, and not that of the French humanists, it is clearly the decorative aspect of Chaucer that appeals to him. Even when he uses the English vocabulary which he cultivated so sedulously, the words have quite a different significance. Here he is elaborating an English subject: Seest, howe brag yond Bullocke beares, So smirke, so smooth, his pricked ears? His homes bene as broade as Rainbowe bent, His dewelap as lythe as lasse of Kent. See howe he venteth into the wynd. Weenest of love is not hys mynd? Seemeth thy flocke thy counsell can, So lustless beene they, so weake so wan, Clothed with cold, and hoary with frost.1 This is the voice of a new sophistication. Words like 'brag', * smirke', and'pricked 5 have a traditional look about them, but their use suggests the arrival of a new poetic purpose. They are fastidiously chosen to 1

The Shepheardes Calender: Februarie. 233

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present to the court a courtly picture of the countryside, and they are set in a rhythm which acts as a decorative border to the whole. They fit the social grace and dignity which an Elizabethan court possessed, and their effect is undoubtedly pleasing. But they suggest danger at hand. Already there is a perilous lack of root in this convention. Those whose way of life has become remote from the real soil cannot expect to preserve for long the veneer of the soil; and that, translated into social terms, is the meaning of The Shepheardes Calender. When Spenser tries to write about the common physical experiences of healthy mankind, his words become little more than pleasant decorative trimmings; they are coins which have only a diminishing reserve of real feeling behind them. When Langland desires to express his deepest feelings, he finds it natural to rely on the simplest images. He writes of the Incarnation in terms of the most universal physical processes: Loue is the plante of pees and most preciouse of vertues; For heuene holde hit ne mygte so heuy hit semede, Til hit hadde on erthe goten hym-selve. Was neuere lef vp-on lynde lyghter ther-after, As whanne hit hadde of the folde flesch and blod ytake; Tho was it portatyf and pershaunt as the poynt of a nedle, May non armure hit lette nother hye walles; For-thy is loue ledere of oure lordes folke in heuene. The issue is quite clear. Langland's language is the vehicle of a finely integrated experience, alive and sensitive to every point of contact, and crystallizing suavely into poetry. The effect of that adjective, * pershaunt', followed by 'as the poynt of a nedle*, for example, is not so inferior to Shakespeare's 'bare bodkin'; it is certainly of the same kind, and depends upon the same vitality of perception. The words are almost transparent vehicles for the emotion that underlies them and demands the simplest, most vital expression. Their value, so to speak, is sacramental (the word has a peculiar relevance in view of the nature of Langland's allegory) and the presence of universal physical experiences is a help in indicating even the most spiritual reality. But for Spenser these things have only a decorative value, and here too is a philosophy at stake beneath the critical issue; body is body, and can only meet spirit by degrading it—this was the implication of Spenser's attraction to Neo-Platonism. Spenser, in fact, is the first great Puritan poet. The second was Milton, who, it is well known, thought Spenser a better moral teacher than Aquinas. No two men have done more, by their very genius, to crush the true poetic tradition of England. It is typical of all Puritans that their attempts to escape the body and live by the 'spiritual' 234

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faculty alone in a kind of baseless caricature of Christian sanctity leads to the free spawning of every kind of evil. Milton's account of the relation of Sin and Death in Book II of Paradise Lost is perfectly typical. It can be amply paralleled in Spenser. The pages of the Faerie Queene abound in monsters of every description, who are perfectly unreal as moral representations of evil, but who teem with incredible frequency and vividness. One cannot avoid feeling that Spenser got a kind of half-horrified thrill out of this continual loathsome reproduction. Indeed, one must be struck by the vividness of Spenser's description of evil and deformity: And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony, Deformed Creature, on afilthieswyne, His bellie was vp-blowne with luxury, And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne, And like a Crane his necke was long and fyne, With which he swallowed vp excessive feast, For want whereof poore people oft did pyne; All all the way, most like a brutish beast, He spued vp his gorge, that all did him deteast. In green vineleaues he was right fitly clad; For other clothes he could not weare for heat, And on his head an yuie girlond had, From vnder which fast trickled downe the sweat, Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat, And in his hand did beare a bouzing can, Of which he supt so oft, that on his seat His drunked corse he scarse vpholden can, In shape and life more like a monster, than a man. After that, one would not deny Spener's greatness as a poet. But the passage is doubly significant in view of its ancestry, which is Christian and mediaeval; the 'bouzing can' is there to remind us of its connection with the vivid vernacular, and the contrasting reference to the poor recalls one of the main social grievances of the English pulpit. The whole picture, moreover, belongs to the world of the miracle plays, where Herod died raving and rotting to pieces as Aelfric had described him in a sermon more than 500 years before. But there evil had always been subordinate to and less real than good, so that even Herod might easily turn into something like a joke. All was given its proper place in a theology that covered the whole of experience and centred everything upon the complete man's destined vision of God. So it was in Langland, whose allegory, like his language, grew out of his experience before transcending it. The symbol of Piers has a content that Spenser's figures lack for this very reason; he is fully natural both before and 235

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after he touches the supernatural. Langland's moral judgments are always founded on particular instances, and his portraits remind us of Ben Jonson's humours. The 'theory' of humours is often regarded as scholarly and continental in impulse, but this is not so.1 The essence of it consists in taking a real human type and in stressing one aspect of it until it gives a peculiar life to the whole figure. The quality of that life may be described as * intensity'; it dominates the character even to the point of distortion, though the distortion, being to scale within the limits of the play, always gives us increased and not diminished reality. Moliere, of course, has the quality, but in him it is complicated by social considerations; in Jonson, the moral impulse stands unconcealed. The tavern incident in Passus C VII, already referred to, is typical. It is of the same kind as Bartholomew Fair, similar in its Hogarthian fidelity to detail and in the firmness of its morality; and the mention of Hogarth reminds us that there was still vitality in this tradition in the eighteenth century. But it is time to return to particulars, and a single example here is worth pages of generalities. The words of Lechery, a typical Langlandian personification, will serve: To eche maide that ich mette ich made hure a sygne Semyinge to synne-warde and somme gan ich teste A-boute the mouthe, and by-nythe by-gan ich to grope, Til our brothers wil was on; to werke we yeden As wel fastyngdaies as Frydaies and heye-feste euenes, As lief in lent as oute of lente all tymes liche— Such werkus with ous were neuere oute of season— Til we myghte no more; thanne hadde we murye tales Of puterie and of paramours and proueden thorw speches, Handlynge and halsynge and al-so thorw cissynge Excitynge oure aither other til oure old synne; Sotilede songes and sende out olde baudes For to wynne to my wil wommen with gyle; By sorcerye som tyme and som tyme by maistrie. Ich lay by the louelokest and loued hem neuere after. Whenne ich was old and hor and hadde lore that kynde, Ich had lykynge to lauhe of lecherous tales. Now, lord, for thy leaute of lechours haue mercy! All the characteristics we are seeking are here. Each element in this picture could be paralleled in the pages of the didactic literature of the time; here is a related passage, one of many, taken from Owst's book: 1

Since writing this, I have seen Mr L. C. Knights' article on ' Tradition and Ben Jonson' in Scrutiny, September 1935. The connection is obvious, as is my debt to Mr Eliot at this point. 236

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these costumable lechours, when age suffreth hem no longer to the dedus unclennes, yit woll thei than synge and make bost at ther owne lewdnes in lechery; ye, and tell more therof at the taverne than ever he tolde othur thenketh to tell to his confessour all the dayes of his liff. No two selections could do more to illustrate the origin and development of that concreteness and vitality in delineation which is the basis of the English comedy of humours and of Langland's allegorical method. The characteristics of lechery are not presented in a Spenserian abstraction, but by the mouth of a human being. The feeling is human, and not only human, but dramatic; that is the essence of the practice of humours. The human figure is simplified by that ' distortion to scale' of which we have spoken, but so simplified that its significance is not less but greater. Real human nature is given us, but given under an aspect, seen in the light of one dominating quality. Such a simplification is essential to the dramatist, and Langland foreshadows the development of the Elizabethan theatre, not only here, but time and again in his work. But this is not all. It is essential to realize that the human figure thus revealed through a dominating aspect is firmly subordinated to a moral aim. Lechery is given, towards the end of the speech, a certain tragic quality in the bitter line: Ich lay by the louelokest and loued hem neuere after, and in the vanity which is conveyed in the thought of Whenne ich was old and hor and hadde lore that kynde. The feeling is common in mediaeval work and occurs again in Piers Plowman: At churche in the charnel cheorles aren euel to knowe, Other a knyght fro a knaue other a queyne fro a queane. Such sentiments are not to be confused with the haunting presence of the inevitable worm, which, after the changes of the sixteenth century, extended from the domain of pathology to become an important part of religious experience. It is more to the point to remember that no community can be called balanced or complete which has not a considered attitude to the two central themes of European literature— death, and what Langland called 'the flesh'; without such an attitude poetry degenerates inevitably into triviality or romantic pose. Langland wrote within the framework of one such attitude; we may find it unsatisfactory or incomplete, but it gave his work a point of universal reference. He did not share the metaphysical preoccupation of the 237

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Renaissance with the idea of impersonal Time, a preoccupation expressed in Shakespeare's line: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws. The feeling of the Sonnets is something new and complex. It is obtained here by transferring the epithet 'devouring', which belongs naturally to the 'lion', to Time, thus creating a very interesting emotional situation. The lion naturally raises associations of splendid and boundless life and activity; but the transference of 'devouring' suggests that all this activity is in reality a self-consuming one, that it is ultimately one with the wearing-down of life into pure annihilation. And the 'blunt' shows the typical metaphysical sensing of the ultimate and intangible in terms of the life of the finger-tips. Shakespeare's tendency, in fact, as far as this poem is concerned (for it was only one of his many tendencies), is to subdue the nervous activity of life to the idea of Time 'metaphysically' apprehended. In Langland, however, Time is regarded as merely the condition for the living moral action of man. Full value is given to the human and religious tragedy represented by the figure of Lechery. The tragedy is that of 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame', and Langland's moral judgment fully recognizes, not only the 'waste' and the 'expense', but the fact that it is 'of spirit', and must be so in his Christian philosophy. So we emphasize once more that the allegory of Piers Plowman follows the principle of its writer's central doctrine—the Christian Incarnation. It starts from the real, and nothing that is real is irrelevant to it. Instead of imposing itself upon reality as a tyrannous abstraction, burdening the human and corporal with a dissociated spirituality, it works from the body to the soul, from natural life to the consummation of grace in which its author believed. And, by so doing, it teaches us the true strength of English literature. Turn once more to Spenser, and you will find yourself in a different world. The bitter Fifth Book of the Faerie Queene only emphasizes what is characteristic of the whole work. Consider Artegall and his servant Talus, the confessed representatives of Spenserian justice: Long they her sought, yet no where could they finde her, That sure they ween'd she was escapt away; But Talus, that could like a limehouse winde her And all things secrete wisely could bewray, At length, found out, whereas she hidden lay Vnder an heape of gold. Thence he her drew By the faire lockes, and fowly did array, Withouten pity of her goodly hew, That Artegall him selfe her seemless plight did rew. 238

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Yet for no pity would he chaunge the course Of Justice, which in Talus hand did lye; Who rudely hayld her forth without remorse, Still holding vp her suppliant hands on hye, And kneeling at his feete submissiuely. But he her suppliant hands, those hands of gold, And eke her feete, those feete of siluer trye, Which sought vnrighteousnesse, and iustice sold, Chopt off, and nayld on high, that all might them behold, Her selfe then tooke he by the sclender wast, In vaine loud crying, and into the flood Ouer the Castle wall adowne her cast, And there her drowned in the durty mud: But the streame washt away her guilty blood. Once more, the technical mastery is considerable, a sure sign that Spenser was more interested than he sometimes was in his subject: I need only point to the fact that the rhymes do succeed in emphasizing the flow of the poet's indignation, and remark upon the sharp brutality of'chopt off' as the culmination of an effective rhetorical construction. But its success only serves to show how dubious and how barbarous (in the last resort) were the interests and emotions of its author. We must remember that the whole incident is more than moral allegory. Spenser was the sort of man who is sometimes admired in the most academic circles as 'an idealist, who was also a man of the world', and the above represents the treatment that he regarded as suitable for the Irish among whom he lived. It defends a policy already put into operation by Lord Grey, the original of Artegall. That is its political meaning. Spiritually, it represents a view of Justice coloured by the bitter Puritan melancholy so typical of Spenser, and must be read in the light of his sombre reflections on decay and mutability. Puritanism is more than a mere matter of dark clothes and a nasalized psalm-singing; Spenser was a courtier and Milton's 'urbanity' was known to all his contemporaries. Its spirit can best be felt by a comparison of the Faerie Queen with Piers Plowman. The allegory of the latter is, as we have seen, a real and experienced thing, and its virtues and personifications spring out of flesh and blood. In Spenser, however, the knights and ladies are pale abstractions, so pale that their creator is unable to keep them apart in our minds as his tangled tale proceeds. Ultimately, the only reality is provided by Mutability and the Blatant Beast, for whom, one feels, the disembodied shades of Chastity, Temperance, and Courtesy are fair game. Langland's allegory is based on a hierarchy of virtues leading from the Life of Do-Well (the ordinary daily life, lived in the sight of God) to that of Do-best (the life of the 239

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saint who orders and directs the activities of the Church), and holiness is the crown of each and all of them; but Spenser's Knight of Holiness is hardly to be distinguished from his fellow who represents Temperance. Both live only in the intellect; for the emotions, they have no significance and no life. This suggests that Puritanism, as embodied in Spenser, is nothing else than the disembodied and destructive intellect preying on the body to kill the soul. That is the importance of Spenser and Milton, and their relation to the development of the English tradition. Their pallid successors are seen in the age of Tennyson and after, producing a dead poetry out of a dead 'poetic' language —sterile emotions issuing in a sterilized speech. In such a situation, Langland commends himself to the attention of all by the breadth and healthiness of his experience. To maintain the actuality of our sensible and emotional responses is at once the function and the condition of art, and it points beyond itself to a view of life which is complete and, in a true sense, orderly. Complete, because it has a catholic appreciation of good at every level, and orderly, because it teaches us to be content with no intellectual synthesis that falsifies or belittles the scope of human experience. And those two aims might pass to-day for a definition of the function of criticism.

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9 THE HISTORY OF CRITICAL JOURNALISM THE GREAT REVIEWS R. G. COX (1937)

I In Scrutiny for June 1935 [see p. 272 below] Mr Denys Thompson drew attention to the fact that throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century this country possessed a serious, intelligent and responsible journalism, providing a focus for current movements of thought and opinion, a means of livelihood and a field of action for the middlemen of letters, and an authoritative expression of critical standards. The subject is obviously one for extended study, but a very limited inquiry is sufficient to bring home the fact that the present state of periodical criticism is exceptional, and that the easy excuse that things were always the same, so often used to defend a complacent acquiescence in the contemporary critical anarchy, is simply not true. I propose to concentrate here on the period which saw the foundation of the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine, and their rapid assumption of critical authority, and within this period to consider mainly specific criticism of literature. These notes are intended as illustrations of the kind and quality of the critical work of the Reviewers: their preoccupations and preconceptions in matters of taste, their methods, and their authority and influence. In the first place one cannot insist too strongly on the fact that the Reviews had a larger sale in actual numbers, without working out the proportion to the population, than most modern periodicals with anything approaching the same pretensions to intelligence and seriousness. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly were selling nearly 14,000 copies each at their peak period, about 1818 to 1819, and Blackwood's soon reached a similar sale. To this must be added the steady sale of the bound volumes, and it should be remembered that each copy was often handed round among several people. No genteel family, said Scott, could be without the Edinburgh, and Lord Cockburn described the effect of the first number as 'electrical': 'It was not merely that the journal expounded and defended right principles and objects. Its 241

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prerogative was far higher. It taught the public to think. It opened the people's eyes. It gave them periodically the most animated and profound discussions on every interesting subject that the greatest intellects in the kingdom could supply.' It is significant that in Mansfield Park, when the company at Sotherton were tired of exploring the gardens, * they all returned to the house together, there to lounge away the time as they could with sofas, and chit-chat, and Quarterly Reviews, till the return of the others, and the arrival of dinner'. It is unnecessary to suggest the modern social equivalent. Even their victims had to admit the power and distinction of the Reviews; Shelley confessed to Peacock that it was the talent with which the Quarterly was conducted that made it such a formidable political enemy. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly were the mouthpieces of the two great political groups of cultivated society, while at the same time they defined, moulded, and partially formed the opinions of their respective parties, and exercised a literary authority which was the legitimate successor of that of Addison and Johnson. Blackwood's had not the same authoritative position, but it made up for this in liveliness and audacity. It was, in fact, doing extremely varied kinds of work at all levels of seriousness, and its criticism contains a great variety of opinions. But the general critical level was high, and the resulting section through current literary opinion is very interesting. No modern periodical, of course, could combine sheer horseplay with highbrow critical essays, but that is only an illustration of how little the reading public of 1820 was stratified. It was still possible to write for the reading public as a whole, just as it was still possible for the reviewers to examine the whole output of the publishers. Besides these three, as Mr Thompson pointed out, there were various periodicals of smaller circulation—the Monthly Magazine, the Monthly Review, the British Critic, the London Magazine, Campbell's New Monthly, the political journals of Hunt and Cobbett, all contributing to that * irrigation of the surface of society' which Blackwood's mentions with approval in the forty-second Noctes Ambrosianae (April, 1829). II The first question demanding consideration is the attitude of the reviewers to the Romantic poets, and particularly to the Lake School. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly based their judgments firmly on the eighteenth-century principles of Reason, Truth and Nature, and although there are hints of a gradual modification of this attitude, a change which is more marked in the later Blackwood's, it is generally at the bar of Good Sense that the Romantics are tried. For an age 242

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which accepted Romantic standards as absolute, this procedure stood manifestly self-condemned as at once sacrilegious and obscurantist, but it ought now to be possible to consider the question without prejudice. A little examination of the actual criticism should make it clear that this detached and ironical attitude to the new school often produced extremely pertinent and profitable results. The Edinburgh opened the attack in its first number, with Jeffrey's long article on Southey's Thalaba. He begins in the orthodox eighteenth-century manner, saying that the standards of poetry 'were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful to question', and he denounces the Lake Poets as a sect of wilful eccentrics, tracing the new style back to Rousseau, Kotzebue and Schiller, to Cowper, Ambrose Philips, Quarles and Dr Donne. It is the authors' 'unquestionably very considerable portion of poetical talent' which makes them a 'formidable conspiracy against sound judgment'. His criticisms of the cult of simplicity are shrewd and intelligent, and it has been overlooked, I think, that he anticipates several of Coleridge's points against Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria. His chief points are that passionate language may be simple, but that in the more prosaic intervals their method is liable to produce meanness and insipidity; that the Wordsworthian simplicity is 'assumed and unnatural' to an educated author, so that he will be continually deviating from it; that 'the language of the higher and more cultivated orders. . . is adapted to poetry by having been long consecrated to its use' and that there is in these poets an 'exaggeration of thought' (Coleridge's 'mental bombast'): * There must be a quil mourut and a "let there be light" in every line.. .A whole poem cannot be made up of striking passages.' His final judgment, amply supported by examples, is that Southey possesses ' an amiable mind, cultivated fancy and a perverted taste'. Later reviews of Southey placed him finally as second-rate: already in the article on Ma Joe (Oct. 1805) Jeffrey speaks of his 'diffuse and interminable redundancy', and remarks that the great easiness of his loose and colloquial blank verse 'will one day be his ruin'. The Quarterly treated him more kindly, though Scott's praise of Kehama was not unqualified (Feb. 1811). Blackwood's once referred to him as a poet of the very highest order (Noctes Ambrosianae^ Dec. 1828), but the review of the Life of Wesley (Feb. 1824) says that 'he himself is now the only man who ever alludes to Southey's poems', and the Tale of Paraguay \s described (Sept. 1825) as, 'with many paltry, and a few fine passages, an exceedingly poor poem, feeble alike in design and execution'. The Edinburgh's first review was the article on the Poems (July 1807). The merits of the Lyrical Ballads are admitted: 'In spite of

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their occasional vulgarity, affectation and silliness, they were undoubtedly characterized by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and natural feeling', but Wordsworth is described as a mannerist, and his childishness ('some namby-pamby to the small celandine') and bathos ('a Hymn on Washingday, sonnets to one's grandmother—or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye') are particularly attacked. At the same time several exceptions are noticed: the Song at Brougham Castle is highly praised, together with the sonnets and The Happy Warrior. As for the summary dismissal of the Immortality ode, it can easily be justified by a short analysis, and if further argument is needed, one may appeal to the criticism of Coleridge, and more particularly of Arnold, who found it 'declamatory*. It is pointed out that Wordsworth writes best when he is not writing consciously to a theory, and the review concludes : When we look at these and many still finer passages in the writings of this author, it is impossible not to feel a mixture of indignation and compassion at that strange infatuation which has bound him up from the fair exercise of his talents, and withheld from the public the many excellent productions that would otherwise have taken the place of the trash before us. The review was at least an attempt to discriminate among Wordsworth's mixed output. Jeffrey's opening sentence on The Excursion (Nov. 1814) is known to everyone, but, apart from the fact that no important critic has ever attempted to defend the poem as a whole from the charges of 'interminable dullness and mellifluous extravagance', it is not often realized that this review contains a good deal of praise and several long extracts to illustrate Wordsworth's peculiar merits. On Book I he says: We must say, that there is very considerable pathos in the telling of this simple story; and that they who can get over the repugnance excited by the triteness of its incidents, and the lowness of its objects, will not fail to be struck with the author's knowledge of the human heart, and the power of stirring up its deepest and gentlest sympathies. and elsewhere, referring to the passages he had quoted with approval: When we look back to them, indeed, and to the other passages which we have now extracted, we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the beginning; but when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be rescinded. Nobody can be more disposed to do justice to the great powers of Mr Wordsworth than we are; and, from the first time that he came before us, down to the present moment, we have uniformly testified in their favour, and assigned indeed our high sense of their value as the chief ground of the bitterness with which we resented their perversion. 244

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There was every excuse, too, for Jeffrey's witty destruction of The White Doe of Rylstone (Oct. 1815). The story, it is said, would have made 'a pretty subject for a ballad; and in the author's better day, might have made a lyrical one of considerable interest'. The article on Wordsworth in the February number, 1822, is a severe but just account of his later work: Since he has openly taken to the office of publican, and exchanged the company of leech-gatherers for that of tax-gatherers, he has fallen into a way of writing which is equally distasteful to his old friends and old monitors —a sort of prosy, solemn, obscure, feeble kind of mouthing—sadly garnished with shreds of phrases from Milton and the Bible—but without nature and without passion—and with a plentiful lack of meaning, compensated only by a large allowance of affectation and egotism. Unfortunately the reviewer makes the bad blunder of including the Duddon sonnets in this condemnation. The first review of Wordsworth in the Quarterly was Lamb's article on the Excursion, not very interesting except as evidence that Wordsworth's reputation was now fairly well established. Gifford's article on the White Doe and Poems (Oct. 1815) begins with a generous tribute to Wordsworth's powers, but complains that 'he has by no means turned these valuable endowments to their greatest advantage'. He answers the arguments of the Preface that the passions are more easily observed in rustic life by pointing out that poetry is not the same thing as 'metaphysical' (i.e. psychological) analysis, and that 'as in every other production of the human intellect, so in poetry: the superior pleasure which one subject affords rather than another is mainly ascribable to the comparative degree of mental power which they may require'. The reasons he assigns for Wordsworth's bathetic lapses are interesting: he criticizes the exclusive concern of the Romantics with their own feelings, and objects to the description of this kind of'exuberant sensibility' as specifically 'poetic', apart from ordinary human sensibility, and says that it is not the intensity of the poet's own feelings which matters, but his power of evoking feelings in others. He repeats the warning against the affectation of a ballad style which 'can never be natural to a man like Mr Wordsworth', and notes that simplicity of language may often be purchased at the expense of perspicuity. The whole review is a particularly intelligent and temperate piece of criticism. Coleridge's Remorse was made the excuse for a general discussion of the methods of the Lake Poets (April 1814). The reviewer notes that they work by evoking associations rather than by statement, but that they also go in for analysis of the minutest emotions, ' preferring, indeed, from the greater skill 245

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required in the task to trace to their causes the slight and transient rather than the strong and permanent feelings of the mind'. This leads to the actual cultivation of emotions arising from slight causes, and hence to distortion of values, and to a self-consciousness which makes the emotions of these poets often appear strained and fictitious. Blackwood's accepted the Lake Poets from the first, and its condemnation of the Edinburgh's strictures is only one sign of its more Romantic tendencies; even the Ecclesiastical Sketches were made the pretext for a general eulogy of Wordsworth—'indisputably the most original poet of the age5, and one to whom all contemporary poets were indebted. The Noctes Ambrosianae, which so often act as a kind of safety-valve for conversational outspokenness, and consequently contain much interesting criticism, yield some comments in a different tone, as when the Shepherd says (Oct. 1823): Yon lakers... Great yegotists; and Wordsworth the worst o' ye a'; for he'll alloo nae merit to ony leeving creatur but himsel*. He's a triflin' cretur in yon Excursion; there's some bonny spats here and there, but nae reader can thole aboon a dozen pages o't at a screed, without whumming ower on his seat. Wudsworth will never be popular. Naebody can get his blank poems off by heart; they're ower wordy and ower windy, take my word for't. Shackspear will sae as muckle in four lines as Wudsworth will sae in forty. The general essay in December 1818, probably by Wilson, On the Habits of Thought inculcated by Wordsworth^ is altogether a very intelligent and discriminating appreciation of his work, and it contains some interesting comments on what Arnold was to call 'Wordsworth's healing power': Wilson quotes the last few lines of Book I of the Excursion^ referring to 'the relation which the consideration of moral pain or deformity bears to this far-extended sympathy with the universe', and comments: 'Notions like those of Mr Wordsworth are evidently suited only to a life purely contemplative; but that universality of spirit, which becomes true philosophy, should forbid, in persons of different habits, any blind or sudden condemnation of them. * It has long been the fashion to marvel at the obtuseness of the Reviewers when confronted with the productions of the new school in poetry, but it is very much to be doubted whether any modern poet could count on receiving from the current literary periodicals reviews, however laudatory in tone, which would show more genuine appreciation and understanding of his aims than was shown by contemporary critics of Wordsworth. Even when the Reviewers were frankly unsympathetic, like Jeffrey, their strictures were based on recognized principles, and they snowed more real 246

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discernment and discrimination than most critics writing to-day in the little-read highbrow journals, let alone the periodicals of the same circulation and influence. Ill The other Romantics were criticized from the same more or less eighteenth-century standpoint. Jeffrey's review of the Reliques of Burns (Edinburgh, Jan. 1809) has an excellent diagnosis of the Romantic idea of the artistic temperament—'the dispensing power of genius and social feeling in all matters of morality and common sense. This is the very slang of the worst German plays and the lowest of our town-made novels... It is humiliating to think how deeply Burns has fallen into this debasing error.' The same essay emphasizes Burns's debt to a rural culture and points out that he was using a living language with a poetic tradition. Scott's review of the same book in the first number of the Quarterly regrets that the author's fastidiousness had led him to omit such poems as The Jolly Beggars and Holy Willie's Prayer. He remarks on Burns's power of uniting the ludicrous and the macabre, and points out that his satirical power declined immediately he tackled general subjects not connected with his own immediate observation. In the case of Scott's own poems, the Reviewers mostly agreed with the enthusiastic popular verdict, but their praise was usually discriminating, and Jeffrey's famous review of Marmion (1808) struck at the whole cult of mediaevalism: 'We must remind our readers that we never entertained much partiality for this sort of composition... To write a modern romance of chivalry seems to be much such a fantasy as to build a modern abbey, or an English pagoda.' The Quarterly reviewer of The Lord of the Isles (July 1815) discusses Scott's great popularity and its significance: 'Whether this is a sort of merit which indicates great and uncommon talents, may perhaps admit a doubt; but at all events it is a very useful one to the public at large.' Scott is said to write mainly with a view to pleasing, and is censured for carelessness, in 'not bestowing upon his publications that common degree of labour and meditation which, we cannot help saying, it is scarcely decorous to withhold „ . . ' Much of the criticism of Byron was fairly favourable, but the Reviewers usually objected to his misanthropy and Romantic Satanism ('the searching of dark bosoms'). The Edinburgh review of Childe Harold Canto IV (June 1818) compares him with Rousseau, and censures his egotism: Posterity may make fewer allowances for much in himself and in his writings than his contemporaries are willing to do; nor will they, with the same 247

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impetuous zeal, follow the wild voice that too often leads into a haunted wilderness of doubt and darkness. . . But they will not, like us, be withheld from sterner and severer feelings. The following remarks from the same review foreshadow Matthew Arnold's criticisms of the Romantics: But highly as we estimate these merits of our modern poetry, it is certain, that the age has not yet produced any one great epic or tragic performance. Vivid and just delineations of passion there are in abundance, but of moments of passion—fragments of representation. The Quarterly took up much the same position. Scott's review of Childe Harold Canto III (Oct. 1816) is very favourable, and contains the sentence quoted by Arnold which describes Byron as 'managing his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality'; but in April 1818 he said of the fourth Canto: 'His poetry is like the oratory which hurries the hearers along without permitting them to pause on its solecisms or singularities;' and although he praised the poem highly he declared that the chief reasons for Byron's great popularity were, first, the novelty of this exposure of a personality, and secondly, the Byronic melancholy, which, he insists, is only curable in healthy relations with one's fellows. There is a reference here to 'bad metaphysics and worse polities', but it was Don Juan which provoked the moral outbursts in the Quarterly and in Blackwood's. The latter, however, after the first scandalized note, acknowledged the merits of the poem: 'That (laying all its manifold and grievous offences for a moment out of our view) it is by far the most admirable specimen of the mixture of ease, strength, gayety and seriousness extant in the whole body of English poetry, is a proposition to which . . .very few of them will refuse their assent.' The controversy over Don Juan continued for years in Blachwood's but on the whole the poem was adequately defended. The question of its morality was taken up by 'Odoherty' in September 1823: W h o . . . can honestly hesitate to admit that Don Juan is a great work, a work that must last? I cannot... Is it more obscene than Tom Jones}—Is it more blasphemous than Voltaire's novels? In point of fact, it is not within fifty miles of either of them: and as to obscenity, there is more of that in the pious Richardson's pious Pamela^ than in all the novels and poems that have been written since. The Cockney School was not attacked with the same animus in the Edinburgh as in the Tory reviews, but the essential criticisms were made nevertheless. Jeffrey's praise of Hunt's Rimini was tempered by objections to the poem's vulgarity (June 1816). Hazlitt's criticism was described as lacking any 'leading principles of taste', and as con248

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taining many inconsistencies and affected paradoxes (Nov. 1820 and March 1825). Keats was not reviewed until August 1820, and then received a very favourable notice from Jeffrey in which generous praise is qualified by comments on the * waste fertility' of the early work and Endymion—which is nevertheless ' as full of genius as absurdity'—and on the typical extravagances of immaturity. Shelley was not noticed until the article on his posthumous poems (July 1824), which contains some shrewd criticisms of his style: 'Mr Shelley's style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a passionate dream, a striving after fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions—a fever of the soul. . . associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.' The review speaks of 'the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions'; and remarks that much Romantic poetry seems to have no purpose except that of giving vent to some morbid feeling of the moment. From the Quarterly', of course, the Cockneys met with short shrift, whether on the score of morals, politics or literature. The literary criticism is severe, but full of sound sense: Hunt's vulgarity was fair game, and the reviewer of Rimini can hardly be accused of undue prejudice. He attacks the sloppiness of Hunt's loose couplets, his coined adjectives, and his sickly sensuousness; but allows some merits: 'After these extracts we have but one word to say of Mr Hunt's poetry; which is, that amidst all his vanity, ignorance and coarseness, there are here and there some well-executed descriptions, and occasionally a line of which the sense and expression are good.' The article on Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare9s Plays (May 1818) objects to his criticisms of Johnson, his use of slang, his misquotations, and his self-contradictions. 'Hamlet', says the reviewer, 'is introduced to us in the dashing style of a snowman at a fair—Walk in ladies and gentlemen—" This is Hamlet the Dane, etc."' The reviewer of Lectures on the English Poets (Dec. 1819) attacks chiefly the looseness of his reasoning: Mr Hazlitt prefers appearing chiefly in the character of a philosophical reasoner. In this choice he is unfortunate; for his mode of thinking, or rather, of using words, is singularly unphilosophical. Some vague half-formed notion seems to be floating before his mind; instead of seizing the notion itself, he lays hold of a metaphor, or of an idea connected with it by slight associations: this he expresses; but after he has expressed it, he finds that he has not conveyed his meaning; another metaphor is therefore thrown out, the same course is trodden over and over again, and half a dozen combinations of phrases are used in vague endeavours to express what ought to have been said directly and concisely in one. 249

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The reviewer goes on to give multiple definitions of Hazlitt's use of the word 'poetry': 'He employs the term "poetry" in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other.' Other reviews attacked his vilification of Pope, and his egotism and vulgarity. The Quarterly's review of Keats (probably by Croker, April 1818) has acquired an undeserved notoriety, and should not be confused with the less defensible attacks of Blackwood's. It is severe, but it gives reasonable arguments to support its objections, and acknowledges that the author has talent: It is not that Mr Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody), it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy and gleams of genius—he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. The censure of his loose versifications, his word-coinages, and his 'immeasurable game at bouts-rimes'; is entirely just. In fact the only apology needed for the article seems to be that made by the reviewer himself: Mr Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this 'immature and feverish work* in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the 'fierce hell* of criticism which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline. The Quarterly s criticism of Shelley, as one might expect, was largely concerned with his doctrines, but the more strictly literary comments are often extremely shrewd and pertinent. The reviewer of the Prometheus Unbound volume said: We should compare the poems contained in this volume to the visions of gay colours mingled with darkness, which often in our childhood, when we shut our eyes, seem to revolve at an immense distance around us. In Mr Shelley's poetry, all is brilliance, vacuity and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words which sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid; fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory. . . The predominating characteristic of Mr Shelley's poetry, however, is its frequent and total want of meaning. Far be it from us to call 250

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for strict reasoning, or the precision of logical deductions, in poetry; but we have a right to demand clear, distinct conceptions. Shelley's practice of hurrying the reader past unrealized images by sheer rhythmic momentum, and his way of becoming more interested in the metaphor than the object it describes, did not pass unnoticed: ' His poetry is in general a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory.' The song of the Spirits of the Human Mind in Prometheus receives the fair comment: 'Sometimes to the charms of nonsense those of doggerel are added.' The whole review is a reasoned criticism from a point of view not far from that of Arnold's later article. The most virulent attacks on the Cockneys came from Blackwood's and even when all allowance has been made for the pretentiousness and vulgarity of the Hunt circle, there remains a good deal in these articles which cannot be excused. Apart from Lockhart's and Wilson's irresponsible pleasure in extravagant abuse, there seems to have been a considerable amount of snobbery, as well as political feeling, in their attacks. But both sides indulged in mud-slinging to some extent, and Hazlitt's replies to Gifford were pretty thorough pieces of invective. Usually the actual criticisms were supported by reasonable argument: it was chiefly the tone which was so offensive. The first article on the Cockney School (Oct. 1817) is typical. The author, probably Lockhart, begins by describing the school and its leader: 'Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects.' Rimini reminds him of the gilded drawing room of a little boarding-school mistress... The company are entertained with lukewarm negus and the sound of a paltry pianoforte... His muse talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner-girl... For the person who writes Rimini to admire the Excursion is just as impossible as it would be for a Chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or gilder of tea-cups, to burst into tears at the sight of the Theseus, or the Torso. He proceeds to attack Hunt's morals, and comments on his social position: 'All the great men of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but Mr Hunt cannot utter a dedication or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits.' Hazlitt was at first received favourably by Blackwood's: his lectures were reported from London, and there was a long comparison of his criticism with that of Jeffrey (June 1818); but he was soon coupled with Hunt and made to 251

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share the abuse heaped on the school in general. Sometimes the attacks are very witty, and often the criticism is sound enough, if it had only been made more objectively and with less venom. A pertinent comment on Hunt's Indicator essays occurs in Wastles Diary in the September number, 1820: 'Only think of a sensible man, about the year 1920, reading a dissertation, by a little vulgar Sunday-paper-witling of 1820, on the propriety of calling children by fine names.' It does not seem to have occurred to the writer that the twentieth century would be reading and applauding dissertations on even more trivial subjects by a yet smaller breed of Sunday-paper-witlings. The abuse of Keats in Blackwood's is sufficiently notorious, and a comparison of Croker's Quarterly article, cited above, with the fourth article on the Cockney School (August 1818) is at any rate enough to show that Croker's is merely legitimately severe criticism. Nevertheless, many of the criticisms here are fair enough: 'The nations are to listen and be dumb! and why, good Johnny Keats? because Leigh Hunt is the author of the Examiner, and Haydon has painted the Judgment of Solomon, and you and Cornelius Webb and a few more city sparks, are pleased to look upon yourselves as so many future Shakespeares and Miltons!' The Hunt circle were indeed absurdly convinced of their own importance, and the following comment on their attitude to the eighteenth century was reasonable, if peevishly worded: ' It is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their country will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their merits or those of any other men of power.'

There were one or two subsequent half-apologies for the Keats article: Wastles Diary for September 1820 remarks: 'There is much merit in some of the stanzas of Mr Keats' last volume, which I have just seen: no doubt he is a fine feeling lad—and I hope he will live to despise Leigh Hunt, and be a poet 'After the fashion of the elder men of England.' Shelley, in spite of his 'perverted' morality—'a pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition and sensuality'—was treated more leniently than the other Cockneys. The reviewer of Prometheus Unbound (Sept. 1820) indignantly denies that Shelley is more kindly treated because he is a gentleman; nevertheless the suspicion remains. But the review of Adonais, probably by Maginn (Dec. 1821), contains some sound criticism of his style: 'The art of the modern Delia Cruscan is thus to eject every epithet that he can conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon, and throw them out to settle as they will.' The writer objects to the constant use of animism in Adonais^ and shows, 252

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by one or two unkind parodies, how easy it is to do this kind of thing mechanically. He enumerates various passages which will not stand cool analysis, and quotes instances from The Cenci of sentimentality and sensationalism, remarking, ' So much easier it is to rake together the vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism than to paint the workings of the mind.' A note in the sixth Noctes (Dec. 1822) praises Shelley's translation of Faust—a fragment which seems to have met with general approval. IV The chief count against the Reviewers is their tolerance of Moore, Campbell, Rogers and their followers in the line of elegant sentimentality. This typically Regency development forms a link between the minor eighteenth-century meditative and pastoral or didactic vein and the early Victorian album-poets, and usually consists of mild and insipid romanticism expressed in a dilapidated eighteenth-century poetic diction. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly both praised Rogers: the Edinburgh speaks of him as * already a classic,' but the Quarterly is more cautious, and points out that he attempts nothing very ambitious. Jeffrey, writing on Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming (April 1809) rejoiced 'to see once more a polished and pathetic poem in the old English style of pathos and poetry', and his insipid account of Theodric (Jan. 1825) called forth a taunt in Blackwood's about the 'Bairnly School of Criticism'. The same sort of taste appears sometimes in the reviews of Scott and Byron, and of course, Moore, but it is usually qualified by more detached criticisms (Moore's is 'a kind of cosmetic art—it is the poetry of the toilette', and Lalla Rookh is 'too profuse of gems and sweets'). The Quarterly was more discriminating about Campbell, and remarked that Theodric would strengthen the growing conviction of the public that' the character of his mind is to be feeble and minute'. In common with Blackwood's and the Edinburgh it praised Mrs Hemans highly. In Blackwood's these typically Regency poets met with a mixed reception. They were often praised, but Theodric was declared 'a fainter, dimmer, more attenuated Gertrude' (Jan. 1825) and The Ritter Bann ridiculed; while there are references to the 'schoolboy key on which Moore's love and heroism is always set (Jan. 1822); to the ridiculous air of gallantry in the ' irredeemably bad' Loves of the Angels (Jan. 1823); and to the generally ephemeral nature of his work. In this connection it may be appropriate to consider Gifford's objections to Crabbe (Quarterly, Nov. 1810) that he is 'not a pleasing poet': 'The peculiarity of this author is that he wishes to discard everything like illusion from poetry. To talk of binding down 2

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poetry to dry representations of the world as it is, seems idle; because it is precisely in order to escape from the world as it is, that we fly to poetry.' In November 1827 Blackwood's, too, was talking of Crabbe's * cynicism', but usually he was praised as an established classic: Jeffrey used him rather as a stick to beat Wordsworth. In general these foretastes of Victorian standards are exceptional in the Reviews: they remind the reader that the surviving eighteenth-century standards which were their chief strength were already entering upon that process of modification which led to the cultural decline of the latter part of the century. Some of the same modifications of taste are apparent in the attitude of the Reviewers to older literature. Oddly enough, the Edinburgh shows nineteenth-century attitudes to the Augustans from the beginning, side by side with their opposites. Jeffrey's essay on Scott's edition of Swift (Sept. 1816) says straight out: * We are of opinion, then, that the writers who adorned the beginning of the last century have been eclipsed by those of our own times,' though it shows at the same time a very sound and discriminating appreciation of Swift's powers; and the Quarterly article on Herrick and Carew (Aug. 1810) declares that * the reign of Elizabeth, and not that of Anne, was without doubt the Augustan age of English poetry'. But there are constant defences of the eighteenth century in all the Reviews: Croker's article in the Quarterly on Spence's Anecdotes of Pope is a fair specimen. He protests against 'arbitrary standards and narrowing theories of art', and concludes: 'In vain.. .would the populace of poets estrange themselves from Pope, and teach that he is deficient in imagination and passion, because, in early youth, "he stoop'd to truth, and moralised his song". It is not the shadows of the imagination and the spectres of the passions only which are concerned in our poetic pleasures.' Even in Blackwood's we find the Shepherd, in the nineteenth Noctes (March 1825) speaking of Pope's ' Yepistles about the passions, and sic like, in the whilk he goes baith deep and high, far deeper and higher baith than many a modern poet, who must needs be either in a diving bell or a balloon'. The general criticisms of the Romantics are often very close to those of Arnold later in the century. The Edinburgh's review of Chandos Leigh's Poems (March 1821) objected pertinently that modern poets had no idea of the value of compression. The following extract from an article in Blackwood's called Miscellanea Critica No. 1 (Sept. 1826) is typical of several other pronouncements on the same subject: May it not.. .be remarked specifically as characterizing the poetical spirit of our day that it is rather lively in feeling than intellectually steadfast or profound?—And do we not by the overflowing abundance of our verse— 254

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every spirit, almost that is ever so lightly touched by this concord of sweet sounds, breaking forth into numbers, as the pleasure were the impulse— increase this vivacity and movableness of feeling, withdrawing ourself from the earnest and sometimes painful depth of thought—and from that depth, too, of feeling, which is not, save where thought is deep ? The article On the Drama (April 1822) in the same magazine objects to Romantic egotism: We lament to see men forever fishing in their little selves, and angling, as it were, for gudgeons in a pool... We earnestly entreat the poets of the day to keep their stomachs to themselves for the future, and not to be so confoundedly communicative as to disgust us every now and then with a view of their very entrails. It is butchery, not poetry. Remarks of this kind show a detachment and insight which it would be very difficult to parallel in modern reviewing. In the second part of this article I hope to illustrate the criticism of fiction and drama in the Reviews, their attitude to the theory of criticism and to the question of art and morality, and the general seriousness with which they took their position as arbiters of public taste. But the above examples of their dealings with poetry in general, and the Romantics in particular, are a sufficient indication, I think, of the shrewdness and penetration which they brought to bear on the business of criticism. All their best work shows a sense of responsibility, a consciousness of performing a necessary and valuable function, a concern for the maintenance of the highest standards of thought and feeling, which are completely lacking in modern reviewing. The Edinburgh's motto—Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur—represents a vigilant critical morality unknown to an age so innocent of standards as our own. It has been shown that they were by no means entirely unsympathetic to the new school of poetry, and even at their most brutal they at least provided a strong body of recognized and established opinion against which the new writers could react. This in itself is not so entirely negative as it might appear at first sight; at any rate, it is probable that it is not the smallest of the handicaps of the modern poet that he cannot even count on an intelligent opposition. At their best, the Great Reviews provided far more than that: they produced, in fact, criticism of the general tendencies and the particular writers of their age which is often better than anything else on the same subjects throughout the century that followed.

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THE GREAT REVIEWS (II) R. G. COX (1937)

V In their criticisms of novels, the Reviewers began by distinguishing two main classes: the novel of manners, including the work of Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney, and the novel of melodrama, comprising all the forgotten imitations of Mrs Radcliffe. To these were soon added the numerous offspring of German sentimentality and sensationalism, and later Scott and the historical novel. The novel of manners was a typical eighteenth-century product, so it is natural that Maria Edgeworth should have been favourably treated by all the Reviews. Both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, however, censured her lapses into a too obvious didacticism: in the Quarterly for March 1812 Gifford declared: * A novel, which is not in some degree a lesson either of morals or conduct is, we think, a production which the world might be quite as well without.' The reviewer of Patronage (Jan. 1814) warned the author that morality ought not to smell of the lamp. The Edinburgh's comments were similar. Jane Austen was ignored by the Edinburgh, but the Quarterly had two very favourable notices of her work. Scott, writing on Emma (Oct. 1815), comments upon the difficulty of preventing this kind of realistic description from developing into * a mere signpost likeness', and mentions particularly, among her literary merits, * neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect... The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand, but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.' Archbishop Whately (Jan. 1821) approved particularly of her moral teaching: When this Flemish painting, as it were, is introduced, this accurate and unexaggerated delineation of events and characters, it necessarily follows, that a novel, which makes good its pretensions of giving a perfectly correct picture of common life, becomes a far more instructive work than one of equal or superior merit of the other class; it guides the judgment, and supplies a kind of artificial experience. The Reviewers were particularly alive to the effect of the novel in moulding the emotional life of its public—what D. H. Lawrence called leading 'the flow of our sympathetic consciousness'—and this led to a concern for morality in fiction which meant in practice no mere prudery but a vigorous campaign against sentimentality and 256

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sensationalism. The Edinburgh's comment on a novel called Charles et Marie (April 1803) is typical: Where the effect is to rise chiefly from delineations of the heart, an author may be tempted to think that his knowledge of the heart is great, precisely as he can, with any degree of apparent justice, deduce powerful emotions from slight events. We shall thus have all the feelings in their distorted, rather than their natural state, and be told to look upon the sickliness of artificial refinement as the very health and vigour of passion. Scott's reviews of Godwin's Fleetwood (Edinburgh, April 1805) and Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio (Quarterly, May 1810) are typical diagnoses of melodrama; of the former he says: There is no attempt to describe the minuter and finer shades of feeling: none of that high finishing of description by which the most ordinary incidents are rendered interesting: on the contrary, the effect is always sought to be brought out by the application of the inflated language of high passion. The Quarterly described Frankenstein as ' a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity': the Edinburgh made short work of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (July 1821): Mr Maturin has contrived to render his production almost as objectionable in the manner as it is in the matter. .. And as we can plainly perceive, among a certain class of writers a disposition to haunt us with similar apparitions and to describe them with a corresponding tumour of words, we conceive it high time to step forward and abate a nuisance which threatens to become a besetting evil, unless checked in its outset. Lockhart, in his Thoughts on Novel-Writing (Blackwood's, Jan. 1819) discusses the growth of the novel of sentiment, an undesirable form, in reading which the will is inactive and the mind receives ' a temporary excitement, neither very pure in kind nor always agreeable to feel, from its want of harmony and consistency'. Blackwood's usually placed sentimentality and sensationalism quite adequately, though with less firmness than the older Reviews. The reviewer of Maturin's Melmoth (Nov. 1820) acknowledges his popularity and admits his sensational power, but warns him that even The Mysteries of Udolpho involved more thought and labour than works of this kind: He should remember that although his faults are not able to deprive him of the admiration of the present time, they may bid very fair to shut him out altogether, or nearly so, from the knowledge of posterity. He should remember that it is one thing to be an English classic, and another to occupy ample room and verge enough in every circulating library throughout the land. 9

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HISTORY OF CRITICAL JOURNALISM The novels of Scott were in general treated by the Reviews almost as an absolute value in fiction, but the chorus of praise was not entirely unqualified. Jeffrey's review of Waverley (Nov. 1814) remarks that it is obviously hastily and unskilfully written, and speaks of 'the laborious, tardy and obscure explanation of parts of the story that the reader would be better pleased to forget*. He describes the 'flippant and smart' style where the author speaks in his own person'as considerably below mediocrity'. Even Gifford, in the Quarterly (July 1814), expressed some doubt as to the value of historical novels as a class: We confess that we have, speaking generally, a great objection to what may be called historical romance, in which real and fictitious personages, and actual and fabulous events are mixed together to the utter confusion of the reader, and the unsettling of all accurate recollections of past transactions; and we cannot but wish that the ingenious and intelligent author of Waverley had rather employed himself in recording historically the character and transaction of his countrymen Sixty Years Since than in writing a work which, though it may be, in its facts, almost true, and in its delineations perfectly accurate, will yet, in sixty years hence, be regarded or rather, probably disregarded, as a mere romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy. The Quarterly declared Guy Mannering (Jan. 1815) much inferior to Waverley-, with many absurdities of plot and trite and hackneyed sensational incidents; but in general the reviewers agreed with the popular verdict on Scott, and simply made comparisons between the various works. Occasionally there were absurdly extravagant comparisons with Shakespeare, and it became the fashion to bracket Scott with Cervantes, and to declare him superior to all the eighteenth-century English novelists. The Quarterly?, review of The Fortunes of Nigel (July 1822) sums up the later attitude: It seems to be generally admitted that the author is the greatest writer who has ever adorned this department of literature. It seems admitted, though with a less approach to unanimity, that his characters are superior to his plots, his humble to his higher life; his Scotland to his England; his tragedy to his comedy, and in general, his earlier to his later works. Various imitators of Scott, particularly Gait, Lockhart and Wilson, received general commendation; Blackwood's especially praised Gait's naturalness and accuracy of observation of Scottish life. The praise of Graham Hamilton (June 1822) shows what Blackwood's expected from a novelist: It presents a spirited picture of the manners and follies of the times, in that portion of society with which the reputed author may be supposed most 258

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familiar; the characters are well drawn; the story possesses considerable interest, and it has a moral kept sufficiently in view without being offensively obtruded upon the attention at every moment. The reviews of fiction in Blackwood's are often little more than summaries of the story of each novel, with long extracts, and a few general introductory remarks. On the whole the criticism of the novel in the Reviews is disappointing; too often an elaborately judicial manner is found to be supported by no very acute discrimination. At the same time, the grosser examples of melodrama and sentimentality were firmly placed, and it should be remembered that it was a comparatively new development in criticism to treat the novel as a serious literary form at all. The Quarterly's novel reviews were the most satisfactory; it dealt adequately with the * Fashionable Novels' of the 'twenties, and rarely pretended that the second or third rate was anything else. VI The chief problem in the criticism of the drama was to account for the decadent state it had reached, and then to suggest some possible means of rejuvenation. At first we find the Edinburgh discussing whether the moderns ought to write on the French model or the Elizabethan, and deciding chiefly in favour of the Elizabethan, though efforts like Lamb's John Woodvil met with short shrift, and Joanna Baillie was criticized for the obvious nature of her borrowings. The German influence, represented particularly by Kotzebue and Schiller, was considered uniformly pernicious. The reviewer of Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes (Blackwood's, June 1819) defended poetic drama and unrealistic conventions: Without poetry we could have no worthy drama. It would never do for the imaginary beings who move across the stage to be bound down to the language of real life, any more than to be clothed in its habiliments... The language of drama... cannot be the language of life—for its characters are not the characters of life... No living man ever spoke as Macbeth speaks. Indeed, all the principal characters of Shakespeare use a language which is anything but natural, if by natural be meant that of real life. He describes the language of most drama since Shakespeare as ' a sort of measured and monotonous slang', and praises Joanna Baillie, Coleridge and Maturin for trying to restore the Elizabethan dramatic verse. On the other hand, the writer of the article On the Drama, Ducis Shakespeare and Jouys Sylla (April 1822) emphasizes the necessity for drama to have its roots in the people, and ascribes the decline to the narrowing process which took place after the Restoration. Byron and Scott, he says, will never write tragedies: 259

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All those pretty affectations that mark the petit-maitre of the day, and they go off very well over a tea-table, pass for nothing in the huge ear of a theatrical assemblage. It is nonsense to say that a writer should consult but his own taste; it must be influenced, be it ever so unconsciously, by floating opinion, and the more secluded he lives, the more will he be influenced by the little he does hear. It is no use copying the sixteenth-century style, since it is manifestly unnatural to a modern; and in any case the Elizabethans have been overrated: 'As to Mr Lambe, he deserves to be hanged for wasting talent, like the Schlegels, in making silk purses out of sows' ears.' Similarly the Edinburgh reviewer of Byron's Sardanapalus (Feb. 1822) concludes that the moderns suffer from being too obviously and too consciously imitators of the Elizabethans: ' . . .they speak an unnatural dialect, and are constrained by a masquerade habit; in neither of which is it possible to display that freedom and those delicate traits of character which are the life of the drama.' The Quarterly {Brutus and Evadne, Jan. 1820) objected to the hybrid 'dramatic poem', and lamented the lack of judgment among theatre audiences: We do not remember a single good tragedy of modern date; Mr Coleridge's Remorse and Mr Milman's Fa£io, indeed, considered merely as proofs of poetic talent are distinguished performances, though we think them... very imperfect as plays. But. . . their fate seems to be decided in a way still less creditable to their judges. Chance, caprice, anything but true principles appears to direct the judgment of a first audience. In the earlier numbers of the Edinburgh there are several passages showing that the reviewers still regarded character in drama as part of the total effect in the eighteenth-century manner, and had not yet adopted the nineteenth-century dogma that it was all-important, especially the review of Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions (July 1803): The skilful delineation of character is no doubt among the highest objects of the drama, but this has been so generally admitted, that it was the less necessary to undervalue all the rest. The true object of the drama is to interest and delight; and this it can frequently accomplish by incident, as well as by character. In a consideration of a French tragedy, by Raynouard (Edinburgh, Oct. 1806) there is a remark that has obvious bearings on the later developments of Shakespearean criticism: 'The admirers of poetry would not thank the antiquary who should prefix to Hamlet and Macbeth a clear and indubitable statement of the events on which these tragedies are founded.' But in August 1824 Blackwood's made an elaborate defence of Joanna Baillie against the Edinburgh's earlier criticisms and the writer of an article on the Causes of the Decline of the 260

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British Drama (July 1822) applies a completely realistic criterion: * dramatic—that is to say, like life9. The logical conclusion of this tendency is Hartley Coleridge's essay On the Character of Hamlet (Nov. 1828) with its notorious suggestion: 'Let us, for a moment, put Shakespeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance. In real life it is no unnatural thing to meet with characters every whit as obscure as that of the Prince of Denmark.' But in 1828 this attitude was still far from general. VII At the beginning of its career, the Edinburgh showed a hearty contempt for the discussion of the theory of criticism: 'In matters of taste... we conceive that there are no discoveries to be made, any more than in matters of morality. The end of poetry is to please, and men cannot be mistaken as to what has actually given them pleasure.' But this eighteenth-century confidence (Oct. 1805: review of Southey's Madoc) did not last long. Already in 1806 we find Hallam reviewing Knight's Principles of Taste, in a typically commonsense essay. He begins by defining the various uses of the word ' taste,' selecting for his own purposes the meaning: 'the power of discrimination in the fine arts, or the feeling associated with it'. He makes short work of those who, like Knight, deny any positive standards; and proceeds to assign three causes of divergence in taste—insensibility, insufficient knowledge, and hastiness of decision. On the last point he remarks: 'This practice of "judging by perception" (that is, we presume, according to our first impressions) has conduced to make taste appear uncertain and capricious.' He concludes with a warning against the warping of critical judgment by personal associations. Discussion of the principles of criticism often leads to discussion of the duties of the critic, and there are many passages which show the reviewers to have been fully conscious of their responsibilities. In a review of James Montgomery's poems (Jan. 1807) Jeffrey says: 'It is hard to say what numbers of ingenious youth may be led to expose themselves in public, by the success of this performance, or what addition may be made in a few months to that great sinking fund of bad taste, which is daily wearing down the debt which we have so long owed to the Classical writers of antiquity.' His review of The Lady of the Lake (Aug. 1810) contains a long discussion of the relation between popularity and intrinsic value: 'The great multitude, even of the reading world, must necessarily be uninstructed and injudicious, and will frequently be found, not only to derive pleasure from what is worthless in finer eyes, but to be quite 261

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insensible of those beauties which afford the most exquisite delight to more cultivated understandings.' Good judges, on the other hand, are in that very state... to which all who are in any degree capable of tasting those refined pleasures would certainly arrive if their sensibility were increased, and their experience and reflection enlarged. It is difficult, therefore, to avoid considering them as in the right, and calling their taste the true and the just one, when it appears that it is such as is uniformly produced by the cultivation of those faculties upon which all our perceptions of taste so obviously depend. The Quarterly reviewer of Repton's Fragments on Landscape Gardening (Jan. 1817) quotes with approval a passage from the book in which Repton has been discussing those * whose ideas of perfection are contained in a few words, "I know what pleases myself": But the man of good taste endeavours to investigate the causes of the pleasure he receives, and to inquire whether others receive pleasure also. He knows that the same principles which direct taste in the polite arts, direct the judgment in morality, that the knowledge of what is good whether in actions, in manners, in language, in arts, or science, constitutes the basis of good taste, and marks the distinction between the higher ranks of society and the inferior orders of mankind, whose daily labours allow no leisure for other enjoyments than those of mere sensual, individual or personal gratification. The reviewer of Milman's Samor (Quarterly, Dec. 1818) was pessimistic about contemporary criticism (though the state of affairs he implies in his very complaints seems wholly admirable in comparison with modern conditions) and blamed particularly the type of criticism which attempts to be itself creative literature: How should the genus irritabile respect the opinions of the modern critic? They see in him in general an ambitious rival, one who approaches them most injudiciously on their own ground, who is not intent upon laying before the world a fair examination of their faults and beauties but solicitous only that the critique should be at least as shining and poetical as the poem itself. The result is that the poet neglects all rules—' no one aims at producing a perfect poem. . . but to give proof by brilliant flashes that he might if he pleased have written such a poem'—and the legitimate function of criticism is not fulfilled: 'Now we hate the cant of criticism as much as any wit or poet of any age or nation. . . but of criticism itself rightly employed, we will say that the poet who denies its jurisdiction has never thoroughly considered, and does not rightly understand, the real nature of the poetic character.' 262

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A typical concern for the maintenance of standards is shown in Southey's review of Dr Sayers' Works (Quarterly, Jan. 1827): 'The mediocrists may more truly be said to withdraw their contemporaries from the contemplation of what is excellent in their respective arts, so far as they succeed in obtaining attention for themselves. And successful they frequently are; in spite of Horace's sentence, men and booksellers favour them, whatever the Gods may do.' There are many instances in Blackwood's of the same consciousness of responsibility. The essay On the Reciprocal Influence of the Periodical Publication and the Intellectual Progress of this Country (Nov. 1824) comments on the part played by the Reviews in raising the standard of public thought and feeling, and declares: The intellect of the country. . . cannot advance in strength and influence over the condition and the happiness of the community; it cannot be raised to that standard to which it is capable of reaching, while the reasoning powers are weak and the taste is bad. Taste.. .may, indeed, be produced and nourished simply by the perusal of works of a high standard; but if so produced and nourished, it is apt to partake too much of mere feeling, to be too much under the authority of example, and it can scarcely escape being contaminated by some elements of weakness and error. "Whereas, if the mind is prepared for the perusal of such works by an insight into the principles of taste, the progress will be more steady and regular, and the object in view will be obtained in its highest purity, and placed on its firmest and securest basis. In May 1822 there appeared a very interesting Letter on the Different Stages of Taste, which aimed at showing that * certain principles of classification as to the qualities and grades of feeling, have an existence in rerum natura\ The same insistence on emotional discrimination as the most important duty of the critic appears again in the comparison between Hazlitt and Jeffrey (Blackwood's, June 18x8): But the intellectual faculties of a critic are not the sole means to be employed in forming his judgments. His moral constitution should be as much awake to sentiment as his understanding to the relation of ideas. To estimate the truth and propriety of different tones of feeling is even a more difficult task, in some cases, than to reason. I do not allude so much to the appreciation of what is morally beautiful and decorous between man and man, for there we have the accumulated suffrages of ages and of multitudes to appeal to. The most difficult questions in morals are those which relate to the temper of mind with which the world and the business of life ought to be contemplated, since the propriety of our feelings, on those subjects, must depend on very extended and complicated considerations. The essay on Eloquence (Sept. 1820) sums up this belief in the importance of literature and literary criticism in the assertion:' Civilization

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has essentially subsisted among men, neither in the security of law, nor in the invention of the arts of life, but in the condition of the minds of those who have held the highest places of society.' At the same time, however, there were signs in Blackwood's of the beginnings of an attitude to criticism which was to become more and more popular throughout the following century. The typical statement of this point of view is to be found in the article On Literary Censorship (Nov. 1818): ' Literature should be generous and aspiring... the best we can expect from criticism is a refreshing shower, or a stirring breeze... We cannot make power; but we can cherish and invite its natural growth, or we can repress it.' But this was still very much the minority view. All the Reviews contain articles emphasizing the importance of directing a keen critical scrutiny upon the words in which a poet expresses himself: an essay in Blackwood's On the Study of Language as essential to the Cultivation of Literature (April 1819) insists that criticism of style is at the same time criticism of the writer's personality: For in the study of the words of language we seek to feel their beauty and power as parts of living speech... This perception of the force of words is at once severely exact, delicate and passionate... In fact, the study of the form by which the mind is to express itself, is at the same time the study of that mind which is to find expression in such a form. The Quarterly reviewer of Milman's Fa{io (April 1816) deals with this same question, in censuring Milman for an ' unnatural and artificial sustainment of language': Some part of the frequency of this fault may be attributed to the common error in books of criticism of considering the qualities of diction distinctly from those of matter, the mode of expression from the thing expressed. Such a separation either in theory or practice is false and dangerous. The former ought clearly to be in entire dependence on the latter. If diction can for a moment be separated from thought, then verses composed at random, of words selected from a Poetical Dictionary, may have some value, while, on the other hand, if thoughts alone confer value on words, the whole efforts of criticism should be directed to the right cultivation and regulation of the mental powers. The Edinburgh provides several examples of intelligent analysis of a poet's use of language. The reviewer of Moore's Anacreon (July 1803) remarks: We meet with rosy bonds, rosy rays, rosy forms, rosy bosoms, and a number of other odd rosy things. . . We suppose that to a listless Arcadian reader the diction has the effect of introducing a number of very agreeable and confused images; but it only reminds the attentive critic of the little artifices of poetry, and puts him on his guard against their effect. 264

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Or again. Jeffrey comments in his review of Lalla Rookh (Nov. 1817) on the * profusion of gems and sweets': We have spoken of these as faults of style—but they could hardly have existed without going deeper; and though they strike us at first as qualities of the composition only, we find, upon a little reflection, that the same general character belongs to the fable, the characters and the sentiments—that they all sin alike in the excess of their means of attraction—and fail to interest, chiefly by being too interesting. Scattered throughout the pages of the Reviews there are interesting asides on various critical problems: rhythm, the difficulties of translation, the function and value of poetry, and so on. The following discussion of the difference between the methods of poetry and prose is by an Edinburgh reviewer who shows elsewhere in the article a thorough knowledge of Coleridge; it occurs in a review of a number of anthologies (April 1825): The grand distinction, in short, which exists between poetry and prose, is, that the former (independently of its principle of elevation) presents two or more ideas, linked or massed together, where the latter would only offer one. And hence arises the comparative unpopularity of the former with ordinary readers, who prefer humble rhyme to poetry, and a single idea to a complicated one, inasmuch as it saves them from the fatigue of thinking. It is interesting to compare the conception of poetry implied here with that of Macaulay's famous essay on Milton (Aug. 1825): 'He who in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become as a little child.' The various attitudes taken by the Reviewers to the question of morality in literature show, as one might expect, a vacillation between the good sense of the eighteenth century and the squeamishness of the Victorians. At first one finds, along with the commonplace that art should contain moral instruction, the kind of intelligence shown by the following comment on a bad novel: * The moral effect of a work ought perhaps to be the same with its moral, but it is not always so; and under correction, it forms a far more important subject of inquity,' or by Sydney Smith's diagnosis of a favourite type of sensationalism at the end of his review of Delphine ('this dismal trash') in the Edinburgh for April 1803: It is in vain to say that the fable evinces in the last act, that vice is productive of misery. We may decorate a villain with graces and felicities for nine volumes, and hang him in the last page. This is not teaching virtue, but gilding the gallows, and raising up splendid associations in favour of being hanged. The later attitude is shown in the Edinburgh's approval of Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (Oct. 1821). On this particular subject the Quarterly 265

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was much more sensible; a footnote in the review of SchlegePs Cours de Litter-attire Dramatique (Oct. 1814) deals with the proposed expurgation: We live in an age of pedantic affectation and exaggerated sensibility. . . Among the most extraordinary attempts at moral improvement, none, perhaps, is better calculated to excite a sarcastic smile than the publication of a 'Family Shakespeare' from which all objectionable passages are expunged. This is Jack tearing off Lord Peter's coat, with a vengeance! In general the Quarterly was more easily shocked than the Edinburgh, but in many cases, as in its dealings with sensational fiction, the moral concern turns out to be part of a genuine seriousness. Blackwood's had similar moral prejudices, amply illustrated in their articles on the Cockney School and Byron, but there are several instances of shrewd attacks on squeamishness and cant which show that the eighteenthcentury common sense was still flourishing. An article on Jeremy Collier (July 1820) denounces the inconsistencies of recent taste in drama: With a passion for tragic characters of the most over-wrought and unnatural atrocity, we have weakened our comedy by a morbid fastidiousness, which is perhaps a leading cause of the present striking inferiority, or rather, comparative extinction of this species of writing... The cant of delicacy has done ten times the injury to the drama that sheer downright fanaticism has ever done. In the fifteenth Noctes (June 1824) Odoherty comments on the Chancellor's attempts at censorship: 'Discountenancing Don Juan— strangling Byron's memoirs (so far as the English MS. was in question). Fine doings—fine doings—we shall be a pretty nation soon, I calculate;' while in the thirty-ninth Noctes (Nov. 1828) the Shepherd, in a spirited defence against the accusation that the Noctes are indelicate, asserts: ' There canna, sir, be a mair fatal symptom o' the decline and corruption o' national morals than what's ca'd squeamishness.' These and similar passages should be taken into account as a counterweight to the shocked horror of the comments on Prometheus Unbound and Don Juan. VIII The critical vigilance of the Reviews when faced with the unequal, the mediocre, or the utterly worthless, could be illustrated from almost any number. Many of these articles are extremely lively and amusing, as for instance Sydney Smith's disposal of Dr Langford's Sermon in the first number of the Edinburgh, or his account of Lewis's Alfonso in the second. It was Sydney Smith, of course, who referred to a dull 266

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book of Voyages en Islande as 'this very tedious and authentic book'. The reviewer of Mant's Poems (Edinburgh, Oct. 1807) refuses to encourage mediocrity: 'Though we are happy to tell him that we think his talents respectable, yet we feel it a duty to announce to him that we have not been able to discern in his works any of the tokens of immortality; and to caution him not to put himself in the way of more unmerciful critics.' Moore's review of Lord Thurlow's Poems (Edinburgh, Aug. 1814) is a witty castigation: 'Lord Thurlow. . .loves the Muse with a warmth which makes us regret that the passion is not mutual.' 'Book-making' was severely treated, in whatever form it manifested itself: the following extract is from a review of Hayley's life of Cowper, in the fifth number of the Edinburgh: Mr Hayley seems to have exerted himself to conciliate readers of every description, not only by the most lavish and indiscriminate praise of every individual he has occasion to mention, but by a general spirit of approbation and indulgence towards every practice and opinion which he has found it necessary to speak of. Among the other symptoms of book-making which this publication contains, we can scarcely forbear reckoning the expressions of this obsequious and unoffending philanthropy. The Quarterly had some amusing ironical summaries of third-rate novels: the reviewer of Maturin's Women, or Pour et Contre (Dec. 1818) pretended that the book was a satire and praised it for giving such a thorough exposure of sensational fiction. Mrs Barbauld's satire Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was greeted with cheerful scepticism: 'Our old acquaintance Mrs Barbauld turned satirist! The last thing we should have expected, and now that we have seen her satire, the last thing that we could have desired.' On Lord John Russell's tragedy Don Carlos^ Croker pronounced the following verdict (July 1823): In tragic poetry, some little may be done by intensity of feeling without power of intellect; but nothing by power of intellect without intensity of feeling. In both these qualities we consider this writer to be mainly deficient. We do not mean that he has not his fair share of understanding, or that his feelings may not be lively enough to give harmony and pleasure to domestic intercourse. Were the noble author a young man emerging into literary life, it would be our duty to warn him against engaging too seriously in a pursuit to which his powers appear so inadequate. At a time when literary albums were at the height of their vogue the Quarterly commented on a batch of them (Oct. 1827): Are the classics of our age to continue to see their beautiful fragments doled out year after year in the midst of such miserable and mawkish trash as fills at least nineteen pages out of every twenty in the best of the gaudy 267

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duodecimos now before us? It is admitted on every hand that there are few good painters among us, and very few good engravers; and it is admitted by all but the editors of the * pretty pocket-books' themselves that there are not many good writers. Why should publishers of eminence go on year after year encouraging that busy mediocrity in letters, which even the humblest of their brethren would blush to patronize in the arts? Blackwood's was equally unwilling to pretend, like the American lady mentioned by Arnold, that excellence was common and abundant. The reviewer of The Martyr of Antioch (March 1822) accuses Milman of being the enfant gate of criticism: There may be some minds so constituted as to thrive better under this sort of general favour than under any other treatment, but we think that the event has shown that it is not so in the case of Mr Milman... In these volumes he has exhibited no ordinary command over the resources of the poetical language. . . But. . . what have these four volumes added to the liter-

ature of England} Would our literature have been a whit less complete than it is had Mr Milman never published one line of all he has written? We are afraid that there is but one answer which any candid man can make to this trying question.. . The fact is, that Mr Milman appears to have entirely neglected those habits of sincere self-examination, by means of which alone the power of intellect can be built up higher and higher. The article on Hayley's Memoirs (Sept. 1823) is an example of Blackwood's in a more outspoken mood: William Hayley was, beyond all doubt, the most distinguished driveller of his age. Devoted to literature upwards of threescore years—constantly reading or writing, or talking with reading and writing people, ambitious of literary fame, not without a sort of dozing industry, and at all times inspired with an unsuspecting confidence in his own powers, flattered by a pretty extensive circle of personal friends, petted by the Blues, and generally in high odour with the gentlemen of the periodical press—it is certainly rather a little singular, that never once, on any occasion whatever, great or small, did one original idea, or the semblance of one, accidentally find its way for a single moment into his head. Modern criticism is more polite, but it would be very difficult to contend that in order to achieve good manners it was either desirable or necessary to sacrifice this kind of alertness and sense or responsibility. Politeness, too, has its own possible corruptions: it would be a mistake, for instance, to suppose that because the Reviews accused each other of the practice of puffing that the puff was more common then than now. The real difference is that to-day it is ungentlemanly to suggest that such a thing as puffing exists, whereas in the time of the Reviews puffing was sure to meet with a speedy and thorough exposure. Black268

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wood's Magaiine published adverse reviews of Blackwood's own publications; and it dealt amusingly with Colburn's attempts at modern advertising methods. He rashly announced a number of forthcoming novels as * Works of the First Importance': Blackwood's seized on the phrase and for a long time insisted on referring to every novel of Colburn's which was under review as 'this work of the First Importance . . . ' There are several passages in which the reviewers defend their own plain speaking. Jeffrey's review of Hogg's Queen s Wake (Edinburgh, Nov. 1814) is typical: The great end of public criticism, we hope our readers are aware, is not the improvement of those who are its immediate objects, but public example and information; and therefore it is that we seek to exercise it chiefly on authors who have obtained some degree of notoriety—their errors being by far the most dangerous, and their excellences the most likely to attract imitation. It is for the same reason that it is generally of greater consequence to point out the faults than the beauties of writers who have risen to distinction : for this distinction... is the natural reward of their beauties, while their faults are often so mixed up with their general merits that unless they are clearly discriminated they are extremely apt to be praised along with them and sometimes even imitated in their stead. The reviewer of Maria Edgeworth's Patronage (Edinburgh, Jan. 1814) welcomes writers who are capable of standing up to criticism: It is indeed delightful now and then to meet with authors who neither dread the lash nor the spur; whose genius is of that vigorous and healthful constitution as to allow the fair and ordinary course of criticism to be administered without fear that their rickety bantlings may be crushed in the correction... Such a writer is Miss Edgeworth. There seems little more to say, except to point to the state of modern reviewing: it is obvious which is the healthier attitude to criticism. IX The homogeneity of the reading public at this time is well illustrated by the fact that the poems of Clare did not escape the notice of the Quarterly: Southey gave them a favourable and encouraging review in May 1820. Jeffrey, reviewing Crabbe's Tales (Nov. 1812), remarked: 'In this country, there are probably not less than two hundred thousand persons who read for amusement and instruction among the middling classes of society. In the higher classes there are not as many as twenty thousand,' but he is confident that a great part 269

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of the larger body are ' to the full as well-educated and as high-minded as the smaller'. All the Reviews showed great faith in the spread of education and they were generally confident that this happy state of affairs could be maintained. An article On the Effects of Knowledge upon Society (B/ackwood's, Oct. 1818) makes important reservations: If reading communicates vigour to their internal spring [that of the passions and sentiments] and increases their impulsive power, then everything is to be expected from the diffusion of knowledge; but if reading enervates them and renders them passive, there can be no doubt that the splendour of human existence will diminish in proportion. The reviewer of Schlegel's History of Literature (Blackwood's, Aug. 1818) questions whether the modern age has the same right to congratulate itself on developments in the arts as on its progress in useful knowledge, and speaks of the * triumph of the phi/osophes': Even the common people begin to take more pride in having some general ideas than in retaining that warmth of attachment to one set of objects which entirely depends, as they have been told, upon ignorance of that which is beyond their circle. The travelling regiments of books which pour in their heterogeneous impressions from the four quarters of the heavens, level all peculiarities before them, and turn the private enclosures of attachment and opinion into a thoroughfare. When the mind is artificially supplied, by means of books, with more sources of sentiment than are able at once harmoniously to keep possession of it, the speculative understanding steps in to settle their claims, and concludes by leaving the whole man in a woful state of obliteration. The prophetic awareness of this writer may be compared with the even more penetrating essay by Carlyle in the Edinburgh for June 1829, called Signs of the Times: "Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical or Moral Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age... Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery but the internal and spiritual also. Here too, nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old, natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its pre-established apparatus, it is not done by hand but by machinery. .. These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates, not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand... At no former era has Literature, the printed communication of Thought, been of such importance as it is now. . . The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. 270

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But even Carlyle is not unduly pessimistic; although he admits that literature itself is not unaffected by the trend of the new industrial civilization, he does not consider it impossible for it to take over these immense new responsibilities. In 1829 it was still possible to be optimistic, particularly in regard to the state of periodical criticism. In the April number of Blackwood's, the forty-second Noctes contained a discussion on criticism between North and the Shepherd: North

Now—all our philosophical criticism—or nearly all—is periodical; and fortunate that it is so both for taste and genius. It is poured daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, into the veins of the people, mixing with their heart and blood. Nay, it is like the very air they breathe.. .Our current periodical literature teems with thought and feeling, James,—with passion and imagination... Who so elevated in intellectual rank as to be entitled to despise such a Periodical Literature? Shepherd Nae leevin' man—nor yet dead ane. North The whole surface of society, James, is thus irrigated by a thousand streams; some deep—some shallow. Shepherd And the shallow are sufficient for the purpose o' irrigation. I think that the above extracts show that these claims were not unreasonable. The Reviews made mistakes, they allowed themselves to be influenced on occasion by political and social feeling, they expressed themselves impolitely and sometimes brutally. On the other hand their prejudices, like those of Johnson, are obvious, and it is easy to make allowance for them: at the same time their offences, which have been greatly exaggerated by a more sentimentally genteel race of critics, are seen on examination to be very small in comparison with their solid merits of seriousness and critical conscientiousness. They never doubted that literature deserved the serious concern of the adult intelligence, and that it was their business to maintain standards of taste which had behind them the consensus of educated opinion. They consistently refused to pretend that excellence was 'common and abundant', and with their extraordinary influence and authority, they played the major part in creating for the writers of their age that informed, intelligent and critical public without which no literature can survive for very long, and which is so conspicuously lacking to-day.

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A HUNDRED YEARS OF THE HIGHER JOURNALISM DENYS THOMPSON (1935)

In an article which appeared here (Dec. 1933) stating the case for a serious weekly, some assertions were made about the journalism of a hundred years ago. A complete history of the press of the last century would make a very impressive background against which to silhouette the present plight of journalism. People who insist on this plight (if ever they meet with argument) come across the objection that used to be raised by the vested interests on the defensive—* Things were always the same.' There is room in a few pages to show that they weren't. The reviews of the first quarter of the century drew life from an educated, responsible and homogeneous public, to which they gave expression and coherence. Of the Edinburgh Review Scott said, ' No genteel family can pretend to be without it,' and Carlyle that it was 'a kind of Delphic oracle and voice of the inspired for the great majority of what is called "the intelligent public"'. In 1832 an old Lincolnshire squire assured Tennyson's father that 'the QuarterlyReview was the next book to God's Bible'. About 1820, in a population of twenty millions, Blackwood's' Maga and the Quarterlyhad between them a circulation of 31,000, the Edinburgh 7,000 and the other journals from 200 to 4,000. If one allows two or three readers for each copy, it means that at least one reader in two hundred read a first-rate review, of a quality now unapproached. The rates of payment were thus always adequate and often high. Tom Moore refused an offer of 'some hundreds' from Murray the publisher 'to become the editor of a Review like the Edinburgh', while Jeffrey, to induce Moore to contribute for the Edinburgh on any subject he liked, increased to thirty guineas the standard rate of twenty guineas a sheet1 for contributions of the first order. Such rates 'stimulated every brain, and half convinced the world that Poetry, Romance, Philosophy, and even Criticism, were the first crafts and the most profitable in the world'. A full account of the facts of the period is given in A. S. Collms's The Profession of Letters (see also Elton's Survey of English Literature, 1780— 1830) and of their significance in Fiction and the Reading Public. It need hardly be added that the spirit in which the reviews were conducted was very different from anything we know. If at times they were excessively ferocious, they united in condemning any kind of fraternizing among writers. Blackwood's own 'Maga\ for instance, 1

In the Edinburgh^ eight pages. 272

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slated a book in which he had invested money, and the Edinburgh published Carlyle, though his views were repugnant. * The whole surface of society, James, is thus irrigated by a thousand streams. . . ' Thus North, in Noctes Ambrosianae, is made to describe contemporary journalism; and a hint of the range of the reading public is thrown out by the contributor to Blackwood's who thought that the inadequacy of his article would be compensated by its appeal to * practical people, the trading interests, and the middle classes'. The Edinburgh was read in homes where the Nonconformist conscience banned Shakespeare, and the provincial papers used to quote the reviews. Their power was accordingly great: it was said of the Edinburgh that 'to have the entry of its columns was to command the most direct channel for the spread of opinions and the shortest road to influence and celebrity'. Below the reviews in the early part of the century teemed such light-heated enterprises as those of Hunt and Cobbett, political in purpose, and in one case very powerful. The first editor of the Spectator, commenting on the engagement of Hunt and Hazlitt to prop the Atlas, said, * Their very names would sink the Atlas fifty per cent, were the undoubted fact known—for, in my day, we looked far more to the support of the Clergy, the Army, etc., than the classes for whom Hazlitt and Hunt write.' The age was fortunate which had a literary underworld of this kind, for Cobbett's journalism is literature, Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty appeared in the Examiner, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci in the Indicator. Politics were not divorced from literature: the brothers who ran the Examiner thought 'patriotism and literature the only things worth living for'. Similarly, the reading public was not yet stratified, for Hunt was pressed to write for the Quarterly, and both he and Hazlitt were welcome contributors to the Edinburgh. The idea of the army as audience for a paper of intellectual pretensions sounds odd now, but the instance cited above is not unique. Smith, Elder, a versatile exporting house, would 'be hard at work at one timefittingout a crack corps of Horse for a little frontier campaign and at another packing a post-chaise with the latest number of the Quarterly or Edinburgh to catch a fast East Indiaman off Deal', though in 1827 Blackwood had been able to congratulate himself that his eMaga9 'was almost the only magazine that is read or heard of in India'. (A few pages later he reported that the officers of the Indian Army 'stand far higher as literary men than the officers of the King's Army'.) Military men were also among the contributors to the reviews and Macaulay, apropos of circulating libraries for colleges in India, enquires ' Why should we grudge a young officer the pleasure of reading our 273

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copy of Boswell. . .or Marmontel's Memoirs?' Later, when the Pall Mall Gaiette was sold over the editor's head, he * resolved to start a newspaper, and went to the Garrick Club to think the matter over quietly. To his astonishment and intense gratification drafts and cheques and promises of support kept pouring i n . . . [Among the visitors was] an unknown officer from the Guards' Club with £1,100 hastily subscribed there.' £104,000 was collected in a day. The Army is only one of the classes which no longer exist or no longer come into contact with anything living in their literature. In the third quarter of the century there were four outstanding journals. The Saturday Review, started in 1855, 'did more to create journalism as a profession than would be believed at the present moment, when journalists are recruited from all classes. It was understood . . . that it was written wholly by university men. The paper assumed a manner of authority [and] heaped derision on the shams of the time' {Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant, p. 92). And Leslie Stephen {Some Early Impressions) reported that the writings of G. S. Venables 'seemed to be judicial utterances from the loftiest readings of culture, balanced, dignified, and authoritative. . .What Venables' articles really did, I suppose, was to embody in finished and scholarlike style the opinions prevalent among the most intelligent circles of the London society, of which Holland House had been the centre in the preceding generation'. The Cornhill (1859) had, according to St Loe Strachey, 'the quality of originality. It hit exactly the popular taste, and in a very short time it was selling by the hundred thousand.' But its character changed when Leslie Stephen gave up the editorship. A declaration of Strachey, who succeeded, is a sinister suggestion of what was happening: 'I felt sure there was good copy.. .in the great criminal trials of former ages. . .In the nineties we were all talking and writing about "human documents ", by which we meant memoirs, autobiographies and above all diaries, which, when written, were not meant to see the light, and in which the naked human heart was laid bare for inspection'{Adventure of Living, pp. 195-6). Before Strachey improved the paper, its 90,000 subscribers had been content to read the articles which were collected in Culture and Anarchy, sauced, however, with a serial novel. The Pall Mall Gazette was started in 1865 as a twopenny evening paper, and was at its best under John Morley's editorship. Frederic Harrison wrote for it, and Arnold's Friendship's Garland first appeared there. But people complained that the P.M.G. was 'too incessantly strenuous, earnest, etc. [They] want more relief.' And when W. T. Stead took over the paper, they got it. With the Expansion of Empire as one of its planks it became 'invariably the most readable paper in 274

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London' and 'the liveliest thing in journalism England had ever seen'. Of the * Truth about the Navy' campaign, F. W. Hirst wrote (in Six Panics), ' The year 1884 deserves attention as the beginning of a most disastrous expansion in naval armaments in which the provocative impulse has too often been furnished by Great Britain.' Stead was 'actuated probably by no worse motive than an irresistible desire to be the centre of a journalistic sensation'. It seems worth spending rather more space on the P. M. G. because the change of editorship to Stead was prophetic. 'Let us strive and scream, for tomorrow we die'—and Stead added 3,000 to the 10,000 circulation that Morley had reached. The P.M.G.'s progressive editor was an ignorant vulgarian. 'He h a d . . . no general knowledge of art or history, philosophy or science . . . and it was consequently impossible for cultured minds to get into any sort of effective contact with his except on the crudest common ground.' And his biographer writes, ' It may well be considered what our journalism would have been without him. The roots of some of the finer things which came to a crop under the hand of Northcliffe are to be found, as he agreed with me more than once, in the work and visions of Stead.' Northcliffe was 'in his younger days much indebted to Stead for valuable help and counsel'. The Fortnightly Review, founded in 1865, and for a time edited by Morley, had ' a marked place in the history of our periodical literature, as well as in the diffusion and encouragement of rationalistic standards in things spiritual and temporal alike'. It helped to provide a centre 'for the best observation of fresh flowing currents of thought, interest and debate' {Recollections of Lord Morley, Vol. 1, p. 85). Its miscellany of writers presented 'a sinister unity'—including Arnold, Swinburne, Meredith, D. G. Rossetti, Bagehot, Huxley, Pater, Lewes, Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen, and others. Other periodicals were Macmillaris (circulation at one time nearly as large as CornhilVs), Bentleys Quarterly, Temple Bar (an imitation of the Cornhill), the National Review, the Parthenon, St. Paul's Magazine, and the Nineteenth Century, in imitation of the Fortnightly. The Westminster Gazette started in 1892. Nineteenth-century biographies show that the higher journalism was an important factor in the life of the time. Rintoul said that to the provincial press the Spectator supplied ' much of its matter, and considerably influenced opinion'. In her William Blackwood and his Sons, Mrs Oliphant reported of the reviews that ' the country papers quote numerous extracts... I have known twenty provincials quote anecdotes from the same article.' Governments looked to the P.M.G. for guidance, and of twro of its editors, Greenwood and Morley, Mr J. A. Spender writes, ' They were appealing to a select audience of 275

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politically instructed readers, who in those days were the makers of opinion, and from whom an immense influence radiated outwards to the multitude. And above all journalists read them and founded other articles on what they wrote. n Journalism in fact fulfilled one of the functions of a church. Writers of the time frequently referred to this aspect of it, and according to their biographies several of the higher journalists had thought of taking orders—Leslie Stephen and Frederic Harrison, for example. Of Morley, typical of the old journalist who made a decent living and spent a useful life, Stead wrote, 'To him a newspaper was simply a pulpit from which he could preach.' This suggests another justification of nineteenth-century journalism. It provided many intelligent people with a livelihood and an opportunity of using their talent without feeling that it was wasted. Others kept themselves by journalism till their books gained recognition. Carlyle was helped by the Edinburgh, Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes came out in Tinsleys Magazine, Gissing refused work for the P.M.G. and Fortnightly, Sir Henry Maine was for a time kept going by the Saturday Review, while H. D. Traill gave up an inspectorship of returns for journalism and Mrs Oliphant sent a family to Eton on the proceeds of her writing. 'I joined the great army of literature,' Leslie Stephen wrote,' because I was forced into their ranks, but also with no little pride in my being accepted as a recruit.' Journalism gave expression to the best minds of the time, though not merely to brilliant individuals, for (as George Eliot noted) ' the lively currents of thought and discussion explain the speed and apparent ease with which writers dashed off articles and reviews—they came from a fund acquired by social intercourse'. But on reading the essays collected from nineteenth-century journalism one is left with the impression that first-rate minds were rare indeed. Arnold alone is eminent. Most of the essayists seem to be second-rate, rather than ' minds of the second order'. So few of them approach Arnold's percipience of the tendencies of the age. Even the best critics—Leslie Stephen, for instance—are insufficiently aware: he believed in the 'vox populi', and it is significant that his best books are his magnum opus, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, his Pope and English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century—for except in date he belongs more 1

In My Early Life, Mr Winston Churchill writes of the 'nineties: * Politics seemed very important and vivid to my eyes in those days. They were directed by statesmen of commanding intellect and personality. The upper classes in their various stations took part in them as a habit and not as a duty. The working men whether they had votes or not followed them as a sport. They took as much interest in national affairs and were as good judges of form in public men, as is now the case about cricket or football. The newspapers catered obediently for what was at once an educated and a popular taste. * 276

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to that century than to the nineteenth. Frederic Harrison seems to have been one of the alerter minds; his controversy with Arnold (by which he is chiefly remembered?) does not do him justice. He bears rereading better than most of his contemporaries, better than Morley, for example. The main run of journalists at the time seem to have been of a rationalist strain bred from Mill, of whom Morley wrote, ' The better sort of journalist educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired the habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway novels.' They used the vocabulary of Progress, though not as grossly as The Times \ we find even so intelligent a woman as George Eliot observing, with America in mind, 'Is it not cheering to t h i n k . . . that the higher moral tendencies of human nature are yet only in their germ?' The liberal-rational journals died or compromised without much fight. One cannot help speculating what might have happened if there had been more publicists of Arnold's quality. (Incidentally, Mr Wells has said that if we had paid attention to Arnold we might have avoided the War.) The social-economic changes which asphyxiated them could not, of course, have been arrested, but if there had been a more general consciousness of the process of civilization among the journalistic middlemen, a periodical or two might have been saved, and the goodwill and sense of responsibility of their readers might have been mobilized. Journalism may have been ' the Church of the nineteenth century', but it had not the organization and the possibility of tradition which make the most moribund church potentially alive. The disintegration of the reading public has been described elsewhere, but perhaps it is worth pointing out a few landmarks. In 1881 Titbits was started, followed in 1888 by Answers; Pearson s^ the Strand and the Daily Graphic followed in 1890; the Daily Mail started to run in 1896, and the Daily Express four years later. How perverted the taste for literature was by 1912 and the nature of the new appeals are indicated by this quotation from J. M. Dent, about his Everyman: 'I had long wanted a journal which should help people to know the value of literature in everyday life, not a critical journal such as the Athenczum, or other literary journals, but one of an interpretative, appreciative character, such as would tempt the reader to explore. It w a s . . . to be cosmopolitan.' The Everyman type has by now almost completely replaced the Athenceum kind. The latter was perhaps the last journal to give regular employment to first-rate critics—some of Mr Murry's best work appeared in it—and its fate, along with the Nations and the Week-end Review's, is too recent for more than mention. 277

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The War destroyed the last vestiges of the nineteenth-century tradition in journalism, by increasing the demand for cheap stimuli, and supplying improved machines to meet it. * Before the War there were four penny and two halfpenny evening papers in London, and a wellmarked line divided the penny from the halfpenny. The former catered for the supposedly educated classes; the latter appealed to the multitude . . . At the end of the War the difference in price was obliterated. All the commercial advantages now fell to those with the largest circulation, and the life of the others became increasingly difficult and financially impossible.. .the Westminster was converted into a morning paper, the P.M.G. and the Globe ceased publication, and the Evening Standard circulates in the same wide field as its penny contemporaries . . . London now has only three evening papers approximately of the same type, whereas before the War it had six—and at a still earlier date eight.' This is from Vol. II of Mr J. A. Spender's Life, Journalism and Politics (p. 133), and is followed by an excellent account of the economic starvation of the liberal press. A characteristic of the nineteenth-century press is that an interest in politics, when it occurs, is not divorced from intelligent attention to the arts. It is early evident in the declaration (quoted above) of the Hunts about 'patriotism and literature'. Later we find Frederic Harrison agitating for a nine-hour working day, and writing about Trade Unions and strikes, while at the same time intelligently critical of Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Macaulay—'the great penny-a-liner'. The dissociation of the arts from practical concerns, evidenced in the scientific and technical pursuits of 'Mechanics Institutes', did not affect the higher journalism till the appearance of such editors as St Loe Strachey. {The Times is an exception; apparently it always did act as a 'drummer' for Progress, cf. the quotations in Scrutiny, Vol. Ill, p. 378.) His Spectator', in its early days at least, 'regarded all the arts as a subdepartment of morals or utility... all the poetry as a disease of pubescence'; it was shocked by the Brontes, but welcomed Kipling and Henley. Without sensitive attention to literature, it is difficult to see how a journal can preserve any kind of centrality: and for what that lack means, consider the hopeless dissipation represented by the ' middles' of the contemporary Spectator, the inability to evaluate the various manifestations of human energy. The Manchester Guardian has not been mentioned yet, because it is not a liberal journal in the sense I have been using the word (cf. the beginning of the previous paragraph). It is a product of the specialization which the last century developed. Though it was founded as a weekly over a hundred years ago, there are very few allusions to it in the memoirs of nineteenth-century publicists, and it does not appear 278

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to have taken part in the (non-political) controversies which were fought out in other papers. One gets the impression that its best work was in the political-economic sphere, and this is confirmed by reading Mr J. L. Hammond's Life ofC. P. Scott. The journalists whom I have mentioned had time for reading, reflection, and above all social intercourse, especially if theirs was a long-interval periodical. Scott on the other hand was swept into the editorship of a daily at the age of twentyfive, and never had the time to develop himself evenly. He was allabsorbed in keeping the machine going—no time was left for other interests. * The bare daily routine of the office takes up the whole of my mind and thoughts. I have none left for general culture, none even for the special culture required by my profession, but little for society . . . ' For the work of editor demanded that he should be intimately acquainted with a growing diversity of topics. Perhaps it is fair to suggest that this one-sidedness had something to do with his confidence in Mr Winston Churchill and Mr Lloyd George; but it certainly accounted for his optimism about the law of progress. In this way the character of the Manchester Guardian was determined; and though Mr Hammond in an interesting page (p. 52) endorses the claim that some of Scott's contributors * gave to the Guardian what was meant for mankind', it is impossible to be impressed by his list of contributors. The Guardian, too, provides a type of the higher journalist (twentieth-century model) in C. E. Montague, sharply contrasting with the essayists mentioned above. His biographer describes one of his subject's stories as 'serious, and uplifted', and very fitly a taste for mountaineering accompanied the uplift—'More than anything except war, climbing satisfied his thirst for adventure. . . the spirit and poetry of the heights pass into his books.' So in 1914 he joined up with juvenile enthusiasm in, of course, the Sportsmen's Battalion. Virile and idealistic, he had the heart of a boy. The new types of higher journalist, the inception and development of their careers, open an interesting field for comparative study by the literary biologist. Frederic Harrison 'arrived' by writing in the Westminster Review an article on 'Neo-Christianity': it was by a skit in the Oxford Magazine that Montague attracted the attention of his editor—whose own maiden appearance in the Guardian had been an account of a boat-race on the Seine. Compare the early works (at university age) of Mr Priestley and Sir John Squire. Mr Murry, on the other hand, was an extremely good critic before he was called to a more manly sphere. And can Mr Gerald Gould of the Observer be the same who fourteen years ago wrote for the lamented Labour Publishing Company a pamphlet called The Lesson of Black Friday: A Note on Trade Union Structure} 279

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THE RESPONSIBLE CRITIC OR THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT ANY TIME F. R. LEAVIS (1953)

Essays in Criticism^ one gathered at the outset, was to be, in a positive way, a criticism of Scrutiny. Scrutiny was lacking in scholarship: the new quarterly from Oxford would show us how a critical vigour not inferior to Scrutiny's might, as it should, be combined with true scholarly precision. How many of the readers of Essays in Criticism— or of the Editorial Board—judge that intention to have been realized I do not know, and I shall not, perhaps, be taken for an impartial observer; but I can only, with a whole and very regretful sincerity, report that we have not as a matter of fact felt ourselves challenged or rivalled by Essays in Criticism; that we have not at any time found its pages characterized by such notable examples of scholarly or critical or scholarly-critical practice as might call forth the blush of shame and stimulate us to higher endeavours; and that we should have supposed the formulators of the initial pretension themselves not unready to wonder whether Essays in Criticism has yet begun to teach the lessons, and provide the high pattern, aimed at. And here perhaps I point to the significance of the long statement of position and elaboration of programme contributed to the issue for January this year by the Editor, Mr F. W. Bateson, under the heading, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. Mr Bateson surveys the varieties, as he sees them, of contemporary critical practice, tells us what is wrong with each, and at the same times gives us his account of the right performance of the function of criticism—the ideal to which we are to regard Essays in Criticism as henceforward dedicated. This account, in its confused and confusing largenesses, might not have been altogether easy to comment on if Mr Bateson had not done some demonstrating. The demonstrating shows us—it shows us decisively— what that 'discipline of contextual reading', which as expounded strikes us so disconcertingly as both the progeny and the destined progenitor of confusion and misconception, in effect means; there is no reason for not pronouncing bluntly on it. The observations from which Mr Bateson starts are that we may be 280

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too precipitate in supposing ourselves in a position to judge a poem, and that sometimes some scholarly knowledge may be necessary. The first (its truth is signally exemplified in Mr Bateson's own practice) may be freely granted, and the second, stated with that generality, will not be disputed. I am thus guarded in respect of the second because experience has taught me that, when it is invoked, one needs to inquire into the intention. This may very well be of the kind represented by Miss Rosemond Tuve, whose books were discussed by R. G. Cox in the last issue of Scrutiny. Those books illustrate the spirit of a scholarship that, whatever it professes (and even believes), is inimical to criticism, that is, to intelligence. [See Vol. I, p. 304 of this Selection.} I do not like, let me say at this point (it seems a fitting one), the way in which scholarship is commonly set over against criticism, as a thing separate and distinct from this, its distinctive nature being to cultivate the virtue of accuracy—it is a way I had occasion to object to in an exchange with Mr Bateson some eighteen years ago. Accuracy is a matter of relevance, and how in the literary field, in any delicate issue, can one hope to be duly relevant—can one hope to achieve the due pointedness and precision of relevance—without being intelligent about literature? Again, how does one acquire the necessary scholarly knowledge? Some of the most essential can be got only through much intelligent reading of the literary-critical kind, the kind trained in * practical criticism': in the interpretation and judgment, that is, of poems (say) where it can be assumed that the text, duly pondered, will yield its meaning and value to an adequate intelligence and sensibility. Such intelligent reading, directed upon the poetry of the seventeenth century, cannot fail to be aware of period peculiarities of idiom, linguistic usage, convention and so on, and of the need, here, there and elsewhere, for special knowledge. The most important kind of knowledge will be acquired in the cultivation of the poetry of the period, and of other periods, with the literary critic's intelligence. Miss Tuve's insistence on an immense apparatus of scholarship before one can read intelligently or judge is characteristic of the academic over-emphasis on scholarly knowledge; it accompanies a clear lack of acquaintance with intelligent critical reading. And, of so extravagant an elaboration of * contextual' procedures as Mr Bateson commits himself to, one would, even without the conclusive exemplifying he does for us, have ventured, with some confidence, that the 'contextual' critic would not only intrude a vast deal of critical irrelevance on his poem; he would show a marked lack of concern for the most essential kinds of knowledge. The astonishing manifestations of irresponsibility (to take over the offered word from Mr Bateson) that he actually achieves, however, 281

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could hardly have been divined. I will deal with the instances in which he undertakes to correct myself. And I start by noting what I had to note when I had my first exchange with him all those years ago, and have had to note again in the interval: in framing his charges of default of the scholar's trained and delicate scruple he displays something strikingly other than scrupulousness in presenting the alleged defaulter. The implications and ramifications of context can be best demonstrated by a concrete example. A good one can be found on p. 74 of Revaluation, where Leavis has printed side by side four lines of Marvell (from 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'): A Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins, Tortur'd, besides each other part, In a vain Head, and double Heart and four lines by Pope (DunciadYV, 501-4): First slave to Words, then vassal to a Name, Then dupe to Party; child and man the same; Bounded by Nature, narrow'd still by Art, A trifling head, and a contracted heart. Leavis's point is the ' affinities' between the two passages. It is part of his case that Pope's 'wit' represents a continuation of the Metaphysical tradition. Whatever the merits of the general thesis, it receives no support from these lines, since the 'affinities' only exist within a verbal context of meaning. The verbal similarity between the last line of each passage is, of course, striking and obvious. But Leavis makes the collocation in order to establish a resemblance between MarvelPs and Pope's poetic styles, and once the matter is raised to a stylistic context the 'affinities' disappear. It turns out that once a matter is raised to a stylistic context by Mr Bateson most of the things that concern a literary critic are likely to disappear; but perhaps it is worth my pointing out that the 'resemblance' discussed in those pages of Revaluation is a very different matter from what Mr Bateson suggests: I take some trouble to make plain that it is a matter neither of the Metaphysical tradition nor of the verbal similarity between the last lines of the passages from Marvell and Pope. If the reader looks at page 74 (66 in the 'Peregrine') he will find, immediately after the piece of Pope reproduced by Mr Bateson, this : But such particularity of resemblance may hinder as much as help; it may be better to adduce something as insistently unlike anything Pope could have written as King's 'Tis true, with shame and grief I yield, Thou like the Vann first took'st the field 282

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And gotten hast the victory In thus adventuring to dy Before me, whose more years might crave A just precedence in the grave. A certain crisp precision of statement, a poised urbanity of movement and tone, that relates this passage to the other two becomes very apparent in the last line. The effect is as of an implicit reference, even here in King where personal feeling is so indubitably strong, of the immediate feeling and emotion to a considered scale of values—a kind of critical * placing', as it were. That last sentence, with its carefully related words and phrases, associating mode of * statement' with * movement' and 'tone', defines well enough, I think, in relation to the three quoted passages, the qualities upon which I wanted to focus attention. What, in fact, I am doing is to develop the proposition that immediately precedes, in Revaluation (see the bottom of page 73), the passage quoted from Marvell: 'It is, then, plain enough that Pope's reconciliation of Metaphysical wit with the Polite has antecedents.' I am indicating the way back from Pope to Ben Jonson, and if Mr Bateson had thought the whole presented case worth attending to he might have been led to observe in Marvell some marked antecedents of the Augustan to which 'the implications and ramifications of context' leave him blind. It is depressing when one's immense pains to be precise in observation and delicately firm in thought go so unrewarded, but in justice to Mr Bateson I have to admit that what I complain of is as nothing, measured by the treatment he accords Marvell and Pope. It is at their expense that he confounds me. This is the way in which he demonstrates how completely wrong I am: In terms of literary tradition the meanings of * head' and 'heart' are demonstrably quite different in the two passages. In Marvell's lines the vivid images of the first couplet almost compel the reader to visualize the torturechambers of the 'vain Head, and double Heart'. It is the kind of allegory that was popularized in the early seventeenth century by the Emblem Books, in which a more or less conventional concept is dressed up in some striking new clothes, the new clothes being the real raison d'etre. In Pope's last line, however, the abstract or quasi-abstract words which lead up to it make it almost impossible to see either the 'trifling head' or the 'contracted heart'. Obviously Pope's 'head' and 'heart' belong to the same order of reality as his 'Nature' and 'Art'. They are simply items in his psychological terminology, one the antithetical opposite of the other, and their modern equivalents would, I suppose, be the intellect and the emotions. Nothing could be further removed than these grey abstractions from Marvell's picture-language. So far the analysis of the two passages has been verbal and stylistic. The apparent verbal identity is, as I have shown, contradicted by the very different figures of speech and stylistic conventions employed by the two poets. 283

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But Mr Bateson has shown nothing at all. What he has asserted about the 'very different figures of speech and stylistic conventions employed by the two poets' he has merely asserted; and it can, by anyone who reads Marvell's poem (to take that first), immediately be seen to be in great part false. Here is the whole first speech of A Dialogue between the Soul and Body. O who shall, from this Dungeon, raise A Soul inslav'd so many wayes? With bolts of Bones, that fetter'd stands In Feet, and manacled in Hands. Here blinded with an Eye; and there Deaf with the drumming of an Ear. A Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins. Tortur'd, besides each other part, In a vain Head, and double Heart. There is undoubtedly some 'vivid', that is (to avoid the visual suggestion), potent, imagery here; but can Mr Bateson describe what he sees in response to Marvell's 'picture-language'? Can he, in fact, give any account of the poem that will begin to make the expression, c picture-language', anything but disconcertingly inappropriate? Can he suggest what picture could be drawn of the Soul 'inslav'd' in the dungeon of the body in any of the 'many ways' against which it protests? None could be that bore any relation to Marvell's poem, which is an utterly different thing from what Mr Bateson says it is. Of its very nature it eludes, defies and transcends visualization. So one is surprised to be told, by a scholar (who should know these things), that it is 'the kind of allegory that was popularized in the early seventeenth century by the Emblem Books'. To call it an allegory at all can only mislead, and to say, as Mr Bateson does, that i t ' dresses up' a ' more or less conventional concept' in some 'new clothes' (these being the 'real raison d'etre') is to convey the opposite of the truth about it. For it is a profoundly critical and inquiring poem, devoted to some subtle exploratory thinking, and to the questioning of 'conventional concepts' and current habits of mind. The paradoxes with which it opens may not be unrelated to convention, but that undoubted force which so strikes Mr Bateson (though he hasn't bothered with significance) is not in the least a matter of their compelling us to visualise anything; it is that they are paradoxes the essence of which is to elude or defy visualization. With bolts of Bones, that fetter'd stands In Feet, and manacled in Hands. 284

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—How do we see the Soul? What visual images correspond to 'fetter'd' and 'manacled'? We certainly don't see manacles on the Soul's hands and fetters on its feet: the Soul's hands and feet are the Body's, and it is the fact that they are the Body's that makes them 'manacles' and 'fetters'. No doubt there is in every reader's response to those words some kind of visual element; but the reader for whom the response is in any major way a matter of seeing manacles and fetters has not adjusted himself to the poem. Reading this rightly, we feel, as something more than stated, the Soul's protest (paradoxically in part physical—this is where 'imagery' comes in) against the so intimately and inescapably associated matter: the introductory 'with bolts of Bones' makes the antithesis, Soul and Body, seem clear and sharp. In the next couplet Mr Bateson himself can hardly have explained the effect as a matter of our being made to visualize: Here blinded with an Eye; and there Deaf with the drumming of an Ear. The Soul is protesting against the conditions and limitations of life in a world of sense-experience. And the eye is a physical organism—it can be pulled out; and a diagram can be drawn of the ear. But the antithesis, Soul and Body, has lost some of the sharpness it had when the Body was represented by 'bolts of Bones'. This development is confirmed by what follows. The comment on A Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins is made by the Body when it, in turn, speaks. The effect of these lines is immediate, and it is one concerning which we can say that we certainly do not see the Soul hanging in its 'Chains'. And when we come to the 'vain Head' and 'double Heart' it takes the wit of'double' to remind us that the heart (and the head too) can be thought of as a mere physical part of the material body. We don't, with that reminder, see them, or think of them, as 'torture-chambers'; it is not in them as 'torture-chambers' that the Soul is tortured, and Mr Bateson's criticism derives from a striking failure of attention: 'In Marvell's lines the image has run away with the antithesis (it doesn't really matter whether the torture-chamber is the head or the heart or some other part of the body) The poem offers no such simple scheme as he supposes. It is devoted to exploring a sense of the relation between 'soul' and 'body' that couldn't have been expressed in any simple scheme—emblematic, allegorical, diagrammatic, or what. The 'vain Head' and the 'double Heart', though they stand here for the Body, are clearly not just the 285

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physical part and the muscular organ. And this is not inadvertence, or slackness of grasp, in Marvell, whatever Mr Bateson may be inclined to suggest (he writes of a ' half-realization [in Marvell's Dialogue] that his medium was on its last legs and could no longer be taken with complete seriousness'). When the Body speaks we have this: O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this Tyrannic Soul? Which, stretcht upright, impales me so, That mine own Precipice I g o . . . Will Mr Bateson say that he finds himself compelled to visualize the Soul 'stretcht' upright* and 'impaling the Body? Hardly. What is conveyed with such power here is the Body's sense of the perilous game that, in its erect posture, it plays with gravity.1 The passage answers (concave to convex, as it were) to that in which the Soul speaks of being hung up in chains—a passage that expresses a sense of the inseparable, indistinguishable, implication of life in ' nerves and arteries and veins'. It wouldn't, the comment came as one read, have been ' hung up' if life had not informed the nerves and arteries and veins, and made them more than a material network. And now, as one reads, the comment comes that the conditions against which the Body protests are those which make it a body. It is a comment that is insisted on by what follows: And warms and moves this needless Frame: (A Fever could but do the same). A Frame that has lost its warmth, its power of motion and its needs is on the way to becoming a 'kneaded clod'. And, wanting where its spight to try, Has made me live to let me dye. —The Body (as Claudio testifies), having acquired its needs and become a body, cannot want to become 'needless'. A Body that could never rest, Since this ill Spirit it possest. —To 'rest' would be to die, which the Body, of its very nature, cannot wish to do. What it rebels against is the state, entailed in its state of being a body, of needing to fear death: 'mine own Precipice I go'—the point is now made with fuller significance. 1

* After he was stretch'd to such an height in his own fancy, that he could not look down from top to toe but his eyes dazled at the Precipice of his Stature' Rehearsal Transpros'd, i. 64 (quoted in the Commentary to the Poems, edited by Margoliouth). 286

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A body that fears to die, and has to fear to die because it has been made to live by the Soul, is not so readily to be set over against the soul, as something clearly distinguished, as the title of the poem seems to imply. And that is the point of the poem. The succeeding speech of the Soul develops it: What Magick could me thus confine Within another's Grief to pine? Where whatsover it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain. And all my Care its self employs, That to preserve, which me destroys: Constrained not only to indure Diseases, but, what's worse, the Cure: And ready oft the Port to gain, Am Shipwrackt into Health again. The Body's ills may be the Body's, b u t ' I feel, that cannot feel, the pain': the other's 'Grief is equally the Soul's, for all the distinction that has been stated as an antithesis. I need not comment on the rest of the speech—except, perhaps, to ask how much picture-language Mr Bateson finds even in the closing couplet of it. The Body's counterpart of this speech concludes the poem: But Physick yet could never reach The Maladies Thou me dost teach; Whom first the Cramp of Hope does Tear: And then the Palsie Shakes of Fear. The Pestilence of Love does heat: Or Hatred's hidden Ulcer eat. Joy's chearful Madness does perplex: Or Sorrow's other Madness vex. Which Knowledge forces me to know; And Memory will not forego. What but a Soul could have the wit To build me up for Sin so fit? So Architects do square and hew, Green Trees that in the Forest grew. The maladies of the Soul—described as that because they are of the kind that Physick cannot reach—are equally the Body's. The Body is exposed, it says, to suffering them by Knowledge, and Memory, which it speaks of as belonging to the Soul, but which are nevertheless sufficiently of the body to involve the Body in maladies. I am not suggesting that Marvell rejected the distinction between the soul and the body. But, plainly, this poem has for theme the 287

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difficulty of the distinction—its elusiveness; it explores with remarkable originality and power the perplexities and problems that, for one bent on distinguishing, must, in concrete experience, be found to lie behind the distinction as conventionally assumed—as assumed, for instance, by an allegorical or emblematic writer. I will not here go into the significance of the closing couplet (I confess, indeed, that I have not wholly convinced myself with any account of the development that, with its curiously satisfying effect as of a resolution, it gives to the theme). The poem is among Marvell's supreme things, profoundly original and a proof of genius; and my notes on its not unobvious (I should have thought) characteristics are enough to bring out the remarkable nature of Mr Bateson's feat. Of this poem he can say: ' It is the kind of allegory that was popularized in the early seventeenth century by the Emblem Books, in which a more or less conventional concept is dressed up in some striking new clothes, the new clothes being the real raison d'etre9. With his eyes (presumably) on it he can tell us: 'There is an obvious connection between Marvell's metaphors and the analogical thinking of the Tudor and Stuart divines. Hooker, for example, uses the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies as an argument for imposing ecclesiastical law upon the Puritans.' How can we explain such a performance? Can it be said that the critic who can tell us, with this serene assurance, these things about such a poem has, in any serious sense of the verb, read it? And Mr Bateson tells us them in a considered pronunciatory essay in which he offers to expose the irresponsibility of other critics, and to show us how we may achieve precision, and a certitude of correctness, in analysis, interpretation and judgment. What makes the performance the more astonishing is that he circulated the essay, he tells us, among his editorial colleagues (the note on the Editorial Board in front of Essays in Criticism lists eight) before publishing it. Is it possible that none of them made any remark on the extraordinary aberrations I have adduced? But the essay contains much more, of various kinds, that is equally matter for wonder, and seems equally to have escaped remark from Mr Bateson's colleagues. He treats Pope, for instance, with as confident and dumbfounding an arbitrariness as that which Marvell suffers : In Marvell's lines the image has run away with the antithesis (it doesn't really matter whether the torture-chamber is in the head or the heart or some other part of the body), whereas in Pope's lines the concept has almost killed the imagery, the progress being towards a mathematical purity with the sensuous elements segregated into a separate compartment of their own. And there is a still further contradiction. The most interesting feature in the lines is that the Metaphysical style in which he was writing has forced Marvell 288

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to say what he cannot have wanted to say. And Pope's Augustan style has forced his hand in the same way. Marvell's poem is a thoroughly serious affair, but the vividness of the imagery has resulted in a blurring of the argument by making it impossible for the reader not to equate—or, indeed, in terms of the poetic impact, subordinate—the immoral head and heart with such relatively innocent and secondary members as the nerves, arteries and veins. So gross a breach of the poem's logic cannot possibly have been intended by Marvell. The passage from the Dunciad raises a similar problem. How is it Pope, a master of language if ever there was one, has used his concrete terms with so little precision? In these lines * slave', * vassal' and 'dupe' are virtually interchangeable. And so are * Bounded', 'narrow'd' and * contracted'. These tautologies can't have been meant by Pope. Mr Bateson's ability to believe, and judicially to pronounce, that Marvell has been guilty of a 'breach of the poem's logic' such as 'cannot possibly have been intended' goes, we have seen, with his decision that Marvell shall have intended what, on the unequivocal and final evidence of the poem itself, he clearly didn't—the poem offers not the faintest ghost of a ground for the belief, which wholly denatures it. Mr Bateson's confidence that Pope can't have meant what he wrote exposes itself immediately, in what stands there on Mr Bateson's page, for the purely gratuitous achievement it is—exposes itself at the first cursory reading, one would have thought, by what within the compass of a single glance it commits Mr Bateson to (and again one can't help wondering that none, apparently, of his editorial colleagues should have brought so disastrous and undeniable a fact to his notice). What he brands 'tautologies' are obviously not tautologies, and it is not Pope ('a master of language if ever there was one') who has shown himself, in respect of precision in the use of words, astonishingly indifferent. Here again are the four lines of Pope: First slave to words, then vassal to a Name, Then dupe to Party; child and man the same; Bounded by Nature, narrow'd still by Art, A trifling head, and a contracted heart. How can Mr Bateson so have anaesthetized himself as to be able to pronounce 'slave', 'vassal' and 'dupe' 'virtually interchangeable'? That the forces of these words should have something in common is essential to the intention: 'child and man the same*. But that the forces are different, and that each word has a felicity in its place, is surely apparent at once, without analysis. What analysis yields I need only briefly indicate. Words should be servants—the servants of thought and of the

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thinker; the badly educated child is made a 'slave to words' (the cliche has point, as cliches usually have). Such a child, grown to political years, naturally becomes 'vassal to a Name'. The felicity of this expression takes us beyond cliche (the 'mastery of language' shown here is characteristic of Pope): the relation of personal subservience to a great patrician name (and a 'mere name', it is suggested) —a relation substituting for service of Principle1—is with special point described contemptuously by the feudal term in an age in which feudalism is Gothick. And such an initiate into politics, expecting his reward for faithful service of Party, finds himself a 'dupe': he has been used, but can command no substantial recognition from 'Int'rest that waves on parti-colour'd wings'. 'Vassal' and 'dupe' express quite different relations, and a moment's thought will show that they couldn't be interchanged. And neither noun could go with 'words': 'vassal' expresses a relation between persons, and 'dupe' implies an exploiting agent. There is hardly any need to argue that 'slave' could not, without loss of point, as these words stand, be substituted for 'vassal' or 'dupe'. And since ' slave to words * is something of a cliche, the progression 'slave', 'vassal', 'dupe', gives us a climax. As for Mr Bateson's assertion that 'Bounded', 'narrow'd', and ' contracted' are tautologies, that need not take us long. ' Bounded by Nature*—this refers to the limitations imposed by innate constitution. The person thus limited is made 'by Art'—i.e. by education—even more limited than he need have been: anyone who reads the passage can see that 'bounded' and 'narrow'd' are not interchangeable (and that 'virtually' doesn't help Mr Bateson's case). And if Pope had described the heart as 'bounded' or 'narrow'd'—but clearly he couldn't have done that. If, then, he had not described it as 'contracted' he would have forgone a marked felicity. 'Contracted'—which picks up 'trifling' alliteratively, with a gain of expressive value for both terms— has something like the effect of'double' in Marvell's 'vain Head and double Heart': it keeps us in touch with the heart as a physical organ. It suggests the muscular contraction, though this contractedness is permanent, and not part of the vital rhythm; and the presence of the muscular effect gives to the evoking of life meanly constricted a force that it wouldn't otherwise have had. There are wider and more varied possibilities of imagery than Mr Bateson would seem to have supposed. And he clearly assumes 1

Cf. Twenty lines further on: * A Feather, shooting from another's head, Extracts his brain; and Principle is fled; Lost is his God, his country, everything; And nothing left but Homage to a King. 290

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a naive account of the pair, concrete-abstract, as a simple antithesis. I cannot help thinking that if he had concentrated his attention on reading Pope's poetry he would have got a better understanding of those changes in the English language which marked the later part of the seventeenth century than he has derived from all his exercises in 'the discipline of contextual reading'. He might certainly have learnt something about the possibilities of 'abstract' diction in poetry, and, going on to Johnson, might have discovered that there may be concreteness and imagery in verse that is wholly Augustan in idiom, convention and way of using language. As it is, he can tell us, with that impressive poise of the contextually responsible critic, such absurdities as this: ' by his infusion of the Picturesque (the object of his thefts from the Metaphysical poets) Pope was able to mitigate to some extent the abstractness of his medium'. The changes in civilization that can be studied in the poetry of Dry den, Pope and Johnson are indeed of great interest. But Mr Bateson tells us little about them when he tells us—as any first-term undergraduate can be relied on to—that 'the abstract character of Pope's diction can be related without difficulty to the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume'. Mr Bateson, however, goes on: But this intellectual context, important though it certainly is for understanding Marvell and Pope, does not seem to provide the ultimate framework of reference within which their poems need to be read. Behind the intellectual context lies a complex of religious, political and economic factors that can be called the social context. As this level of meaning seems to be the final context of which the critical reader of literature must retain an awareness, it will be worth while trying to summarize, however baldly, the social context implicit in these two passages. In spite of the defensive 'however baldly', it is impossible not to comment severely on the gratuitousness, the flimsy and fanciful arbitrariness of what Mr Bateson then offers us as summaries of the implicit 'social contexts' (and his 'social' is a term we need to note). I don't know whether he has read the parts of Harold Smith's work that have appeared in Scrutiny over the past eighteen months—parts of an inquiry into the cultural changes manifested in the language and conventions of poetry during the period in question, but if he wants to expound the 'intellectual context' and the 'complex of religious, political and economic factors' that lie behind it, he can't do better than go to Smith for light. Smith has a full sense of the complexities, is delicate and precise in formulation, and never loses his grasp of the fact that poetry is both the focus of his inquiry and of unique value as evidence. 19 1

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And here we come to the sad truth about Mr Bateson's discipline of contextual reading. ' What general conclusions', he pleasantly asks, * can be drawn from this analysis of the two passages quoted by Leavis?' Mr Bateson draws conclusions of decided largeness; but, of course, none that are valid can be drawn, since the "analysis" ignores the passages. And—what we have now to note—the consequence of this last fact is that his discipline is not merely irrelevant; it isn't, and can't be, a discipline at all: it has no determinate enough field or aim. That he shouldn't notice, or be embarrassed by, this disability is characteristic of his whole project; the indeterminateness makes possible (for Mr Bateson—and, apparently, his colleagues, or most of them) the confident ambition of the project, and the remarkable pretension that (as we shall see) crowns it. He starts from the commonplace observation that a poem is in some way related to the world in which it was written. He arrives by a jump (at least, his arrival there is not by any steps of sober reasoning) at the assumption that the way to achieve the correct reading of a poem—of, say, Marvell's or Pope's—is to put it back in its * total context' in that world. No idea of such an undertaking troubles the reader whose attention is really and intelligently focused upon the poem, and if the undertaking were proposed to him he would see its absurdity at once. He would see that it was gratuitous, and worse; and at the same time he would see that any achievment corresponding to it is impossible— that the aim, in fact, is illusory. What is this * complex of religious, political and economic factors that can be called the social context', and the reconstruction of which enables us (according to Mr Bateson) to achieve the * correct reading', 'the object as in itself it really is, since it is the product of progressive corrections at each stage of the contextual series'? How does one set to work to arrive at this final inclusive context, the establishment of which puts the poem back in 'its original historical setting', so that 'the human experience in it begins to be realized and re-enacted by the reader'? Mr Bateson doesn't tell us, and doesn't begin to consider the problem. He merely follows up those plainly false assertions about the passage of Marvell and Pope with some random notes from his historical reading. That is all he could do. And all he could do more would be to go on doing that more voluminously and industriously. For the total 'social context' that he postulates is an illusion. And so it would have been, even if he had started by reading the poem. But he would then—at least, if he had really read the poem, and kept himself focused upon that—have seen that in the poem, whatever minor difficulties of convention and language it might present, he had something determinate —something indubitably there. But' context', as something determinate 292

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is, and can be, nothing but his postulate; the wider he goes in his ambition to construct it from his reading in the period, the more is it his construction (in so far as he produces anything more than a mass of heterogeneous information alleged to be relevant). It will not, I think, be supposed that I should like to insulate literature for study, in some pure realm of'literary values' (whatever they might be). But on the one hand it is plain to me that no poem we have any chance of being able to read as a poem requires anything approaching the inordinate apparatus of * contextual' aids to interpretation that Mr Bateson sees himself deploying. On the other hand it is equally plain to me that it is to creative literature, read as creative literature, that we must look for our main insights into those characteristics of the 'social context' (to adopt for a moment Mr'Bateson's insidious adjective) that matter most to the critic—to the reader of poetry. I do indeed (as I have explained in some detail elsewhere) think that the study of literature should be associated with extra-literary studies. But to make literary criticism dependent on the extra-literary studies (or to aim at doing so, for it can't be done) in the way Mr Bateson proposes is to stultify the former and deprive the latter of the special profit they might have for the literary student. To suggest that their purpose should be to reconstruct a postulated 'social context' that once enclosed the poem and gave it its meaning is to set the student after something that no study of history, social, economic, political, intellectual, religious, can yield. The poem as I've said, is a determinate thing; it is there; but there is nothing to correspond—nothing answering to Mr Bateson's'social context' that can be set over against the poem, or induced to re-establish itself round it as a kind of framework or completion, and there never was anything. The student who sets out in quest of such a 'context' may read historical works of various kinds and he may assemble a number of general considerations such as Mr Bateson offers us as explaining why Marvell has been ' forced to say what he cannot have wanted to say', but he will find that the kind of context that expands indeterminately as he gets from his authorities what can be got contains curiously little significance—if significance is what, for a critic, illuminates a poem. And he may go on and on— indeterminately. It may be said that in these comments I do not sufficiently recognize that a preoccupation with 'context' would involve a continual reference back to the poem. To this I can only reply that (firstly) Mr Bateson himself doesn't pay any attention to the poem; and that this is not, so to speak, an accident, because (secondly) no one who was actually concerned with the problem of arriving at the correct reading of a 293

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poem could have conceived Mr Bateson's phantom scheme of' contextual checks'—and called it a discipline. The seriousness with which he takes his 'social context' as a fact, determinate and determining, is complete. 'It is to be noted', he tells us,' that the culminating desideratum, the final criterion of correctness, is the awareness of the appropriate social context.' He goes on: The discipline of contextual reading, as defined and illustrated in the preceding paragraphs, should result in the reconstruction of a human situation that is demonstrably implicit in the particular literary work under discussion. Within the limits of human fallibility, the interpretation will be right. But the process provides no guarantee, of course, that the reader's response to the essential drama, however correctly that is reconstructed, will be equally correct. I confess that I don't know what this means; but Mr Bateson would seem to be suggesting that one may reconstruct the 'essential drama' of a poem correctly without responding to it correctly; that the taking possession of it is independent of valuing. That is an error of Mr Bateson's which I remember to have corrected some eighteen years ago.1 He insists, however, that 'the question of values must not be excluded'. But I find what he says about the nature and process of judgment so wholly unintelligible that I will quote the crucial passage: The reservation must be immediately made that the judgment is not separable in criticism—as distinct from ethics and aesthetics—from the particular structure of meanings that is being judged. A poem, for example, is not good or bad in itself but only in terms of the contexts in which it originated. For us to be able to use it, to live ourselves into it, the essential requirement is simply an understanding of those original contexts, and especially the original social context. A social order, as such, is necessarily the affirmation of certain values. In the social context, therefore, the values implied in the poem become explicit, and its relative goodness or badness declares itself. Because of its final dependence on the setting of the poem within its social context the mere process of responsible reading includes the necessary value-judgments. I can, I say, extract no meaning from this. It cannot, I suspect, be explained, because the author's conviction (it seems to me) that he 1

I am glad to see that Mr Bateson took the point. He sums up a discussion thus (Essays in Criticism, April 1953, p. 235): And the moral? It is, I suppose, that a poem cannot in fact be discussed at any level—above the bibliographical at any rate—unless it has first been read critically. Other people's criticism won't do instead. That is what I told him. I regret to have to say that it is wholly characteristic of his work, in its relation to what has appeared in Scrutiny, that his grasp of a point he has in a way taken should be so imperfect. 294

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had coherent thought to express was an illusion. It would be interesting to be told what sense was made of it by the editorial colleagues ('most of them') who gave the article their 'general approval*. One thing I am certain of: whatever sense can be given it, the passage is incompatible with any true account of value-judgment. One judges a poem by Marvell not by persuading a hypothetical seventeenth-century 'context', or any 'social context', to take the responsibility, but, as one alone can, out of one's personal living (which inevitably is in the twentieth century). The 'mere process of responsible reading', if we take 'responsible', not in Mr Bateson's inverted sense, but in the ordinary sense, 'includes the necessary value-judgments' (and 'valuation' is not a simple idea in analogy with 'putting a price on', and not a mere matter of' relative goodness or badness') because, if the poem is an important challenge, it engages, in the response that' reconstructs' it, and as an inseparable part of the response, the profoundest and completest sense of relative value that one brings from one's experience. No one realizing the nature of such responding could lay Mr Bateson's stress upon the 'original social context', whatever precisely such a context may be, and whatever precisely may be the evaluative efficacy that Mr Bateson ascribes to it. I have observed earlier that 'social' is an insidious word. The nature of the attraction it has for Mr Bateson reveals itself to us when he comes to the importance he claims for the responsible critic: The more closely you read a work of literature—the more, that is, you learn to respond correctly at all the levels of context—the more you will profit by it. But 'profit' is an inadequate word to describe the contribution to the community—with the status such a contribution inevitably confers— that the trained reader brings to a muddled mass society. If it is true that a work of literature cannot be properly understood or appreciated except in terms of the social context in which it originated, the skilled reader of literature will tend, by the nature of his skill, to understand and appreciate contemporary social processes better than his neighbours. What in particular actuality the 'contribution' of the 'trained reader' to his muddled 'context' could be we are left to divine from these large intimations—and their context. But the nature of the ambition, or hankering, they express is made clear enough. Of the essay of Arnold's that remains for him 'the supreme model' Mr Bateson says: There are two phrases in that essay, each only four words long, that everyone who has read the first series of Essays in Criticism cannot help remembering. They are the four words in which Arnold summed up the case against the English Romantic poets (they 'did not know enough') and the four words he quoted from a newspaper report of a particularly sordid child-murder. 295

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('Wragg is in custody'). No two phrases could well be more unconnected and apparently irrelevant to each other. Arnold's essay derives its peculiar distinction from its success in persuading us that the two worlds of reference which the phrases symbolize, the literary world and the social world, are in reality closely interrelated. Yes, in the last analysis Wragg was in custody because the Romantic poets did not know enough. Did Mr Bateson explain to his colleagues what he meant by that last sentence? Did any one of them ask him to explain it? And if he had been asked, what would he have said? Anyone not predisposed by the desire to be told something of the kind can see at once that it is one of those impressive utterances the impressiveness of which depends upon one's not asking what they mean. The conviction with which Mr Bateson brings it out depends upon the confusion he has engendered with the word * social'. When he tells us that the 'infusion of social issues, in the widest sense of the term, into purely literary criticism is probably the most crying need of all', we divine the general nature of the intention. We know that this 'widest sense of the term* hasn't the wideness that seemed to excuse the initial use of 'social' in the phrase 'social context', and we suspect that the intention is closely related to Mr Bateson's 'impenitence'1 about Auden. Not that we know in any strict sense what he means; it is impossible to believe that he himself knows. How do you 'infuse social issues' into 'purely literary criticism'? What is purely literary criticism? Mr Bateson clearly feels that he has disposed of this last question, and justified the dismissing and placing work to which he puts the phrase, in his remarks about Mr Cleanth Brooks, designed as these are to give force to his statement that 'the exclusion of historical and social factors by some modern critics begins to assume a more sinister aspect'. That he should feel so only exemplifies the extravagant irresponsibility that characterizes his whole essay. A suspicion of the irresponsibility of criticism as known to him in his most intimate acquaintance with it might be diagnosed as the real significance of the portent. Let us prove that 'scholarly criticism' isn't a mere club-game for academics! But the way to vindicate criticism as a serious function is not to claim for the critic a kind of responsibility or competence that doesn't belong to him as such, but to assert and vindicate its true responsibilities. Intent on these, one will see little need to talk about 'literary values' (and I don't know what 'purely literary criticism' would be—unless strictly relevant criticism). The critic, by way of his discipline for relevance in dealing with created works, is concerned with life. But Mr Bateson's posited relation be1

'On the status of Auden at any rate I am impenitently on Father Jarrett-Kerr's side', F. W. Bateson, Essays in Criticism, April 1953. 296

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tween poem and 'social context' is a matter of vain and muddled verbiage; the student who supposes that there is, or was, or can be, any reality answering to those impressive formulations will at the best be able to say that he has had the pleasure and the profit of disabusing himself. The business of the literary critic as such is with literary criticism. It is pleasant to hope that, when he writes or talks about political or 'social' matters, insight and understanding acquired in literary studies will be engaged—even if not demonstrably (and even if we think it a misleading stress to speak of his special understanding of 'contemporary social processes'). But his special responsibility as critic (and, say, as the editor of a critical review) is to serve the function of criticism to the best of his powers. He will serve it ill unless he has a clear conception of what a proper working of the function in contemporary England would be like, and unless he can tell himself why the function matters. If he tells himself (and others) that it matters 'because a skilled reader of literature will tend, by the nature of his skill, to understand and appreciate contemporary social processes better than his neighbours', he misrepresents it and promotes confusion and bad performance. 'It is important', he says, 'to emphasize the utile as well as the duke of criticism'. The confusion, pregnant with ill consequences, is there, in that distinction of his which he offers with such confident matter-of-factness. The utile of criticism is to see that the created work fulfils its raison d'etre; that is, that it is read, understood and duly valued, and has the influence it should have in the contemporary sensibility. The critic who relates his business to a full conception of criticism conceives of himself as helping, in a collaborative process, to define—that is, to form—the contemporary sensibility. What it should be possible to say of 'the skilled reader of literature' is that he 'will tend, by the nature of his skill', to understand and appreciate contemporary literature better than his neighbours. The serious critic's concern with the literature of the past is with its life in the present; it will be informed by the kind of perception that can distinguish intelligently and sensitively the significant new life in contemporary literature. These reminders of the conception of the critical function that the editor of a literary review ought to have are enough to enforce my point. If literature, as the critic is committed to supposing it does, matters, then what in relation to it matters above all is that it should be what it ought to be in contemporary life; that is, that there should be such a public as the conception I have pointed to implies: a public intelligently responsive and decisively influential. It is through such a 297

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public, and through the conditions of general education implied in the existence of such a public, that literature, as the critic is concerned with it, can reasonably be thought of as influencing contemporary affairs and telling in realms in which literary critics are not commonly supposed to count for much. That is the faith of the critic. Where contemporary cultural conditions give no ground for such a faith—where there is no such public, and literature, in the critic's sense, is not a power in contemporary life—then for a critic to encourage himself with talk of the important role that the 'skilled reader' plays in a 'muddled mass society' by reason of his superior understanding of 'contemporary social processes' is irresponsible trifling or solemn self-deception. What does Mr Bateson mean when, appealing for support to poor Arnold, he says, ' The values of the modern world seem to the layman to be embodied in literature to a far greater degree than they are in modern religion or philosophy'? Does he suppose that there is any close relation (or, as things are, any but a discouraging one) between the conception to which, with the help of the reference to Arnold, we can see him to be pointing (in spite of his unhappy phraseology) and the kind of importance he offers the 'skilled reader'? There is, however, a special understanding of' contemporary social processes', and a special preoccupation with them, that a critic as such, and above all the editor of a critical review, ought to show. I am thinking of those 'social processes' for my preoccupation with which I was rebuked, in the October issue of Essays in Criticism, by Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr—the social processes that have virtually brought the function of criticism in this country into abeyance. I say, I was rebuked for that, though actually the nature of the preoccupation got no recognition in the course of some strictures on the persistence in Scrutiny of the evidence of it. Why, my critic wondered, should I have thought it worth devoting several precious pages of Scrutiny to ' a series of derogatory comments on an unimportant autobiography by Mr Stephen Spender'? The reference was to an article (Vol. XVIII, No. i), 'Keynes, Spender and Currency Values', in which I related Mr Roy Harrod's Life of Keynes to Mr Spender's book in an account of the processes that have, as I say, virtually extinguished the critical function Again, a discussion of the significance of one of those British Council 'Surveys' becomes an attack on Mr John Hayward and the Warden of Wadham. I look with some anxiety for evidence that Fr Jarrett-Kerr was not expressing a sense of these matters that he shares with Mr Bateson and the Editorial Board of Essays in Criticism. I know of none—which is a surprising thing, in view of the daily battle that has to be fought 298

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(if one takes either education or the function of criticism seriously) against the processes of civilization that have been documented in Scrutiny (with Fiction and the Reading Public in the background) during the past twenty years. Does Mr Bateson share Fr Jarrett-Kerr's view that it doesn't matter what the reviewing in the weeklies or the Sunday papers is like; or how the BBC uses its immense resources, and its formidable powers of literary influence; or what the British Council does with its prestige, its authority and the public funds; and that it doesn't matter if all these are shown (by a redundance of such evidence as may be represented by Mr John Hayward's Survey) to work together in a system that brings in also the universities, and if the system imposes the valuations and the ethos of the Sunday reviewing? Will he deny the evidence, or dismiss it without consideration? Or, does he think that, if at Oxford Essays in Criticism (strengthened by * going to school with both Mr Empson and Mr Trilling') opens its 'Critical Forum' quarterly and at Cambridge Scrutiny (in its less scholarly way1) still continue to carry on, the function of criticism in this country is being pretty well provided for? If so, I cannot take seriously his idea of the function of criticism, or his interest in literature, or his conception of its importance—and a peculiarly ironical light is thrown on his own view that the 'skilled reader' may be counted on to contribute to the community (winning thus ' the status such a contribution inevitably confers') a superior insight into 'contemporary social processes'. * * * If you propose to place the importance of literary criticism in some non-literary-critical function, you betray your unbelief that literary criticism really matters. And, if you don't believe in literary criticism, then your belief that literature itself matters will have the support of an honoured convention, but must be suspect of resting very much on that. And if you don't see that literature matters for what really gives it importance, then no account you offer of the intellectual superiority that may be expected to bring the 'skilled reader' of literature 'status' in the community can be anything but muddle and self-delusion. On the other hand, as I insisted with close argument and particularity of illustration in Education and the University, to be seriously interested in literary criticism as a discipline of intelligence is inevitably to be led into other fields of interest. I have remarked on the irresponsibility with which Mr Bateson assimilates me with Mr Cleanth Brooks, under the head of that 'purely literary criticism' which 1

A way that, nevertheless, to judge from the pages of Essays in Criticism, * scholars' find substantially helpful as well as stimulating. 299

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ignores its 'social duty'. For that is what he does, with his not uncalculating, but characteristically irresponsible procedure (he doesn't, I think, mean any harm). No one would gather from his essay that (so far as producible evidence is concerned) I have paid considerably more attention to relating literary criticism with other studies and disciplines, and to defining its importance for any one seriously concerned with the problems of contemporary civilization, than he has done. The substance of Education and the University (as also the closely related essay printed later as an introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge) appeared in Scrutiny^ the spirit of which has been in keeping. But what matters most about a mainly literary review is its performance in actual literary criticism. It is impossible to gather from Mr Bateson's so promisingly styled essay that he has any notion of what a justifying, or a creditable, performance of the function discussed by him would be. You cannot adequately discuss the 'Function of Criticism at the Present Time' in terms of critical method—even in terms of critical method as variously exemplified by the string of names that for Mr Bateson constitute the 'new critical movement' to the 'splendid qualities of which' we have 'gradually got used'. To make my point effectively it is necessary to have recourse to the concrete: you cannot cogently present the idea of criticism as a matter of generalities. In so far, then, as the function of criticism (which, for a full performance, demands interplay between different centres) can be performed in one organ, Scrutiny represents a sustained attempt, over the past twenty years, to perform it in relation to contemporary England. And for the performance, in spite of all deficiencies (of which the Editors would perhaps give a severer just account than anyone else), this sober claim can be made: the volumes offer an incomparable literary history of the period and, at the same time, in such consonance as to be an organic part of the whole coherent critical achievement, what will be recognized to amount to a major revaluation of the past of English literature. That is because Scrutiny was concerned to determine the significant points in the contemporary field and to make, with due analysis, the necessary judgments, and because its judgments have invariably turned out to be right. 'While literary people in general', testifies Mr Eric Bentley,1 'waited till recently to discover that Lawrence was great and that Aldous Huxley is not great, Scrutiny made the correct appraisals from the start.' Mr Bentley here is offering an illustration of a general truth. I say that the judgments 1

In his Introduction to The Importance of Scrutiny (George W. Stewart, New York), a volume of selections from Scrutiny. Mr Bentley conceived and carried out this project in America.

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have turned out to be right: after what was often the most indignant resistance in the world of literary fashions, they have been accepted, and now pass current as what has been always known. It may be said that Mr Bateson disagrees about Auden. But Mr Bateson's disagreement, by the signs, is a very half-hearted last-ditch affair. 'On the status of Auden', he says (Essays in Criticism, April 1953), 'I am impenitently on Fr Jarrett-Kerr's side.' Apart from the fact that Fr Jarrett-Kerr's grounds are Anglo-Catholic, stressing Auden's later development, while Mr Bateson's, I suspect, are wholly different, Fr Jarrett-Kerr has explicitly abandoned the claim of major status for Auden. But it was the belief that Auden was a major poet, a luminary comparable in magnitude with Yeats and Eliot—superseding Eliot, in fact—that gave him his immense influence. Scrutiny challenged the estimate from the start with steady criticism, and challenged the whole Poetical Renascence—Auden, Spender, the present Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the rest—at a time (let it be once again recorded) when the Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and Classicist Criterion gave the movement, a * gang-movement' if ever there was one, the freedom of its review pages. To place Auden and that Public School Leftism; to stand by Eliot (who in the early 'thirties needed it), while making duly the limiting, qualifying and adverse judgments; to insist on Eliot's immense superiority as a creative force to Pound, while at the same time insisting on Lawrence's immense superiority to Eliot; to justify a lack of sustained interest in Joyce—I need not enumerate the other and related judgments in the contemporary field that Scrutiny established critically: my point is that here, in such work, we have the utile of criticism (and it is creative work). In the creating, with reference to the appropriate criteria—the creating in an intelligent public—of a valid sense of the contemporary chart (as it were), or sense of the distribution of value and significance as a mind truly alive in the age would perceive them, the 'function of criticism at the present time' has its fulfilment. It is to such a fulfilment that a critic must look when he inquires into the nature of his special responsibility. And if, really believing that literature matters, he ponders the importance of such a fulfilment, he will hardly feel the need to prove his seriousness by claiming, as a critic, any more direct efficacy of engagement upon the 'social' and political world. But Mr Bateson shows something like an unawareness of the function of criticism so conceived. In relation to the contemporary writers, the critics, it falls within his purpose to discuss he betrays what I can only call an inertia of judgment. His uncritical largeness of respect for the 'splendid qualities' of what he styles the 'new critical 301

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merit' might be taken for tact. But why should he 'respect and admire' the criticism of Wyndham Lewis? That reputation was never grounded in anything but fashion, and fashion of the frothiest kind. To commend Christopher Caudwell is perhaps less of an offence, since the inertness of the acclaiming judgment that perpetuates his book as a classic is in general tacitly recognized; few besides the critic who reviewed it for Scrutiny have really read it through, and no one, at this date, is likely to be persuaded that he ought to try and read it. But what excuse can Mr Bateson allege for saying that he * respects and admires' the dialectic of Kenneth Burke, which some earnest souls may very well suppose that they ought to devote themselves to mastering? Itself it represents astonishing energy and devotion, but how utterly unrelated its rigours are to any problem that may concern an intelligent student of literature Marius Bewley has, in a very thorough examination, shown in Scrutiny, And why does Mr Bateson speak of the 'thoroughness, the usefulness' and the * general good sense' of Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature} To have suggested that the student may go hopefully to it for help or enlightenment is an irresponsibility that ought to trouble Mr Bateson's conscience. There are too many of these conventional values which, once established, are perpetuated by inertia, and it is not the function of criticism to countenance them. I am provoked, then, by Mr Bateson to point out that, in the field in which he has offered himself as the astringent and pioneering representative of discrimination, it is Scrutiny that has done the work. The history is a long one. Scrutiny, twenty years ago, provided the radical criticism of the' psychological', pseudo-scientific, and, generally, Neo-Benthamite enterprises of I. A. Richards—who, oddly enough, owed his prestige and his then virtually unchallenged institutional status in so large a part to the support of T. S. Eliot. In the matter of Eliot's own criticism, it was in Scrutiny that the discriminations were established. As for the function of criticism in regard to the life in the present of the literature of the past, that, I may fairly say, has not been neglected in Scrutiny. To take the novel: not only have the main particular Scrutiny revaluations become generally current, but the associated idea of the significant tradition from Jane Austen to Lawrence (as well as a totally new conception of Jane Austen's importance and of the nature of her achievement) has become a fact of general acceptance at the same time, with the implication that it has always been so. About this, and all the other work of major revaluation, affecting radically the prevailing sense of the past, that has been achieved in Scrutiny, I will say no more than this: if Mr Bateson would like evidence of what has been done, and evidence that it has told, he will find it on an impressive 302

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scale if he looks through the files of Essays in Criticism, starting backwards from the present issue, and engages in some genuine comparative scholarship. I have not ended on this note in any spirit of vainglorious pleasure. But there are occasions when the idea of modesty is out of place, and to be intimidated by it is to neglect (in Mr Bateson's phrase) one's * social duty*. This seems to me decidedly one. One cannot, as I have said, effectively present the idea of the critical function—the Function of Criticism at the Present Time—in generalities: one must show it in the concrete, in action. To present it as effectively as possible seems to me, in the circumstances, what is called for. And the way I have taken is the best I know—I know of no other, in fact—of enforcing what I have said, making plain what I mean by it, and vindicating my right to say it, with some astringency, to Mr Bateson.

THE RESPONSIBLE CRITIC: REPLY F. W. BATESON (1953)

My article on 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (Essays in Criticism, Jan. 1953), on which Dr F. R. Leavis has commented at such embarrassing length and with such intimidating 'astringency' (it is his own word) in the last issue of Scrutiny, was written under difficulties—a lot of it in a public ward while recovering from an operation—and I dare say there are passages in it that are ill considered or clumsily expressed. But is it really, taken as whole, the absolute nonsense Dr Leavis seems to believe? Though the opinion naturally is a biased one, I cannot help thinking he exaggerates the article's deficiencies. In the nature of things any attempt to define a new and more or less coherent critical position in twenty-six fairly short pages has to run the risk of occasional oversimplifications. Arnold's classical essay, which provided my own point of departure, is not guiltless in that respect. Be that as it may, there is certainly some exaggeration in Dr Leavis's references to Essays in Criticisms editorial programme. The unwary reader might gather from his first paragraph that Essays in Criticism was founded for the sole purpose of showing up and combating the unscholarliness of Scrutiny. In point of fact its founders are all admirers of Scrutiny, who wished to provide Oxford with a journal that might perform a complementary function in that university to the one performed so brilliantly by Scrutiny at Cambridge. It is true that Essays in Criticism aspires to a higher level of literary 303

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scholarship, but this difference in our policies is surely far less important than the serious interest in literature shared by both journals. Dr Leavis's references to Scrutiny seem to me equally exaggerated. On page 181 of his article he makes the astonishing claim that in the whole of Scrutiny's twenty years' life 'its judgments have invariably turned out to be right'. Quod est absurdum. This is not to deny that Scrutiny's judgments have generally been right (no critic now alive has made fewer mistakes than Dr Leavis), or that Scrutiny, when it was at its best, was a far better journal than Essays in Criticism is now or is ever likely to become. Dr Leavis devotes nearly half his article to a minute and sometimes rather niggling examination of some brief comments of mine on two passages from Marvell and Pope which he had originally juxtaposed in Revaluation. The Marvell lines— A Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins. Tortur'd, besides each other part, In a vain Head, and double Heart. receive the following comment in Revaluation: 'The familiar turn of that close, a turn not confined to Marvell, of whom, however, the supreme representative of seventeenth-century urbanity, it is most characteristic, surely has affinities with a characteristic effect of Pope's longer couplet.' Four lines were then quoted from The Dunciad: First slave to words, then vassal to a Name, Then dupe to Party; child and man the same; Bounded by Nature, narrow'd still by Art, A trifling head, and a contracted heart. After which Dr Leavis inserted a reservation—' But such particularity of resemblance may hinder as well as help'—before passing on to discuss some lines from Henry King's Exequy. It was all as clear as houses. If words mean anything at all Dr Leavis's point in making this collocation in Revaluation was to suggest that the resemblances in the last line of each of the passages quoted typified in some way the affinities between Marvell's poetry and Pope's. If he hadn't meant that, what can his object have been in selecting these particular passages for quotation? Of course, the passages also possess other qualities which may or may not have been shared by the poets, but in 1936 at any rate, Dr Leavis obviously expected the 'particularity of resemblance' to 'help' the reader to take his point, if on reflection he also realized it might 'hinder*. I cannot understand, therefore, why he should now berate me (page 164) for attributing to him an interest in 304

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'the verbal similarity between the last lines of the passages from Marvell and Pope'. That he was wrong in finding the similarity significant, as he now seems to admit, does not alter the fact that he did once make this mistake—which in any case is not of any great importance. My reason for citing it in my article was not to catch out Revaluation, a book for which I have considerable respect, but to show in a striking example how the same words tend to assume different meanings in Metaphysical and Augustan poetry. Dr Leavis had simply saved me the trouble, as I thought, of hunting out an example of the difference between purely verbal and' stylistic* levels of meaning. In themselves Dr Leavis's expansions and elaborations of his earlier comments on the two passages are persuasive and often acute. But instead of refuting my thesis he tends to talk round it. I had argued (i) that, as Marvell used the words head and heart, the sense-impression predominated, whereas for Pope the words were primarily conceptual, and (ii) that the general linguistic trend represented by these passages had resulted here in a distortion or enfeeblement of the poetic argument. Dr Leavis seems to think that he has disposed of my first point by showing that there are non-sensuous elements in Marvell's poems. Of course there are. There are non-sensuous elements in the Emblem Books. If Dr Leavis will turn to Emblem VIII in the fifth Book of Quarles's Emblemes, he will find a crude exemplification of the convention in which Marvell was writing—a skeleton lolling in a sitting posture (the Body) with a kneeling figure inside it (the Soul). The essence of the paradoxical relationship was that the idea of the mutual dependence of body and soul could only be explored in physical terms. 'How do we see the Soul?' Dr Leavis asks. ' . . .we certainly do not see the Soul hanging in its "Chains'" (pp. 166-7). Well, Quarles saw his Soul. And if, as is surely the case, the comparison of the network of human nerves, arteries and veins with the chains fastened round a dead criminal's body (in order that it might not disintegrate) is a visual metaphor, how can the reader fail to complete the metaphor by seeing the soul in the corpse on the gallows? I suspect that Dr Leavis has missed the full force of the allusion. My second point depended upon the hierarchical pre-eminence of the head and the heart in Marvell's time. A poem in which the feet, the hands, the eyes, the ears, and the nerves, arteries and veins receive more memorable treatment than the head and the heart would have puzzled and disturbed a seventeenth-century reader. Dr Leavis's insistence on reading everything written in English as though it was written yesterday has in this instance accidentally improved Marvell's poem for him. And Pope's lines are misunderstood in much the same way. I had complained that slave, vassal and dupe are 'virtually 305

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interchangeable' in this passage. To show how wrong I am Dr Leavis proceeds to analyse the lines: Words should be servants—the servants of thought and of the thinker; the badly educated child is made a * slave to words' (the cliche has point, as cliches usually have). Such a child, grown to political years, naturally becomes Vassal to a Name'. The felicity of this expression takes us beyond cliche (the * mastery of language' shown here is characteristic of Pope): the relation of personal subservience to a great patrician name (and a * mere name', it is suggested)—a relation substituting for service of Principle—is with special point described contemptuously by the feudal term in an age in which feudalism is Gothick. And such an initiate into politics, expecting his reward for faithful service of Party, finds himself a 'dupe': he has been used, but can command no substantial recognition from 'Int'rest that waves on parti-colour'd wings' (p. 171). It will not be necessary to refute Dr Leavis's analysis in detail. All I need do is to quote the first sentence of the Pope-Warburton note on these lines: 'A Recapitulation of the whole Course of Modern Education describ'd in this book, which confines Youth to the study of Words only in Schools, subjects them to the authority of Systems in the Universities, and deludes them with the names of Party-distinctions in the World'. Not to put too fine a point on it, Dr Leavis has misunderstood, more or less completely, all three of Pope's phrases. Slavery to 'Words' refers to the way in which Latin and Greek were taught in eighteenthcentury schools; the 'Name' to which the adolescent pays homage is not that of a member of the nobility but the philosophical system taught in the universities; and it is party slogans that dupe the young man and not the politicians' promises of pickings and sinecures. I know that it is human to err, but the mistake about 'vassal to a Name' is a fairly gross error. That what Pope really meant by the words was in fact something very like 'a slave or dupe of Aristotelianism' is confirmed by the Pope—Warburton note on Dunciad IV, 255—71. No doubt a misreading of two lines in The Dunciad is not in itself a very serious matter. What is more disturbing are the reading habits Dr Leavis's analysis exemplifies. Taken by themselves and in isolation from what precedes and succeeds them anybody might misread Pope's lines as Dr Leavis has done, but in Book IV of The Dunciad and as spoken by Silenus (Thomas Gordon) the process of corruption described in the couplet must be an intellectual one and the corrupting agents (schoolmasters, dons, political pamphleteers) must necessarily be men of words rather than deeds. The most perfunctory attention to the context of Pope's lines would have saved Dr Leavis's face. And this brings me to his comments on the central thesis of my article— 306

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that a work of literature can only be usefully criticized in terms of its original context. My mistake, according to Dr Leavis, is that by introducing this notion of context I am abandoning 'something determinate —something indubitably there' (p. 174) for something indeterminate. 'The poem', he says, 'is a determinate thing; it is there\ whereas 'there is nothing to correspond—nothing answering to Mr Bateson's "social context" that can be set over against the poem, or induced to establish itself round it as a kind of framework' (ibid.). Dr Leavis does not explain, however, in what sense the poem is there (wherever there is). I imagine he must mean that the poem, as we meet it on the printed page, consists of certain specific words arranged in a certain determinate order. But strictly speaking, of course, there is nothing there, nothing objectively apprehensible, except a number of conventional black marks. The meanings of the words, and therefore a fortiori the meaning of the whole poem, are emphatically not there. To discover their meaning we have to ask what they meant to their author and his original readers, and if we are to recover their full meaning, the connotations as well as the denotations, we shall often find ourselves committed to precisely those stylistic, intellectual and social explorations that Dr Leavis now deplores. There is no alternative— except to invent the meanings ourselves. Dr Leavis is in fact opening the door to sheer subjectivism. The degree and intensity of the exploration will naturally depend upon the remoteness of the particular poem from ourselves, but some contextual readjustment is inevitable all the time, even in reading a contemporary. I was trying in my article to analyse this process of adjustment. I may not have succeeded, but that it calls for analysis is surely self-evident. Dr Leavis's further complaint that the explorer 'may go on and on—indeterminately' (p. 174) has more basis. I suppose we are all reluctant in reading Marvell to follow Miss Wallerstein back to the Fathers—or Miss Tuve, in reading Herbert, into the intricacies of the mediaeval service. But the whole point of the contextual apparatus that I proposed in my article was to simplify the reader's problems by showing the final dependence of the various levels of context on what I called the 'social context'. I was not piling up unnecessary difficulties so much as trying by the formulation of an organon to prevent the serious reader from succumbing to the timewasting temptations to ingenious mis-reading now dangled before us by the most talented contemporary critics, English and American, including very occasionally Dr Leavis himself. I will not deny that Dr Leavis's acerbities have hurt and distressed me. I had hoped that in their different ways Essays in Criticism and Scrutiny might co-operate in the common pursuit of true literary judgment. It is his ideal, as he has often assured us, and it is also the 307

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ideal of Essays in Criticisms Editorial Board. Is such a co-operation, with the agreement to differ that it implies and requires on the marginal issues, impossible even now? The question is not intended to be a rhetorical one. In any case let me assure him that if I had realized how he would react to my article I would certainly have phrased it differently. I had not thought that anything in it exceeded the bounds of fair criticism. If it did, as apparently it did, I hope he will accept my apologies.

REJOINDER F. R. LEAVIS (1953)

I am sorry that Mr Bateson has been ill. I replied in good faith to the challenge he printed—and printed (I have to remind him) with the explicit assurance that it had ' obtained the general approval of most of his colleagues. And I have to add now that he shows no sign of feeling that he has grounds for reproaching them (though, in the special unfortunate circumstances, was it not peculiarly incumbent on them to perform their duty responsibly and with rigour—their duty towards Mr Bateson and Essays in Criticism?). He shows no sign, in fact, of recognizing that my replies exposed any serious weakness in his manifesto, which he still seems to think defensible and sufficiently well considered. He puts me, then, in a difficult position; for I am very far from wishing to hurt and distress him any more, yet his rejoinder, I can only say, confirms and justifies, with a completeness that the most sanguine controversialist can seldom, in his dreams, have hoped for from a rejoining adversary, the criticism he deprecates. He asserts again that superiority in scholarship the pretension to which I had noted as the distinctive mark of Essays in Criticism, and he demonstrates again with a truly remarkable conclusivesness that what he conceives to be a use of scholarship can only promote an incapacity to read poetry. That superior scholarship of his feeds its confidence on misconception. With what aplomb he tells me that I insist on 'reading everything in English as though it was written yesterday'! The fact that his formulation points to is that / have read Marvell's poem, whereas he insisted—and still insists—on busying himself with his apparatus of interpretation instead. Let me tell him that I have also read other poems of Marvell, and read them a great deal, and that I have read a great deal of other seventeenth-century poetry. I have even heard of Quarles, and have even read him. And it seems to me that Mr Bateson might well have been better qualified to 308

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read Marvell's poem if he had not read Quarles, and had not turned to Emblem VIII in the fifth Book. He tells us that the picture he describes is a * crude exemplification of the tradition in which Marvell was writing9 (my italics). That odd proposition might have passed if it had led to Mr Bateson's showing us how utterly different a thing from an attempt to present such an Emblem in words MarvelPs poem is. But what Mr Bateson in his essay actually told us about the Dialogue was: 'It is the kind of allegory that was popularized in the early seventeenth century by the Emblem Books, in which a more or less conventional concept is dressed up in some striking new clothes, the new clothes being the real raison d'etre9. So convinced is he that Marvell's poem must be this that he could talk, in his essay, of 'Marvell's picturelanguage', a description the disastrous falsity of which I still suppose myself to have demonstrated; for he produces no reason for believing otherwise. And to my careful ('niggling') account of the Dialogue as a superlatively successful poem of an extremely original kind (and not, as Mr Bateson judges, one that betrays a 'half-realization' in Marvell that 'his medium was on its last legs, and could no longer be taken with complete seriousness'), Mr Bateson replies, in effect, that I must be wrong, because in my ignorance (having missed, he' suspects', the 'full force of the allusion'), I can't see that the Dialogue asks us to control and limit our response with a visualization of Quarles's Emblem. For this belief about the poem he gives no grounds, except his conviction that it clearly must be so, because Marvell is writing in that convention. I demonstrate that it is not so, by giving a detailed analysis of what the poem actually does, and Mr Bateson replies that my ignorance 'has in this instance accidentally improved Marvell's poem for him'. But for that 'accidentally' I should have supposed Mr Bateson to be intending irony. As it is, I can only take him to mean that, by some freak of chance, my analysis has the convincing effect of applying to the poem, so that, if you read this without keeping your mind on Quarles, you find yourself reading the remarkably subtle and successful poem I analyse—which only shows (that appears to be Mr Bateson's moral) how important it is to hold firmly on to your scholarship. He doesn't dispute that, if you read the text 'as if it had been written yesterday' {his phrase, of course, not mine), you have the poem that I establish in analysis. But it is an illicit poem, illicitly better than the one that Marvell actually wrote, and it must be rejected by the responsible critic. The nature of Mr Bateson's reliance on scholarship is perhaps, if not so astonishingly, even more revealingly exemplified in his fresh demonstration upon Pope. He has caught me out!—this time (the happy 309

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confidence speaks in his prose) there can be no question: 'It will not be necessary to refute Dr Leavis's analysis in detail. All I need do is to quote the first sentence of the Pope-Warburton note on these lines.' All he need do!—the scholar-critic knows of the note that tells us authoritatively the official meaning of the lines, he produces the note, and that settles the matter. It will not be necessary to read the lines. And in his assurance of the finality of this piece of scholarship he remains still happy about his assertion that * slave', 'vassal' and 'dupe' are 'virtually interchangeable', as also are 'Bounded', 'narrow'd' and 'contracted' ('These tautologies can't have been meant by Pope'.) That he should be able to see tautologies here demonstrates neatly what his kind of approach does for the understanding of poetry. I (he must believe, though the news will clearly surprise him) had read the 'Warburton-Pope note'. I found—and find—in it nothing essential that I hadn't already gathered from the text itself. I say 'nothing essential', since I assumed—and assume still—that how such a text is to be read, and how much (or how little) such a note helps towards the attainment of a right reading, must be determined finally by a study of the text. It hadn't occurred to me that any note, by anyone, could be taken as settling for us authoritatively what we are to find in Pope's poetry. Mr Bateson's ability to believe otherwise—I rub my eyes at the evidence that he does—exposes with neat conclusiveness the nature of scholarly control as applied in 'contextual' interpretation. It explains —if a belief so astonishing can be said to explain—his being able to flatten Pope's essential felicities of distinction into tautologies. The 'Name', he tells us with triumphant finality, 'to which the adolescent pays homage is not that of a member of the nobility but the philosophical system taught in the universities, and it is party slogans that dupe the young man and not the politicians' promises of pickings and sinecures'. The authoritative note tells us this and that settles it. Actually, the note doesn't tell us this: the 'nots' are not there; but for Mr Bateson they are necessarily implied—they have to be if the note is to serve the ends of the responsible critic. And so the effect of the scholarly method of control is to reduce Pope to saying that the child is slave to Words, the adolescent is slave to a philosophical system (Words again), and the young man slave to Words (the 'names of Party-distinctions')—thus, Mr Bateson feels, for the reiterated 'slave' we might equally well substitute a reiterated 'vassal' or 'dupe'. But if Mr Bateson had not provided himself with his method and the distracting largenesses of his ambition, could he have failed to see that Pope's shift to 'vassal' has an effect on 'Name' that no note could undo even if it tried? The failure is the more portentous because any 310

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ordinarily perceptive reader of those lines as they come in their context must have noticed how largely the wit and poetry of the Dunciad rely on the double entendre^ the pun and the kindred play on words. And it shows an odd unfamiliarity with Pope's habit in developing an attack, or a line of argument, to assume that, when he offers to exhibit the ill consequences of a defective education, he must be confining himself to the narrow—and pointless—kind of consistency preferred by Mr Bateson. Pope here exhibits his characteristic strength; his' vassal' and 'dupe', far from being disguised repetitions of 'slave', are both creative words; and if Mr Bateson, in giving (we must suppose) his so much more than perfunctory attention to the context of the lines in question had been able to take the force of those immediately following, he would have seen that Pope there, so far from submitting the development of his case against the 'whole Course of Modern Education' to the canons of the 'contextual' interpreter, has turned his art to imputing, with whatever lack of strict logical cogency, a sinister responsibility for the social and political scene in general. I hope that Mr Bateson won't now, shifted at last, tell us that the 'Name' to which the 'finish'd Son' is 'vassal' must^ therefore, be the Queen, so that I was wrong in suggesting any lesser notability. On the other hand, if he feels moved to complain that these are further acerbities, I hope he will remind himself that he has been the challenger, and that, by the terms of his own large offer, a great deal more than my amour-propre is involved in my reply to his criticisms, his defence of which exposes so strikingly the nature of his misconceptions. The apologies with which he incongruously ends his rejoinder are wholly out of place. There was no danger, I assure him, of my being hurt, and if I have found his criticisms deplorable, it is not because they are 'unfair', or damaging to me. I do not even feel that Mr Bateson's insistence on his right to misrepresent my argument in Revaluation is a matter for apology, it is so pointless at this stage. If my contention had been what he makes it, his commentary would still have been the exhibition of false assumptions, misconceptions, and irrelevancies that it is. But I do suggest that he should look again at those pages of mine, and consider whether a critical argument may not have to be more complex and delicate than any allowed for in his own scheme; he may then see that the 'reservation' introducing the lines from King is not the product of misgiving, or the evasive tactic, he judges it to be, but part of a process of definition, and that such a process may involve more than two terms of comparison if it is to indicate at all precisely the particular 'affinities' that are in question ('verbal' is Mr Bateson's gift). He has already reproached me with answering his initial challenge 311

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at 'embarrassing length', so I will not take the plunge into epistemology to which he invites me (it is, in fact, unnecessary). I will merely point again to the extreme fallaciousness of the assumption that the 'contextual5 methods he has demonstrated give us, or tend to give us, the meanings that Marvell's words and Pope's words had for Marvell and Pope. There is a quaint irony in his being able to suggest that /, refusing to adopt his methods, am driven to inventing the meanings myself. Nothing is plainer than that the arbitrary odds and ends of fact, assumption, and more or less historical summary that he produces as 'context' serve him merely as licence for not, in any serious sense, reading the poem—for, that is, substituting with confidence something of his own (and something that we can see to be grotesquely inferior to what the poet offers). And he has not done anything to invalidate (quite the contrary, in fact) my observation that the 'total context' to which these odds and ends point, he thinks, as an ideal is a mere postulate, betraying muddle and misconception—an illusion the pursuit of which would never propose itself to anyone whose attention, focused on Marvell's Dialogue or the fourth book of the Dunciad, was held and directed by the perception that here is remarkable poetry. For the reader capable of such recognition the poem is 'there', and the process by which we justify our natural assumption that such a poem can be established as something of common access in which minds can meet, so that if we differ about it our differences are intelligent and profitable, and can perhaps be substantially eliminated, and do not in any case invalidate our convinced working assumption that our perceptions and judgments meet in the poem—this process, comparative and collaborative as it essentially is, demands above all many close and sensitive readings of the text. But why Mr Bateson should insist that anyone who rejects his 'contextual' prescription, along with its damning results, must be reading Marvell or Pope with the naive and ignorant eye that brings no other relevant knowledge and experience than what derives from poems written yesterday I do not know. I am not, however (I assure him), hurt or offended by his assumption of my blank ignorance, but merely amused. He may see in this a manifestation of my suffisance, for I will go on to say that I do not consider myself to have been convicted of knowing so enormously less about the seventeenth century and the Augustan period than Mr Bateson knows. Knowledge (as I have already said) is needed for the critic's work, but the most essential kind of knowledge can come only from an intelligent frequentation of the poetry—the poetry of the age in question, and the poetry of other ages; and in the measure in which you commit yourself to ideas and theories like Mr Bateson's you debar yourself from that. Some of the essential meanings that one 312

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has to recognize are created by the poet, but this possibility (as his * impenitence* about his handling of Marvell's dialogue so signally demonstrates), Mr Bateson cannot permit himself to entertain. As for the challenge I threw out regarding the record of Scrutiny-, that was a considered one. I had first written: 'its judgments have almost invariably turned out to be right'. I afterwards eliminated the 'almost' because it seemed to me merely pusillanimous. The challenge had—if I may reclaim a word that Mr Bateson has put to his own uses —a context. I was insisting on an aspect of the function of criticism that his essay, in spite of the large promise of its title, had wholly ignored: 'In the creating, with reference to the appropriate criteria— the creating in an intelligent public—of a valid sense of the contemporary chart (as it were), or sense of the distribution of value and significance as a mind truly alive in the age would perceive them, the "function of criticism at the present time" has its fulfilment.' The challenge, with the force given it by the context, seems to me wholly justified. It has, of course, the implicit form: 'This is so, is it not?' As far as I know (unless he is prepared to stand by Wyndham Lewis), the only dissent hazarded by Mr Bateson is that he remains' impenitent' about Auden—and he has done nothing to make that impenitence respectable. It is because the plight of the function of criticism at the present time does seem to me a matter of such urgent importance that I have thought Mr Bateson's essay and his rejoinder worth replying to. Let me assure him again that his reflections have not affected me in any way that could make his apology anything but inappropriate, and that I would much rather not have had to cause the pain and distress of which he complains. But the replies called for by such a demonstration as he has chosen to commit himself to must necessarily strike him as severe. To take it in any way seriously must be to make it an occasion for a reminder of the truths it challenges—truths about the nature of criticism, the state of criticism today, and the relation between that state and the contemporary barrenness in creative literature. It is significant of prevailing conditions that a manifesto on the ' Function of Criticism at the Present Time' printed in one of the few British journals devoted to literary criticism should ignore the most important aspect of the function. It is still more significant that the writer of the manifesto (the Editor-in-chief) should be able, while claiming for the literary critic a special insight into 'contemporary social processes', to associate himself with an attitude that, lightly and ironically, and without paying any attention to the presented evidence, which is conclusive, dismisses the effort to get the present plight of the critical function recognized. Something has always been wrong with criticism, 313

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we are told; there is nothing new or peculiarly alarming about the situation today. A man of Mr Bateson's age has no excuse for lending himself to this attitude, however it may be with the younger sporters in the Critical Forum. The accelerating processes of civilization have worked so immense a change so rapidly that those who began to take note of the literary world in the 1930s and later are unaware of any other state of affairs than that with which they are familiar; for any other observer the changes must be frightening. I have in these pages taken the major trahison des clercs of the Criterion at the time of the Poetical Renascence as giving us a decisive date. How, there is still (it seems) some point in asking, was it possible to get Mr Stephen Spender established as a distinguished writer? There is no mystery about the processes by which it was done; the portentous fact is that they met with no resistance (except in Scrutiny', against which the institutional and European Criterion could be invoked, and was). They belong, these processes, to the literary world—to the phase of our civilization—that acclaimed Auden a major poet and established him as such, so that for a couple of decades he has been a classic in our schools. It may be said of Auden that he certainly had talent: it was the talent of an undergraduate who, from an English Public School, had passed through an ancient English university, and left it, arrested at the undergraduate stage, unmistakably and essentially a product of 'this American world' and equally unmistakably Public School and Oxford. His career was a portent of our time. We point to a major aspect of the significance when we ask what later talent of that magnitude, so dubious in itself, the system that established him and ensured his permanent immaturity has presented to the world. He remains unique. Mr Spender and Mr Day Lewis, on the other hand, have had innumerable successors. The discovered brilliances burst on us every year, established by the unanimities of the New Statesman, the Sunday papers and the BBC. I remember reading in Horizon as it neared its end some depressed reflections about the state of literature in this country. Something was wrong: why was there no new life? Disillusionment with the Welfare State, and, we might put it, with the practical accompaniments, now that we have them, of the philosophy (so to speak) of the New Statesman—that seemed to be the writer's answer. The Labour Government, he complained, had 'done nothing for the writer'. But the BBC, the British Council and the related institutions are manifestations of the same modern developments as those which issued in the Welfare State, and the trouble—there would be more point in saying—is that they do too much for the writer. This of course is a complaint that we are

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unlikely to hear very much of, for the sufficient reason that it is just the beneficiaries who control the effective expression of opinion in our literary world. Why should they feel that 'the writer* suffers any disadvantage by these facilities, publicities and recompenses? 'The writer' clearly doesn't. That that kind of writer is not the kind on whom the renewal, the continuing life, of literature depends—how, in the nature of things, can we look to them for the vigilant service of that truth? There is no need to explain why the system can never favour the recognition of the truly original talent, the creative force. Where serious standards have lapsed, the insignificant (in criticism as well as elsewhere) can enjoy an importance to which otherwise they would aspire in vain. And what use can there be in asking them to reflect that such enjoyment, given security, must mean the death of literature? Further, the bearing on our creative barrenness of the failure of criticism is illuminated by that essay of Arnold's which Mr Bateson so admires, but of which he seems to have missed the main theme. I will not tell him what that theme is (let him read the essay again), but merely remark that the 'intellectual and spiritual atmosphere', the 'order of ideas', in which the talent finds itself to-day is not one that favours maturation and development. The 'atmosphere', the 'order of ideas', may be fairly represented by those British Council 'Surveys', the valuations of which are propagated and enforced by the virtual unanimity of the British Council (financed by the tax payer), the BBC (an enormously wealthy, influential and powerful public corporation), the weeklies and the Sunday papers—and into this system the universities are being more and more drawn. That this is fact no one has seriously attempted to deny. It is fact; it is new; and it must be appalling to all who really believe that literature matters. To make a show of energizing on behalf of the function of criticism while ignoring this situation is to be worse than futile.

POSTCRIPT F. W. BATESON (1966)

As in an earlier exchange with Dr Leavis {Scrutiny-, IV, 1935), I blundered into this controversy more or less inadvertently. The point of departure this time, as Dr Leavis has explained, was my article with the Arnoldian title, which proposed as an immediate critical ideal a keener sense of responsibility to literary history, in the widest sense of 3*5

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the term, than had been shown by such men as I. A. Richards, C. S. Lewis, William Empson and John Crowe Ransom, whose lapses I anatomized in some detail. The responsible scholar-critic, I argued inter alia, must be aware of the changing climates of social opinion which find their supreme expression in the literary classics. I instanced the transition from the primarily visual Renaissance to the primarily cognitive early eighteenth century. And looking round for some familiar quotations to enforce the instance I remembered the passage in Revaluation. What I must emphasize once again is that in selecting this passage I had not intended to score scholarly points against Dr Leavis, but simply that the lines quoted from Marvell and Pope in it came in handy. If Arnold himself had juxtaposed the same two quartets, as he might well have done, I would certainly have used them without any sense of disloyalty to the general cause of criticism. As it happens, a year or two before the article was written I had paid a special tribute to Dr Leavis's unique position in contemporary criticism in the final paragraph of my English Poetry: a Critical Introduction. (It is still there in the revised edition of 1966—together with 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'.) In his retort printed above, Dr Leavis did not meet my points either about Marvell or about Pope. The 'explication' of the four lines from The Dunciad is very ingenious, but it is not what Pope meant, as the context demonstrates, or even what Pope said he meant in the Pope-Warburton note. But such minutiae are not what we turn to Dr Leavis for. The critical gospels that he and I preach are, indeed, complementary rather than contradictory. As a scholar-critic the literary object that I have tried to see as in itself it really is may seem to overemphasize meaning (stylistic differentiation) at the expense of response (quasi-self-identification), but the difference of critical philosophies is surely only one of degree. A proper response to a work of literature presupposes a comprehension of its meaning—and vice versa. The corruption of a poet, according to John Dryden, is the generation of a critic. Into what, then, if the process continues, does criticism degenerate? Into 'appreciation', on the one hand, and 'bibliography', on the other. Either too subjective an approach (the defect of Dr Leavis's virtue) or too much objectivity (the scholarship that is mere pedantry, to which I must often plead guilty). In so far as that is what he charges me with, I kiss his rod. But he must not hold it against me, a lesser man in an inferior English Faculty, if I too correct his occasional subjective excesses. In the end we shall be found to be on the same side.

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II

VALEDICTORY F. R. LEAVIS (1953)

This is the last issue of Scrutiny. The decision to come to an end has been only narrowly evaded a number of times before. If anyone had forecast in May 1932 that the new quarterly would last for twenty years, that would have seemed very improbable. Actually it is more than twenty-one years since the first issue, though the present issue completes only the nineteenth volume. Through the 1930s Scrutiny appeared with perfect regularity. With the outbreak of the war the troubles started, and they quickly multiplied. There were difficulties about paper and difficulties at the printing works, and at one time there was a delay of months, caused by the bombing that demolished the adjoining house, narrowly missed the Round Church, and destroyed the music library at the Union. But the main difficulty was that the connection of collaborators and contributors was dispersed. Demobilization didn't solve that difficulty. The post-war world was a preoccupying and distracting one for those who came back to civilian life (and it has to be remembered that all work for Scrutiny has had to be done without payment). Readers who look through the last ten years of the review will note the appearance from time to time of new contributors. But never again was it possible to form anything like an adequate nucleus of steady collaborators. For Scrutiny (perhaps there is no need to say) has never been a hospitable carrier for literary essays. There has never been a Scrutiny orthodoxy, but there has certainly been a Scrutiny conception of the function of criticism at the present time, together with a corresponding one of the proper spirit of a critical quarterly. And if, holding that each number must be something more than a miscellany, you at the same time exact a high standard of work, you will not in the most favourable circumstances find that there is a large choice of suitable contributors. When Scrutiny started it depended on a group of collaborators who were for the most part young research students. In the immediate background was Fiction and the Reading Public, representing a new realization to which any serious effort to perform the function of criticism must be addressed. Further (chronologically) in the background was the Calendar of Modern Letters, the last impressive offer, it seemed to us, to make an intelligent critical organ maintain itself 317

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by dint of its intelligence and its liveliness. For, though we didn't anticipate the positively hostile non-recognition of our existence that, together with the steady encouragement of what may be called the Auden ethos and milieu, was to characterize the Criterion for the remainder of its existence, we hadn't judged the Criterion to be anything but a depressing failure to justify its name. To attempt to serve the critical function in this spirit, of course, must be to incur enmity in both the literary and the academic worlds. Early on, a powerful personage in the realm of English studies was reported as saying: 'Scrutiny is very alarming.' If Scrutiny was alarming, that was not because of any power or position or financial backing enjoyed by its promoters. They had no money to lose, and they knew that they must make the review pay in the face of a marked lack of encouragement from the ruling influences, both literary and academic. And it was not by marshalling or drawing upon any corps of established writers that they made Scrutiny alarming. They trained themselves, and found, and largely trained, their own recruits. The relation of Scrutiny to the Calendar, and the lines on which it seemed to us that a new attempt to vindicate the critical function must be conducted, are described in the introduction1 to Towards a Standard of Criticism, a selection of work from the Calendar. If the academic world had been less inimical to the kind of enterprise (surely a very desirable kind by any defensible conception of an ancient university), these efforts would have resulted in the formation of a continuing centre of life, giving Scrutiny the conditions for an assured permanence. But of course—almost, one has to say, inevitably —things were different. Librarians all over the world have long been pleading and searching and competing for back numbers in order to complete their sets. Successful academics have been able to write their successful books because of what they have found in Scrutiny, or in books the substance of which first appeared here. (Certain recent cases of the normal tacit denial of indebtedness where indebtedness is peculiarly heavy are notorious, and perhaps not only among undergraduate observers—and it may be put on record that contributors to other journals have been reporting for years the editorial excision from their contributions of acknowledgments to Scrutiny authors and of references to Scrutiny.) It has often been suggested that since Scrutiny has an established classical status and the back numbers are out of print, the run of volumes should be reprinted. But, in the university that produced Scrutiny, overt recognition of its existence (the conclusion is unavoidable) is still bad form, the existence itself being so deplorable. 1

Reprinted in Anna Karenina and Other Essays (Chatto and Windus, 1967). 318

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As for the literary world, a rich subject awaits some (probably American) researcher: the discrepancy between the official or conventionally agreed valuation of Scrutiny and the evidence of a decisive influence exerted. The Times Literary Supplement by itself, in this respect, would afford a revealing study. There is an account of a conversation with a very eminent and influential man of letters that gives the moral climate very well. Tete-a-tete with an inquiring young visitor, he expressed a superlatively high opinion of Scrutiny: ' There has been nothing so good.' When it was suggested to him that some public expression of such an estimate would, in the past, undoubtedly have made a lot of difference, and might even now help, he replied: ' The time is not yet ripe.' Well, Scrutiny has now come to an end, so that, whatever consequences the process of ripening may bring, the promoted continuance of Scrutiny won't be one of them. The discrepancy was illustrated again in Scrutiny s relations with the British Council, which is financed to promote British culture in the world at large. Workers for the Council in the field testify that they have found Scrutiny irreplaceable for their purposes; they have got up their lectures from it (from what other source could they have done that?), and they have been able, by producing it, to convince intelligent foreigners that there was a contemporary British literary culture. British Council headquarters cannot but have known the service performed, and the high prestige enjoyed, by Scrutiny in all the centres of British Council activity abroad. But all the authority of the Council has been given, in its publications and its export of personalities, to endorsing and imparting the valuations of that social-literary milieu for which Scrutiny has been an offence to be ignored and, if possible, suppressed. When Scrutiny did—by way of proof that there was no discrimination against it—get a mention in one of those Surveys, it was as being devoted to ' the methodical and uncompromising destruction of reputations'; with such ease could the sustained creative work of positive revaluation over the whole range of English literature, the work found so indispensable by the Council's representatives, be authoritatively dismissed. Yet the Council found itself sponsoring the export of Scrutiny on a considerable scale. And the piquant fact may be once more recalled: first we were asked to supply 'spare' copies free, and then, when we replied that there were no spare copies, we were offered half-price. The working of bureaucratic machinery?—no doubt. And when you have millions of the public money to dispense in the interests of British culture you must economize in the right places. If there is any profit to be got out of these ironies of history it depends on the history's being put on record. That is the reason for this amount of reminiscence. 319

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The reason for insisting on the fact of Scrutiny's decisive influence is that only so can this valedictory note be a cue for anything but depression. Disinterested and grounded judgment, unequivocally expressed, will tell, however resented and penalized— will tell, if only a pied-a-terre can be established from which to put it into currency: that is the moral. It will hardly be taken for an optimistic one. Where now is the pied-a-terre to be found? Conditions were adverse enough twenty years ago; they are very much worse to-day. One's sanguine imagination could run to ideas of a small but critically active public that would have at any rate some centres in universities (and if not in universities, where?). Without such a public how can the system that for its centre has the BBC receive any check or challenge? But who in a university nowadays sees any harm in the literary influence of the BBC? And what lecturer in an 'Arts' department cannot aspire, he also, not only to broadcast, but to review for the dominant weekly, or one of the culture-bearing Sunday papers? Where, then, shall we look for the effective centres of that indispensable public, the informed and disinterested key public without which the appeal to mature standards cannot be made, or remains a mere offensive breach of manners on the part of the critic? It is a disturbing question. Let this, however, stand on record: Scrutiny lasted for more than twenty years, and has not had to stop for any lack of a supporting public. Without any but the most occasional and minimal advertising revenue it has always, after the earliest days, paid its way, and its circulation has been rapidly expanding. And there has been a sense in which its very success has told against it: the writers it has trained, their value recognized, have been in request elsewhere. The intellectuals of literary journalism will not make public lament for Scrutiny. But they will not be unaffected by the loss. At one time the lag with which the perceptions and promptings put into currency by this review percolated to the world of literary fashions was six or seven years. Of late, as anyone who looks at the weeklies and listens to the Third Programme must have observed, the effect has been telling much more rapidly. But this is the moment for the parting salute; a sad moment, many times postponed, but now an inevitable one. We have carried on, without secretary, without business manager, without publicity manager, and without publicity, for two full decades. It may perhaps—the recall of following lines will halt itself at a proper point—be permissible to conclude with Say not the struggle naught availeth... 320