THE USE OF PC '~TR Y

AND THE USE OF CRIIIC!SM

books by T. S. Eliot

* COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1935

FOUR QUARTETS

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS

THE FAMILY REUNION

SELECTED ESSAYS

ESSAYS ANCIENT AND MODERN

THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

THOUGHTS AFTER LAMBETH

WHAT IS A CLASSIC?

POINTS OF VIEW

* OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM

STUDIES IN THE RELATION OF CRITICISM

TO POETRY IN ENGLAND

BY

T. S. ELIOT Charles El,ot Norton Professor of Poetry

in Harvard Umverslty 1932- 1933

LONDON

FABER AND FABER LIMITED 24 RUSSELL SQUARE

FIRST PUBLI~HED NOVEMBER MCMXXxui

BY FABER AND FABER LIMITED

24 RUSSELL SQUARE LONDON w.e. I

SECOND IMPRESSION J ANUARY MCMXX~V

REPRINTED OCTOBER MCMXXXVII

JANUARY MCMXLIII, JULY MCM)flIV

OCTOBER MCMXLV, JUNE MCMxLVI

FEBRUARY AND DECEMBER MCMXi VIII

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

R. MACLEHOSE AND COMPANY LIMITED

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS GLASGOW

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To the Memory of CHARLES WHIBLEY

to ,,,,hom I promIsed a better book

CONTENTS

PREFATORY NOTE II

I. INTRODUCTION 13

II. APOLOGY FOR THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE 37

III. THE AGE OF DRYDEN 53

IV. WORDSWORTH AND COLE-RIDGE 67

V. SHELLEY AND KEATS 87

VI. MATTHEW ARNOLD 10 3

VII. THE MODERN IviIND 121

VIII. CONCLUSION I43

9

PREFACE

T hese lectures, dehvered at Harvard Umversity dunng

the wmter of1932-33, owe much to an audIence only

too ready to applaud ment and condone defect; but I am

aware that such success as they had was largely dramatic,

and that they wIll be solI more dlsappomnng to those who

heard them than they wLll be to those who dId not. I should much prefer to leave my auditors wlth whatever

InlpreSSlon they then recelVed; but by the terms of the

FoundatIOn by Mr. StIllman the lectures must be subnlltted

for pubhcatIOn, and WIthIn a fixed perIod. Thus I explaIn

my COllll1lISSI0n of another unnecessary book.

I anl glad, however, of the opportunIty to record In

print my obhgatlon to the PresIdent and Fellows of Har­

vard College, to the N ortoll Professorslup CommIttee, and

In particular my grantude to Professor John LIvmgston

Lowes; to the Master of Ehot House and Mrs. Mernman,

wIth most pleasant memOrIes of the Associates and Tutors

of the House; to Dr. Theodore Spencer, and to Mr. and

Mrs. Alfred DWIght Sheffield for mnumerable cnticisnls

and suggestIons.

I much regret that willIe I was preparmg these lectures

for dehvery In Amenca, Mr. 1. A. Rtchards was ill Eng­

land; and that whIle I was preparmg them for pubhcatlo

tn England, he was m AmerIca. I had 'hoped that they

IDlght have the benefit of hIs CntlCIsnl.

T.S.E.

LOHdOll, August 1933. II

INTRODUCTION November 4th, 1932

'The whole country IS now exclted by the pohncal campa1gn, and ill a condltion of lrratlonal emotlon.

The best of the prospect IS that a reorgarusatlOn of parnes seems not unlIkely as an mdlrect result of the present con­test between the Republicans and the Democrats ... But any radIcal change IS not to be hoped for.'

These words occur ill a letter WrItten by Charles Ello! Norton on September 24th, 1876. The present lectures Wlll have no concern with pohtlcs; I have begun WIth a poh­tlcal quotatlon only as a remmder of the varIed mterests of the scholar and humanist whom tlus foundatlon com­memorates. The lecturer on such a foundation 1S fortunate who can feel, as I do, sympathy and admlratlon for the man whose memory the lectures are mtended to keep hving. Charles Eliot Norton had the moral and spintual quahtles, of a stOIC land, which are pOSSIble WIthout the benefits of revealed rehglon; and the mental gIfts which are pOSSIble wIthout gemus. To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beauttful thmg: that IS enough for one man's hfe. Few men have known better than he how to gIve Just place to the claims of the pubhc and of the pnvate life; few men have had better opportumty, few of those havmg the opportun1ty have

11

INTRODUCTION

avatied theillselves of It better than he. The usual pohuclan,

the man of public affairs, IS rarely able to go to the 'publIc

place' WIthout assummg the 'pubhc face': Norton always

preserved hIS prIvacy. And hVIng as he dId In a non.

ChrIstian SOCIety, and In a 'world whIch, as he saw It on

both sIdes of the AtlantIc, showed signs of decay, he mam­

tamed the standards of the humanIty and hUl11all1snl that

he knew. He was able, even at an early age, to look upon

the passIng order WIthout regret, and towards the commg

order WIthout hope. In a letter of December 1869 he speaks

more strongly and more comprehenSIvely than In that

which I have quoted. 'The future IS very dark 111 Europe, and to me It looks as

If we were entering upon a perIod quite new In hlstory­

one ill wIllch the questIons on whIch partIes WIll dIvide,

and from whIch outbreak after outbreak of paSSIOn and vlOlence will arIse, WIll not longer be pohtical but Im­

mediately socIal .. Whether our perIod of economIC

enterprIse, unlinuted competItIon, and unrestraIned IndI­

viduahsm, IS the rughest stage of human progress IS to me

very doubtful; and sometImes, when I see the eXIsting

conditIons of .European (to say nothIng of AmerIcan)

social order, bad as they are for the mass ahke of upper and

lower classes, I wonder whether our CIVIlIsatIon can mam­

tain Itself agamst the forces which are banding together

for the destructIon of many of the instItutions In which it

IS embodIed) or whether we are not to have another penod of decline, fall, and rum and reVIval, hke that of the first

thirteen hundred years of our era. It would not gneve me

much to know that thIS were to be the case. No man who

14

INTRODUCTION

knows what SOCIety at the present day really IS but must agree that It IS not worth preservmg on Its present basIs.' 1

These are words to whIch many who approach con­

temporary problems wIth more dogmatic assumptions than Norton's can gIve assent. Yet for hIm the permanent

Importanc~ ofhterature If not of dogma was a fixed pOInt.

The people wruch ceases to care for ltS hterary lnhentance becomes barbanc; the people wruch ceases to produce lIterature ceases to move In thought and sensIbility. The

poetry of a people takes Its hfe from the people's speech

and In turn gIves hfe to It, and represents Its hIghest pomt of conSCIOusness, Its greatest power and ItS most delIcate

sensIbIlity. In these lectures I have to deal as much or more WIth

cntIcism of poetry as wIth poetry Itself, and my subJcct is not merely the relatIon of CrItIcIsm to poetry, If by that

we assume that we know alrcady what poetry is, and does, and IS for. Indeed, a good part of cntlclsm has consIsted

SImply m the pursuIt of answers to these questtons, Let me

start WIth the SUppOSItIOn that we do not know what poetry IS, or what It does or ought to do, or of what use it IS; and try to find out, ill exammmg the relatIon of poetry

and CrItiCISlh, what the use of both of them IS. We may even dIscover that we have no very clear Idea of what use IS; at any rate we had better not assume that we know.

I shall not begm WIth any general defilutIOn of what IS

and what is not poetry, or any dIScussIon of whether poetry

need be always In verse, or any consIderatIOn of the dIf-

lMy quotatlons from Norton's letters are taken from the Life and Letters of Charles EllotNorton (Houghton, Mrlfhn' 2. vols.).

l~

INTRODUCTION

Ference between the poetry-verse antIthesis and the poetry­

prose antithesis.', CrIticism, however, may be separated

from the begmni~g not into two kinds, but according to

two tendenCles. I assume that criticism is that department

of thought wruch elther seeks to find out what poetry is,

what its use is, what deslres It satisfies, why It is WrItten and

why read, or reclted; or which, making some conSClOUS or

unconSCIOUS assumptlon that we do know these things,

assesses actual poetry. We may find that good CrltICIsm has

other deSigns than these; but these are the ones wruch It 15

allowed to profess. CntICISm, of course, never does find

out what poetry is, ill the sense of arrlvmg at an adequate

defirut1o~) but I do not knc:w of what use such a definlt10n

would be if It were founet Nor can Crltlclsm ever arrlve at "' ...

any final appraisal of poetry. But there are these two

theoretical hnuts of CrItiCIsm: at one of which we attempt

to answer the question 'what is poetry?' and at the other '1S

dus a good poem;>' No theoretic ingenuity will suffice to

answer the second question, because no theory can amount

to much which IS not founded upon a duect experience of

good poetry; but on the other hand our dIrect experIence

of poetry mvolves a good deal of generalising actiVIty:

The two questions, which represent the most abstract

formulation of what IS far from being an abstract aCtiVIty,

,imply each other. The cntic who remams worth readmg

has asked, if he has only Imperfecdy answered, both ques­

tions .. Anstode, m what we possess of rus wntmgs upon

poetry, does, I think, qUIcken our apprecIation of the Greek

tragtc dramatists; Colendge, ill his defence of the poetry of

Wordsworth, is led mto generalisations about poetry

r6

INTRODUCTION

wInch are of the greatest Interest; and Wordsworth, in his

explanation of his own poetry, makes assertions about the

nature of poetry which, If exceSSIve, have a WIder bearmg

than even he may have realIsed. Mr. 1. A. Rlchards, who

ought to know, If anyone does, what eqUlpment the

sCIennfic cntlc needs, tells us that 'both a passlOnate know­

ledge of poetry and a capacity for dispassionate psycholo­

gical analysis' are reqUlred. Mr. Rlchards, hke every senous

critic of poetry, is a senous morahst as well. His ethics, or

theory of value, IS one which I cannot accept; or rather, I

cannot accept any such theory which IS erected upon purely

mdIvidual-psychological foundations. But his psychology

of the poetIC expenence is based upon his own experience

of poetry, as truly as his theory of value anses out of his

psychology . You may be dIssatIsfied WIth his phtlosophIcal

conclusions but snIl believe (as I do) in his chscriminating"

taste m poetry. But If on the other hand you had no faith in

the cntIc's ability to tell a good poem from a bad one, you

would put lIttle rehance upon the valIdIty of Ius theories.

In order to analyse the enjoyment and appreCIatIOn of a

good poem, the cntIc must have expenenced the ellJoy­

ment, and he must conVInce us of hIS taste. For the expen­

ence of enjoymg a bad poem while thmkmg It is a good

one IS very dllferent from that of enjoymg a good poem.

We do expect the critIC who theorises to know a good

poem when he sees it. It IS not always true that a person

who knows a good poem when he sees It can tell us why It

IS a good poem The expenence of poetry, hke any other

experience, IS only partially translatable mto words; to

begin with, as Mr. Rlchards says, 'It is never what a poem

B 17 E.U.P.

INTRODUCTION

says that matters, but what It is'. And we know that SOllle

people who are lllartlculate, and cannot say why they hke a

poem, may have deeper and more dlscnmmatmg sensi­

blhty than some others who can talk ghbly about It; we

must remember too that poetry IS not wntten SImply to

prOVIde matenal for conversatIon. Even the most accom­

phshed of CrItICS can, In the end, only pOlnt to the poetry

wInch seems to mm to be the real tiling. Nevertheless, our

talkmg about poetry IS a part of, an extenslOn of, our expen­

ence of It; and as a good deal of tlunking has gone to the

makmg of poetry, so a good deal lllay well go to the study

, of It", The rurument of CrItIcism IS the ability to select a good

poem and reject a bad poem; and Its most severe test IS of

ltS ability to select a good new poem, to respond properly to

a new situatlon The expenence of poetry, as It develops m

the conSCIOUS and mature person, IS not merely the sum of

the expenences of good poems Education In poetry re­

qUIres an orgarusation of these expenences. There IS not

one of us who IS born WIth, or who suddenly acqUIres at

puberty or later, an Infallible dIscnmmation and taste.

The person whose expenence IS hffilted IS always hable to

be taken m by the sham or the adulterate article; and we

see generation after generatIon of untraIned readers bemg

taken in by the sham and the adulterate in Its own tlme­

mdeed preferrmg them, for they are more eaSIly assinulable

than the genUIne article. Yet a very large number of people,

I beheve, have the natlve capaCIty for enjoymg some good

poetry: how much, or how many degrees of capaCIty may

profitably be dtstmgUlshed, IS not part of my present pur­

pose to enqUIre, It IS only the exceptlOnal reader, certaInly,

18

INTRODUCTION

who In the course of tune comes to classIfy and COlnpare

rus experiences, to see one m the light of others; and who, as

rus poetIc expenences multIply, wIll be able to understand

each more accurately. The element of enjoyment IS en­

larged mto apprecIatIOn, wruch brmgs a more Intellectual addItIOn to the ongmalIntensity of feehng. It IS a second

stage In our understandIng of poetry, when we no longer

merely select and reject, but orgamse. We may even speak

of a trurd stage, one of reorgamsatlOn; a stage at wruch

a person already educated m poetry meets wIth sometlnng

new In rus own tIme, and finds a new pattern of poetry

arrangmg Itself m consequence. Trus pattern, which we form In our own mmds out of

our own readmg of poetry that we have enjoyed, IS a kInd

of answer, wruch we make each for mmsel£, to the ques­tIOn 'what IS poetry?' At the first stage we find out what

poetry IS by readmg It and enjoymg some of what we read;

at a later stage our perceptIOn of the resemblances and dtf­ferences between what we read for the first time and what

we have already enjoyed Itself contnbutes to our enJoy­

ment. We learn what poetry IS-If we ever learn-from readmg It; but one mIght say that we should not be able to

recogmse poetry m partIcular unless we had an mnate Idea

of poetry m general. At any rate, the questIon 'what IS

poetry?' Issues qUIte naturally from our experIence of poems. Even, therefore, although we may admIt that few

forms of mtellectual actiVIty seem to have less to show for

themselves, in the course of mstory, in the way of books worth readmg, than does CntIcISm, It would appear that

CritiCISm, hke any phtlosophtcal aCtiVIty, IS InevItable and

19

INTRODUCTION

reqmres no JustIfication. To ask 'what IS poetry?' is to

pOSIt the cnocal functIOn. r suppose that to many people the thought must have

occurred, that at some penods when great poetry was wntten there was no written cnOCIsm; and that in some

penods in wruch much cnOCIsm has been wntten the quahty of the poetry has been Infenor. Tills fact has sug­

gested an antltheslS between the crItical and the creatIve, between CrItIcal ages and creaove ages; and It IS sometImes

thought that CrItIcism flOUrIshes most at ornes when crea­

tlve VIgour IS ill defect. It IS WIth such a prejudtce In nnnd that people have coupled WIth 'cnocal ages' the adjectIve

'Alexandrian'. Several gross assumptIons underhe tills pre­judIce, incluclmg a confusion between several dIfferent

thmgs, and between works of very dIfferent quahty, m­eluded under 'cnttcIsm'. I am using the term 'cnticIsm'

throughout these lectures, as I hope you will dIscover, WIth

a pretty narrow extension. I have no deSIre to extenuate the vices of the vast number of books wruch pass by that

designatIon, or to flatter the lazy habIt of substltunng, for a careful study of the texts, the assll1111ation of other people's

opinions. If people only wrote when they had something to say, and never merely because they wanted to write a

book, or because they occupIed a posinon such that the writing of books was expected of them, the mass of criocism would not be wholly out of proportion to the

small number of criocal books worth reading. Neverthe­less, those who speak as If cnOClsm were an occupatIon of

decadence, and a symptom, If not a cause, of the creatlve

unpotence of a people, Isolate the CIrcumstances of litera-

20

INTRODUCTION

ture, to the extent of faisificatlon, from the CIrcumstances

ofhfe. Such changes as that from the epic poem composed

to be recIted to the epic poem composed to be read, or

those whIch put an end to the popular ballad, are illsepar­

able from socIal changes on a vast scale, such changes as

have always taken place and always will. W. P. Ker, ill his

essay on 'The Forms ofEnghsh Poetry', observed that.

'The art of the MIddle Ages generally IS corporate and

social; the sculpture, for example, as It IS found on the great

cathedrals. WIth the RenaIssance the motIve of poetry IS

changed. In the MIddle Ages there IS a natural hkeness to

the Greek condItIOns; after the Renaissance there IS a con­

scious and illtentIOnal reproductIon among the modern

natlons of the condItions wruch prevaIled III the poetry of

Rome. Greek poetry ill many respects IS medIaeval; the

LatIn poetry of the great age IS RenaIssance, an I1111tatlon

of types denved from Greece, wIth qUIte drlferent CIrcum­

stances and a dIfferent relatlon of the poet to Ins audlence.

'Not that Latln or modem poetry IS unSOCIal. It is true

... that the tendency of modern art, mcludmg poetry, is

often contrary to the popular taste of ItS tlme; the poets are

often left to themselves to find their themes and elaborate

theIr modes of expreSSIOn in sohtude, WIth results that are

often found as perplexmg and offenSIve, and as negligIble,

as Brownmg's Sordello was generally found to be.'

What is true of the ma.) or changes ill the form of poetry

IS, I tlnnk, true also of the change from a pre-cntical to a

critical age. It IS true of the change from a pre-plulosophIcal

to a phtlosophical age; you cannot deplore cntlelsm unless

you deprecate phIlosophy. You may say that the develop-

21

INTRODUCTION

Inent of CntlCISm IS a symptom of the development, or

change, of poetry; and the development of poetry IS Itself

a symptonl of socIal changes. The Important moment for

the appearance of cnticism seems to be the time when

poetry ceases to be the expressIOn of the mlnd of a whole

peopl~. The drama of Dryden, wInch furmshes the cruef

occaSIOn for rus cntIcal WrItIng, IS formed by Dryden's per­

ceptlon that the possIbilities of wrItmg In the mode of

Shakespeare were exhausted, the fornl persIsts In the

tragedIes of such a wnter as Sludey (who IS much nlore up

to date m IllS comedIes), after the mmd and sensIbIlIty of

England has altered. But Dryden was not wntIng plays for

the whole people; he was wntmg In a form wInch had not

grown out of popular tradItIOn or popular requIrements, a

form the acceptance of wlnch had therefore to come by

diffUSIOn through a small SOCIety. Somethmg SImIlar had

been attempted by the Senecan draulatists. But the part of

SOCIety to wInch Dryden's work, and that of the Restora­

tIon comedians, could lmmedlately appeal constItuted

something hke an mtellectual arIstocracy; when the poet

finds mmself m an age m wruch there IS no Intellectual

anstocracy, when power IS In the hands of a class so demo­

cratised that wlulst still a class It represents Itself to be the

whole natIon; when the only alternatIves seem to be to

talk to a cotene or to sohloqrnse, the dUficulues of the poet

and the neceSSIty of CritICISm become greater.\ In the essay

from whIch I have Just quoted, Ker says:

'There IS no doubt that ill the nmeteenth century poets

are more left to themselves than they were ill the eIghteenth,

and the result is unrrustakable In theIr strength and weak-

22

INTRODUCTION

ness .... The herOIc Independence of Brow rung, and Indeed all the adventurous capncIOus poetry of the runeteenth century, IS closely related to CrItICISm, and to the eclectIc learning wmch ranges over the whole world In search of artIstIc beauty .... The thenles are taken from all the ages and countnes; the poets are eclectIc students and CrItIcs, and they are JustIfied, as explorers are JustIfied; they saCrI­fice what explorers sacnfice when they leave their native home. . . . I shall not be mIsunderstood If I remark that thelr v1ctories brmg along wlth them some danger, If not for themselves, at least for the fasmon, the tradItIon of poetry.'

The gradual changes In the functIOn of poetry, as socIety alters, WIll, I hope, emerge somewhat after we have con­s1dered several CrItICS as representatIves of several genera­tions. Durmg three hundred years cntlCISm has come to modify Its assumptIOns and Its purposes, and It will surely cont1nue to do so There are several forms which cntIc1sm may take, there 1S always a large proportIOn of cntIcism wmch 1S retrograde or Irrelevant, there are always many wnters who are qualIfied neIther by knowledge of the past nor by awareness of th,.,.e sens1b1hty and the problems of the present. Our earhest cntic1sm, under the mfluence of class1cal studIes and of Itahan cntIcs, made very large assumpt10ns about the nature and functIon of hterature. Poetry was a decoratIve art, an art for whIch sometImes extravagant claims were made, but an art In which the same pnnc1ples seemed to hold good for every cIvIhsat10n and for every socIety; 1t was an art deeply affected by the rIse of a new SOCIal class, only loosely (at best) assocIated

23

INTRODUCTION

with the Church, a class self-conscious in Its possession of

the mysterIes of LatIn and Greek. In England the cntical

force due to the new contrast between Latm and vernacular

met, in the sIxteenth century) wIth just the nght degree of

resistance. That 15 to say, for the age whIch IS represented

for us by Spenser and Shakespeare, the new forces stImu·

lated the native geruus and did not overwhelm It. The pur­

pose of my second lecture wIll be to gIve to the cnticism of

this penod the due wInch It does not seem to me to have

receIved. In the next age, the great work of Dryden in

CriticIsm IS, I thmk, that at the rIght moment he became

conscIOUS of the necessIty of affirmmg the natIve element m

hterature. Dryden IS more consclOusly Enghsh, In IllS plays,

than were his predecessors; lus essays on the drama and on

the art of translatIon are conSCIOUS studIes of the nature of

the Enghsh theatre and the Enghsh language; and even IllS

adaptation of Chaucer IS an assertIOn of the native tradItIon

-rather than, what It has sometimes been taken to be, an

amusmg and pathetic fatlure to appreCIate the beauty of the

Chaucenan language and metric. Where the Elizabethan

CrItiCS, for the most part, were aware of something to be

borrowed or adapted from abroad, Dryden was aware of

somethmg to be preserved at home. But throughout tills

period, and for much longer, one aSSUlnptlOn renlamed

the same: the assumptIOn as to what was the use of poetry.

Any reader of SIdney's Apology for Poetry can see that IllS

misomousoi agamst whom he defends poetry are men of

straw, that he is confident of havmg the sympathy of rus reader with hun, and that he never senously has to ask rumself the questIons, what poetry IS for, what it does, or

24

INTRODUCTION

whether It IS deslIable. SIdney's assumption is that poetry gives at once dehght and InstrUCtion, and IS an adornment of social hfe and an honour to the nation.

I aln very far from dISSenting from these assumptions, so

far as they go; my pomt IS that for a long time they were never questIOned or modIfied; that durmg that tlme great

poetry was written, and some CrItiCIsm wInch just because of Its assumptions has permanent InstructlOn to gIve. I hold

Indeed that In an age m which the use of poetry 1S something

agreed upon you are more hkely to get that mmute and scrupulous examlnation of felicity and blemish, line by lme, which IS conspIcuously absent from the cntIclsm of our time,

a CrItlClsnl which seems to demand of poetry, not that It shall be well written, but that It shall be 'representative of Its age'. I WIsh that we mlght dIspose more attentIon to the correctness of expreSSIOn, to the clarity or obscunty, to the grammatlcal preCISIon or inaccuracy, to the choice of words

whether Just or Improper, exalted or vulgar, of our verse:

In short to the good or bad breerung of our poets. My pOInt here is that a great change in the attltude towards poetry, In the expectatlons and demands made upon It, dId come,

we may say for convenience towards the end of the eIgh­

teenth century~ Wordsworth and Colendge are not merely demohshmg a debased trarutlon, but revoltmg against a

whole SOCIal order; and they begIn to make claims for

poetry wInch reach their hIghest pomt of exaggeration ill Shelley's famous phrase, 'poets are the unacknowledged legIslators of mankInd'. Earher laudators of poetry had

Said the same thmg, but it chd not mean the same thtng:

Shelley (to borrow a successful phrase from Mr. Bernard

2S

INTRODUCTION

Shaw) was the first, m tlus tradItIOn, of Nature's M.P.'s.

If Wordsworth thought that he was SImply occupIed wIth

reform of language, he was deceIved; he was occupIed

wIth revolutlOn of language, and lus own language was as

capable of artIficIalIty, and no more capable of naturalness,

than that of Pope-as Byron felt, and as Colendge candIdly

pointed out. The decay of relIgIOn, and the attntlOn of

pohucalinstitUtlOnS, left dubIous frontIers upon wruch the

poet encroached; and the annexatIOns of the poet were

legItImIsed by the cntlc. For a long tIme the poet IS the

pnest. there are stIll, I belIeve, people who nnaglne that

they draw rehgIOus ahillent from BrownIng or Mere­

dIth. But the next stage IS best exemphfied by Matthew

Arnold. Arnold was too temperate and reasonable a man

to mamtam exactly that rehgIOus InstructIon IS best con­

veyed by poetry, and he hUlls elf had very little to convey,

but he dIscovered a new formula: poetry IS not relIgIOn,

but It IS a capItal substItute for rehglOn-not Invahd port,

wluch may lend Itself to hypocnsy, but coffee WIthout

caffeme, and tea WIthout tannm. The doctnne of Arnold was

extended, If also somewhat travestied, In the doctnne of

'art for ares sake'. Tlus creed llught seem a reverSlOn to the

SImpler faIth of an earher tlme, In wInch the poet was like

a dentist, a man with a defil11te Job. But It was really a hope­

less adnussIOn of rrresponslbthty. The poetry of revolt and

the poetry of retreat are not of the same land. J In our tIme we have moved, under vanous ImpulSIOns,

to new positIOns. On the one hand the study of psychology has impelled men not only to InVeStlgate the illlnd of the

poet with a confident ease whtch has led to some fantastic

26

INTRODUCTION

excesses and aberrant cntIcIsm, but also to lnVeStIgate the

mmd of the reader and the problem of' communicatIon'­

a word wInch perhaps begs a questIOn~ On the other hand

the study oflustory has shown us the relatIOn of both form

and content of poetry to the conditIOns of Its tIme and

place. The psychologIcal and the socIOlogIcal are probably

the two best advertIsed varieties of modern CrItiCIsm; but

the number of ways In wInch the problems of cntICIsm are

approached was never before so great or so confusmg.

Never were there fewer settled assumptIOns as to what

poetry IS, or why It comes about, or what It IS for. CrIti­

CIsm seems to have separated mto several dlverse kInds.

I have not made tlus bnef reVIew of the progress of

cntIcIsn11n order to lead up to assocIatmg myself WIth any

partIcular tendency of modern cntIcIsm, least of all the

socIOloglcal.,I suggest that we may learn a good deal about

CrIticIsm and about poetry by exa1ll1mng the Ins tory of

cntIc1sm, not merely as a catalogue of succeSS1ve notions

about poetry, but as a process of readjustment between

poetry and the world m and for wInch 1t 1S produced. We

can learn somethmg about poetry s1mply by studymg what

people have thought about 1t at one penod after another;

wlthout commg to the stult1fYIng conclUSIon that there IS

nothmg to be sa1d but that op1nIOn changes. Second, the

study of cntICIsm, not as a sequence of random conJec­

tures, but as readaptatIOn, may also help us to draw some

concluslOns as to what 1S permanent or eternal ill poetry,

and what 1S merely the expreSSIOn of the SpITlt of an age;

and by discovermg what does change, and how, and why,

we may become able to apprehend what does not change.

27

INTRODUCTION

And by mvesttgatmg the problems of what has seemed to

one age and another to matter, by examining dIfferences

and identIties, we may somewhat hope to extend our own

hlllltatIOnS and lIberate ourselves from some of our pre­

Judices/ I will quote at thIs pomt two passages whIch I may have occaslOn to quote agaIn. The first is from Dryden's

Preface to Annus Mirabilis: 'The first happiness of the poet's Inlagll1ation IS properly

InventlOn, or the fmdmg of the thought; the second IS

fancy, or the vanatIon, denvIng, or mouldmg of that

thought, as the judgement represents It proper to the sub­

Ject; the thIrd IS elocutIon, or the art of clothIng and adorn­

mg that thought, as found and vaned, in apt, sigruficant,

and soundmg words; the qUickness of the imagInatIOn IS

seen III the inventIon, the fertlhty m the fancy, and the

accuracy in the expressIOn.'

The second passage IS from Colendge's Biographia Litteraria:

'Repeated medItatIOns led me first to suspect . . . that

Fancy and Imagination were two dIstinct and widely chf­ferent faculttes, instead of being, accordmg to the general

behef, eIther two names WIth one meaning, or, at furthest,

the lower and htgher degree of one and the same power.

It is not, lawn, easy to conceIve a more appOSIte transla­

tion of the Greek phantasia than the Latm imaginatio; but It is equally true that in all SOCIetIes there exists an mstlnct of

growth, a certam collective, unconscious good sense work­

ing progressively to dcsynon):Ill1se those words onginaily

of the same meanmg, wruch the conflux of dialects sup­

plied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek. and

2.8

INTRODUCTION

the German .... Mtlton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fancIful nund.'1

The way In whIch the expression of the two poets and cntics 15 deternnned by their respective backgrounds IS very marked. Evident also IS the more developed state of rnmd of Colendge: Ius greater awareness of phIlology, and Ius conSCIOUS determmatlon to make certam words mean cer­taIn tlungs. But what we have to consider 15, whether what we have here is two rachcally opposed theones of Poetlc ImagInatIOn, or whether the two may be reconciled after we have taken account of the many causes of difference wIuch are found ill the passage of time between Dryden's generation and Colendge's.

It may appear that most of what I have Said, whIle It may have some bearmg on the appreciation and understandmg of poetry, has very little to do With the wntlng of it. When the critics are themselves poets, It may be suspected that they have formed therr cntica! statements With a VIew to

Justifying their poetic practice. Such critiCIsm as the two passages quoted IS hardly deSIgned to form the style of younger poets; it IS rather, at its best, an account of the poet's expenence ofrus own poetIc actiVity, relatedm terms

II may remark here as well as anywhere else that the statement con­tamed m tlns last sentence 15 hable to operate an rrranonal persuaslOn upon the mmd of the reader. We agree that MIlton IS a much greater poet than Cowley, and of another and supenor land We then concede WIthout exammatlon that the chfference may be formulated by thlS neat anntheSlS, and accept WIthout exammatlon the dIstInctIon between imagination and fancy whIch Colendge has done no more than unpose. The antIthesIs of highly agamst very 15 also an element of persuasion. See p. 58.

INTRODUCTION

ofrus own mind. The crltlcallmnd operatlng in poetry, the

critical effort wmch goes to the writing of It, may always

be in advance of the critIcal mind operatIng upon poetry,

whether It be one's own or some one else's. I only affirm

that there IS a sIgmficant relatlOn between the bestpoetry and

the best CrItIcIsm of the same penod. The age of CrItIcIsm

IS also the age of ctltIcal poetry. And when I speak of

modern poetry as bemg extremely crItIcal, I lnean that the

contemporary poet, who IS not merely a composer of graceful verseS,-IS forced to ask mmself such quesnons as

'what IS poetry for?', not merely 'what am I to say?' but

rather 'how and to whom am I to say It?' We have to com­

mun1cate-If 1t 1S commUlllCatlOll, for the word may beg

the quesnon-an expenence which IS not an experience In

the ordInary sense, for It may only eXIst, formed out of

many personal expenences ordered In some way whIch

may be very dIfferent from the way of valuatIon of prac­

tIcal hfe, ill the expressIOn of It. If poetry IS a form oCcom­munication', yet that whIch IS to be commurucated IS the

poem Itself, and only mCldentally the experience and the

thought wInch have gone Into It. The poem's eXIstence IS

somewhere between the wnter and the reader; It has a

reahty whIch IS not SImply the reahty of what the writer IS

trying to 'express', or oEms expenence of writIng It, or of

the experience of the reader or of the WrIter as reader. Con­

sequentlythe problem of what a poem 'means' IS a good deal

more difficult than It at first appears. If a poem of mine

enntled Ash-Wednesday ever goes mto a second edltlOn, I have thought of prefiXIng to It the hnes of Byron from DonJuatt:

30

INTRODUCTION

'Some have accused me of a strange desIgn Agamst the creed and morals of tIlls land,

And trace It IU this poem, every hue. r don't pretend that I qUIte understand

My own meanmg when I would be very fine; But the fact IS that I have nothmg planned

Except perhaps to be a moment merry ... '

There IS some sound crItlcal admoU1tlon m these hnes. But a poem IS not just eIther what the poet 'planned' or what the reader conceIves, nor IS ItS 'use' restrIcted wholly to what the author mtended or to what It actually does for readers. Though the amount and the quahty of the pleasure which any work of art has gIven smce It came Into eXlstence IS not Irrelevant, still. we never Judge It by that; and we do not ask, after beIng greatly moved by the SIght of a pIece of architecture or the audItIon of a pIece of mUSIC, 'what has been my benefit or profit from seeIng this temple or hearIng dlls mUSIC?' In one sense the questIon Imphed by the phrase 'the use of poetry' is nonsense. But there IS another Ineanmg to the question. Apart from the varIety of ways ill which poets have used theIr art, WIth greater or less success, WIth deSIgns of m­

structlon or persuaSIOn, there IS no doubt that a poet WIshes to gIve pleasure, to entertam or dIvert people; and he should normally be glad to be able to feel that the enter­tainment or dIverSIOn IS enjoyed by as large and varIOUS a number of people as pOSSIble. When a poet dehberately restrIcts Ius pubhc by his chOIce of style of writ1ng or of subject-matter, trus IS a specIal SItuatIon demandmg explan-

31

INTRODUCTION

anon and extenuation, but I doubt whether this ever happens. It IS one thIng to write ill a style which IS already

popular, and another to hope that one's wnting l11ay even­

tually become popular. From one pOlnt of VIew, the poet

aspires to the conchtIon of the musIc-hall comedIan. Being mcapable of altermg his wares to suit a prevailing taste, if there he any, he naturally desIres a state of SOCIety In wmch'

they may become popular, and in wInch his own talents

will be put to the best use. He is accordIngly Vltally mter­

ested ill the use of poetry. The subsequent lectures WIll treat of the varylllg conceptlons of the use of poetry durmg the

last three centunes, as Illustrated ill cnticIsm, and especially

ill the critICISm prOVided by the poets themselves.

NOtE TO CHAPtER I

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF TASTE IN POETRY

It may he not inopportune, ill connexion with some of the questions touched upon ill the foregomg chapter, to

summarISe here certam remarks which I made elsewhere

upon the Development of Taste. They are, I hope, not with­out some bearmg upon the teaclung ofhterature m schools

and colleges.

I may be generahsmg my own lnstory unwarrantably,

or on the other hand I may be uttering what IS already a

commonplace amongst teachers and psychologIsts, when I put forward the cOl1Jecture that the majority of clnldren,

up to say twelve or fourteen, are capable of a certam enjoy­

ment of poetry; that at or about puberty the majority of

~r use for It, but that a small minority

32

INTRODUCTION

then find themselves possessed of a craVIng for poetry wInch IS wholly dIfferent from any enjoyment experIenced before. I do not know whether httle gIrlS have a dIfferent taste in poetry from little boys, but the responses of the latter I beheve to be faIrly umform. Horatius, The Burial of Su John Moore, Bannockburn, Tennyson's Revenge, some of the border ballads' a hkmg for nlartial and sangwnary poetry is no more to be dtscouraged than engagements WIth lead soldters and pea-shooters. The only pleasure that I got from Shakespeare was the pleasure of being commended for readmg htm, had I been a clnld of more mdependent ffilnd I should have refused to read rum at all. Recogrusmg the frequent deceptIons of memory, I seem to remember that my early hkmg for the sort of verse that small boys do hke varushed at about the age of twelve, leavlng me for a couple of years Wlth no sort of Interest m poetry at all. I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of FItzgerald's Omar wInch was lying about, and the almost overwhelmmg mtroductlon to a new world of feehng wruch tlns poem was the occaSIOn of glVing me. It was hke a sudden converSIon; the world appeared anew, pamted WIth bright, dehcious and patnful colours. Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course With Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossettl, Swmbume.

I take tlns perIod to have perSIsted unttl about my twenty­second year. Bemg a perIod of rapId asslIn.1latlon, the end may not know the begmning, so dtfferent may the taste become. LIke the first perIod of clnldhood, It IS one beyond whtch I dare say many people never advance; so that such

c 33 E.U.P.

INTRODUCTION

taste for poetry as they retaIn In later hfe IS only a senti.

mental memory of the pleasures of youth, and IS probably

entwmed wlth all our ether sentImental retrospectIve feel. mgs. It IS, no doubt, a perIod of keen en] oyment; but We

must not confuse the IntenSIty of the poetlc experience 1ll

adolescence wIth the mtense experIence of poetry. At tlus

perIod, the poem, or the poetry of a SIngle poet, mvades

the youthful conSClOusness and assumes complete posses-

510n for a tIme. We do not really see It as sometlnng with an eXlstence outSIde ourselves; much as In our youthful

experIences of love, we do not so much see the person as

infer the eXistence of some outside object wluch sets ill

monon these new and delIghtful feelIngs III wluch we are

absorbed. The frequent result IS an outburst of sCrIbblmg

which we may callImttanon, so long as we are aware of the meanmg of the word 'InntatlOn' whtch we employ. It IS not dehberate chOlce of a poet to mllmc, bu..t wrItmg

under a land of daemomc posseSSIOn by one poet.

The tlnrd, or mature stage of enjoyment of poetry, comes

when we cease to IdentIfy ourselves WIth the poet we

happen to be readmg, when our CrItical faculties remam

awake; when we are aware of what one poet can be ex­pected to give and what he cannot. The poem has Its own

eXistence, apart from us; It was there before us and will en­

dure after us. It IS only at tlus stage that the reader IS pre­

pared to chstmgUlsh between degrees of greatness ill

poetry; before that stage he can only be expected to ms­

tingmsh between the genume and the sham-the capaCIty to

make this latter mStlnctlOn must always be practised first. The poets we frequent ill adolescence will not be arranged

34

INTRODUCTION

1ll any objectIve order of eminence, but by the personal

accIdents whIch put them into relatIon WIth us; and this IS nght. I doubt whether It IS possIble to explam to school chUdren or even undergraduates the differences of degree

among poets, and I doubt whether It IS WIse to try; they have not yet had enough expenence ofhfe for these matters

to have much mearung. The perception of why Shakespeare, or Dante, or Sophocles holds the place he has IS something which comes only very slowly ill the course ofhvmg. And

the dehberate attempt to grapple wIth poetry which IS not

naturally congerual, and some of whtch never will be, should be a very mature aCtiVIty indeed; an aCtiVIty which well repays the effort, but whtch cannot be recommended

to young people WIthout grave danger of deadenmg theIr senSIbility to poetry and confoundmg the genume develop­ment of taste with the sham acquiSItiOn of It.

It should be clear that the 'development of taste' IS an

abstraction. To set before oneself the goal of bemg able to enJoy, and m the proper objective order of ment, all good poetry, IS to pursue a phantom, the chase after which

should be left to those whose ambItion It IS to be 'cultI­vated' or 'cultured', for whom art IS a luxury article and Its

appreCIatiOn an accomphshment. For the development of

genume taste, founded on genume feelmg, IS mextncable from the development of the personahty and character.1

Genume taste IS always unperfect taste-but we are all, as a matter of fact, Imperfect people, and the man whose taste

In poetry does not bear the stamp of rus particular per-

lIn makmg thts statement I refuse to be drawn mto any dISCUSSIon of the defirunons of'personahty' and 'charactee.

35

INTRODUCTION

sonility, so that there are drlferences in what he hkes from

what we hke, as well as resemblances, and dtfferences ill the

way of hkmg the same thIngs, IS apt to be a very urunter­

estIng person WIth whom to dtscuss poetry. We may even

say that to have better 'taste' in poetry than belongs to one's

state of development, IS not to 'taste' anyt1nng at all. One's

taste in poetry cannot be Isolated from one's other mterests

and passlOns; it affects them and IS affected by them, and

must be hnnted as one's self IS hmIted.

Trus note is really mtroductory to a large and dtfficult

questIon: whether the attempt to teach students to appre­

cIate Enghsh hterature should be made at all; and wIth what

restnctIons the teachmg of Enghsh hterature can nghtly be

mcluded ill any acadermc cnrncnlum, If at all.

APOLOGY FOR THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

November 25th, I932

T he hterary CrIticIsm of the Ehzabethan penod IS not very great in bulk; to the account wruch George

Samtsbury has gIven there cannot ill Its kmd be very much to add, and from rus cntical valuation there IS not much to detract. What concerns me here is the general opmlOn of It wruch students are hkely to form, In relatlon to the poetry of the age, on account of two 'lost causes' which that cntICISm champlOned. The censure of the popular drama, and the attempt to introduce a more severe claSSIcal form Illustrated by the essay of SIr Pruhp SIdney, and the censure of rhymed verse, and the attempt to Introduce some adap­tation of classical forms illustrated by the essay of Cam­pIon, might be taken, and have been taken, as strikmg examples of the funhty of correctIve CntICISm, and of the supenority of irreflective inspiranon over calculation. If I can show that no such clear contrast IS possible, and that the relation of the critical to the creatIve mmd was not one of simple antagonism ill the Ehzabethan age, it will be eaSIer for me to demonstrate the mttmacy of the creatlve and the cnocal mind at a later period.

Everyone has read Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie and Daniel's Defence ofRyme. CamplOn, who except for Shakespeare was the most accomphshed master of rhymed lyric of his time, was certainly in a weak posi-

37

APOLOGY FOR THE

tlon for attackIng rhyme, as Damel In hIS reply was not slow to observe. HIs treatise IS known to most people

merely as the repOSItory of two very beautIful pIeces,

Rose-cheeked Laura come and Raving war begot, and of a

number of other exerCIses most of wInch by theIr Infen.

onty bear WItness agamst him. ExpenmentatlOn WIth seInl­

claSSIcal metres IS less dended to-day than It was before the

tIme of Robert Bndges. I do not beheve that good Enghsh

verse can be WrItten qUIte In the way which Campion

advocates, for It IS the natural geruus of the language, and

not anCIent authonty, that must deCIde; better scholars than

I, have suspected even that Latln verslficatlOn was too much

mfluenced by Greek models; I do not even beheve that the

metnc of The Testament of Beauty IS successful, and I have

always preferred Dr. Bndges' earher and more conven­

tional verse to his later experIments. Ezra Pound's Seafarer, on the other hand, IS a magnrlicent paraphrase explO1tmg the

resources of a parent language; I discern ItS beneficent lU­

fluence upon the work of some of the more Interestmg

younger poets to-day. Some of the older forms of Enghsh

versIficatIon are bemg revIved to good purpose. But the

point to dwell upon IS not that CampIon was altogether

wrong, for he was not; or that he was completely downed

by Daniel's rejomder; and we must remember that In other

matters DanIel was a member of the classlclslng school.

The result of the controversy between Campion and

Daniel is to estabhsh, both that the Latin metres cannot be copIed in English, and that rhyme IS neIther an essentIal nor

a superflUIty. Furthermore, no prosodIC system ever In-

t vented can teach anyone to WrIte good Enghsh verse. It IS,

38

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

as Mr. Pound has so often remarked, the musIcal phrase that matters.1 The great acInevement of Ehzabethan verSI­ficatIon IS the deve10pnlent of blank verse; it IS the dramatIc poets, and eventually MIlton, who are Spenser's true heirs. Just as Pope, who used what IS nommally the same form as Dryden's couplet, bears httle resemblance to Dryden, and as the wnter to-day who was genumely mfluenced by Pope would hardly want to use that couplet at all, so the wnters who were slgmficantly Influenced by Spenser are not those who have attempted to use Ins stanza, wInch IS ImlTIltable. The second greatest accomphshment of the age was the lync; and the lync of Shakespeare and CamplOn ... owes Its beauty not pnmanly to Its use of rhyme or to Its

perfectlOn of a 'verse form', but to the fact that it IS wntten to musIcal form; It IS wntten to be sung. Shakespeare's knowledge of InUSlC IS hardly hkely to have been compar­able to CamplOn's; but In that age a wnter could hardly escape knowmg a httle. I can hardly conceive such a song as Come away death bemg wntten except m collaboratlOn wIth the musiclan.2 But, to return to CamplOn and Darnel,

lwhen Mr. Dnnkwater says (Vlctortan Poetry) 'there IS now no new verse form to be dIscovered m Enghsh' It IS rus own conceptlOn ofform that precludes novelty He really means 'there can be no new verse form exactly hke the old ones' -or hke what he thInks the old ones are See a cunous book on the relanon of poetry to mUSIC, mtended for readers WIth no techrucal knowledge of mUSIC, Magic of Melody, by John Murray GIbbon (Dent)

2The real supenonty of Shakespeare's songs over CampIon's IS not to be found, so to speak, illtemally, but ill theIr setttng. I have elsewhere commented upon the mtense dramanc value of Shakespeare's songs at the pomts where they occur ill the plays

39

APOLOGY FOR THE

I conslder the controversy important, not because either

was quite nght or wrong, but because it IS a part of the

struggle between natIve and foreIgn elements as the result of whIch our greatest poetry was created. Calnpion pushed to an extreme a theory wInch he dId not hImself often

practise, but the fact that people could then think along

such hnes IS sIgmficlnt. The essay of SIdney m wInch occur the passages rIdicul­

Ing the contemporary stage, so frequently quoted, may

have been composed as early as ISBo; at any rate, was com .. '

posed before the great plays of the age were written. We can hardly suppose that the wnter who ill passmg showed

not only a hvely appreclatlOn of Chevy Chase, but also of Chaucer, smghng for mentlon what is Chaucer's greatest

poem-Troilus-would have been ImperceptIve of the ex­cellence of Shakespeare. But when we thmk of the multl­

tude of bad plays, and the nUInber of preCIOUS but imper­fect plays, wruch SIdney dId not hve to read or see per­formed, we cannot deny that rus lamentatIons have some applIcation to thlwhole penod. Weare apt, In tlunkmg of the age of Shakespeare, to lmagme somethmg hke a fertile field In which tares and fine wheat luxunated, In wluch the former could not have been eradIcated Without rIsk to the latter. Let both grow together untIl the harvest. I anl not

mchned to deny the exceptlOnalnumber of wnters of real poetic and dramatIC geruus; but I cannot help regrettmg that some of theIr best plays are no better than they are. 'So falleth It out,' says SIdney, 'that haVing mdeed no rIght

Comedy, In that cOffilcal part of our Tragedy we have no­thing but scurnhty, unworthy of any chaste ears, or SOine

40

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

extreme show of doltlshness, indeed fit to hft up a loud

laughter, and nothIng else.' He is perfectly right. The Changeling IS only a sohtary example m Its extreme con­

trast between the grandeur of the main plot and the nause­

ousness of the secondary plot from wmch It has Its title.

The plays of Marston and Heywood-the latter a wnter of

some theatncal ability, the former conSiderably more­

are sluularly disfigured. In The Witch of Edmonton we have

the odd spectacle of a play contammg COImC and tragic

elements, each pretty certalnly contnbuted by a dIfferent

writer, each nSlng at moments to great heights m Its own

land, but very Imperfectly welded; I find the readjustments

of mood requITed ill dus play very trymg. Now the desire

for 'comic rehef' on the part of an audience IS, I beheve, a

permanent cravrng of human nature; but that does not

mean that It IS a cravmg that ought to be gratIfied. It springs

from a lack of the capacity for concentration. Farce and

love-romances, espeCIally If seasoned With scabrousness,

are the two forms of entertamment upon wInch the human

mmd can most easIly, lovingly and fei the longest tIme ,1

maintain Its attentIon; but we hke s\"me farce as a rehef

from our sentiment, however salacIous, and some sentl­

Inent as a rehef from our farce, however broad. The

audience wruch can keep Its attentIOn :fixed upon pure tragedy or pure comedy IS much more highly developed.

The Atheruan stage got rehef through the chorus, and

perhaps some of ItS tragedy may have held attentIOn largely

by its sensatIonahsm. To my mmd, Racme's Berenice repre­

sents about the sunlIDlt of CIV1hsatIon In tragedy; and it IS,

in a way, a Chnstlan tragedy, with devotion to the State

41

APOLOGY FOR THE

substItuted for devotion to dIvIne law. The dramatic poet

who can engross the reader's or the audItor's attention

durmg the space of a Berenice IS the most cIvIlIsed drama­

tIst-though not necessarily the greatest, for there are other

quahnes to consIder. My pOlnt IS trus: that the ElIzabethan drama dId tend to

approach that unity of feeling wInch SIdney deslres. From

the tragedy or rustory In whIch the COmIC elenlent was

sImply left blank. to be supphed by some clown favoured by the pIt (as some of the farce In Faustus IS supposed to be an abbreVIatIOn of the gags of one comedIan), the drama grew

to matunty, ill, for example, Coriolanus, Volpone, and In a

later generation The Way of the World. And It dId tms, not

because dOCIle dramatists obeyed the WIshes of Sidney, but

because the Improvements advocated by SIdney happened

to be those wmch a maturmg CIVIlIsatIon would make for

Itself. The doctnne of Unity of Sentiment, In fact, happens

to be nght. And I tillnk, ill passIng, that snnply because we

have been Inchned to accept the 'COtnlC rehef' notlOn as a

kInd of fixed law ofEhzabethan drama, we have sometImes

nnsunderstood the mtentlOn of the dramatIst: as, for m­

stance, In treatIng The Jew of Malta as a huffe-snuffe grand

tragedy dIsfigured by cloWlllsh IrrelevancIes of doubtful taste, we have lll1ssed Its pomt.

Some objectors may brmg forward Shakespeare eIther

as a tnumphant exception to tills theory or as a tnumphant

refutation of It. I know well how chfficult It IS to fit Shake­

speare Into any theory, espeCIally If It be a theory about

Shakespeare; and I cannot here undertake a complete

justIfication, or enter upon all the qualIficatIons that the

42

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

theory reqmres. But we start wIth 'COmIC relief' as a prac­tICal necessIty of the tIme for the wnter who had to make IDS hving by wntmg plays. What IS really mterestmg IS

what Shakespeare made of trus neceSSIty. I thInk that when we turn to Henry IV we often feel that what we want to re-read and lmger over are the Falstaff epIsodes, rather than the pohtlcalrughfalutln of the KIng's party and Its adver­sanes. That IS an error. As we read from Part I to Part II and see Falstaff, not merely gluttomsmg and playmg pranks mdIfferent to affaIrs of State, but leadmg rus band of con­scnpts and conversmg WIth local magnates, we find that the rehef has become senous contrast, and that polItIcal saUre Issues from It. In Henry V the two elements are st1l1 more fused, so that we have not merely a chromcle of kings and queens, but a umversal comedy In wruch all the actors take part in one event. But It IS not In the rustories, plays of a tranSIent and unsansfactory type, that we find the COmIC relIef most nearly taken up Into a rugher umty of feelIng. In Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream the farCIcal

element IS an essentIal to a pattern more complex and elaborate that any constructed by a dramatist before or smce. The KnockIng on the Gate In Macbeth has been CIted too often for me to call attentIon to It; less hackneyed IS the scene upon Pompey's galley m Antony and Cleopatra. TIns scene IS not only m Itself a prodIgIOUS pIece of polItical satIre-

'A beares the tlnrd part of the world, man ... '

but IS a key to everything that precedes and follows. To demonstrate tills pomt to your satIsfactlon would, I know,

43

APOLOGY FOR THE

reqtnre a whole essay to Itsel£ Here, I can only affirm that for me the violence of contrast between the tragic and the

COmlC, the subhme and the bathetIc, in the plays of Shake­

speare, disappears ill Ills InatUt111g work; I only hope that a companson of The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and The Tempest will lead others to the sanIe conclusIon. I was once

under censure for suggestmg that 111 Hamlet Shakespeare

was deahng wIth 'mtractable ma.tenal'· lny words were

even interpreted as mamtainmg that Coriolanus IS a greater

play than Hamlet. I am not very much Interested In decldmg

wmch play of Shakespeare IS greater than whIch other; be­cause I am more and more mterested, not m one play or an­

other, but in Shakespeare's work as a whole. I do not dunk

1t any derogation to suggest that Shakespeare dtd not always

succeed: such a suggestion would inlply a very narrow VIew

of success. HIs success must always be reckoned In under­

standmg of what he attempted; and I belIeve that to admit

his partial failures IS to approach the recognltlOn of rus real

greatness more closely than to hold that he was always

granted plenary mspiratton. I do not pretend that I thInk

Measure for Measure, or Troilus and Cressida, or All's Well That Ends Well, to be a wholly 'successful' play; but if any

o~e of Shakespeare's plays were omitted we should 110t be

able to understand the rest as well as we do. In such plays, we

must consider not only the degree of wuficatlOn of all the

elements Into a 'Ulllty of sentlment', but the quahty and

kind of the emotions to be unified, and the elaborateness of the pattern of UlllficatIon.

Tills consIderatIon may appear to have earned us far away from Sidney's simple assertton about the decorum to

44

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

be observed In excludmg extraneous matter; but we are

really WIth Inm all the tIme. So Inuch, for the present, for

the Uruty of SentIment. But SIdney IS orthodox m laws

still more dIfficult to observe; for he says roundly, 'the stage

should represent but one place, and the uttermost t1me pre­

supposed In 1t should be, both by ArIstotle's precept and

common reason, but one day.' Tills unIty of place and t1me

IS a stumblIng-block so old that we tlunk 1t long smce worn

away: a law, lIke some others, so uruversally ViOlated, that,

hke the herome of Hood,

'We thought It dymg when 1t slept

And sleepIng when It dIed.'

But my pomt IS sInlply that the umtIes dIffer radIcally from

human legIslatIon m that they are laws of nature, and a law

of nature, even when It IS a law of human nature, IS quite

another thing from a human law. The kInd of lIterary law

in which Aristotle was interested was not law that he lard

down, but law that he dIscovered. The laws (not rules) of

unity of place and tIme relnain vahd ill that every play

whIch observes them in so far as its material allows IS ill that

respect and degree supenor to plays which observe them

less. I belIeve that m every play ill wInch they are not

observed we only put up WIth therr VIolation because we

feel that somethmg IS gamed wInch we could not have If the law were observed. Trus is not to establish another law.

There is no other law possible. It 1S merely to recogmse that

m poetry as ill Me our business is to make the best of a bad

job. Furthermore, we must observe that the UnitIes are not

three separate laws. They are three aspects of one law: we

45

APOLOGY FOR THE

may Vlolate the law of Unity of Place more flagrantly If We

preserve the law of Umty of TIme, or vice versa; we may

Violate both If we observe more closely the law of Druty of

SentIment. We start, most of us, wIth an unconSCIOUS preJuchce

agamst the UmtIes-I mean, we are unconSCIOUS of the

large element ill our feehng wruch IS mere Ignorance and mere preJudIce. I mean that Enghsh-speaking peoples have

ImmedIate and IntImate experIence of great plays In wInch

the Unities are grossly vIOlated, and perhaps of Infenor

plays in wInch they are more nearly observed. Furthermore,

we have a natural, mevitable and largely justIfiable sym­

pathy WIth the hterature of our own country and language,

and we have had the Umtles so rubbed mto us, when we

studied Greek or French drama, that we may tlnnk 1t 1S be­

cause of the unfaIDlhar dramat1c form that we do not care

for them so much as we care for Shakespeare. But It IS Just as

hkely that we do not care for them because they represent

the genius of an ahen people and a fore1gn tongue, and hence

are prejuchced agamst the dramatIc form. I beheve that

those plays of Shakespeare wInch approXimate more nearly

to observatIon of the U11ltles are in that respect better plays; I

would even go so far as to say that the Kmg of Denmark,

ill sendmg Hamlet to England, was attemptmg to v10late

the Dnity of Actlon. a CrIme far worse, for a man In rus position, than attempted murder. And what I have denoIll1-

nated Unity of Sennment IS only a shghdy larger term than Druty of Action.

Uruty, says Butcher, mrus edItion of the Poetics, IS mam­fested mamly ill two ways.

46

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

'FIrst, in the causal conneXlOn that binds together the several parts of a play-the thoughts, the emotIons, the dcciSlOns of the will, the external events bemg inextnc­ably Interwoven. Secondly, In the fact that the whole senes of events, wIth all the moral forces that are brought into collislOn, are dIrected to a smgle end. The actIon as It advances converges on a definIte pOInt. The thread of pur­pose runrung through It becomes more marked. All mmor effects are subordmated to the sense of an ever-growmg umty. The end IS lmked to the begInnIng wIth inevItable certaInty, and In the end we ruscern the mearung of the whole.'

It should be obVIOUS that the observance of trus UnIty must lead us, gIven certam dramatIc matenal otherwIse highly valuable, mevltably to vIolatIon of the Urutles of Place and TIme.I As for TIme, ArIstotle only remarks rather casually that the usual practIce of tragedy was to con­fine ItSelf, so far as pOSSIble, to the actIOn of twenty-four hours. The only modern author who has succeeded ill

observmg tms Uruty exactly IS Mr. James Joyce; and he has done so wIth only shght deviatlOn from the Uruty of Place , as the actlOn all takes place In or near the town of Dublm, and Dublm 15 a contnbutmg cause of the umty of the whole book. But Sir Pruhp SIdney, wIth the weIght of Itahan CrItICISm upon rus back, and probably not having read Anstotle so deeply as he had read Latm authors and Itahan CrItics WIdely, only went a httle too far: he was rIght m prmclple, and he was Justlfied In rus strIctures upon the

IThe authonty for the Uruty of Place IS usually held to be Castel­vetro. ThlS IS not, of course, an Anstotehan doctnne.

47

APOLOGY FOR THE

drama of Ins day. A greater cntic than Sidney, the greatest

entic of Ins orne, Ben Jonson, says WISely: '1 know notlung can conduce more to letters, than to

examine the Wrltmgs of the Ancients, and not to rest m their sole authority, or take all upon trust from thenl; pro­

vIded the plagues of Judging, and pronouncmg against

them, be away; such as envy, bItterness, precIpitation,

Impudence, and scurnle scoffing. For to all the observatIons

of the Ancients, we have our own experience; which, if we

will use and apply, we have better means to pronounce.

It IS true they opened the gates, and made the way that

went before us; but as gmdes, not commanders.'

And further : 'Let ArIstotle and others have their dues; but If we can

make farther d1scoverIes of truth and fitness than they, why

are we envied';)'

It was natural that a member of the Countess of Pem­

broke's circle, Wrltmg wlnle popular hterature was stIll

mosdy barbarous, should be more fearful and mtolerant

than Ben Jonson, writIng towards dIe end of Ins days, WIth

a rich creative past in retrospect, and reVIewing his own

great work. I do not pretend that Sidney's cnticism made

any more impression upon the form wruch later poet!e

drama took than dtd, say, the example of Greville, Daniel

or Alexander. The clllef channel through wInch the Coun­

tess of Pembroke's crrcle may have- affected the course of

English poetry IS the great clvilising influence of Spenser. Spenser exercIsed great influence upon Marlowe; Mar­

lowe first showed what could be done WIth dramatIc blank verse, and Marlowe's great disciple Milton showed what

48

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

could be done with blank verse in a long poem. So great the influence of Spenser seems to me, that I should say that without it we might not have had the finest developments of blank verse. Such a denvatlOn in Itself should be enou~ to rescue the Countess of Pembroke's fnends and relatives from obscunty, enough to rugrufy therr cntlcal efforts, to ralse them from the Ignormny of wealthy well-born amateurs of the arts, or obscurantist supporters of a fasrid-10US and sterue classlclSm.

So much for the two real problems of specIfic mterest wruch occupied the attentlon of Ehzahethan cntics: the problem of dramatic form and the problem of verse technique. Of the fashion set by Sidney, the panegync of poetry and the poet, I shall have more to say when I come to contrast It with the laudatton of the Poet by Shelley, and WIth, so to speak, his orclmatton by Matthew Arnold. Puttenham and Webbe play chorus to SIdney. Poetry, we are repeatedly told, IS 'makmg', and we are re­mmded that 7T'OL€lV means to make. LIp-servIce IS patd to the Aristotehan 'Imitatton', but none of the wnters of the

perIod seems to have penetrated very deeply into the notion of mimesis. The opimons of Plato and Anstode are garbled hke a jurucious advertisement selection from a book-reVlew. Webbe would have us believe that Plato and

Anstotle JOIn m supposmg 'all wIsdom and knowledge to be included mystically in that ruvine mstinction where­with they thought theIr vates to be inspired'. The notion of divine inspl!atlon is made the most of. The poet expresses both chVllle and worldly truth, and exerts moral mfluence -here 'inutatIon' is brought in again. Fmally, the poet

D 49

APOLOGY FOR THE

gIves de~ght, and in effect helps materially to maintaIn and to raise the level of culture; no court IS glorious wIthout mm, and no people great which has no poets. Interspersed

in the discourses of SIdney, Puttenham and Webbe are some acute observatIons; and Puttenham's prefatory note on Speech 1S most mterestmg. I am not concerned wIth

these, or wIth the C1rcumstances 1n wluch these essays were

brought forth; though I may be allowed to offer a word of thanks, m passmg, to Gosson because lus School of Abuse provoked them. It IS, however, worthy of remembrance

that these cntical treatises appeared just before the begmnmg of the great age; so that If they are a SIgn of anythmg, It IS of

growth and not of decay. And ill these SImple effUSIOns we have In embryo the

cntIcal questions wruch were to be dIscussed Iuuch later. To talk of poets as makers and as inspired does not get us very far, and thIs notion of msplratlOn need not be pressed

for hteralness; but It shows some perceptlon of the questlOn: 'how does the makmg of poetry come about?' To talk vaguely of poets as plulosophers does not get us very far either, but It IS the SImplest reply to the questIon: 'what IS

the content of poetry?' Slnularly wIth the account of poetry ill ltS lugh moral purpose, the questIon of the rela­tion of art and etlucs appears, and finally, ill the simple

assertions that poetry g1ves rugh dehght and adorns soc1ety IS some awareness of the problem of the relatIon of the poem to the reader and the place of poetry m society. Once you have started you cannot stop. And these people started before Shakespeare.

I shall have spoken to no purpose if I have glven the

50

COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE

ImpresSlOn that I wIsh sImply to affirm the Importance of a neglected, or rather behttled group ofhterary people whose taste IS supposed to have been counter to that of the age. Had that been my mtention I should have adopted a dtfferent scheme of treatment, dealt wIth them severally, and ill parocular have had somethmg to say about the specIal Importance of John Lyly ill the develop­ment ofEnghsh prose and of proper comedy. My purpose has been rather to determme the relaoon of the crlocal currents to the general stream of creatIve activIty. In that form of lllstorlcal survey wruch IS not concerned wIth the total movement ofhterature, but wIth-on the lowest level -mere readablhty, and wruch alms to tell us what works we can solI enJoy, which emphasIses those books which men have found It worth theIr wlule to contmue to read and which are valuable to us lfrespecove of theIr hIstorlcal pOSItiOn, some of these wnters are properly Ignored. The works of SIr Pruhp SIdney, excepting a few sonnets, are not among those to which one can return for perpetual re­freshment; the Arcadia IS a monument of dulness. But I have wIshed to affirm that In lookIng at the penod WIth an mterest ill the development of the CrItIcal conSClOusness m and towards poetry, you cannot dISSOCIate one group of people from another; you cannot draw a hue and say here IS backwater, here IS the mam stream. In the drama, we seem to have on the one hand almost the whole body of men of letters, a crowd of scholars conung down from Oxford and CambrIdge to pIck a poor hving ill London, needy and often almost desperate men of talent; and on the other an alert, curious, semi-barbarous pubhc, fond

51

APOLOGY FOR THE COUNTESS

of beer and bawdry, mcludmg much the same sort of people whom one encounters m the local outIymg theatres

to-day, cravmg cheap amusement to thrill theIr emotions,

arouse theIr nnrth and satisfy their cunosIty; and between

the entertamers and the entertamed a fundamental homo­

geneIty of race, of sense of humour and sense of rIght and

wrong. The worst fault that poetry can comnut IS to be

dull, and the Ehzabethan dramatIsts were more or less

frequently saved from dulness or galvamsed mto anima­

tIon by the necessIty to amuse. Thelr hvehhood depended upon It: they had to amuse or ~tarve.

THE AGE OF DRYDEN December 2nd, 1932

In my prevlOus lecture I was concerned with the Ehza­bethan crItIcal nund expressIng Itself before the greater

part of the great hterature of the age had been wntten Between them and Dryden occurs one great CrItical mmd, that of a great poet whose cntical WrIting appears to be­long to qwte the end of the penod. If I treated Ben Jon­son's opinions with complete respect, I should conde1lll1 myself for speaking or Wrltlllg at all; for he says roundly, 'to judge of poets 1S only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best'. Nevertheless, though I am not a good enough poet to Judge of Jonson, I have already trIed to do so, and cannot now make matters worse. Between SIdney and Campion ill the latter part of the sixteenth century, and Jonson wnting towards the end of Ins hfe, the greatest penod of English poetry is comprehended; and the maturing of the Enghsh mind in tlus ttme is well seen by readmg the treatises of Sidney and Ins contemporaries, and then the Discoveries of Jonson. He called Ins Discoveries also Timber, and it IS ttmber WIth much undergrowth and dead wood In It, but also hvmg trees. In some places, Jonson does but express in a more adult style the same common­places. About pc>etry:

'The study of It (if we will trust Aristotle) offers to man-

S3

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

land a certain rule, and pattern oflivmg well, and happIly;

chsposIng us to all civIl offices of society. If we wIll belIeve

Tully, It nounsheth, and Instructeth, our youth; delIghts

our age; adorns our prospenty; comforts our adverslty;

entertams us at home, keeps us company abroad, travaIls

With us, watches, dlvldes the tlme of our earnest, and

sports; shares m our country recesses, and recreatlons; mso­

much as the Wlsest and best learned have thought her the

absolute nustress of manners, and nearest oflan to vIrtue.'

Trus lIst of the Inents of poetry, wIth Its condltIOnal

references to Anstotle and Tully, has the quaIntness of a

generatIOn near to MontaIgne, and IS no lnore cOnVInCIng

than a patent medIcIlle cIrcular; and it has some of the

heavy sententIousness of FranCIS Bacon. Secondary to the

senous advantages to be derIved from poetry, comes the

assurance that poetry gIves pleasure, or, as he says, gUIdes us by the hand of actIOn, WIth a ravIshmg delIght, and In­

credIble sweetness. The questions Imphed are, as I SaId to­

wards the end of my last lecture, among those fundamental

to CrItICIsm: Jonson has put them III a nper style than that

of the cntIcs who wrote III rus youth, but he has not

advanced the enqUIry. The authonty of antIqUIty, and the

assent of our preJudIces, are enough. It IS rather In lus practical cntlClsm-I mean here not so much lus CrItlCISm

of mdividual wnters, but Ius advlce to the practItlOner-that

Jonson has made progress. He reqUlres 111 the poet, first, 'a goodness of natural Wlt'. 'To trus perfectIon of nature In

our poet, we reqUIre exerCIse of those parts, and frequent.'

HIs tlnrd reqUlsite ill a poet pleases me especlally: 'The third reqwsite m our poet, or maker, IS Imitation, to be able

54

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

to convert the substances, or rIches of another poet, to hIs

own use.' When we come to a passage begmrung 'In WrItIng there IS to be regarded the Invention, and the

Faslnon' we may, If we have already read some later

CrItiCS, expect more than we get. For so far as I understand

hun Jonson means notlung more than that before you

WrIte you must have somethIng to WrIte about, whIch is a

marufest truth frequently Ignored both by those who are

trymg to learn to write and by some of those who en­

deavour to teach wrItlng. But when we compare such pas­

sages as these from J011son wIth the passage whtch I quoted

from Dryden ill my first lecture9 we feel thattIn Dryden we

meet for the first tIme a man who IS speaklllg to us. It IS

from a CrItIcal essay wntten before Dryden had really

found out how to wnte poetry, but It IS somethIng very

dIfferent from an appeal to the anCIents; It 1S really analy­

tlcal., I wIll presume to quote It agaIn for the purpose of

closer examlnatlOn:

'The first happIness of the poet's ImagmatIOn IS properly

mventIOn, or the fmdtng of the thought, the second 15 fancy,

or the vanatlOn, denvIng, or mouldlllg of that thought, as

the Judgement represents 1t proper to the subject; the thIrd

15 elocutIon, or the art of dotiling and adornmg that

thought, as found and vaned, ill apt, sIgnIficant, and sound­

mg words, the qUIckness of the InlaginatlOn IS seen ill the

mventlon, the ferulity 1n the fancy, and the accuracy m the

expressIOn.' ,

'Fmdmg of the thought' does not mean findlllg a copy­

book maXl1n, or startIng WIth a synopsIs of what we are

gomg to put lnto verse, fIndmg an \dea' \vlnch IS later to

S5

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

be 'clothed and adorned' m a rather literal interpretation of the metaphor. It corresponds to the mcepnon of any pIece of imagmative writmg. It is not castIng about for a subject) upon which, when found, the 'lmagmanon' IS to be exer­clsed; for we must remark that 'mvention' IS the first

moment ill a process only the whole of which Dryden calls

'unaginatIon', and no less than the whole of which corre­

sponds to the celebrated and admrrable account of 1Illagm­ation given by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 'Invention' ill the sense used here by Dryden does not seem

to me to be properly covered by the New English Dic­tionary, wInch quotes tIns very passage ill support of the followmg defimtion: 'The devlsmg of a subject, Idea. or

method of treatment, by exerCIse of the mtellect or Imagm­ation.' The words 'mtellect or Imagmanon' strike me as a

burkmg of the question: if there is a clear dlstincnon be­tween mventton by exercise of mtellect and mvention by exerCIse of Imagmanon, then two defirunons are called for; and If there is no chfference between mtellectual and Imagmatlve InventIon there can hardly be much difference between lmaginatIon and mtellect. But Dryden IS talking

expressly about imagination, not about intellect. Further­more, the word 'devising' suggests the dehberate putting together out of materials at hand; whereas I beheve that Dryden's 'mvention' mc1udes the sudden irruption of the

germ of a new poem, possIbly merely as a state of feeling. His 'mventton' is surely a findmg, a trouvaille. 'Fancy' re­presents the conscious elaboration of the anginal donnee­I prefer not to call that which IS found by invention by the name of 'idea'; and fancy, I believe, covers also the con-

56

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

scious and delIberate uniting of severalmvennons In one poem. 'Vanatlon, deriVing, or mouldmg of that thought', Dryden calls It. 'Vanation' and 'mouldIng' are, I think, pretty clear; 'denvmg' IS more dIfficult. I trunk that the definItIOn 3B In the N.B.D. comes pretty close to It· 'To extend by branches or modllications.' Fancy is an actiVity of the lmagmation rather than of the mtellect, but IS necessarily In part an mtellectual aCtiVIty, masmuch as it IS a 'moulding of the thought as judgement represents it proper'. Dryden does not, I believe, necessarily Imply that the 'thud happiness' of poenc imaginanon, 'elocunon', IS a thtrd act, I mean, that the act of findIng the proper words, 'clothmg and adorning'the thought, begins only after the operation of fancy is complete. In fancy the findIng of the words seems to me already to have begun; that IS, fancy IS pardy verbal; nevertheless, the work of elocution, 'cloth­mg and adormng m apt, sIgmficant and soundIng words', IS the last to be completed. Observe that 'soundIng' here means what we, just as apprOXImately, should be hkely to call 'mUSIcal': the fmdtng of the words and the order of words expreSSIve of the underlying mood wruch belongs to the mvennon. (Shakespeare's great lme 111 King Lear,

Never, never, never, never, never,

IS Just as sounding as Poe's hne adimred by Ernest Dowson,

The vIOl, the VIolet and the vIne.)

We are hable, I think, to underrate Dryden's crincal analyses, by assummg that they only apply to the kind of poetry that he Writes himself; and thus we may overlook lus meanmg, as of the word 'invention'. Even if Dryden's

57

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

poetry seems to us of a pecuhar, and, as it has seemed to

many, a pecuharly unpoetIc type, we need not conclude

that lus mind operated qUIte differently from those of

poets at other penods; and we must remember hIS cathohc

and diSCrUn1nat111g taste In poetry. I do not need, I dunk, to quote agaIn here the passage

froll1 Colendge wluch I quoted In contrast to that of

Dryden, because I do not propose to exanune it so narrowly.

You WIll have observed the more developed etymologIcal

sense I am not sure that Colendge has made as satIsfactory

an J.nalysis as that of Dryden. The dIstinction IS too sImple.

The last sentence, 'MIlton has a I11ghly ImaglnatlVe, Cow·

ley a very fanClful lrund, , should be enough to arouse

SusplclOn. It represents a course of argument wluch IS

specIOUS. You assert a dIstmctl0n, you select two authors

who illustrate It to your satIsfaction, and you Ignore the

negatIve instances or drlIicult cases. If Colendge had wntten,

'Spenser had a lnghly Imagmatlve, Donne a very fancIful

nnnd,' the assumed superIorIty of ImaginatIOn to fancy

might not appear qUIte so Immediately convIncIng. Not

only Cowley, but all the metaphysical poets, had very

fancIful mmds, and If you removed the fancy and left only

imagmatlon, as ColerIdge appears to use these terms, you

would have no metaphysIcal poetry. The rustlnctl0n IS

adffilttedly a rustmctIOn of value; the term 'fancy' IS really

made derogatory, Just apphcable to clever verse that you do not like.

Between Dryden, and Wordsworth and ColerIdge the

oue great C!1tlcal mmd IS that of Johnson. After Dryden, and before Jolmson, there IS lnuch Just crItIcism, but no

58

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

great crinc. The lnferionty of common lUlnds to great

IS more paInfully apparent In those modest exerCIses of the

m.ll1d ill wInch common sense and sensIbIlIty are needed,

than In theIr faIlure to ascend to the Ingher BIghts of gelliUS.

Addlson IS a conSpICUOUS example of tIlls enlbarrassmg

medlOcnty, and he IS a symptom of the age whIch he

announced. The dIfference between the temper of the

eIghteenth century and that of the seventeenth IS profound.

Here, for example, IS AddIson on the subject on wInch we

have already heard Dryden and Colendge, the Imagma­

tlon: 'There are few words In the Enghsh language wInch are

employed ill a more loose and unCIrcumscn bed sense than

those of the fan~y and the ImagInatIOn. I therefore thought

It necessary to fix and determme the notIOn of these two

words, as I Intend to make use of them In the thread of my

followIng speculatIons, that the reader may conceIve

nghtly what IS the subject wInch I proceed upon '1

It IS perhaps as well to warn you that AddJ.sonis a wnter

towards whom I feel sometInng very lIke antIpathy. It seems to me that even In these few words the smugness and

prIggIshness of the man appear. Of an age dUrIng whIch the

Church sank to an unlovehness unequalled before or smce,

AddIson was one of the most apposIte ornaments, he pos­

sessed the Chnstian VIrtues, and all ill the wrong order:

humIhty was the least of hIS attamments. It would seem,

from thIs account of 'fancy' and 'ImagInatIOn', that Adru­

son had never read, certamly never pondered, Dryden's

remarks upon the subject. I do not feel sure, however. that

1 The Spectalor,June 21st, 1712, No. 4Il

59

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

tIns yokIng of fancy and imagmatlon by Adchson chd not

stnke the eye of ColerIdge, and start hun upon Ins process

of dliferentlatlon. For Dryden 'Imagmatlon' was the whole

process of poetIc creation m wInch fancy was one element.

AddIson starts out to 'fix and determme' the notlon of the

two words; I cannot find any fixmg or determming of the

word 'fancy' m thIs or the followmg essays on the subject;

he IS entirely occupied WIth the Imagmatlon, and pnmarIly

wlth the vlSUal Imagmatlon, and solely WIth the VISUal

ImagmatIon accordIng to Mr. Locke. That IS a debt wluch

he hastens to acknowledge: he pays a handsome testimolllal

to the SCIentIfic truths wInch Locke has estabhshed. Alas, philosophy IS not SCIence, nor IS hterary CrItICIsm; and It is an elementary error to thInk that we have dIscovered as

objective laws what we have merely Inlposed by prIvate

legislation.

It IS cunous to find the old notions of dehght and m­

structlon, with winch the SIxteenth century defended

poetry, cropping up agam ill a form typIcal of the age of

Addison, but hardly WIth any greater profundIty of mean­ing. Addtson observes that:

'A man of a pohte imagmatlon IS let rota a great many

pleasures that the vulgar are not capable of receIving. He can converse With a pIcture, and find an agreeable com­

pamon ill a statue. He meets WIth a secret refreshment in a

descrIption, and often finds a greater satisfaction ill the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does ill the posseSSIon. '

The eighteenth-century emphases are illuminating. In­stead of the courtler, we have the man of pohte imagm-

60

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

atlon. I suppose that Addison IS what one would describe as a gentleman; as one might say, no better than a gentleman. fIts notion of recomlnending Imaginatlon, because it enables you to enj oy a statue or a piece of property Wlth­

out having to put your hand in your pocket to pay for It, IS a very happy thought indeed. And gentleman as he IS, he has a very low op1l11on of those who are not genteel:

'There are indeed but very few who know how to be idle and Innocent, or have a relish of any pleasures that are not crirmnal. '

Tell that, we might add, to the Unemployed. The par­ticular exammation of AddIson may be left to Mr. Saints­bury, whose History of Criticism IS always dehghtful, generally useful, and most often rIght. My mtroductlon of Adchson has not been, however, merely m order to poke fun at rum. What is interesting and relevant to observe in Adchson is not merely detenoratIon, a deterioration of socIety, but of mteresting change. In the same series of papers on Imagmation he says:

'It may here be worth our whtle to examIne how It comes to pass that several readers, who are all acquamted WIth the same language, and know the meanmg of the words they read, should nevertheless have a dIfferent relish of the same deSCrIptions.'

Addtson does not succeed m folloWIng up thts very Important questIon WIth any very Important answer, but It is suggestIve as the first awareness of the problem of com­murucation; and his whole dIscussion of the nature of Imaginanon, however fnutless for the purposes of hterary critiCJ.sm~ IS a very interesting attempt at a general

61

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

aesthetics. Any matter wInch COines eventually to be the subject of detaIled InVestIgatIOn and specIalIsed labour may be preceded, long before any frUltful development takes

place, by such random guesses as these, wInch though not

directly productIve of frUItful results IndIcate the dIrection

ill wInch the mmd IS movmg.

AddIson, although too poor a poet to be stnctly com­

parable to the other CrItICS whom I have mentIoned and

have to mentIOn, acqUIres Importance by bemg thoroughly

representatIve of Ins age. The Instory of every branch

of mtellectual aCtIVIty provides the saIne record o~ the

dtminutIon of England from the tIme of Queen Anne.

It IS not so much the mtellect, but somet1ung superIor to

lllteliect, wInch went for a long time lIlto echpse, and tIns

luminary, by whatever name we may call It, has not yet

wholly Issued from Its secular obnubIlatIon. The age of

Dryden was stIll a great age, though begmrung to suffer a

death of the SpIrIt, as the coarsenmg of Its verse-rhythms

shows, by the tlme of AddIson theology, devotIOn and

poetry fell fast Into a formahstic slumber. AddIson IS de· fimtely a wnter for a lTIlddle class, a bourgeois hterary

dIctator. He was a popular lecturer. To lum poetry meant

dehght and edIficatIon In a new way. Johnson has here, ill

rus own language, fixed adrmrably the dIfference between Dryden and AddIson as dIrectors of taste:

'Dryden has, not many years before, scattered CrItiCISm

over his prefaces WIth very httle parsImony, but though he

sometimes condescended to be somewhat famIliar, IllS

lnanner was ill general too scholastIc for those who had yet

theIr rudiments to learn, and found It not easy to under-

62

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

stand theIr master. HIs observations were framed rather for

those that were learnIng to wrIte, than for those that read

only to talk. 'An mstructor hke AddIson was now wantmg, whose

remarks, beIng superficIal, lrught be eaSIly understood, ar..d

bemg Just, might prepare the nlllld for more attamments.

Had he presented Paradise Lost to the publIc WIth all the

pomp of system and seventy of SCIence, the critIcIsm would

perhaps have been admIred, and the poem still have been

neglected; but by the blandIshments of gentleness and facIl­

Ity he has made MIlton an unIversal favounte, WIth whom

readers of every class trunk It necessary to be pleased.'

It was stIll then, apparently, a not unlettered penod, III

wInch readers of any class could dunk It necessary to be

pleased WIth Paradise Lost. But the usual classificatlOn of

Dryden, AddIson and Johnson together as CrItIcs of an

Augustan age faIls to allow adequately for two dIfferences:

the spintual deterioratlOn In SOCIety between the penods

of the first two, and the renlarkable IsolatlOn of the trurd.

It IS surely by unconSCIOUS Irony that we speak of an 'age

of Johnson' as we do of an 'age of Dryden' or an 'age of

Adruson'. Lonely In rus lIfe, Johnson seems to me stIll

more lonely In rus Intellectual and moral eXIstence. He could

not even very much like the poetry of rus age WIth whIch

ad111lrers of the eIghteenth century now 'dunk It necessary

to be pleased'; If more than just to Colhns, he was no more

than severe to Gray. He hImself, I am convIllced, IS theIr

supenor as a poet, not III senSIbIlIty, not ill metrIcal

dextenty or aptness of phrase, but In a moral elevatlon Just

short of subhnuty.

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

Such writIng as Johnson's Lives of the Poets and lus essay on Shakespeare loses none of Its permanence from the con­

slderation that every generatlon must make Its own

appraisal of the poetry of the past, m the hght of the per­

formance of Its contemporanes and ImmedIate prede­

cessors. CntlCISm of poetry moves between two extremes,

On the one hand the cntIc may busy lumself so much with the Imphcatlons of a poem, or of one poet's work­

Imphcations moral, social, rehglOus or other-that the poetry becomes hardly more than a text for a dIscourse.

Such is the tendency of the morahsmg critics of the rune­teenth century, to wlnch Landor makes a notable exception.

Or If you stick too closely to the 'poetry' and adopt no

attitude towards what the poet has to say, you Wlll tend to

evacuate It of all sigmficance. And furthermore there 15 a

plnlosoplnc borderhne, wlnch you must not transgress too

far or too often, If you wish to preserve your standmg as a crinc, and are not prepared to present yourself as a plnlo­

sopher, metaphysician, soclOlog1st, or psychologist Instead.

Johnson, m these respects, IS a type of cntical integnty.

Withm his hmitations, he IS one of the great cnncs; and he is a great cnnc partly because he keeps Wlthin lus hmlta ..

tions. When you know what they are, you know where

you are. Considermg all the temptations to which one IS

exposed in judging contemporary WIlting, all the pre­

judlces which one IS tempted to mdulge in judgIng WIIters

of the immediately precedIng generatIon, I View Johnson's

Lives oj the Poets as a masterpIece of the Judiclal bench.

His style IS not so formally petfect as that of some other

prose writers of his time. It reads often hke the writing of

64

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

a mall who IS more habltuated to talk111g than to wrltmg;

he seems to dunk aloud, and III short breaths, rather than

m the long penods of the lustonal1 or the orator. HIs

cntlCISm IS as salutary agamst the dognlatlc excesses of the

eIghteenth century-m.ore llldulged In France than III

England-as It IS agamst exceSSIve adulanon of mdlVidual

poets wIth theIr faults as well as vIrtues. We shall have, III

the runeteenth century, several vaganes to contemplate, of

cntlcs who do not so much practise cntlCIS111 as make use

of It for other purposes For J olmson poetry was stIll poetry,

and not another dung. Had he lIved a generatIon later, he

would have been 0 bhged to look nlore deeply lllto the

foundatIOns, and so would have been unable to leave us an

example of what cntlclSlll ought to be for a CIVIlIsation

wluch, bemg settled, has no need, wlule It lasts, to enqulIe

mto the functions of ItS parts.

E 65 E.U I-

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

December 9th, 1932

I t IS natural, and In so rapId and superficIal a reVIew as trus mevitable, to consIder the cntIclsm of Wordsworth

and of Coleridge together. But we must keep ill rrund how very dIfferent were not only die men themselves, but the CIrcumstances and motives of the cOmpOSItIOn of their prmcipal crItical statements. Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads was wntten while he was snllin rus youth, and wlnle rus poetIc geruus stIll had much to do; Colendge wrote the Biographia Litteraria much later ill hfe, when poetry, except for that one bnef and toucrung lament for lost youth, had deserted lum, and when the dIsastrous effects of long dISSIpatIon and stupefactIon ofhts powers ill transcendental metaphysIcs were brmgmg Inm to a state of lethargY1 WIth the relatIon of ColerIdge's thought to subsequent theologIcal and pohtlcal development I am not here concerned. The Biographia IS our prmclpal docu­ment; and In connexion wIth that there IS one piece of lus formal verse which in Its pasSIonate self-revelatIon rIses almost to the height of great poetry. I mean Dejection: an Ode.

There was a ame when, though my path was rough, TIns joy within me dalhed wIth distress,

And all nusfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dream ofhappllless:

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

For hope grew round me, hke the twining vine,

And frUlts and folIage, not my own, seemed nune.

But now afihctlon bows me dnwn to earth:

Nor care I that they rob me of my mIrth;

But oh! each VISItatIOn

Suspends what nature gave me at my bIrth,

My shapmg SpUIt of ImagInatIOn. For not to think of what I needs must feel,

But to be stIll and patIent, all I can,

And haply by abstruse research to steal

From my own nature all the natural man­

Trus was my sale resource, my only plan.

Till that wruch suits a part mfects the whole,

And now is almost grown the habIt of my soul.

ThIS ode was wntten by Apnl 4th, 1802: the Bio­graphia Litteraria were not publIshed for fifteen years after

that. The hnes strIke my ear as one of the saddest of

confeSSIOns that I have ever read. When I spoke of Cole­

ndge as druggmg rumself WIth metaphysicS I was tmnkmg

senously of these Ins own words: 'haply by abstruse re­

search to steal from my own nature all the natural man'.

Coleridge was one of those unhappy persons-Donne, I suspect, was such another-of whom one mIght say, that

if they had not been poets, they mlght have made something of theIr hves, nnght even have had a career; or conversely,

that if they had not been mterested m so many thmgs,

crossed by such dIverse paSSIons, they lUlght have been

great poets It was better for Colendge, as poet, to read books of travel and exploratIon than to read books of

metaphysics and polItical econOlny. He dId genumely want

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

to read books of metaphysIcS and polItIcal economy, for he had a certam talent for such subjects. But for a few years

he had been VIsIted by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom tlus hackneyed Inetaphor IS better apphcable) and thenceforth was a haunted luan; for anyone who has ever

been VISIted by the Muse is thenceforth haunted. He had no vocatlOn for the relIgIOus lIfe, for there again somebody hke a Muse, or a lnuch Ingher beIng, IS to be ll1voked, he

was condemned to know that the httle poetry he had wntten was worth nlore than all he could do WIth the rest

of Ins hfe. The author of Biographia Litteraria was already a fumed man. Sometlmes, however, to be a 'ruIned man' IS

Itself a vocation. Wordsworth, on the other hand, wrote lus Preface, as I

have said, willIe in the plelutude of Ins poetIc powers and

while lus reputatIon was still only sustamed by readers of dlscernment. And he was of an OpposIte poetIC type to Colendge. Whether the bulk ofms genume poetIC acmeve­ment IS so much greater than ColerIdge's as It appears, is uncertaIn. Whether rus power and msplratlOn remamed

WIth lum to the end is, alas, not even doubtful. But W ords­worth had no ghastly shadows at hIS back, no Eumerudes

to pursue 111m; or If he dId, he gave no SIgn and took no notIce; and he went dronll1g on the stIll sad music of

mfirmlty to the verge of the grave. HIs illsplratlOn never

havmg been of that sudden, fitful and ternfymg bnd that VISIted ColerIdge, he was never, apparently, troubled by the conSClOusness of haVIng lost It. As Andre Glde's

Prometheus said, ill the lecture wInch he gave before a large auchence m Pans: II faut avoir un aigle. Coleridge

69

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

remamed. m contact WIth his eagle., Neither In detaIl of ~

hfe and interest were the two men surular-Wordsworth mdlfferent to books, Colendge the voraclOUS reader. But they had that In common wInch was more Important than

all dIfferences: they were the two most OrIgInal poetIc minds of theIr generatIOn. TheIr mfluence upon each other

was consIderable; though probably the Influence ofW ords­worth upon Colendge, durmg theIr bnef penod of llltl­

mate assoCIatiOn, was greater than that of Colendge upon Wordsworth Tms recIprocal mfluence would hardly have

been possIble to such a degree wIthout another Influence wInch held the two men together, and affected both of

them more deeply than eIther knew, the Influence of a great woman. No woman has ever played so Important a

part in the hves of two poets at once-I mean theIr poetlc

hves-as dId Dorothy Wordsworth. The emphasis upon the dIfferences of mlnd, tempera­

ment and character of the two men must be all the greater because theIr cntical statements must be read together. In

some respects there IS of course, as would be expected, a conSCIOUS dtfference of opmion. Wordsworth wrote his Preface to defend lus own maImer of WrItIng poetry, and Coleridge wrote the Biographia to defend Wordsworth's poetry; or ill part he dtd. I must confine myself to two pOilltS. One IS Colendge's doctrme of fancy and Imagma­non; the other IS that on wluch ColerIdge and Wordsworth

made common cause: theIr new theory of poetIc dIction. Let me take up the latter pOlnt first. In tlus matter of

poetIc mction, It IS at first very hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Wordsworth's poems had met wIth no

70

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

worse recepnon than verse of such novelty is accustomed to receIve I myself can remember a tIme when some questIon of 'poetIC dIctIOn' was In the air; when Ezra Pound Issued lus statement that 'poetry ought to be as well wntten as prose'; and when he and I and our colleagues were men­tioned by a wnter In The Morning Post as 'hterary bol­sheViks' and by Mr. Arthur Waugh (With a point wInch has always escaped me) as 'drunken helots' . But I thmk that

we belIeved that we were affinrung forgotten standards, rather than setting up new Idols.}W ordsworth, when he saId that rus purpose was 'to imit~te, and as far as pOSSIble, to adopt, the very language of men', was only saymg In other words what Dryden had saId, and fightmg the battle wruch Dryden had fought; and Mr. Garrod, m calhng attention to trus fact, seems to me intemperate In assertmg that Dryden had never Inade real to rumself'two VItal consideratIons: first, that such language must express passlOn, and secondly, that it must base Itself 111 Just 0 bser­vatIon'. Dryden among the shades ffilght medttate upon Mr. Garrod's conception of paSSIOn and observatIOn. And on the other hand, as has also been pomted out, first by Colendge lllmself In the Biographia, Wordsworth by no means worried himself to excess In obserVIng rus own prm­clples. 'The language of the tmddle and lower classes of socIety'lls of course perfectly proper when you are repre­sentmg dranlatically the speech of these classes, and then no other language IS proper; slnularly when you are represent­lUg dramatIcally the language of the upper classes; but on

lWhat was Wordsworth's conceptIon of the language of the upper classes of Soclety?

71

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

other occaSlOns, It is not the busIness of the poet to talk like any class of socIety, but lIke himself-rather better, We

hope, than any actual class, though when any class of socIety happens to have the best word, phrase or expletive for anythmg, then the poet IS entItled to It As for the cur­rent style of wntlng when the Lyrical Ballads appeared, It was what any style of wnting becomes when It falls lUto

the hands of people who cannot even be called medIO­CrltIes True, Gray "vas overrated. but then Johnson had COlne down on Gray wIth a deadlIer force than Words­worth could exert. And Donne has seemed to us, In recent years, as stnlong a peculIarly conversJtlonal style; but dId Wordsworth or Colendge acclaIm Donne? No, when It came to Donne-and Cowley-you wIll find that W ords­worth and Colendge were led by the nose by Samuel Johnson, they were Just as eIghteenth century as anybody, except that where the eIghteenth century spoke of lack of elegance the Lake poets found lack of paSSlOn. And much of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge IS

just as turgId and artIficIal and elegant as any eIghteenth century dIe-hard could wIsh. What then was all the fuss about?

There really was somethIng to make a fuss about. I do not know whether Professor Garrod has grasped It, but if so he seems to Ignore It, Professor Harperl, however, seems to have it by the nght lug. There IS a remarkable letter of Wordsworth's ill 1801 which he wrote to Charles James Fox 11l sendIng him a copy of the Ballads. You wIll find a long extract from this letter m Professor Harper's book

lIn Ius LIfe ofW ordsworth.

72

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

I quote one sentence. In commend1ng Ins poems to the

fasluonable pOhtlCIan'S attentlOl1 Wordsworth says:

'Recently by the spreadmg of manufactures through

every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage,

by workhouses, houses of Industry, and the mventlOn of

soup shops, etc., superadded to the mcreasmg dispropor­tlOn between the pnce of labour and that of the necessaries

of !tfe, the bonds of domest1c feehng among the poor, as

far as the mfluence of these clungs has extended, have been

weakened, and 1n Innumerable Instances entIrely destroyed.'

Wordsworth then proceeds to expound a doctrme wInch nowadays IS called dIstnbut!sln. And Wordsworth was not

merely takIng advantage of an opportunIty to lecture a

rather dlsreputable statesnlan and rouse !um to useful act1v­

Ity, he was senously explalillng the content and purpose of

lus poems: wIthout thIs preamble Mr. Fox could hardly be

expected to nlake head or tall of the IdIOt Boy or the saIlor's

parrot. You Inay say that tIllS publIc Splnt IS Irrelevant to

Wordsworth's greatest poems; nevertheless I beheve that

you WIll understand a great poem hke Resolution and Inde­pendence better If you understand the purposes and socIal

passions which anImated Its author; and unless you under­

stand these you WIll nnsread Wordsworth's hterary

CfltlClSm entIrely. IncIdentally, those who speak of Words­

worth as the ongmal Lost Leader (a reference wruch

Brownmg, as I remember, derued) should make pause and

consider that when a man takes polItICS and soclal affaIrs

senously the dIfference between revolutIOn and reactIon

may be by the breadth of a haIr, and that Wordsworth may

possIbly have been no renegade but a man who thought, so

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

far as he thought at all, for himself But It is Wordsworth's

socIal mterest that msplres IDS own novelty of form 111

verse, and backs up IDS exphclt remarks upon poetIc dIction;

and It IS really dus socIal mterest wIDch (conscIously or not)

the fuss was all about. It was not so llluch from lack of

thought as from warmth of feehng that Wordsworth

ongmally wrote the words 'the language of conversatIon

Ul Imddle and lower class socIety'. It was not from any re­

cantatIOn of polItIcal pnnciples, but from haVIng had It

brought to rus attentIon that, as a general hterary prmclple,

trus would never do, that he altered them. Where he wrote

'my purpose was to Imttate, and as far as pOSSIble, to adopt,

the very language of men' he was sayIng what no senous

critIC could dIsapprove.

Except on trus pomt of dIctIon, and that of 'choOSIng

mCIdents from common hfe', Wordsworth IS a most

orthodox cntIc. It IS true that he uses the word 'enthusIasm'

wruch the eIghteenth century dId not hke, but In the lnatter

of mtmeSlS he IS more deeply Anstotehan than some who

have almed at followmg Anstotle more closely. He says of the poet:

'To these quahtIes he has added a dISpOSItIOn to be affected more than other men by absent dungs as If they

were present; an ability of conjuring up In hunself paSSIons,

whtch are mdeed far from bemg the same as those produced

by real events, yet (especIally m those parts of the general

sympathy wIDeh are pleasIng and delIghtful) do luore

nearly resemble the paSSIOns produced by real events, than

anything wruch, from the motIons of their own mtnds

merely, other men are accustomed to feel III themselves.'

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Here IS the new version of ImitatIon, and I think that it

1S the best so far: 'Anstotle, I have been told, has saId, that Poetry IS the

most plulosopluc of all WritIng; It IS so: Its object IS truth, not mdividual and local, but general, and operatIve.'

I find that 'It IS so' veryexhtlaratmg. For my part, rather

than be parrotted by a hundred generatIOns, I had rather be neglected and have one man eventually come to my conclusIOns and say 'there IS an old author who found tms ont before I dId' .

Jwhen you find Wordsworth as the seer and prophet whose functIon It IS to Instruct and edIfy through pleasure,

as 1f tills were sOlnething he had found out for lumsel£, you may begIn to dunk that there IS sometlung m1t, at least for some kmd~ of poetry. SOlne portIons of dus enthusIasm I beheve Wordsworth cominunicated to Coleridge. But

Wordsworth's revolutIonary faIth was more vital to mm than It was to Colendge. You cannot say that It inspIred rus revolutlOn III poetry, but It canllot be d1sentangled frOln the motIves of hIS poetry. (Any radIcal change In poetIC

form IS hkely to be the symptom of some very much deeper change in socIety and In the IndivIduaL I doubt

whether the Impulse In Colendge would have been strong enough to have worked its way out, but for the example

and encouragement ofW ordsworth. I would not be under­stood as affirm1ng that revolutIonary enthusiasm IS the best

parent for poetry, or as JustIfying revolution on the ground that 1t WIll lead to an outburst of poetry-wInch would be

a wasteful, and hardly justifiable way of produclllg poetry. Nor am I IndulgIng 111 socIological ctltlcisln, wInch has to

75

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

suppress so much of the data, and whIch IS Ignorant of so

much of the rest. I only affirm that all human affaIrs are

mvolved WIth each other, that consequently all rustory ill­

volves abstractlon, and that m attemptmg to Wll1 a full understandmg of the poetry of a penod you are led to the

consideratlOn of subjects wInch at first sIght appear to have

lIttle bearmg upon poetry. These subjects have accordmgly

a good deal to do wIth the CntlCISm of poetry; and It IS such

subjects wruch make mtelhgible Wordsworth's InabIhty to

apprecIate Pope, and the Irrelevance of the metaphysIcal

poets to the Interest whIch he and Colendge had at heart.

WIth the foregomg observatlOns m mInd, let me turn to

consIder the great Importance, m the Biographia Litteraria, of the dIstInction between Fancy and ImagInatiOn already

touched upon, and of the defirutlon of Imaglllation gIven

111 a later passage. 'Repeated medItatIons led me fi,rst to

suspect . . . that Fancy and ImagInatIon were two dIstmet

and widely dIfferent facultIes, mstead of beIng, accordmg

to the general behef, eIther two names WIth one meanmg,

or, at furthest, the lower and Ingher degrees of one and the

same power.' In Chapter XIII he draws the followmg Im­

portant dIstmctIons:

'The ImagmatIon then I consIder eIther as pnmary, or

secondary. The Pnmary Imagmatton I hold to be the hvmg

power and pnme agent of all human perception, and as a

repetitIon m the fillite mmd of the eternal act of creation m

the mfimte I AM. The Secondary ImagInation I consIder as

an echo of the former, co-eXlstmg with the conSCIOUS WIll,

yet stIll as Identical WIth the pnmary In the kind of its

agency, and chffering only in degree, and m the mode of

76

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

its operation. It dIssolves, dIffuses, dissipates, in order to re­

create, or where tms process is rendered impossIble, yet

still at all events It struggles to ldeahse and to unIfy. It is

essentIally vital, even as all objects (as objects) arc essentially

fixed and dead. 'FANCY, on the other hand, has no other counters to

play wIth, but fiXItICS and dcfinItes. Thc fancy IS Indeed no

other than a mode of ll1enl0ry emancIpated from the order

of orne and space; whIle It IS blended wIth, and modIfied

by that empIrical phenolnenon of the wIll, whIch we

express by the word ChOIce. But equally WIth the ordmary

memory the Fancy must receive all ItS Inaterlals ready made

from the law of aSSocIatIon. ' I have read some of Hegel and FIchte, as' well as Hartley

(who turns up at any moment with ColerIdge), and for­

gotten It; of SchellIng I am entirely Ignorant at first hand,

and he IS one of those nUInerous authors whonl, the longer

you leave them unread, the less deSIre you have to read.

Hence It may he that I wholly faIl to appreCIate this passage. My mmd IS too heavy and concrete for any flight of abstruse

reasonmg. If, as I have already suggested, the dtfference be­

tween Imagmation and fancy anl0unts in practIce to no

more than the dIfference between good and bad poetry,

have we done more than take a turn round Robin Hood's

barD/ It IS only If fancy can be an ingredIent 111 good poetry,

and If you can show some good poetry wInch is the better

for It; It IS only If the distlllction 11lulnll1ates our immechate

preference of one poet over another, that it can be of use to

a practIcal mind lIke trune. Fancy Inay be 'no other than a

mode of memory emancIpated fronl the order of space and

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

tIme'; but It seems unWIse to talk of memory In conneXlOn with fancy and onut It altogether from the account of

Imagmation. As we have learnt from Dr. Lowes's Road to Xanadu (If we chd not know It already) memory plays a

very great part m ImagmatlOn, and of course a much larger

part than can be proved by that book; Professor Lowes

had only hterary remmlscences to deal wIth, and they are the only lund of rel.TI1l1lscence wruch can be fully traced

and identIfied: but how much more of memory enters mto creation than only our readmg ! Mr. Lowes has, I dunk,

demonstrated the Importance of lnstInctive and uncon ..

soous, as well as dehberate selectIon. Colendge's taste, at

one perIod of hfe, led rum first to read voraclOusly ill a

certam type of book, and then to select and store up certam

kInds of imagery from those books.1 And I should say that the mmd of any poet would be magnetIsed In Its own way,

to select automatically, mms readIng (from pIcture papers and cheap novels, mdeed, as well as senous books, and least

hkely from works of an abstract nature, though even these

are ahment for some poetic mmds) the matenal-an Image, a phrase, a word-which may be of use to rum later. And

this selecnon probably runs through the whole of lus

senSItive Me. There nnght be the expenence of a cruld of

ten, a small boy peermg through sea-water In a rock-pool,

lAnd by a nght appreclatlon The ClIcumstances of early explora­tlon might well snmulate the lmagmatlons of those who endeavoured to set down precisely what they had seen m such a way as to convey an accurate lID.preSSlOU to Europeans who had no experience of anythmg surular. They would often, naturally, stimulate the ImagInation beyond the perception, but It IS usually the accurate Images, the fidehty of wluch may sci1 be recognlsed, that are the most telling

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

and finchng a sea-anemone for the first tIme: the sImple expenence (not so simple, for an exceptlOnal cluld, as 1t

looks) might he dormant tn his mind for twenty years, and re-appear transformed tn some verse-context charged wIth great Imagmattve pressure. There IS so much memory In

Imagmation that If you are to dIstInguIsh between Imagma­tion and fancy In Colendge's way you must define the

dllference between memory tn ImagInatIOn and memory U1 fancy; and It IS not enough to say that the one 'dIssolves,

chffuses and dtssipates' the memories ill order to re-create, wlnlst the other deals wIth 'fiXItIes and defimtes'. Tms

distIDctlOn, In ItSelf, need not gIve you dIstmct ImaginatIOn and fancy, but only degrees of ImagInatiVe success. It would seem from Mr. Richards's notel that he IS almost as much

baffled by the passage which I have quoted, or at least by part of It, as I am. You have to forget all about ColerIdge's

fancy to learn anythIng from him about Imagmanon-as With AddIson-but from Colendge there IS a good deal to learn. I quote another passage, In the fonn m wluch Mr.

R.:tchards has abbreviated It: 'That synthetIC and magIcal power, to which we have

exclusIvely appropriated the name of ImagInatIon ... re­veals Itself In the balance or reconcIhatIon of opposite or dtscordant qualItIes . . . the sense of novelty and freshness,

With old and famlhar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever

awake and steady self-possession WIth enthUSIasm and feehng profound or vehement.' 'The sense of mUSIcal de­

light . . . Wlth the power of reducing multitude into IPrinciples of Literary Cnticism, p. 191

79

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

varIety of effect, and nlodlfying a senes of thoughts by some one predonnnant thought or feehng.'

What such descn ptlons are worth, frolll the P01llt of view of psychologIcal cntlclSln of to-day, can best be learnt from Mr. RIchards's book fronl whIch I have quoted them.

What IS my concern here IS a less profound matter, the

place of Wordsworth and Colendge In the lllstoncal pro~ cess of CrItlCIsm. You WIll have observed In the passage Just quoted a richness and depth, an awaleness of comphcatlOn

which takes It far out of the range of Dryden. This IS not

sImply because ColerIdge thought more profoundly than Dryden, though he dId. Nor aln I sure that ColerIdge

learned so much from German phIlosophers, or earher from Hardey, as he thought he dId; what IS best In hIs cpticism

seems to come from Ins own dehcacy and subtlety of InsIght as he reflected upon lus own expenence of WrItlng poetry. Of the two poets as cntlcs, It was Wordsworth who knew better what he was about: rus crltlcaiinsight, 1n trus one Preface and the Supplement, IS enough to gIve rum the htghest place. I do not assIgn lum thIs pOSitIOn because he cared about the reVIval of agnculture and the relation of productIOn and consumption, though such mterests are symptomatrc; there IS, m rus poetry and In his Preface, a profound spintual reVIval, an lllsplratloll communIcated rather to Pusey and Newman, to Ruskm, and to the great humarutarlans, than to the accredited poets of the next age~ Colendge, WIth his authonty due to his great readIng, probably chd much more than Wordsworth to brmg atten­

tron to the profundIty of the plnlosopluc problems mto which the study of poetry may take us. And the two men

80

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

together need no thIrd wlth thetn to Illustrate the 111lnd of

an age of consclOUS change. It IS not merely that they were

lllterested In a varIety of speculatIve subjects and of prac ...

tical matters of Inlpartance far theIr time, but that theIr

lllterests were Involved In e.lch other and the first famt

SIgn of such c0111phcatI0l1 appeared when AddIson derIved

lus theory of Imagmation 111 the arts froln the theOrIes of

Locke. In Wordsworth and Colendge we find not merely

a vanety of Interests, evcn of paSSIonate Interests; It IS all

one passlOn expressed through thenl all- poetry was for

them the expressIOn of a totalIty of unIfied mterests.

I have trIed to exillbit thc cnticism of Dryden and of

Jolmson, 111 tIllS very bnef reVIew, In Its approprIateness to

theIr penods of Instory, penods when there was, for the

purpose of hterary determInation, a stasI's. And to exlubit

that of Wordsworth and Colendge as the cnticism of an

age of change. Even If It be true that change IS always mak­

mg ready, underneath, dunng a stable perIOd, and that a

penod of change contaIns witlun Itself the elements of

hnutatIOn willch wIll bnng It to a halt, yet some stabilis­

ations are more deeply founded than others. It IS WIth

Matthew Arnold that we come to a penod of apparent

stabIhsatIOn wInch was shallow and prelnature.

NOTE TO CHAPTER IV

ON MR. HERBERT READ'S APPRAISAL OF THE

POETRY OF WORDSWORTH

There is a VIew of Enghsh poetry, already of some

antIqUIty, wluch conSIders the roam hue of Enghsh poetry

F 81 E.U.P.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

from Mllton to Wordsworth, or from perhaps even before

Milton, as an un(ortunate interlude durmg which the Eng­

hsh muse was, If not besIde herself, at least not ill posseman

of her faculties. I am sorry to find tIns view, wInch Was largely Wordsworth's own, re-stated and confirmed by Mr. Herbert Read. Mr. Read IS one of a few contempo­

ranes, hke Mr. Richards, wIth whom I almost never feel

qUlte happy 111 disagree111g; but when, In Ins adffilrable small essay, Form in Modern Poetry, he WrItes as follows, I can only exclaim, 'What are we commg to?':

"The mam traditIOn of Enghsh poetry . . . begms wIth

Chaucer and reaches ItS final culmmatIOn m Shakespeare.

It IS contradIcted by most French poetry before BaudelaIre,

by the so-called claSSIcal phase of Enghsh poetry culmmat­mg in Alexander Pope, and by the late Poet Laureate. It was

re-estabhshed m England by Wordsworth and ColerIdge,

developed m some degree by Browmng and Gerard Man­ley HopkIns, and m our own day by poets hke WIlfred Owen, Ezra Pound and T. S. Ehot.' I

To some extent I am 111 agreement; that IS, I dare say that

my valuation of the earher poets, poet for poet, would apprOXImate closely enough to Mr. Read's; and my adtnlranon for the late Poet Laureate is as moderate as

rus, though I suspect a shght WIlfulness In bnnging rum into thIs context. But I observe first that Mr. Read goes Wordsworth one better and excludes MIlton; and when a

poet has done as big a Job as Milton, is it helpful to suggest that he has just been up a bhnd alley? And is Blake too

minor a poet to count? As for French poetry, Mr. Read saves the situation WIth the quahfication 'mose, so that I

82

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suppose BaudelaIre's master Racine just squeaks in. And is it not arbItrary to assert that the' classIcal phase' of Enghsh

poetry (If we are to employ that term at all) culminates in

Pope? Surely Johnson belongs to It, and, wIth a touch of sennmentahsnl and even Iuawlashness, Gray and Colhns; and where would Landor be but for the classical tradItion?

I hasten to add Mr. Read's next remark: 'The dIstlnction IS

I th b " 1 I" d " " Thi not mere y at etween C aSSlca an ronlantlC. S

divlsion cuts across In a dtfferent dIrection.' I dunk that I understand trus qualIficatIon, and If I understand I agree; nevertheless Mr. Read seenlS to have been USIng the term 'classical' m two dIfferent meanIngs. Mr. Read's dIviSIons

are too clear-cut to leave Iny Inind at ease. He considers

that the poetIc process of a mind lIke Drydcn's and that of a mmd hke Wordsworth's are essentially dtvcrse; and he says roundly of Dryden' s art, t Such art is not poetry.' Now

I cannot see why Dryden's and Wordsworth's lninds should

have worked any more dIfferently froin each other than

those of any other two poets. I do not believe that any two poets' minds work quite in the salue way, so far as we can

know enough about the matter for 'workmg' to mean any­thing at all; I do not beheve that even the sanle poet's mInd need work 1ll the same way In two dtfferent but equally good poems; but there must also be somethlllg in common

in the poetIc process of all poets' nunds. Mr. Read quotes,

m support of his contention, a passage from the Atmus Mirabilis which I have not gIven:

'The ComposItIOn of all poems IS or ought to be of wit;

and WIt ill the Poet, or wit writing (If you WIll give me leave to use a School distinctlon), is no other than the faculty of

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

imagmatlon in the Writer; wInch, hke a rumble SpaUlel,

beats over and ranges through the field of Memory, till It sprmgs the Quarry It hunted after; or, WIthout metaphor,

wInch searches over all the Memory for the SpecIes or Ideas

of those dungs wInch It designs to represent. Wit written is that wInch IS well defined, the happy result of Thought,

or product of Imagmatlon.' I should have thought tIns merely a happy descrIptIon, m

the language avatlable at Dryden's time, and at a less pro­

found level of mSlght than that of Colendge or W ords­

worth at theIr best, of the same sort of process that the latter

were attempting to descnbe m language nearer to our own.

But Mr. Read says No, what Dryden IS talkIng about IS

somethmg different: It IS wit written, not poetry. Mr. Read

seems to me to have fallen Into the error which I mentlOned

m the text, of thmkmg that Dryden IS only talkIng of hIS

own kmd of poetic composltlOn, and that he was qUlte

Incapable of appreclatmg Chaucer and Shakespeare. Yet

all that I myselfhave to go upon, ill the end, IS the bnd of

el1Joyment that I get from Dryden's poetry. The dIfference of oplillon lnlght be put In a metaphor.

In reVlewmg Enghsh poetry, Mr. Read seems to charge

lnmself With the task of castmg out devils-though less

drastically than Mr. Pound, who leaves notlllllg but a room

well swept and not garrushed. What I see, ill the htstory of English poetry, is not so much daemoruc posseSSIOn as the

, sphttmg up of personahty. If we say that one of these

parttal personahtles which may develop m a natlOnal mmd

IS that which marufested Itself ill the period between Dry­den and Johnson, then what we have to do IS to re-tnteg-

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

rate It: otherwIse we are lIkely to get only succeSSIve alter­

natIons of persollahty. Surely the great poet IS, among

other dungs, one who not merely restores a tradttlOn wInch

has been In abeyance, but one who 111 hIs poetry re-tWInes

as many straYIng strands of tradItion as posslble~ Nor can

you Isolate poetry frool evcrytlul1g else In the Ins tory of a

people; and It 15 rather strong to suggest that the EnglIsh

mmd has been deranged ever S111ce the tlole of Shakespeare,

and that only recently have a few fitful rays of reason

penetrated its darkness. If the lualady IS as chromc as that,

It IS pretty well beyond cure.

SHELLEY AND KEA TS February 17th, 1933

It would appear that the revolutIon effected by W ords­worth was very far-reaclung Indeed. He was not the first

poet to present himself as the mspired prophet, nor Indeed 1S tlus qUlte Wordsworth's case. Blake may have pretended, and wIth sonle clalln, to have penetrated mystenes of heaven and hell, but no claIm that Blake tn1ght make seems to descend upon the 'poet' m general; Blake sImply had the VISIons, and made use of poetry to set them forth. Scott, and Byron In Ius more popular works, were merely socIety entertaIners. Wordsworth IS really the first, ill the unsettled state of affaIrs llllus tIme, to annex new authonty for the poet, to meddle with SOCIal affairs, and to offer a

new kind of rehglOus sentIment wruch It seemed the pecuhar prerogat1ve of the poet to Interpret. SInce Matthew Arnold made Ins SelectIons from Wordsworth's poetry, It has become a commonplace to observe that Wordsworth's true greatness as poet IS independent of Ins opllllons, of lus theory of dIctIon or oflus nature-prulosophy, and that It 15

found In poems in wluch he has no ulterior motIve what­ever. I am not sure that this CrItIcal eclect1cIsm cannot go too far; that we canjudge and enjoy a man's poetry wlule leavmg wholly out of account all of the things for wluch he cared deeply, and on behalf of wmch he turned hls

poetry to account. If we dIsmlsS Wordsworth's mterests

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

and behefs, just how much, I wonder, remaIns? To retam

them, or to keep thenl ill IDlnd Instead of delIberately ex­

trudmg them ill preparatlOn for enjoymg IllS poetry, IS that

not necessary to appreCIate how great a poet W Otdsworth

really is? ConsIder, for m<;tance, one of the very finest poets

of the first part of the 111l1eteenth century: Landor He IS an

undoubted master of verse and prose; he IS the author of at

least one long poem wruch deserves to be nluch more read

than It IS, but rus reputatIon has never been such as to brIng lum mto companson wIth Wordsworth or wIth eIther of

the younger poets wIth whom we have now to deal. It IS

not only by reason of a handful of poenlS or a number of

Isolated hues expressIve of deeper emotIon than that of

whIch Landor was capable, that we gIve Wordsworth rus place; there IS sometrung 1l1tegral about such greatness, and

somethmg sigillficant 111 Ius place 111 the pattern of Ius tory,

with which we have to reckon And 111 estlmat1l1g for our­

selves the greatness of a poet we have to take Into account

also the history ofllIs greatness. Wordsworth IS an essentIal

part oflustory; Landor only a Inagnificent by-product.

Shelley both had VIews about poetry and nlade use of

poetry for expressmg VIews. WIth Shelley we are struck

from the begmnmg by the nUlllber of dllngs poetry IS ex­

pected to do, from a poet who tells us, 111 a note 011 vcgeta­

riamsm, that 'the orang-outang perfectly resenlbles man

both m the order and the number of Ills teeth', we shall not

know what not to expect. The notes to Queen Mab ex­press, It IS true, only the VIews of an mtelhgent and enthusI­

astIC schoolboy, but a schoolboy who knows how to wnte;

and throughout rus work, wInch IS of no s111all bulk for a

SHELLEY AND KEATS

short hfe, he does not, I thmk, let us forget that he took rus ldeas senously. The Ideas of Shelley seem to DIe always to be Ideas of adolescence-as there IS every reason why they should be. And an enthuslasDl for Shelley seems to me also to be an affaIr of adolescence: for lllost of us, Shelley has marked an Intense penod before Inatunty, but for how many does Shelley remaIn the companion of age? I confess that I never open the volume of hIs poeins SImply because I want to read poetry, but only WIth SOlne specIal reason for reference I find Ills Ideas repellent; and the dIfficulty of separatmg Shelley fronl hIs Ideas and behefs IS still greater than WIth Wordsworth. And the bIOgraphical Interest wInch Shelley has always excIted makes It dIfficult to read the poetry WIthout relne111bermg the Inal1: and the man

/

was humourless, pedantIc, self-centred, and sometImes almost a blackguard. Except for an occaslOnal flash of shrewd sense, when he IS speakmg of someone else and not concerned WIth Ius own affaIrS or WIth fine wnt111g, his letters are msufferably dull. He Inakes an astol11slung con­tra~t WIth the attractIve Keats. On the other hand, I adnut that Wordsworth does not present a very pleasmg person­ahty eIther, yet I not only enjoy Ius poetry as r cannot enJoy Shelley's, but J el1Joy It InDre than when I first read It. I can only fUll1ble (abatmg n1y prejUdICeS as best I can) for reasons why Shelley's abuse of poetry does me more VIOlence than Wordsworth's.

Shelley seems to have had to a !ugh degree the unusual faculty of pasSlO11ate apprehension of abstract Ideas. Whether he was not SOlnetlmeS confused about IllS own feelmgs, as we may be tempted to beheve when confounded

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

by the plulosophy of Epipsychidion, is another matter. I do not mean that Shelley had a metaphysIcal or pluIosoplucal

mind; his nund was In some ways a very confused one: he was able to be at once and with the same enthusIasm an eighteenth-century ratlOnahst and a cloudy Platolllst. But abstractions could eXCIte m him strong emotIon. HIs views remamed pretty fixed, though hts poetIc gIft matured. It IS

open to Us to guess whether lus ll1lnd would have matured

too; certamly, ill his last, and to my lllind greatest though

unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, there IS eVIdence not

only of better wntmg than III any preVIOUS long poem,

but of greater WIsdom:

'Then what I thought was an old root that grew

To strange dIstortIon out of the hillSIde,

Was Indeed one of those (sic) deluded crew

And that the grass, which methought hung so wIde

And wlute, was but lus tlun dIscoloured haIr

And that the holes he vaInly sought to lude

Were or had been eyes ... '

There IS a precIsion of Image and an economy here that IS

new to Shelley. But so far as we can Judge, he never qUIte

escaped from the tutelage of Godwm, even when he S3;W

through the humbug as a man; and the weIght of Mrs.

Shelley must have been pretty heavy too. And, takIng Ius

work as It is, and WIthOUt vain conjectures about the future,

we may ask. IS It possIble to Ignore the \deas' In Shelley's poems, so as to be able to enjoy the poetry?

Mr. I. A. Rtchards deserves the credIt of havIng done the

pIOneer work tn the problem of Behef ill the enjoyment of

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

poetry; and any methodical pursUIt of the problem I must leave to rum and to those who are qualIfied after him. But Shelley raIses the questIon In another form than that in w1nch It presented Itself to Dle III a note on the subject w1nch I appended to an essay on Dante. There, I was con­cerned wIth two hypothetlcal readers, one of whom accepts the phtlosophy of the poet, and the other of whonl rejects It; and so long as the poets In questIon were such as Dante and Lucretius, trus seenled to cover the lllatter. I am not a Buddhtst, but SOlne of the early BuddInst scriptures affect me as parts of the Old Testalncnt do; I can still enjoy FItzgerald's Omar, though I do not hold that rather smart and shallow VIew of life. But some of Shelley's VIews I posltlvely dIslIke, and that hanlpers my enjoyment of the poems in which they occur; and others seeln to me so puenle that I cannot enjoy the poems In wInch they occur. And I do not find It possIble to skip these passages and satIsfy myself wIth the poetry In wmch no proposItion pushes Itself forward to daIl11 assent. What complIcates the problem still further IS that 111 poetry so fluent as Shelley's there IS a good deal which IS just bad jingling. The follow­lllg, for Instance:

'On a battle-trumper's blast I Bed hither, fast, fast, fast, MId the darkness upward cast. From the dust of creeds outworn, From the tyrant's banner torn, GatherIng round me, onward borne, There was nungled many a cry­Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory!'

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Walter Scott seidoin fell as low as tlus, though Byron more

often But m such lInes, harsh and untunable, one IS all the

more affronted by the ideas, the Ideas wInch Shelley bolted

whole and never assImIlated, vIsIble In the catchwords of

creeds outworn, tyrants and pnests, wluch Shelley em­

ployed WIth such reiteratlOn. And the bad parts of a poem can contannnate the whole, so that when Shelley rIses to

the heIghts, at the end of the poenl:

'To suffer woes wluch Hope dunks Infin1te;

To forgIve wrongs darker than death or nIght;

To defy Power, whIch seeins oinnipotent;

To love, and bear, to hope tIll Hope creates

From ItS own wreck the tIung It contemplates. '

hnes to the content of wInch bebef IS neIther gIven nor

demed, we are unable to enJoy them fully. One does not

expect a poem to be equally sustaIned throughout; and ill

some of the most successful long poelns there IS a relatlOn

of the more tense to the more relaxed passages, wInch IS

Itself part of the pattern of beauty. But good hues amongst

bad can never gIve more than a regretful pleasure. In read.

mg Epipsychidion I am thoroughly gravelled by lInes lIke:

'True love ill tills dIffers from dross or clay,

That to ruVlde IS not to take away ...

I never was attached to that great sect

Whose doctnne IS, that each one should select

Out of the crowd, a mlstress or a fnend

And all the rest, though fatr and WIse, commend To cold oblivlon ... '

SHELLEY AND KBATS

so that when I come, a few hues later, upon a lovely image

like.

'A VISIon hke Incarnate Apnl, warnIng

WIth smIles and tears, Fro~t the anatomy

Into hIs SUlnlner grave,'

I am as much shocked at finding It in such IndIfferent COln­

pany as pleased by findmg It at all. And we InLlst adnut that

Shelley's finest long poeIns, as well as 1>ome of IllS worst,

are those 111 wInch he took IllS Ideas very senously.1 It was

these Ideas that blew the 'fadl11g coal' to hfe; 110 more than;

WIth Wordsworth, tan we Ignore them WIthout getting

sometlnng no more Shelley's poetry than a wax effigy

would be Shelley.

Shelley said that he dlshked didactlc poetry, but rus own

poetry IS clllefly dIdactIc, though (In fmrness) not exactly m

the sense 111 wluch he was USIng that word. Shelley's pro­

fessed VIew of poetry IS not russln111ar to that of W ords­

worth. The language In wInch he clothes It 111 the 'Defence

of Poetry' IS very magluloqucnt, and WIth the exception of

the magmficent image wInch Joyce quotes somewhere In

Ulysses ('the mind In creatIon IS as a fachng coal, wluch

some lllvlsible mfiucncc, hke an Inconstant Wind, awakens

to transItory brightness') it seelns to Ine an InferIor pIece of

WrItl11g to W ordswort1{' s great preface. He says other fine

thIngs too; but the follOWIng IS more sigluficant of the way

in wInch he relates poetry to the socIal activIty of the age.

IHe dId not, for Instance, appear to take his Ideas very seriously in The Witch of Atlas, whlch, wlth all Its charm, I clunk we may dlSlruss asa tnfle

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

4The most unfailmg herald, companion and follower of the awakemng of a great people to work a beneficIal change

in opmion or mstltUtlOn, is poetry. At such perIods there is an accumulatlon of the power of commurucatmg and re­

celvmg Intense and Impassioned conceptlOl1S respectIng

man and nature. The persons In whom trus power resldes

may often, so far as regards many portions of thelr nature,

have little apparent correspondence with that splnt of good of wInch they are the mlmsters. But even wlulst they deny

and abjure, they are yet cOlnpelled to serve, the power wInch is seated on the throne of their own soul.'

I know not whether Shelley had In mmd, In IllS reserva ..

tIons about 'the persons In whom tlns power resldes', the

defects of Byron or those of Wordsworth; he lS hardly

hkely to have been contemplating his own. But tills IS a

statement, and is elther true or false. If he IS suggestmg that

great poetry always tends to accompany a popular 'change

m oplnlon or mstttutlOn', that we know to be false. Whether

at such penods the power of' commurucatIng and recelving

intense and 1mpassioned conceptions respectIng man and nature' accumulates IS doubtful; one would expect people

to be too busy m other ways. Shelley does not appear, ill

tlns passage, to Imply that poetry Itself helps to operate

these changes, and accumulate this power, nor does he

assert that poetry IS a usual by-product of change of these bnds; but he does affirm some relation between the two;

and ill consequence, a parncular relation between his own poetry and the events of lus own time, from wInch It

would follow that the two throw hght upon each other.

TIns is perhaps the first appearance of the ktnetic or revolu~

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

cionary theory of poetry; for Wordsworth dtd not general­

ise to this point. We may now return to the questlon how far It IS pos-

sible to enjoy Shelley's poetry without approving the use to wInch he put It, that is, without shanng IllS VIews and

sympatlues. Dante, of course, was about as thoroughgoing a chdactlClst as one could find; and I have nlaintalned else­where, and still maintain, that it is not essentIal to share

Dante's behefs in order to enJoy IllS poetry.l If In thIs In­

stance I may appear to be extcndIng the tolerance of a bIassed mind, the example ofLucretlus wIll do as well: one

may share the essential behefs of Dante and yet enjoy LucretlUs to the full. Why then should thIs general in­demmty not extend to Wordsworth and to Shelley? Here Mr. Rlchards comes very patly to our help:2

'ColerIdge, when he ren1arkcd that a "wIlhng suspenSIon

of disbehef" accompanlcd much poetry, was notmg an

Important fact, but not qUIte in the happiest terms, for we are neither aware of a dIS belIef nor voluntarIly suspendmg

ltin these cases. It IS better to say that the question ofbehef or dtsbelief, in the Intellectual sense, never arises when we are readmg well. If unfortunately It does arIse, eIther through the poet's fault or our own, we have for [he

moment ceased to be reading and have become astronomers,

lMr. A. E. Housman has affirmed (The Name altd Nature of Poetry, p. 34) that 'good relIgIOUS poetry, whether ill Keble or Dante or Job, 18

hkely to be most Justly apprec1ated al1d most dlscnmmatmgly rehshed by the undevout'. There IS a hard atom of truth In tlns, but 1f taken hterally It would end m nonsense.

!Practical Criticism, p. 277.

9S

SHELLEY AND KEATS

or theologIans, or 1110rahsts, persons engaged m qUIte a

dIfferent type of aCtlVIty.'

We may be pennltted to Infer, III so far as the dIstaste of

a person hke myself for Shelley's poetry IS not attnbutable

to Irrelevant prejudIces or to a slmple bhnd spot, but IS due

to a pecuhanty 111 the poetry and not III the reader, that It IS

not the presentatlon of behefs wInch I do not hold, Of-to

put the case as extrell1ely as posslble-ofbehefs that eXCIte

my abhorrence, that Inakes the dIfficulty. Stl1lless IS It that

Shelley IS dehberately Inaklng use of hIS poetIc gIfts to

propagate a doctnne, for Dante and Lucretius did the same

tiling. I suggest that the pOSItIOn IS sOlnewhat as follows.

When the doctr111e, theory, behef, or 'vIew of hfe' pre­

sented m a poenl IS one wInch the Irund of the reader can

accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of

experIence, It Interposes no obstacle to the reader's enJoy­

ment, whether It be one that he accept or deny, approve or

deprecate When It IS one wInch the reader rejects as

chIldish or feeble, It may, for a reader of well-developed

mmd, set up an almost complete check. I observe 1ll passmg

that we may dIstmgUlsh, but WIthout precisIOll, between

poets who employ theIr verbal, rhythnuc and Imagmative

gIft m the serVIce of Ideas willch they hold passlOnately,

and poets who employ the Ideas wInch they hold with more

or less settled convictlon as nlatenal for a poenl; poets may

vary mdefinitely between these two hypothetIcal extremes,

and at what pomt we place any partIcular poet must remam

mcapable of exact calculatIon. And I am Inchned to thmk that the reason why I was mtoXlcated by Shelley's poetry

at the age of fifteen, and now find It almost unreadable,

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

is not so much that at that age I accepted his ideas, and have since come to reject them, as that at that age 'the ques­tion ofbehef or dlsbehef', as Mr. RIchards puts It, did not

ame. It IS not SO much that thirty years ago I was able to

read Shelley under an IllusIon wInch experience has dis­

Slpated, as that because the questIOn of behef or dIsbelief did not arIse I was in a much better positIon to enJoy the poetry. I can only regret that Shelley did not hve to put Ius

poetIc gifts, wInch were certainly of the first order, at the serVice of more tenable beliefs-wluch need not have been, for my purposes, behefs nlore acceptable to me.

There IS, however, more to the problem than that. I was struck by 'a sentence In Mr. Aldous Huxley's IntroductIOn

to D. H. Lawrence's Letters. 'How bItterly', he says of

Lawrence, 'he loathed the Wilhehn-Meisterish VIew of love as an educatlon, as a means to culture, a Sandow-exercIser for the soul!' PrecIsely; Lawrence in my opinion was nght;

but that view runs through the work of Goethe, and If you mshke It, what are you gOIng to do about Goethe? Does 'culture' requrre that we nlake (what Lawrence never did, and I respect him for It) a dehberate effort to put out of

mmd all our convIctions and passionate behefs about hfe

when we SIt down to read poetry? If so, so much the worse for culture. Nor, on the other hand, may we dIstingUIsh, as

people sometImes do, betweell the occasions on which a particular poet is 'being a poet' and the occaSIOns on which he IS 'bemg a preacher'. That is too facile. If you attempt to emt Shelley, or Wordsworth or Goethe in trus way, there

is no one point at wInch you must stop rather than another, and what you get in the end by this process IS something

G 97 E.U.P.

SHELLBY AND KEATS

which is not Shelley, or Wordsworth or Goethe at all,

but a mere unrelated heap of charming stanzas, the deb!ls of poetry rather than the poetry Itself. And by using, or

abusmg, tms prInCIple of IsolatIon you are in danger of

seekmg from poetry some Illusory pure enjoyment, of

separatmg poetry from everytlllng else In the world, and cheatmg yourself out of a great deal that poetry has to give

to your development. Some years ago I trIed to make the pOInt, in a paper on

Shakespeare, that Dante possessed a 'plulosophy' In a sense 111 wmch Shakespeare held none, or none of any Importance.

I have reason to beheve that I dId not succeed In maktng the

point clear at all. Surely, people say, Shakespeare held a 'phtlosophy', even though It cannot be formulated; surely

our readmg of Shakespeare gIves us a deeper and WIder understandmg ofhfe and death. And although I was anXIOUS

not to gIve such an Impression, I seem to have gIven some readers to think that I was thereby estImatIng the poetry of Shakespeare as of less value than Dante's. People tend to

beheve that there IS Just some one essence of poetry, for whIch we can find the formula, and that poets can be ranged according to theIr posseSSIon of a greater or less quantIty of tills essence. Dante and LucretIUS expounded exphcIt phtlosophtes, as Shakespeare did not. ThIs SImple dlstmct!on is very clear, but not necessarIly hIghly Im­portant. What IS Important is what dIstIngUIshes all of these poets from such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Goethe. And here agam I thInk that Mr. Richards can throw some hght on the matter.

I beheve that for a poet to be also a plulosopher he would

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

have to be virtually two men; I cannot think of any example of this thorough schIzophrenia, nor can I sec any­dung to be gaIned by It: the work IS better performed in­side twO skulls than one. Colendge IS the apparent exalnple, but I beheve that he was only able to exerCIse the one

activity at the expense of the other. A poet Il1ay borrow a pInlosophy or he Inay do wIthout one. It is when he pInlosopmses upon rus own poetic InsIght that he IS apt to go wrong. A great deal of the weakness of modern poetry IS

accounted for 111 a few pages of Mr. RIchards's short essay, Science and Poetry; and although he has there D. H. Law­rence under speCIfic exaInIllatloll, a good dcal of what he says apphcs to the Romantic generation as well. 'To dIS .... nngUlsh" he says, 'allll1tultiOll of an enlotion froll1 an in­tultlon by It, is not always easy.' I belIeve that Wordsworth was InclIned to the same error of wInch Mr. RIchards finds Lawrence gUllty. The case of Shelley IS rather dif­ferent: he borrowed ideas-which, as I have saId, IS per­fectly legItImate-but he borrowed shabby ones, and when

he had got them he muddled them up w1th his OW1l1l1tUl­tions. Of Goethe perhaps it is truer to say that he dabbled ill both plulosophy and poetry and nlade no great success of elther; rus true role was that of the nlall of the world and sage-a La Rochefoucauld, a La Bruyere, a Vauvellargues.

On the other hand, I should conSIder it a false silnphfica­tlon to present any of these poets, or Lawrcnce of whom Mr. Richards was spcalang, sitllply a'i a case of individual error, and leave 1t at that. It is not a WIlful paradox to assert that the greatness of each of these writers IS Indissolubly attached to lus practice of the error, of his own speCIfic

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variation of the error. Their place In history, their import­

ance for theu own and subsequent generations, IS involved

mit; tlus 15 not a purely personal matter. They would not

have been as great as they were but for the hlUitatlOns whIch prevented them from beIng greater than they were

They belong wIth the numbers of the great heretIcs of all nmes. This glVes them a slgmficance qUIte other than that

of Keats, a singular figure In a vaned and remarkable period.

Keats seems to me also a great poet. I am not happy about Hyperion: It contams great hnes, but I do not know

whether It IS a great poem. The Odes-especially perhaps the Ode to Psyche-are enough for hts reputatIon. But I

am not so much concerned wIth the degree of Ius greatness as WIth Its land; and Its land IS mamfested more clearly m hts

Letters than m hIs poems; and In contrast WIth the lands we have been reviewmg, It seeins to me to be much more the hnd of Shakespeare. 1 The Letters are certaInly the most

notable and the most Important ever wntten by any

English poet. Keats' 5 egotism, 5uch as it IS, is that of youth whIch tlme would have redeemed. H1s letters are what

letters ought to be; the fine thmgs come m unexpectedly, neither mtroduced nor shown out, but between tnae and trIfle. Hls observatlOns suggested by Wordsworth's Gypsey, m a letter to Batley of 1817, are of the finest quahty of CrItlCIsm, and the deepest penetration:

'It seems to me that If Wordsworth had thought a htde

11 have not read Mr Murry's Keats and Shakespeare' perhaps I say no more than Mr Murry has sald better and more exhaustively 1ll that book. I am sure that he has medItated the matter much more deeply than I have.

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SHELLEY AND KEATS

deeper at that moment, he would not have wntten the

poem at all. I should judge It to have been written in one of the most comfortable Inoods of Ius hfe-It IS a kmd of

sketchy Intellectual landscape, not a search for truth.' And in a letter to the saIne correspondent a few day~

later he says: 'In passmg, however, I must say one thIng that has

pressed upon me lately, and Increased my Hmmhty and capablhty of subnusslon-and that IS tlus truth-Men of

Gemus are great as certaln ethereal chenucals operatmg on the Mass of neutral Intellect-but they have not any mdl­vlduahty, any determined character-I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men ofPower.'l

This IS the sort of remark, which, when made bya man so young as was Keats, can only be called the result of genius. There IS hardly one statement of Keats about poetry, wInch, when considered carefully and wIth due allowance for the dIfficulties of communication, will not be found to be true; and what IS more, true for greater and nlore mature

poetry than anythIng that Keats ever wrote. But I am being tempted into a descant upon the general

brilliance and profunchty of the observations scattered through Keats's letters, and should probably be tempted further into remarking upon their merIt as models of cor­respondence (not that one should ever take a model m letter-wntmg) and theIr revelation of a charmmg per­sonahty. My design, in this very narrow frame, has been

IMr. Herbert Read quotes tlus passage in his Form In Modem Poetry, but pursues Ius speculatIons to a pomt to wInch I would not wuhngly followhnn.

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only to refer to them as evidence of a very dIfferent kmd of

poetIc mind than any of those I have just been considermg. Keats's saymgs about poetry, thrown out in the course of

pnvate correspondence, keep pretty close to mtultion; and

they have no apparent beanng upon his own times, as he

himself does not appear to have taken any absorbing mterest m pubhc affaIrs-though when he dId turn to such matters,

he brought to bear a shrewd and penetrating intellect. Wordsworth had a very dehcate sensibIlIty to social Me

and social changes. Wordsworth and Shelley both theonse.

Keats has no theory, and to have formed one was Irrelevant to his mterests, and ahen to his mind. If we take either

Wordsworth or Shelley as representatIve of rus age, as

belllg a VOIce of the age, we cannot so take Keats. But we cannot accuse Keats of any withdrawal, or refusal; he was merely about rus bUSIness. He had no theones, yet ill the

sense appropnate to the poet, In the same sense, though to a lesser degree than Shakespeare, he had a 'prulosopluc'

mmd. He was occupIed only with the highest use of poetry; but that does not imply that poets of other types may not nghdy and sometimes by oblIgatIon be concerned about the other uses.

t02

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Even if the dehght we get from Arnold's writings, prose

and verse, be moderate, yet he is in some respects the most

satIsfactory man of letters of his age. You remember the

famous judgement which he pronounced upon the poets of

the epoch whIch I have just been considenng; a Judgement

which, at its ume, must have appeared starthngly mde­

pendent. 'The Enghsh poetry of the first quarter of dllS

century,' he says In hIs essay on The Function of Criticism, 'WIth plenty of energy, plenty of creatIve force, dId not

know enough.' We should be nght too, I think, if we added

that Carlyle, Rusk1n, Tennyson, Browrung, w1th plenty of

energy, plenty of creauve force, had not enough WIsdom.

The1r culture was not always well-rounded; the1r know­

ledge of the human soul was often partial and often shallow.

Arnold was not a man of vast or exact scholarship, and he

had ne1ther walked 1n hell nor been rapt to heaven, but

what he dId know, of books and men, was in its way well ..

balanced and well-marshalled. After the prophetIC frensles

of the end of the eIghteenth and the beginnmg of the rune­

teenth century, he seenlS to come to us sayIng: 'TillS poetry

IS very fine, It IS opulent and careless, It IS sometllnes pro­

found, It IS hIghly ongmal; but you w1ll never estabhsh and mamtam a tradluon If you go on in thIs haphazard way.

There are mmor VIrtues whIch have flOUrIshed better at

other times and In other countries: these you must gIve

heed to, these you must apply, in your poetry, In your

prose, m your conversatlOn and your way of hVIng; else

you condemn yourselves to enjoy ~nly fitful and transIent

bursts ofhterary bnllia,nce, and you WIll never, as a people,

a natIon, a race, have a fully formed tradItIon and person-

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

ality.' However well-nourished we may be on previous

hterature and previous culture, we cannot afford to neglect

Arnold. I have elsewhere tried to point out some of Arnold's

weaknesses when he ventured into departments of thought

for wmch his mmd was unsuIted and ill-eqUIpped. In

plnlosophy and theology he was an undergraduate; in rehglOn a Phtlistlne. It IS a pleasanter task to define a man's hmttations withtn the field In whtch he is qualified; for

there, the definition ofhnutatlOn may be at the same time a

preelSlon of the writer's excellences. Arnold's poetry has

little techrucal interest. It is acadeffilc poetry in the best sense; the best frUIt which can Issue from the promise shown

by the pnze-poem. When he IS not SImply bemg htmself, he IS most at ease in a master's gown: Empedocles on Etna is one of the finest acadenuc poems ever wntten. He tned

other robes which became him less well; I cannot but thmk of Tristram and Iseult and The Forsaken Merman as charades.

Sohrab and Rustum is a fine piece, but less fine than Gebir, and in the claSSIcal hne Landor, WIth a finer ear, can beat

Arnold every tlme. But Arnold IS a poet to whom one readIly returns. It IS a pleasure, certamly, after aSsoclatmg

WIth the riff-raff of the early part of the century, to be in the company of a lnan qui sait se conduire; but Arnold IS

somethmg more than an agreeable Professor of Poetry. With all hts fastIdIousness and superciliousness and offici­ality, Arnold is more Intimate WIth us than Brownmg, more intimate than Tennyson ever IS except at moments, as in the passlonate flights m In Memoriam. He is the poet

and CrItIC of a penod of false stablht¥, Alllns Wrltlllg In the

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

kind of Literature and Dogma seems to me a valiant attempt to dodge the issue, to mediate between Newman and Huxley; but ~his poetry, the best of It, is too honest to employ any but ms genuIne feehngs of unrest, lonehness and dIssatIsfaction. Some of lns hIDltatlons are mamfest enough. In his essay on The study of Poetry he has several paragraphs on Burns. and for an Enghshman and an Enghshman of Ius ttme, Arnold understands Bums. very well. Perhaps I have a partlahty for small oppreSSlve natlonahtles hke the Scots that makes Arnold's patronismg manner lrntate me; and certatnly I suspect Arnold of help­ing to fix the wholly mlstaken notIon of Burns as a smgular untutored Enghsh dJ.alect po_et, lD.S.tead of as a decadelltre­presentatlve of a great ahen trarution. But he says (takIng occasion to rebuke the country 111 which Burns hved) that 'no one can deny that It IS of advantage to a poet to deal WIth a beautlful world'; and tms remark strIkes me as be­traymg a hmitatlOn, It IS an advantage to manland m general to hve m a beautiful world; that no one can doubt. But for the poet IS It so Important? We Inean all sorts of thmgs, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet IS not, to have a beautlful world WIth wruch to deal: It IS to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugIiness~ 'to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

The VISlOn of the horror and the glory was denIed to Arnold, but he knew something of the boredom. He speaks much of the 'consolatory' power of Wordsworth's poetry, and it IS m connexion WIth Wordsworth that he makes many ofms Wisest observattons about poetry.

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

'But when will Europe's latter hour Agam find Wordsworth's heahng power? Others wIll teach us how to dare, And agamst fear our breast to steel: Others wIll strengthen us to bear­But who, all who, wIll make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly-But who, hke hIm, wIll put It by?'l

Hts tone is always of regret, of loss of faIth, lUstabllity, nostalgIa:

'And love, Iflove, of happIer men. Ofhapplet: men, for they, at least, Have dreamed two human hearts mIght blend In one, and were through faIth released From IsolatIon without end Prolonged, nor knew, although no less Alone than thou, thelr lonehness.'

Tlus IS a famihar enough sentIment; and perhaps a more robust comment on the situatIOn IS, that If you don't hke It,

you can get on with it; and the verse Itself IS not lughly chstingUlshed. Marguerite, at best, IS a shadowy figure, neither very paSslOnately desired nor very closely observed, a mere pretext for lamentation. His personal emonon 18

mdeed most convincing when he deals WIth an 1mpersonal

II do not quote these hnes as good verse They are very carelessly Wrltten The fourth hue is particularly clumsy, the SIXth has a bathetic repetltlon. To 'put by' the cloud of human descmy IS not a fehctcous expresslOn. The dashes at the end of two !mes are a symptom of weak­ness, hke Arnold's irntating use of Itahclsed words.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

subject. And when we know his poetry, we are not sur ..

prlsed that in his criticism he tells us httle or nodung about

ms expenence of wntlng it, and that he 1S so httle concerned

with poetry from the maker's pOInt of view. One feels that

the WrItmg of poetry brought rum httle of that excItement,

that joyful loss of self m the workmansInp of art, that ill­

tense and transItory rehef wInch comes at the moment of

completlOn and 1S the chief reward of creatIve work. As

we can forget, m readmg rus Crltlclsm, that he IS a poet

mmself, so it IS all the more necessary to rem1nd ourselves

that rus creative and rus cntical Wrltlngs are essentially the

work of the same man. The same weakness, the same

necessIty for sometrung to depend UPQll,-which make lum

an acadeIDlc Eoet Inake rum an academIC cntiC.

From tIme to tnne, every hundred years or so, It IS

desirable that some CrIt1C shall appear to reV1ew the past ~lf

our hterature, and set the poets and the poems 1n a new

order. ThIs task IS not one of revolutlOn but of readJust­

ment. What we observe 1S partly the same scene, but ill a

chfferent and more dIstant perspectIve; there are new and

strange objects m the foreground, to be drawn accurately ill

proportlon to the more famlhar ones wruch now approach

the honzon, where all but the most eminent becOIne m­

VISIble to the naked eye. The exhaustlve crinc, arlned with

a powerful glass, Will be able to sweep the d1stance and gam

an acquamtance WIth nunute objects in the landscape WIth

wruch to compare mmute objects close at hand; he will be able to gauge mcely the posltlOn and proportion of t4e

objects surrounding us, in the whole of the vast panorama.

Trus metaphoncal fancy only represents the 1deal; but

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

Dryden, Johnson and Arnold have each performed the task as well as human fraIlty WIll allow. The majorIty of

cr1tics can be expected only to parrot the opiruons of the

last master of cntlcIsnl; anl0ng more Independent mmds a

perIod of destructIon, of preposterous over-estImatIon, and

of succeSSIve fashions takes place, untIl a new authority

comes to Introduce some order. And It IS not merely the

passage of tIme and accumulatIon of new artIstIc experIence,

nor the IneradIcable tendency of the great majorIty of men

to repeat the opInions of those few who have taken the

trouble to clunk, nor the tendency of a mmble but myopic

mmonty to progenerate heterodoXies, that makes new

assessments necessary. It IS that no generatIOn is Interested in

Artmquite the same way as anyother; each generation, hke

each mdivIdual, brIngs to the contemplanon of art Its own

categones of apprecIatIOn, makes Its own demands upon

art, and has its own uses for art. 'Pure' artistic appreclanon

15 to my thInkIng only an Ideal, when not merely a figment,

and must be, so long as the appreCIation of art IS an affaIr of

hnuted and transient human bemgs eXlstmg m space and

time. Both arnst and audience are hnuted. There IS for each

time, for each artist, a kind of alloy required to make the

metal workable mto art; and each generatIon prefers Its

own alloy to any other. Hence each new master of CrIti­

CIsm performs a useful serVIce merely by the fact that his errors are of a dtfferent kmd from the last; and the longer

the sequence of cntics we have, the greater amount of cor-

rection is pOSSIble. I

It was deSIrable after the surpnsmg, varIed and abundant contnbution of the Romantic Penod that tills task of

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

criticism should be undertaken again. N otbing that was

done ill tlus period was of the nature of what Arnold was

able to do, because that was not the tIme in wruch It could

be done. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazhtt, De QUIncey, dId work

of great Importance upon Shakespeare and the Ehzabethan

dramatists, and dIscovered new treasure wruch they left for

others to calculate. The mstruments of Arnold's time appear now, of course, very antIquated: Ius was the epoch

of Ward's English Poets, and of The Golden Treasury, bIrth­

day albums and calendars WIth a poetical quotatlOn for

each day.jAmold was not Dryden or Johnson; he was an

Inspector of Schools and he became Professor of Poetry.

He was an educator. The valuatIon of the RomantIc poets,

ill academIC CIrcles, is stlll very largely that wIDch Arnold

made. It was rIght, It was Just, It was necessary for Its time; and of course It had Its defects./It IS tInged by lus own un­

certaInty, lus own apprehensIons, rus own VIew of what it

was best that hIS own tlme should beheve; and It IS very

much influenced by Ins religious attitude! HIs taste is not comprehenSIve. He seems to have chosen, when he could­

for much of Ins work 15 occasional-those subjects in con­

neXIOn WIth wInch he could best express Ius VIews about

morals and SOCIety: Wordsworth-perhaps not qUIte as

Wordsworth would have recognised himself-Heme,

AmIel, Guerm. He was capable of learning from France and

from Germany. But the use to wruch he put poetry was

hmIted; he wrote about poets when they prOVIded a pretext for his sermon to the Bntish pubhc; and he was apt to thmk

of the greatness of poetry rather than of Its genumeness.

There IS no poetry which Arnold experIenced more

lIO

MATTHEW ARNOLD

deeply than that of Wordsworth; the hnes which r quoted

above are not so much a critIcism of Wordsworth as a

testlIDorual of what Wordsworth had done for him. We

may expect to find in the essay on Wordsworth, if any­

where, a statement of what poetry meant to Arnold. It IS

in Ins essay on Wordsworth that occurs Ills famous de­

firution: 'Poetry is at bottom a cnticism ofhfe.' At bottom:

that IS a great way down; the bottom IS the bottom. At the

bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those

cannot bear to look at for long; and it IS not a 'criticism of

hfe'. If we mean hfe as a whole-not that Arnold ever saw

life as a whole-from top to bottom, can anythmg that we

can say of it ultimately, of that awful mystery, be called

cnttcIsm? We brIng back very lIttle from our rare descents,

and that IS not CntlCISln. Arnold might Just as well have saId that Chnstian worship IS at bottom a critIcIsm of the

TrinIty. We see better what Arnold's words amount to

when we recogruse that his own poetry IS deCIdedly critIcal

poetry. A poem hke Heine's Grave IS CrItIcIsm, and very fine

critiCIsm too; and a kind of critICISm wIDch IS Jusnfied be­

cause It could not be made In prose. SometImes Arnold's

critiCIsm IS on a lower level:

'One morn, as through Hyde Park we walked,

My friend and I, by chance we talked,

Of Lessing' s fanled Laocoon.'1

lIt may be sald of Amold's mferIor work, as was sald of that of an InferIor poet, that he faggoted rus verses as they fell, And If they rhymed and rattled, all was well. Of course we do not Judge Arnold as a poet by such effUSions as thiS, but we cannot be blamed for formmg a lower opiruon of hiS capaclty for self-criocism. He need not have printed them.

lIT

MATTHEW ARNOLD

The poem about HeIne IS good poetry for the same

reason that 1t 15 good CrIt1cism: because He1ne IS one of the

personae, the masks, behmd which Arnold IS able to go

through rus performance. The reason why some Cflticism

15 good (1 do not care to generahse here about all CrItICIsm)

IS that the CrItic assumes, In away, the personahty of the

author whom he CrItICIses, and through trus personality IS

able to speak WIth rus own voice. Arnold's Wordsworth is

as much hke Arnold as he IS hke Wordsworth. SometImes a

CrItIc may choose an author to CrItICIse, a role to assume, as

far as pOSSIble the antIthesis to rumself, a personahty whlch

has actuahsed all that has been suppressed ill hinlself; we can

sometimes arrIve at a very satIsfactory IntImacy with our

anti-masks.

'The greatness of a poet', Arnold goes on to say, 'Ites ill

rus powerful and beautIful application of Ideas to hfe.' Not

a happy way of puttlllg It, as If Ideas were a lotion for the

mflamed skm of suffermg humanIty. But It seems to be

what Arnold thought he was dOIng. He presently quahfies

dus assertion by pointmg out that 'morals' must not be

mterpreted too narrowly:

'Morals are often treated ill a narrow and false fashIOn;

they are bound up WIth systems of thought and behef

wInch have had thetr day; they are fallen mto the hands of

pedants and profeSSIOnal dealers; they grow ttresome to some of us.'

Alas! for morals as Arnold conceived them; they are

grown still more t1reso~e. He then remarks sIgmficantly m

speakmg of the 'w ordswortluans':

'The W ordsworcluans are apt to pratse him for.the wrong

112

MATTHEW ARNOLD

thmgs, and to lay far too much stress upon what they call

lus plulosophy. Hls poetry IS the reahty, rus p1ulosophy-so

far, at least, as It may put on the form and habIt of a

"SCIentIfic systell1 of thought", and the more that It puts

them 011-1S the IllusIon. Perhaps we shall one day learn to

make this propositIon general, and to say. Poetry IS the

reahty, plulosophy the 11luslOn.'

Tills seems to me a stnkIng, dangerous and subversIve

assertion. Poetry is at bottom a CrIticIsm of hfe; yet pInlo­

sophy IS llluslOn; the reahty is the critIcIsm of hfe. Arnold

IUlght have read LeSSIng's famed Laocoon with a VIew to

dlsentanghng his own confusions.

We must remember that for Arnold, as for everyone

else, 'poetry' meant a partIcular selectIon and order of poets.

It meant, as for everyone else, the poetry that he hked, that

he re-read; when we COlne to the pOInt of making a state­

ment about poetry, It IS the poetry that sticks m our mmds that weIghts that statement. And at the same tIme we

notice that Arnold has come to an Op1lllOn about poetry

chfferent from that of any of rus predecessors. For W ords­

worth and for ~helley poetry was a verucle fot one land of prulosophy or another, but the phllosophy was somethmg beheved m. For Arnold the best poetry supersedes both

rehgIon and plulosophy. I have tned to Indtcate the results

of this conjuring trIck elsewhere.1 The most generahsed

form of my own VIew IS SImply tIns: that nothIng in tlus

world or the next IS a substitute for anythmg else, and If you find that you must do wIthout something, such as rehglous falm or phtlosopluc hehe£, then you must just do Wlthout It.

1 'Arnold and Pater', In Selected Essays.

H 113 E.U.P.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

I can persuade myself, I find, that some of the dungs that I can hope to get are better worth havIng than some of the

thmgs I cannot get; or I may hope to alter myself so as to

want dIfferent dungs; but I cannot persuade nlyself that It IS the same desires that are satisfied, or that I have m effect the same trung under a dIfferent nalne.

A French fnend...said of the late York Powell of Oxford: 'II etait aussi tranquille dans son manque de foi que Ie mystique dans sa croyance.' You could not say that of Arnold; lus

charm and rus mterest are largely due to the painful posi­

tIon that he occupied between faIth and rusbehe£ LIke

many people the vanisillng of whose rehgious faith has left behInd only habIts, he placed an exaggerated emphasIs upon

morals. Such people often confuse morals with theIr own good habIts, the result of a sensIble upbnnging, prudence, and the absence of any very powerful temptatIon; but I do

not speak of Arnold or of any partIcular person, for only God knows. Morals for the saInt are only a prehmmary matter; for the poet a secondary matter. How Arnold finds morals m poetry IS not clear. He tells us that:

'A poetry of revolt agamst moral ideas is a poetry of revolt agamst life; a poetry of llldtfference towards moral Ideas IS a poetry of IndIfference towards life,' but the statement left In suspenslOn, and WIthout Arnold's tIlus­

tratmg It by examples of poetIC revolt and poetIc m­difference, seems to have httle value. A httle later he tells us why Wordsworth IS great:

'Wordsworth's poetry IS great because of the extra­

ordinary power WIth wInch Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us ill the SImple

114

MATTHEW ARNOLD

primary affectlOlls and duties, and because of the extra­ordmary power with wInch, In case after case, he shows us tlusJoy, and renders It so as to make us share It.'

It IS not clear whether 'the simple prImary affectIOns and

dutIes' (whatever they are, and however chstmgwshed

from the secondary and the complex) is meant to be all expansIOn of 'nature', or another joy st.l.8.Ii:radded: I rather think the latter, and take 'nature' to mean the Lake DIS­

trict. I am not, furthermore, sure of the meanmg of the con­junctlOn of two quite dIfferent reasons for Wordsworth's greatness: one beIng the power wIth wmch Wordsworth

feels the JOY of nature, the other the power by wmch-. he makes us share it. In any case, it IS defimtely a commumca: han theory, as any theory of the poet as teacher, leader, or priest IS bound to be. One way of testIng It IS to ask why other poets are great Can we say that Shakespeare's poetry IS great because of the extraordInary power wIth wmch Shakespeare feels estimable feehngs, and because of the extraordmary power wIth which he makes us share them?

I enJoy Shakespeare's poetry to the full extent of my capaCIty for enjOYIng poetry; but I have not the shghtest approach to certatnty that I share Shakespeare's feehngs; nor am I very much concerned to know whether I do or not. In short, Arnold's account seems to me to err ill puttmg the enlphasls upon the poet's feehngs, instead of upon the poetry. We can say that in poetry there IS com­mUl11Cation from writer to reader, but should not proceed from trus to trunk of the poetry as bemg pnmanly the vehicle of conlmurucatlOn. Communlcanon may take place, but will explaIn nothmg. Or Arnold's statement may

lIS

MATTHEW ARNOLD

be cnticised In another way, by asking whether W ords­

worth would be a less great poet, If he felt With extra­

ordmary power the horror offered to us In nature, and the

boredom and sense of restrlctlOn In the sImple pnmary

affectIOns and dutIes? Arnold seelns to tlunk that because , as he says, Wordsworth 'deals With more of life' than

Burns, Keats and Heine, he IS deahng WIth more of moral

Ideas. A poetry whIch IS concerned With moral Ideas, It

would appear, IS concerned WIth lIfe; and a poetry con­

cerned WIth lIfe IS concerned WIth moral Ideas.

ThIS IS not the place for dISCUSSing the deplorable moral

and relIgIOus effects of confusmg poetry and morals In the

attempt to find a substItute for relIgIous faith. What con­

cerns me here, IS the disturbance of our lIterary values In

consequence of It. One observes tIns In Arnold's CrItICIsm.

It IS easy to see that Dryden underrated Chaucer; not so

easy to see that to rate Chaucer as highly as Dryden dtd

(m a penod in wInch CrItlCS were not laVIsh of superlatIves)

was a tnumph of objectIVIty for ItS tIme, as was Dryden's

consistent dlfferentIation between Shakespeare and Beau­

mont and Fletcher. It IS easy to see that Johnson underrated

Donne and overrated Cowley; it IS even pOSSIble to come

to understand why. But neIther Johnson nor Dryden had

any axe to grmd; and In theIr errors they are more con­

~ than Arnold. Take, for instance, Arnold's opUllon of

Ch~ucer, a poet who, although very dtfferent from Arnold,

was not altogether defiCIent m high senousness. FIrst he

contrasts Chaucer WIth Dante: we admit the inferIOrIty,

and are almost convmced that Chaucer IS not serious

enough. But IS Chaucer, m the end, less serious than

ll6

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Wordsworth, with whom Arnold does not compare him?

And when Arnold puts Chaucer below Franc;ols Villon,

although he IS Ul a way rIght, and although It was htgh tlnle

that somebody In England spoke up for Vll1on, one does

not feel that the theory of ' hIgh senousness' IS In operatIOn.

That IS one of the troubles of the CrItIC who feels called upon

to set the poets In rank: If he IS honest WIth hIs own seIHi­

blhty he must now and agaIn VIolate lus own rules of ratmg.

There are also dangers anslng from beIng too sure that one

knows what 'genuIne poetry' IS. Here IS one very pOSItIVe

pronouncement:

'The dIfference between genmne poetry and the poetry

of Dryden, Pope and all theIr school, IS bnefly tlus: theIr

poetry IS conceIved and composed m theIr WIts, genume

poetry IS conceived and composed ill the soul. The dIf­

ference between the two bnds of poetry IS Immense. '1

And what, we wonder, had Arnold-

'For ngorous teachers seIzed rus youth

And purged its faIth, and tnmmed Its fire,

Showed 111m the mgh wmte star of Truth,

There bade rum gaze, and there aspIre; Even now theIr wruspers pIerce the gloom:

What dost thou In trus hving tomb?'

what had a man whose youth was so rIgorously seIzed and

purged at Rugby, to do WIth an abstract entity hke the

Soul? 'The dtfference between. the two lands of poetry is

lPractlcally the same dlstinctlon as that of Arnold IS mamtamed, though wlth more subtlety and persuaSIveness, by Mr. Housman moo Name and Nature of Poetry . A newer and more radIcal classwcanon to the same effect lS that of Mr. Herbert Read already quoted.

117

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Immense.' Dut there are not two kinds of poetry, but many

bnds; and the dIfference here 1S no more Immense than

that between the land of Shakespeare and the bnd of

Arnold. There IS petulance In such a judgement, arrogance

and excess of heat. It was JustIfiable for Colendge and

Wordsworth and Keats to depreCIate Dryden and Pope, in

the ardour of the changes wluch they were busy about;

but Arnold was engaged 1n no revolutlOn, and lus short­

s1ghtedness can only be excused.

I do not mean to suggest that Arnold's conception of the

use of poetry, an educator's VIew, vItIates lus CrItiCIsm. To

ask of poetry that it glve rehgious and philosopluc satIs­

faction, wlule deprecatmg plulosophy and dogmatIc

religIOn, IS of course to embrace the shadow of a shade.

But Arnold had real taste. HIs preoccupations, as I have

said, make rum too exclusIvely concerned wlthgreat poetry,

and wlth the greatness of It. HIs VIew of MIlton IS for thls

reason unsatlsfymg. But you cannot read lus essay on The Study of Poetry wlthout bemg convlnced by the fehclty of

his quotatlOlls: to be able to quote as Arnold could IS the

best eVldence of taste. The essay IS a classic m EnglIsh

CntlC1sm: so much IS saId in so lIttle space, WIth such

economy and with such authOrIty . Yet he was so conSC10US

of what, for rum, poetry was for, that he could not alto­

gether see It for what 1t IS. And I am not sure that he was

rughly SenSltlve to the musIcal quahttes of verse. HIs own

occaslOnal bad lapses arouse the susp1cion; and.~o far as I

can recollect he never emphasises tms vIrtue of poetlc style,

tlu.s fundamental, m rus CrItlclsm. What I call the 'auditory

Imagmanon' IS the feeling for syllable and rhythm, pene-

118

MATTHEW ARNOLD

ttatmg far below the conSCIOUS levels of thought and feel­

mg, lllvlgoratmg every word; sl11kmg to the most prlIni­

rive and forgotten, returnIng to the OrIgm and bringing somethmg back, seekIng the beginrung and the end. It works through mearungs, certamly, or not wIthout Inean­

mgs m the ordInary sense, and fuses the old and obhterated

and the trIte, the current, and the new and surprIsmg, the

most anCIent and the most CIVIlIsed mentahty. Arnold's notIon of 'hfe', In Ins account of poetry, does not perhaps

go deep enough. I feel, rather than observe, an Inner uncertamty and lack

of confidence and conVIctIon In Matthew Arnold: the con­

servatIsm which SprIngs from lack of faIth, and the zeal for

reform whIch sprIngs from dlshke of change. Perhaps, lookmg Inward and findIng how htde he ha.d to support lnm, looking outward on the state of SOCIety and Its tendenCIes, he was sonlewhat dIsturbed He had no real

sereruty, only an Impeccable demeanour. Perhaps he cared

too much for CIVIlIsatIon, forgettmg that Heaven and Earth shall pass away, and Mr. Arnold WIth them, and there IS only one stay. He IS a representatIve figure. A man's

theory of the place of poetry IS not mdependent of Ins VIew

ofhfe In general.

II9

THE MODERN MIND March 17th, 1933

There IS a sentence In Mantain's Art and Scholasticism wruch occurs to me In this context: 'Work such as

PIcasso's', he says, 'shows a fearful progress In self-con­sciousness on the part of paInting.'

So far I have drawn a few lIght sketches to mrucate the changes In the self-consclOusness of poets thinkmg about poetry. A thorough hIstory of trus 'progress m self-con­sClOusness' In poetry and the critIcism of poetry would have lands of crlt1clSln to consIder wruch do not fall Wlthm the narrow scope of these lectures: the Iustory of Shakespeare CrItIcIsm alone, m wruch, for Instance, Morgann's essay on the character of Falstaff, and Coler1dge's Lectures on Shakespeare would be representatIve moments, would have to be considered m some detaIl. But we have observed the notable developnlent In self-consciousness ill Dryden's Prefaces, and In the first senous attempt, which he made, at a valuation of the Enghsh poets. We have seen rus work In one dIrectIon contInued, and a method perfected, by Johnson l11lus careful eStlmatlOn of a number of poets, an estlmate arnved at by the apphcation of what are on the whole admlrably consIstent standards. We have found a deeper insIght into the nature of the poetic actiVIty ill re­marks scattered through the wntings of Colendge and m

III

THE MODERN MIND

the Preface of Wordsworth and in the Letters of Keats; and

a perceptIon, stIll immature, of the need to elucidate the

social function of poetry in Wordsworth's Preface and In

Shelley's Defence. In the cnticism of Arnold We find a

contmuatlOn of the work of the Ronlantic poets with a

new appraIsal of the poetry of the past by a method wInch,

lackmg the precislOn of Jolmson's, gropes towards wIder

and deeper conneXlOns. I have not wIshed to exhIbIt thls

'progress In self-consclOusness' as beIng necessanly progress wIth an assoclatlOn of higher value. For one thIng, It cannot

be wholly abstracted from the general changes m the human

trund In rustory; and that these changes have any teleo­

logIcal sIgmficance IS not one of my assumptlOns.

Arnold's InSIstence upon order In poetry accordmg to a

moral valuatlOn was, for better or worse, of the first

importance for hIs age. When he IS not at his best he

obVIOusly falls between two stools Just as rus poetry IS too

reflectIve, too rummatIve, to rIse ever to the first rank, so

also IS hIs crItIcism. He IS not, on the one hand, qUIte a pure

enough poet to have the sudden illUnlInatlOns whIch we

find ill the CrItIcism ofW ordsworth, Colendge and Keats;

and on the other hand he lacked the mental dlsciphne, the

paSSlOn for exactness In the use of words and for consIstency

and contlnmty of reasorung, whIch dIstInguIshes the phllo­

sopher. He sometImes confuses words and meanmgs:

neIther as poet nor as prulosopher should he have been

satIsfied WIth such an utterance as that 'poetry 1S at bottom

a CntIClsm of hfe'., A more profound 1ns1ght Into poetry

and a more exact use of language than Arnold's are re­

quired. The cnncal method of Arnold, the assumptIons of

122.

THE MODERN MIND

Arnold, remained valid for the tr:st of Ins cC'ntury. In quit~ diverse developments. it is thc cndd'itn of Anmld that sets the tone: Walter Pater, Arthur Symous, Addington Sy­monds, Leshe Stephen, F. W. H. Myerst George Sailltsbury -all the more emincIlt crincal names of the time bear Witness to It.

Whether we agree or not WIth any or all of his con­clusions, whether we adnllt or deny dlat Ius method is adequate, we must admIt that the work ()f Mr. 1. A. RIchards WIll have becn of cardmal importance in the lustory of literary criticism. Even if his cnticism proves to

be entIrely on the wrong track, even if this modern 'sclf­consclOusness' turns out to be only a blind alley, Mr. Rtchards wlll have dOlle something ill accelerating the exhaustIon of the possibIlities. He WIll have helped in~ directly to dIscredIt the criticism of persons qualified neIther by sensibllity nor by knowledge of poetry) from whIch we suffer daily. There IS some hope of ,greater c1amy; we should begin to learn to distinguish the apprecia­tIon of poetry from theorising about poetry, and to know when we are not talkmg about poetry but about sometlung else suggested by it. There are two elements in Richards's scheme, both of considerable importance for its ultimate standing, of which I have the gravest doubts but wllh wInch I am not here concerned: his theory of Value and' rus theory of Education (or rather the theory of EducatIon assumed 111 or imphed by his attItude in Practical Criticism). As for psychology and hngUlStlCS, that is Ius field and not mine. I am more concerned here with what seem to me to be a few unexanuned assumptlons that he has made. I do

THE MODERN MIND

not know whether he sull adheres to certam assertIOns made

m Ins early essay Science and Poetry; but I do not understand

that he has yet made any publIc 1110dlp.catlOn of them. Here

IS one that IS ill my mlnd

'The most dangerous of the SCIences IS only now be­

g111l1lng to come mto actlOn. I am tlunla.ng less of Psycho­

analysIs or of BehavlOunsm than of the whole subject

wInch mcludes them. It IS very probable that the Hmden­

burg Lme to wInch the defence of our tradItIons retIred as a

result of the onslaughts of the last century wIll be blown up

In the near future. If tIns should happen a mental chaos such

as man has never expenenced may be expected. We shall

then be thrown back, as Matthew Anlold foresaw, upon

poetry. Poetry IS capable of savIng US .... '

I should have felt completely at a loss In thIs passage, had

not Matthew Arnold turned up; and then It seemed to me

that I knew a httle better what was what. I should say that

an affirmation hke this was lughly charactenstic of one type

of modem mmd. For one of the thIngs that one can say

about the modem mmd IS that It comprehends every

extreme and degree of opilllOn. Here, from the essay, Art and Scholasticism, wInch I have already quoted, IS Mr. Maritam:

'It IS a deadly error to expect poetry to provIde the super­

substantIal nOUrIshment of man.'

Mr. Mantam IS a theologIan as well as phIlosopher, and

you may be sure that when he says 'deadly error' he IS ill

deadly earnest. But If the author of Anti-Moderne IS hardly

to be conSIdered a 'modern' man, we can find other

VarIetIes of opimon. In a book called The Human Parrot,

124

THE MODERN MIND

Mr. MontgOlnery Belgton has two essays, one called Art and Mr. Maritaln and the other What is Critt'cism, from

whIch you wIll learn that neIther Mantam nor RIchards

knows what he IS talkIng about. Mr. RIchards further malll­

tams that the expenence of poetry is not a mystIcal revela­

non, and the Abbe Henn Bremond,1111 Prayer and Poetry, IS

concerned wIth telllllg us In what bnd and degree It IS. On

this pomt Mr. Belgl0n IS apparently In accord wIth Mr.

Richards. And we may be WIse to keep m trund a remark of

Mr. Herbert Read ill Form in Modern Poetry: 'If a hterary

cntIc happens to be also a poet ... he IS lIable to suffer

from dIlemnlas whIch do not trouble the plulosopluc calm

ofms more prOSaiC colleagues.'

Beyond a behef that poetry does somethIng of Import­

ance, or has something of Importance to do, there does not

seem to be much agreement. It IS Interestmg that In our

time, wInch has not produced any vast number of Important

poets, so many people-and there are many more-should

be asklng questIOns about poetry. These problems are not

those wInch properly concern poets as poets at all; If poets

plunge Into the discussion, it IS probably because they have

lnterests and CUrIOSItIes outSIde of Wtltlllg poetry. We

leed not smnmon those who call themselves Humanists

(for they have for the most part not been pnmanly )ccupled wIth the nature and functIon of poetry) to bear

WItness that we have here the problem of relIgIOUS faIth

md ItS SubstItutes. Not all contemporary cntIcs, of

lWhile preparmg thls book for press I learn wIth great regret of the ~bbe Bremond's untimely death It IS a great pIty that he could not lave hved to complete the Histoire du sentIment religieux en France

IZ5

THE MODERN MIND

course, but at least a number who appear to have httle else

in common, seem to consIder that art, speCIfically poetry,

has sometlung to do wIth rehgIOn, though they dIsagree as

to what tIllS sometrung may be. The relationshIp IS not

always enVIsaged so morahstlcally as It was by Arnold, nor

so generally as in the statement by Mr. RIchards wInch I

quoted. For Mr. BelgIOn, for Instance,

'An outstandmg example of poetic allegory IS ill the fmal

canto of the Paradiso, where the poet seeks to gIVe an

allegoncal account of the BeatIfic VIsIon, and then declares

lus efforts vaIn. We may read tIllS over and over agam, and

m the end we shall no more have had a revelatIOn of the

nature of the VISIOn than we had before ever we had heard

of eIther It or Dante.'

Mr. BelgIOn seems to have taken Dante at his word.

But what we expenence as readers IS never exactly what the

poet experienced, nor would there be any pOInt In ItS bemg,

though certamly It has some relatIon to the poet's expen­

ence. What the poet experIenced IS not poetry but poetIC

materIal; the wntmg of the poetry is a fresh 'experIence'

for lum, and the readIng of It, by the author or anyone

else, IS another thIng sull. Mr. BelgIOn, In denyIng a theory

which he attrIbutes to Mr. Mantaill, seems to me to make

his own nustakes; but it IS a rehgion-analogy wIDch IS in questIon. Mr. RIchards IS much occupIed WIth the rehgIOus

problem simply ill the attempt to aVOId It. In an appendIX

to the second edItIOn of Principles of Literary Criticism he has

a note on my own verse, wruch, being as favourable as I could deSIre, seems to me very acute. But he observes that

Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio 111UtnUla.tes my 'perSIstent

126

THE MODERN MIND

concern with sex, the problem of our generatIon, as re­

ligIon was the probiein of the last.' I readuy ad1ll1t the

Importance of Canto XXVI, and It was shrewd of Mr.

RIchards to notice It; but In rus contrast of sex and rehglOn

he makes a d1stinctIOn wlllch IS too subule for me to grasp.

One mIght tlunk that sex and relIgIOn were 'problellls' lIke

Free Trade and Inlpenal Preference; It seems odd dlat the

human race should have gone 011 for so many thousands of

years before It suddenly realIsed that relIgion and sex, one

nght after the other, presented problems.

It has been my VieW throughout-and it is only a com­

monplace after all-that the development and change of

poetry and of the critIcIsm of It IS due to elements which

enter from outsIde . .! trled to draw attention not so much to .

the importance of Dryden's 'contnbutIon' to hterary

CrItlCIsm, as Ifhe were merely addmg to a store of quantIty,

as to the importance of the fact that he should want to

artIculate and expound lus VIews on drama and translation

and on the Enghsh poetry of the past; and, when we came

to JOMson, to call attentIOn to the further development of

an rustoncal conSCIOusness wInch made Johnson want to

estimate, In more detaIl, the EnglIsh poets of lus own age

and of previous ages,l and It seemed to me that Words­

worth's theOrIes about poetry drew their ahnlent from

socIal sources. To Matthew Arnold we owe the credIt of

brmgIng the relIgIOUS Issue exphcItly mto the dISCUSSIon of

literature and poetry; and WIth due respect to Mr. R.t.chards,

and With Mr. Rlchards rumself as a WItness, It does not

IThe fact that Johnson was worlang largely to order only mdlcates that tlus rustorlcal conSClousness was already developed.

127

THE MODERN MIND

seem to me that this 'Issue' has been wholly put aSIde and replaced by that of 'sex'. My contemporanes seem to me still to be occupIed wIth It, whether they caIl themselves

churchmen, or agnostics, or ratlOnahsts, or SOCIal revolu­

tl0ruStS. The contrast between the doubts that our con­

temporanes express, and the questlOns that they ask and the problems they put themselves, and the attitude of at

least a part of the past, was well put by Jacques RlvH~!re 111

two sentences: 'If in the seventeenth century Mohere or Racme had

been asked why he wrote, no doubt he would have been able to fmd but one answer; that he wrote 'for the enter­

tamment of decent people' (pour distrqire les honn~tes gens). It IS only wIth the advent of RomantIcIsm that the hterary

act came to be conceIved as a sort of raId on the absolute

and Its result as a revelatlOn.' RIVIere'S form of expresslOn IS not, to my mmd, alto­

gether happy. One mIght suppose that all that had hap­pened was that a WIlful perverSIty had taken posseSSlOn of

hterary men, a new hterary rusease called ROmantiCIsm. That IS one of the dangers of expressmg one's meanmg m terms of 'ROmantiCIsm': It is a term wluch is constandy

changmg ill dIfferent contexts, and wluch IS now hmlted to

what appear to be purely hterary and purely local prob­lems, now expandmg to cover almost the whole of the hfe

of a time and of nearly the whole world. It has perhaps not been observed that ill Its more comprehensIve sigruficance 'ROmantiCIsm' comes to mclude nearly everythmg that

rustInguishes the last two hundred and fifty years or so from theIr predecessors, and mcludes so much that It ceases

128

THE MODERN MIND

to brmg with it any praIse or blame. The change to which

RIv1ere alludes IS not a contrast between Mohere and

Racine on the one hand and more modern French WrIters

on the other; It neIther reflects cred1t upon the former nor

lmphes mfenonty In the latter. In the mterest of clarity and

slmphcIty I wIsh Inyself to avoid employmg the terms

RomantIcIsm and Clas~ilc1sm, terms wInch inflame

pohtical paSSlOns, and tend to prejudice our concluslOns. I

am only concerned with my contentlon that the notion of

what poetry is for, of what IS its functIon to do, does change,

and therefore r quoted Rlviere; I am concerned further

WIth cnticism as eVIdence of the conceptlon of the use of

poetry in the cntic's tIme, and assert that ill order to com­

pare the work of different cntlcs we must mvestlgate theIr

assumptions as to what poetry does and ought to do.

Exammation of the crItIcIsm of our time leads me to be­

heve that we are stIli ill the Arnold perIod.

I speak of Mr. RIchards's views WIth some cW:1idence.

Some of the problems he dIscusses are themselves very

dtfficult, and only those are quahfied to CrItiCISe who have

applied themselves to the same specIalised studIes and have

acquired proficIency ill tlns land of thmkmg. But here I

hmit myself to passages 111 whIch he does not seem to be

speakmg as a specIalIst, and in wmch I have no advantage of

speCIal knowledge eIther. There are two reasons why the

wnter of poetry must not be thought to have any great

advantage. One IS that a dISCUSSIon of poetry such as thts takes us far outSIde the lInuts withm wInch a poet may

speak wIth authority; the other is that the poet does many

dungs upon ll1Stlnct, for whIch he can gIve no better

I 129 :E.U.P.

THE MODERN MIND

account than anybody else. A poet can try, of course, to

gIve an honest report of the way in wInch he Inmself

wntes· the result may, lfhe IS a good observer, be illumm­

atll1g. And m one sense, but a very hlnlted one, he knows

better what Ins poems 'mean' than can anyone else; he may

know the lnstory of their composItton, the matenal wInch

has gone m and come out m an unrecognisable form, and

he knows what he was trymg to do and what he was mean­

ing to mean. But what a poem means IS as much what It

means to others as what It means to the author; and mdeed,

m the course of ame a poet may become merely a reader ill

respect to Ins own works, forgettmg hIs ongmal meanmg

-or WIthout forgetttng, merely changIng. So that, when

Mr. Richards asserts that The Waste Land effects 'a com­

plete severance between poetry and all behefs' I am no

better quahfied to say No! than IS any other reader. I will admtt that I clunk that eIther Mr. Rlchards is wrong, or

I do not understand hIs meanmg. The statement mIght

mean that It was the first poetry to do what all poetry m

the past would have been the better for domg: I can hardly

thmk that he mtended to pay me such an unmerited com­

phment. It mIght also mean that the present sltuaaon IS

radtcally dIfferent from any m which poetry has been pro­

duced m the past: namely, that now there IS nothIng m

which to beheve, that Behef itself is dead; and that there­

fore my poem IS the first to respond properly to the modem

SItuatIon and not call upon Make-Beheve. And It IS In

tlus conneXlOn, apparently, that Mr. RIchards observes

that 'poetry is capable of saVlllg us'.

A dIsCUSSIon of Mr. RIchards's theories. of knowledge 1

THE MODERN MIND

value and meaning would be by no means irrelevant to this assertion, but It would take us far afield, and I aln not the person to undertake it. We cannot of course refute the statement 'poetry IS capable of saving us' without knowing wluch one of the nlultlplc dcfinltions of salvation Mr. Richards has in nund.l (A good 111any people behave as if they thought so too: otherWIse their Interest III poetry is chfficult to explain) I anI sure, from the dIfferences of enVIronment, of perIod, and of Inental furniture, that sal­vation by poetry is not qUIte the same tiling for Mr. Rlchards as It was for Arnold; but so far as I am concerned these are nlcrely dIfferent shades of blue. In Practical Criticism2 Mr. Richards provides a reCIpe wInch I dunk throws sonle lIght upon his theological ideas. He says:

'Somet1ung hke a techl11que or ritual for heightemng sincerity mIght well be worked out. When our response to a poem after our best efforts remams uncertam, when we are unsure whether the feelings it eXCItes come from a deep source in our expenence, whether our hking or dtsliking 15 genuine, IS ours, or an accIdent of fashion, a response to surface details or to essentials, we may perhaps help our­selves by considering it in a frame of feelings whose Sill­

cetlty IS beyond our questiorung. SIt by the:fire (WIth eyes shut and fingers pressed firmly upon the eyeballs) and con­SIder WIth as full "reahsatlOn" as posslble-'

lSee hIs Mencius on the Mind. There IS of course a locution m wroch we say of someone 'he IS not one of us', it IS possIble that the 'us' of Mr. RIchards's statement represents an equally lmuted and select

number.

2Second Impression, p • .290.

131

THE MODERN MIND

five pomts wInch follow, and wInch I shall comment upon one by one. We may observe, in passmg, the Intense re­

lIgious seriousness of Mr. Richards's attitude towards

poetry.l What he proposes-for he lunts in the passage

above that lus sketch might be elaborated-Is nothIng less

than a regImen of SpIrItual ExerCIses. Now for the pomts.

I Man's loneliness (the isolation of the humansUuation).

Lonelmess IS known as a frequent attItude 111 romantic

poetry, and m the form of 'lonesomeness' (as I need not

remmd Amencan readers) IS a frequent attItude ill con­

temporary lyncs known as 'the blues'. But In what sense IS

Man m general Isolated, and from what? What is the

'human sItuatIOn'? I can understand the IsolatIon of the

human sItuation as Plato's DlOtlma expounds It, or in the

ChrIstian sense of the separatIOn of Man from God, but

not an Isolation wInch IS not a separation from anythmg ill

particular.

II. Thefacts ofbirth and of death, in their inexplicable oddity.

I cannot see why the facts of bIrth and of death should

appear odd m themselves, unless we have a conception of

ITrus passage IS mtroduced by a long and Important dISCUSSIon of COnfUCIUS' concepnon of'smcenty', wruch should be read attentIvely. In passmg, It is worthy of remark that Mr Rlchards shares lus mterest m Chmese plulosophy WIth Mr. Ezra Pound and Wlth the late Irvmg BabbItt. An Investigatlon of an mterest common to three apparently qUlte drlferent thmkers would, I beheve, repay the labour. It seems to indIcate, at least, a deracmaoon from the ChrIStIan trachtlon The thought of these three men seems to me to have an lUterestUlg SlIl1ll­anty

THE MODERN MIND

some other way of conung Into the world and of leavmg

it, which strikes us as nlore natural.

III. The inconceivable immensity of the Universe.

It was not, we reillclllber, the 'unmense spaces' them­

selves but theIr eternal silence that terrIfied Pascal. WIth a

defi11lte relIgIOUS background tlu~ IS mtelligible. But the

effect of popular astronomy books (lIke SIr James Jeans's)

upon me IS only of the Insigntficance of vast space.

IV. Man's place in the perspective oftime.

I confess that I do not find thIS espeCIally edlfymg eIther,

or stimulaong to the ImagmatIon, unless I brmg to Its con­

templatlOn some behef that there IS a sense and a meanmg

In the place of human history In the lustory of the world. I

fear that 111 filany people this subject of meditatIon can only

stlmulate the Idle wonder and greed for facts whIch are

satIsfied by Mr. Wells's compendIa.

V. The enormity (sc. enormousness) of man's ignorance.

Here agam, I must ask, Ignorance of what? I am acutely

aware, for instance, of my own Ignorance of spectfic sub­jects on whtch I want to know lnore; but Mr. RIchards

does not, surely, mean the Ignorance of any mdIvidual man,

but of Man. But 'Ignorance' must be relatIve to the sense ill

wruch we take the term 'knowledge'; and ill Mencius on the Mind Mr. Rlchards has gIven us a useful analYSIS of the

numerous meanings of 'knowledge'. Mr. RIchards, who

has engaged tn what I believe will be most frUltful mvesti­

ganons of controversy as systematised nusunderstandmg,

133

THE MODERN MIND

may justly be able to accuse me of pervertlng Ius meanmgs.

But lus modern substitute for the Exercises of St. IgnatlUs IS

an appeal to our feehngs, and I am only trymg to set down

how they affect nune. To me Mr. Rlchards's five pomts

only express a modern emotional attitude wIuch I cannot

share, and which finds its most sentimental expreSSIOn In

A Free Man's Worship. And as the contemplatIon of Man's

place m the Uruverse has led Lord Russell to wnte such bad

prose, we may wonder whether It will lead the ordmary

asprrant to understandmg of good poetry. It IS Just as hkely,

I suspect, to confirm him ill his taste for the second-rate.

I am wllhng to adffilt that such an approach to poetry

may help some people: my pomt IS that Mr. Rlchards

speaks as though It were good for everybody. I am per­

fectly ready to concede the eXIstence of people who feel,

think and believe as Mr. Richards does ill these matters,

If he will only concede that there are some people who do

not. He told us ill Science and Poetry: 'For centuries . . . countless pseudo-statements-about

God, about the umverse, about human nature, the relations

of mind to mmd, about the soul, Its rank and destmy ...

have been beheved; now they are gone, Irrecoverably; and

the knowledge whlch has killed them IS not of a kmd upon

which an equally fine organIsation ofthennndcanbe based.'

I subffilt that tlns is Itself a pseudo-statement, If there IS such a thmg. But these thmgs are mdeed gone, so far as

Mr. Richards IS concerned, if they are no longer beheved

by people whose mmds Mr. Richards respects: we have no

ground for controversy there. I only assert agam that what

he is trymg to do IS essentially the same as what Arnold

I~A

THE MODERN MIND

wanted to do: to preserve emotions without the behd1 with which their history has been involved. It would seem that Mr. Rlchards, on his own showing, is engaged in a rear-guard rehglOus actloll.1

Mr. Mantam, with an equally strong cOllviction that poetry WIll not save us, IS equally despondent about the world of to-day. 'Could any weakness', he asks, 'be greater than the weakness of our contemporanc~?' It is no more, as I have saId before, the particular bUSllless of the poet as poet to concern lnmself with Marit3.1n' 8 attempt to deternune the positl0n of poetry in a Christian world than It IS to concern rumself wlth Richards's attempt to determine the positlOn of poetry in a pagan world: but these various ambIent Ideas get 111 through the pores, and produce an unsettled state of nund. Trotsky, whose Literature and Revolution is the most sensible statement of a CommunIst attitude that I have seen,2 18 pretty clear on the reIatlOl1 of the poet to Ius enVIronment. He observes:

'ArtIstIc creanon IS always a comphcated turning inslde out of old forms, under the influence of new stlmuh wruch

lSomewhat m the Spirit of'rehglon without reveIatton', ofwlnch a grea.ter exponent than Mr. Juhan Huxley was Emmanuel Kant. On Kant's attempt (winch deeply mfluenced later German theology) see an illUminatIng passage m A. E Taylor's The Faith of a Moralist, valli,

chap n.

2There were also some Ulteresnng artlcles m The New Republic by Mr. Edmund Wuson, m controversy (If I remember correctly) with Mr. Michael Gold I regret chac I cannot gIve the exact reference. The ma.jor part of Trotsky's book IS not very mteresang for those who are unacquamted WIth the modern RUSSlall authors: one suspects that most

of Trotsky's swans are geese.

13S

THE MODERN MIND

origmate outsIde of art. In tIDs large sense of the word, art IS a handmaiden. It is not a dIsembodIed element feeding on

ltself, but a function of SOCIal man mdlssolubly tied to Ius

hfe and enVIronment.' There IS a stnkmg contrast between tlns conceptIOn of

art as a handmaIden, and that wInch we have just observed

of art as a saVIour. But perhaps the two notIons are not so

opposed as they appear. Trotsky seems, in any case, to draw the commonsense dIstinction between art and pro­

paganda, and to be dimly aware that the materIal of the

artlst IS not hts behefs as held, but lus behefs as felt (so far as

hIs behefs are part of Ins matenal at all); and he IS senSIble

enough to see that a period of revolutlon IS not favourable

to art, SInce It puts pressure upon the poet, both dIrect and

lnchrect, to make rum overconscious of hIs behefs as held. He would not hmlt Commurust poetry to the wntmg of

panegyncs upon the RUSSIan State, any more than I should hmIt ChriStian poetry to the COmpOSItiOn of hymns; the

poetry ofVillon IS just as 'Chnstlan' ill tlns way as that of

Prudentlus or Adam of St. Victor-though I thInk It would

be a long time before SOVIet SOCIety could afford to approve a Villon, If one arose.1 It is probable, however, that Rus­

sian hterature will become Increasingly unmtelhglble, In­

creasingly meaningless, to the peoples of Western Europe

unless they develop in the same dIrection as Russia. Even as

things are, m the present chaos of opInlon and behef, we

IThe Roman and Commumst Idea of an index of prohibIted books seems tome perfecdysoundm prmciple. It is a question (a) of the good­ness and uwversahty of the cause, (b) of the mtelligence that goes to the apphcatlon

THE MODERN MIND

may expect to fmd qUIte dIfferent lIteratures eXlstmg m the same language and the same country. 'The unconcealed and

palpable mfluence of the devIl on an Important part of con­temporary hterature', says Mr. Mantam, 'IS one of the

slgnIDCant phenomena of the hIstory of our tlme.' I can hardly expect most of my readers to take tIns remark sen­ously;l those who do WIll have very dIfferent CrIterIa of crIticism from those who do not. Another observatIon of Mr. Maritain's may be less unacceptable'

'By showmg us where moral truth and the genuine supernatural are SItuate, rehgIOn saves poetry from the absurdtty of behevmg itself destIned to transform etlncs and hfe: saves it from overweenmg arrogance.'

Trus seems to me to be putring the finger on the great weakness of much poetry and cntIcism of the nmeteenth and twentIeth centunes. But between the motIve wInch Rtvlere attnbuted to Mohere and Racme2 and the mouve of Matthew Arnold bearmg on shoulders Immense what he thought to be the orb of the poet's fate, there IS a serIOUS

via media. As the doctrme of the moral and educatIonal value of

poetry has been elaborated in dIfferent forms by Arnold and Mr. Richards, so the Abbe Bremond presented a modem eqUIvalent for the theory of divme inspIration.

lWlth the mfluence of the devu on contemporary hterature I shall be concerned ill more detaJ.l ill another book

2Wmch does not seem to me to cover the case. Let us say that It was the prunary motIve (even m Athalie). An exact statement would need much space; for we cannot concern ourselves only Wlth what went on WIde the poet's head, but WIth the general state of sooety.

137

THE MODERN MIND

The task of Prayer and Poetry IS to estabhsh the hkeness, and the dIfference of land and degree, between poetry and mystIcIsm In Ins attempt to demonstrate thIs relation he safeguards rumself by Just quahficatlOns, and makes many penetratIng remarks about the nature of poet;y. I will con­fine myself to two pIeces of cautIOn. My first qualm IS over the assertIon that' the more of a poet any particular poet IS, the more he IS tormented by the need of commumcatmg rus experience'. ThIs IS a downright sort of statement wInch IS very easy to accept Wlthout exarmnation; but the matter IS not so sImple as all that. I should say that the poet IS tormented primarily by the need to wnte a poem-and so, I regret to find, are a legion of people who are not poets. so that the Ime-between 'need' to wnte and 'deSIre' to WrIte is by no means easy to draw. And what IS the expenence that the poet is so bursnng to communicate? By the time It has settled down mto a poem It may be so dUferent from the ongmal expenence as to be hardly recogmsable. The' expenence' m question may be the result of a fuslOn of feehngs so numerous, and ultimately so obscure m theIr ongms, that even If there be commumca­tIon of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he IS commumcatmg; and what IS there to be communicated was not m eXistence before the poem was completed. 'Com­mumcatlon' will not explam poetry. I will not say that there IS not always some varymg degree of commumcatlon ill poetry, or that poetry could eXist WIthout any com­murucatIon takIng place. There IS room for very great mmvidual vmatlon in the motlves of equally good mdi­VIdual poets; and we have the assurance of Coleridge,

138

THE MODERN MIND

wIth the approval of Mr. Housman, that Ipoetry gIves most

pleasure when only generally and not perfecdy understood'.

And I dunk that Illy first objection to Bremond's theory IS

related to the second, In wluch also the questlOn of motIve

and llltention enters. Any theory wluch relates poetry very

closely to a rehglOus or a socIal scheme of thmgs alms,

probably, to explain poetry by chscovenng its natural laws; but It IS In danger of binding poetry by legIslation to

be observed-and poetry can recogruse no such laws

When dle crItIC falls Into tlus error he has probably

done what we all do: when we generahse about poetry, as

I have saId before, we are generalising from the poetry wInch we best know and best lIke; not from all poetry, or

even all of the poetry wluch we have read. What IS 'all poetry'? EverythIng WrItten m verse wluch a sufficIent

number of the best nunds have consIdered to be poetry.

Bya suffic1ent number, I mean enough persons of dtfferent

types, at dIfferent tlmes and places, over a space of time,

and mcluding foreIgners as well as those to whom the

language IS native, to cancel every personal bIas and eccentncIty of taste (for we nlust all be shghdy eccentrIC

In taste to have any taste at all). Now when an account hke the Abbe Bremond's IS tested by bemg made Itself a test, it

tends to reveal some narrowness and exclusIveness; at any

rate, a good deal of poetry that I lIke would be excluded, or

gIven some other name than poetry; just as other wnters who hke to include much prose as bemg essentIally 'poetry' create confuslOn by mcludIng too much. That there is a

relation (not necessarily noetic, perhaps merely psycho­logical) between mystiCIsm and some lands of poetry, or

139

THE MODERN MIND

some of the lands of state In wInch poetry IS produced, I make no doubt. But I prefer not to define, or to test, poetry by means of speculatIOns about Its ongms, you cannot find a sure test for poetry, a test by whIch you may dIstIngUIsh between poetry and mere good verse, by re­ference to Its putatIve antecedents In the mmd of the poet Bremond seems to me to mtroduce extra-poetIc laws for poetry. such laws as have been frequently made, and con­

stantly vIOlated. There IS another danger m the assoclatlOn of poetry WIth

mYStiCISm besIdes that whlch I have Just mentioned, and that of leadmg the reader to look m poetry for rehgIOus satisfactIOns. These were dangers for the cntic and the reader; there IS also a danger for the poet. No one can read Mr. Yeats's Autobiographies and IllS earher poetry WIthout feehng that the author was trymg to get as a poet sOlnethmg hke the exaltatton to be 0 btamed, I beheve, from hasInsch or mtrous made. He was very much fascmated by self-Induced trance states, calculated symbohsm, medIums, theosophy, crystal-gazmg, folklore and ho bgo bhns. Golden apples, archers, black pIgs and such paraphernaha abounded. Often the verse has an hypnotIc chann. but you cannot take heaven by magIC, espeCIally If you are, hke Mr. Yeats, a very sane person Then, by a great t!lumph of develop­ment, Mr. Yeats began to wnte and IS still wnting some of the most beautIful poetry In the language, some of the clearest, SImplest, most dlrect.1

IThe best analYSIS of the weakness of Mr Yeats's poetry that I know IS m Mr. Rlchards's Sctence and Poetry But I do not dunk that Mr RIchards qUlte apprecIated Mr Yeats's lacer work.

THE MODERN MIND

The number of people capable of appreciatIng' all poetry'

is probably very snlall, If not merely a theoretIcal hffilt; but the number of people who can get some pleasure and

benefit from some poetry IS, I beheve, very large. A per­

fectly satIsfactory theory wInch apphed to all poetry would

do so only at the cost of beIng vOIded of all content; the more usual reason for the unsatisfactormess of our theones

and general statenlents about poetry IS that whIle professmg

to apply to all poetry, they are really theOrIes about, or generahsatlons from, a hffilted range of poetry. Even when

two persons of taste hke the same poetry, tIns poetry will be arranged ill theIr 1111nds in shghcly drfferent patterns; our IndIVIdual taste In poetry bears the mdehble traces of

our IndIVIdual hves WIth all theIr expenence pleasurable and pamflll. We are apt eIther to shape a theory to cover) the poetry that we fmd most movmg, or-what IS less

excusable-to choose the poetry wInch illustrates the theory we want to hold. You do not find Matthew Arnold quot­lUg Rochester or Sedley. And It IS not merely a matter of 1

mruvldual caprIce. Each age demands chfferent things from poetry, though Its demands are modtfied, from time to tIme, by what some new poet has given. So our critiCISm, from age to age, WIll reflect the thmgs that the age demands;

and the crItICIsm of no one man and of no one age can be expected to embrace the whole nature of poetry or exhaust all of Its uses. Our contemporary crItiCS, hke therr pre­decessors, are making particular responses to particular SItuatIons. No two readers, perhaps, will go to poetry WIth qillte the same demands. Amongst all these demands from poetry and responses to It there is always some permanent,

I41

THE MODERN MIND

element ill common, just as there are standards of good and

bad wntmg independent of what anyone of us happens to

lIke and dishke; but every effort to formulate the common

element IS hnnted by the hnntatlons of partIcular men m

partIcular places and at partIcular tlmes; and these hmlta­

tIons become mamfest m the perspective ofrustory.

142

CONCLUSION March 3ISt, 1933

I hope that I have not given the Impression, in this cur­sory reVIew of theones past and present, that I estImate

the value of such theones accordmg to theIr degree of ap­proxinlatlon to some doctrme wInch I hold myself, and pay them off accordmgly. I am too well aware of limItatIOns of mterest for wruch I do not apologIse, and of lllcapaclty for abstruse reasonmg as well as less pardonable shortcommgs. I have no general theory of my own; but on the other hand I would not appear to dIsmiss the VIews of others Wlth the mdIffetence which the pracononer may be supposed to feel towards those who theonse about lus craft. It is reasonable, I feel, to be on guard agamst V1ews whIch claIm too much for poetry, as well as to protest agamst those wluch claun too httle; to recogmse a number of uses for poetry, with­out adnuttlng that poetry must always and everywhere be subservient to anyone of them. And wlule theories of poetry may be tested by their power of re:firung our sensi­bIhty by lllCreaslng our understandmg, we must not ask. that they serve even that purpose of addmg to our enjoy­ment of poetry: any more than we ask of ethIcal theory that it shall have a drrect apphcatlon to and tnfluence upon human behavIOur. CrItical speculanon, like phllosophical speculatIon and scientlfic research, must be free to follow ltS own course; and cannot be called upon to show !nune ..

143

CONCLUSION

diate results; and I beheve that the pondermg (1n jUdtC10US moderanon) of the questIons whIch It raIses will tend to

enhance our enJoYlnent. That there IS an analogy between myst1cal expenence

and some of the ways m which poetry 1S WrItten I do not deny; and I thmk that the Abbe Bremond has observed

very well the dIfferences as well as the hkenesses; though, as I have saId, whether the analogy is of signI£cance for the

student of rehgIOn, or only to the psycholog1st, I do not know. I know, for mstance, that some forms of ill-health,

debility or anaelllla, may (If other CIrcumstances are favour­

able) produce an efflux of poetry m a way approaclung the condItIon of automatic WrItIng-though, m contrast to the claIms sometImes made for the latter, the materIal has

obVIOusly been mcubatmg WIthIn the poet, and cannot be

suspected ofbemg a present from a frIendly or 1mpertment demon. What one WrItes m tIns way may succeed III

standmg the examination of a more normal state of lllllld;

It gIves me the 1mpressIOn, as I have just Said, of havmg

undergone a long mcubatIon, though we do not know

unttl the shell breaks what kInd of egg we have been SIttIng on. To me It seems that at these moments, whIch

are charactensed by the sudden hfnng of the burden of

anXiety and fear whIch presses upon our datly hfe so

steachly that we are unaware of it, what happens IS somethIng negative. that IS to say, not 'msplratIOn' as we commonly thmk of It, but the breakmg down of strong habItual barrIers-whIch tend to re-form very qwckly.l

11 should hke to quote a confirmation of my own experIence from Mr. A. E. Housman's Name and Nature of Poetry. 'In short I thmk that

144

CONCLUSION

Some obstructIon is momentanly wlnsked away. The

accompanying feeling IS less hke what we know as posiuve

pleasure, than a sudden rehef from an mtolerable burden. l' agree wIth Bremond, and perhaps go even further, ill

findIng that thIs dtsturbance of our quotIchan character

which results m an incantatIon, an outburst of words wmch

we hardly recogruse as our own (because of the effordess­

ness), is a very chfferent thmg from mystIcal illummatIon.,

The latter IS a vIsion wruch may be accomparued by the'

realisation that you will never be able to commUlllcate It to

anyone else, or even by the reahsatlon that when It IS past

you will not be able to recall It to yourself; the former IS

not a VISIon but a motIon ternunatIng ill an arrangement of words on paper.

But I should add one reservation. I should heSItate to say

that the expenence at whIch I have lunted IS responsIble

for the creation of all the most profound poetry wntten,

or even always of the best of a smgle poet's work. For all I know, It may have much more slgru£cance for the psycho­

logist's understandmg of a partIcular poet, or of one poet in a certam phase, than It has for anyone's understandmg of

the production of poetry, m Its first stage, IS less an actIve than a passlve and mvoluntary process; and u I were obhged, not to define poetry. but to name the class of trungs to wInch It belongs, I should call It a secretion; whether a natural secretion, hke turpentIne m the fir, or a morbid secretlon, hke the pearl m the oyster. I thmk that my own case, though I may not deal With the matter so cleverly as the oyster does, 1$

the latter; because I have seldom wntten poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experIence, though pleasurable, was generally aguatmg and exhaustIng' I take added saosfaCtlon In the fact that I only read Mr. Housman's essay some tIme after my own bnes were written.

TA < E.U.P.

CONCLUSION

poetry. Some finer nunds, mdeed, may operate very dIfferendy; I cannot think of Shakespeare or Dante as havmg been dependent upon such caprIcious releases. Perhaps tIns throws no hght on poetry at all I am not even sure that the poetry wInch I have WrItten m tlns way IS the best that I have wntten; and so far as I know, no CrItIC has ever Identified the passages I have in mmd. The way m which poetry IS WrItten IS not, so far as our knowledge of these obscure matters as yet extends, any clue to ItS value.

But, as Norton wrote m a letter to Dr. L. P. Jacks m 1907,

'1 have no behef that such VIews as mine are hkely WIthIn any reasonable tIme to be held by a consIderable body of tnen'; for people are always ready to grasp at any gUlde whIch will help them to recognIse the best poetry WIthout havmg to depend upon theIr own sensIbility and taste. The faIth lU mystIcal msplratlOn is responsible for the

exaggerated repute of Kubla Khan. The imagery of that fragment, certatnly, whatever ItS origins lU Colendge's readmg, sank to the depths of Colendge's feeling, was saturated, transformed there-'those are pearls that were

hIs eyes' -and brought up lUto dayhght agam. But It IS not used: the poem has not been WrItten. A smgle verse IS not

poetry unless It IS a one-verse poem; and even the fmest hne draws Its Me from Its <70ntext. OrganIsation IS necessary as well as 'mspIratton'. The re-creatIon of word and image

whIch happens fitfully ill the poetry of such a poet as Cole­rIdge happens almost mcessandy with Shakespeare. AgaIn and agam, in his use of a word, he will gIve a new meanmg or extract a latent one; agam and agatn the right Imagery, saturated whtle It lay in the depths of Shakespeare's

CONCLUSION

memory, will I'lse hke Anadyomene from the sea. In Shakespeare's poetry this reborn image or word wIll have

Its rational use and justification; in much good poetry the

orgamsatlOn will not reach to so ratlOnal a level. I will take an example which I have used elsewhere: I am glad of the

opportumty to use it again, as on the preVlous occaSIOn I had an inaccurate text. It is from Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois:

'Fly where the evenmg from the Ibertan vales Takes on her swarthy shoulders Hecate

Crowned wIth a grove of oaks: fly where men feel The burning axletree, and those that suffer

Beneath the chanot of the snowy Bear .... '

Chapman borrowed tlus, as Dr. Boas POllltS out, from

Seneca's Hercules CEteus :

'dic sub Aurora POSlt1S Sabaels ruc sub occasu posins H1berts

qruque sub plaustro patiuntur ursae qui que fervent! quatluntur axe'

and probably also from the same author's Hercules Furens:

'sub ortu sohs, an sub cardme

giaclalis ursae?'

There is first the probability that tlus Imagery had some personal saturanon value, so to speak, for Seneca; another for Chapman, and another for myself, who have borrowed it twice from Chapman. I suggest that what gives it such

illtensity as It has ill each case 1S its saturatton-I will not say with 'assoc1ations', for I do not want to revert to

Hartley-but with feelings too obscure for the authors

TA'"7

CONCLUSION

even to know qUIte what they were. And of course only a

part of an author's imagery comes from his readll1g. It comes from the whole ofrus sensitlve hfe smce early cruld­hood. Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetlme, do certam tmages recur, charged

wIth emonon, rather than others? The song of one btrd, the leap of one fish, at a partIcular place and tIme, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path,

~lX ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at mght at a small French raIlway junction where there was a water-lllill. such memories may have symbohc value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feehng Into which we cannot peer . We lllight Just as well ask why, when we try to recall visually some penod in the past, we frnd in our memory just the few meagre arbitrarily chosen set of snapshots that we do find there, the faded poor souverurs of paSSIOnate moments.!

Thus far IS as far as my expenence will take me m trus

dIrection. My purpose has not been to examine thoroughly anyone type of theory of poetry, still less to confute it; but

I rather to indtcate the kinds of defect and excess that we must expect to:find in each, and to suggest that the current

. tendency IS to expect too much, rather than too little, of

1 In chapter XX1l of Princtples of Literary Criticism Mr. Rlchards diS­

cusses these matters in IDS own way. As eVldence that there are other

approaches as well, see a very mterestmg arttcle Le symbolisme et l' ~me prlm.tive by E. Catlliet and J. A Bede m the Revue de litterature com­parle for Apr:Il-June I932. The authors, who have done field-work m Madagascar, apply the theones of Levy-Bruhl: the pre-logical men­tality persists m clvtlised man, but becomes avatlable only to or through the poet.

CONCLUSION

poetry. No one of us, when he thinks about poetry, IS

wIthout Ius own bIas; and Abbe Bremond's preoccupation

wIth mysticism and Mr. Rtchards's lack of interest m

theology are equally sIgmficant. One VOIce was raIsed, m

our tlme, to express a VIew of a different kInd; that of a

man who wrote several remarkable poems mmself, and who

also had an aptitude for theology. It IS that ofT. E. Hulme:

'There IS a general tendency to dunk that verse means

httle else than the expressIOn of unsatlsfied emotlon.

People say: "But how can you have verse wIthout sentl­

ment?" You see what it IS; the prospect alarms them. A

claSSIcal reVIval to them would mean the,prospect of an

and desert and the death of poetry as they understand It,

and could only conle to £ill the gulf caused by that death.

Exactly why this dry claSSical sP1rtt should have a pOSItiVe

and legitImate neceSSIty to express Itself In poetry IS utterly InconceIvable to them. . . . The great ann IS accurate, pre­

ClSe and defirute descrtptlOn. The first thIng IS to reahse how

extraordlnanly chfficult thIs IS. . . . Language has ItS own speCIal nature, Its own conventIOns and communal ideas.

It IS only by a concentrated effort of the nund that you can

hold it fixed to your own purpose.' This IS, we must remark at once, not a general theory of

poetry, but an assertIon of the claIms of a particular land of

poetry for the wnter's own tIme. It may serve to remind us how vartous are the kmds of poetry, and how variously poetry may appeal to different minds and generations

equally quahfied to appreciate It. The extreme of theonsmg about the nature of poetry,

the essence of poetry If there is any, belongs to the study of

J49

CONCLUSION

aestheocs and 15 no concern of the poet or of a CrIttc WIth

my hnnted quahficatlons. Whether the self-conscIOusness

Involved 111 aesthetlcs and In psychology does, not nsk

violatmg the fronoer of conSCIOusness, IS a queStIon which

I need not raIse here; It IS perhaps only my pnvate eccen­

triCIty to beheve that such researches are perilous If not

gUlded by sound theology. The poet IS 11luch more VItally concerned Wlth the socIal 'uses' of poetry, and wIth his own

place m socIety; and tills problem IS now perhaps more

Importunately pressed upon hIs conSCIOUS attentIon than

at any prevIOUS tIme. The uses of poetry certamly vary as society alters, as the pubhc to be addressed changes. In thts

context sometlnng should be saId about th,e vexed questlon

of obscunty and urunteiligibility. The chfficulty of poetry

(and modem poetry IS supposed to be dIfficult) may be due to one of several reasons. FIrst, there may be personal

causes wInch make It ImpOSSIble for a poet to express rum­

self ill any but an obscure way; wlule dus may be regret­

table, we should be glad, I thInk, that the man has been

able to express himself at all. Or drlficulty may be due Just

to novelty: we know the nrucule accorded m turn to

Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Browning

-but must remark that Brownmg was the first to be called dUlicult; hosole crltlcs of the earher poets found them

dUlicult, but called them silly. Or chfficulty may be caused

by the reader's havmg been told, or havmg suggested to

lnmself, that the poem IS gomg to prove dIfficult. The ordmary reader, when warned agamst the obscunty of a

poem, 15 apt to be thrown mto a state of consternatIon very

unfavourable to poetlc receptiVity. Instead ofbegmning, as

ISO

CONCLUSION

he should, III a state of SenSItIVIty, he obfuscates hIs sen~es by the deSIre to be clever and to look very hard for some­

tIung, he doesn't know what-or else by the deSIre not to

be taken ill. There IS such a thmg as stage frIght, but what

such readers have IS pIt or gallery fnght. The more seasoned

reader, he who has reached, ill these matters, a state of

greater purity, does not bother about understandmg; not, at

least, at first. I know that some of the poetry to wInch I am most devoted IS poetry wInch I dId not understand at

first readmg; some IS poetry wInch I am not sure I under­

stand yet: for mstance, Shakespeare's. And finally, there 15

the dIfficulty caused by the author's havillg left out some­

thmg wmch the reader IS used to findmg; so that the reader,

bewildered, gropes about for what IS absent, and puzzles

rus head for a kmd of 'meaning' wInch IS not there, and IS

not meant to be there.

The chIef use of the 'meanmg' of a poem, ill the ordmary

sense, may be (for here agam I am speakmg of some kInds

of poetry and not all) to satlsfy one habIt of the reader, to

keep lus nund dIverted and qwet, whlle the poem does Its

work upon him: much as the Imagmary burglar is always

provIded WIth a bIt of mce meat for the house-dog. TIns IS

a normal SItuation of whIch I approve. But the minds of all poets do not work that way; some of them, assuming that there are other nunds hke theIr own, become ImpatIent of

this 'meamng' wInch seems superfluous, and perceIve pos­

SIbilities of mtensity through Its ehmmauon. I am. not

assertlng that tlus SItuatIOn IS Ideal; ~mly that we must

write out poetry as we C:pl, and take it as we find It. It ma'1

be that for some perIods of SOClety a more relaxed form of

lSI

CONCLUSION

wntmg IS nght, and for others a more concentrated. I be­lIeve that there must be many people who feel, as I do, that the effect of some of the greater l1ll1eteenth-century poets IS

chmirushed by theIr bulk. Who now, for the pure pleasure

of It, reads Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats even, cer­tamly Brownmg and Swmbume and most of the French poets of the century-entire? I by no means beheve that

the 'long poem' IS a thmg of the past; but at least there must

be more m It for the length than our grandparents seemed to demand; and for us, anything that can be SaId as well m

prose can be said better ill prose. And a great deal, m the

way of meanmg, belongs to prose rather than to poetry. The doctnne of' art for art's sake', a mistaken one, and more

advertised than practised, contamed tills true Impulse be­

hmd It, that It IS a recogrunon of the error of the poet's trymg to do other people's work. But poetry has as much

to learn from prose as from other poetry; and I clunk that an Interaction between prose and verse, lIke the mteract10n

between language and language, IS a condItion of VItalIty In

lIterature. To return to the question of obscunty: when all excep­

tions have been made, and after admItting the pOSSIble eXIstence of minor ' illfficult' poets whose pubhc must always be small, I beheve that the poet naturally prefers to

write for as large and mIscellaneous an auruence as possible, and that It is the half-educated and ill-educated, rather than the uneducated, who stand In hIS way: I myself should like an audtence wInch could neither read nor write.1 The most

IOn the subject of educanon, there are some helpful remarks In

Lawrence's Fantasia of the UnconscIous.

152

CONCLUSION

useful poetry, soclally, would be one wInch could cut

across all the present stratIfications of public taste-stratl­

ficatlons wlnch are perhaps a slgn of socIal dIsmtegratlOn.

The ldeal medium for poetry, to my nund, and the most

mrect means of soclal 'usefulness' for poetry, IS the theatre.

In a play of Shakespeare you get several levels of slgru­

ficance. For the SImplest audItors there IS the plot, for the

more thoughtful the character and collihct of character, for

the more literary the words and phrasmg, for the more

musically sensitive the rhythm, and for audItors of greater

senSItiveneSS and understandmg a meamng wmch reveals

Itself gradually. And I do not believe that the classmcatlon

of audIence IS so clear-cut as tIns; but rather that the sensl­

tlveness of every audItor IS acted upon by all these elements

at once, though m c.hfferent degrees of conSCIOusness. At

none of these levels IS the audItor bothered by the presence

of that wIDch he does not understand, or by the presence of

that in whIch he IS not interested. I may make my mearung

a httle clearer by a SImple mstance. I once deSIgned, and

drafted a couple of scenes, of a verse play. My mtentlon

was to have one character whose sensIbility and mtelh­

gence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and in­telligent members of the audience; rus speeches should be

addressed to them as much as to the other personages ill

the play-or rather, should be addressed to the latter, who

were to be materIal, hteral-mmded and VISIOnless, with

the conSCIousness ofbemg overheard by the former. There

was to be an understanding between tlus protagonist and a

small number of the audIence, whlle the rest of the audIence

would share the responses of the other characters tn the play.

I53

CONCLUSION

Perhaps this IS all too dehberate, but one must experiment

as one can. Every poet would hke, I fancy, to be able to thmk that

he had some dIrect SOCIal utility. By tills, as I hope I have already made clear, I do not mean that he should meddle with the tasks of the theologIan, the preacher, the econo-

'll11st, the SOCIOlogIst or anybody else; that he should do

anythIng but wnte poetry, poetry not defmed 1U terms of somethIng else. He would hke to be somethmg of a popular entertamer, and be able to dunk lus own thoughts

behmd a tragIC or a C01ll1C mask. He would hke to convey

the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audIence, but to larger groups of people collectlVely, and the theatre IS the best place U1 which to do It. There nught, one fanCies,

be some fulfilment ill excltmg clus cOinmunal pleasure, to gIve an ImmedIate compensatIon for the parns of tummg blood into ink. As tlungs are, and as fundamentally they

must always be, poetry IS not a career, but a mug's game.

No honest poet can ever feel,quite sure of the permanent value of what he has W!1tten. he may have wasted lus hme

and messed up his hfe for nothmg. All the better, then, If

he could have at least the satlsfactlon of havmg a part to play ill SOCIety as worthy as that of the music-hall comedIan. Furthermore, the theatre, by the techrucal exactlons whIch

It makes and hnutations which it Imposes upon the author,

by the obhgatlon to keep for a defirute length of tlme the sustamed lnterest of a large and unprepared and not wholly

perceptive group of people, by Its problems whIch have

.constandy to be solved, has enough to keep the poet's ~onscious nund fully occupIed, as the pamter's by the manl-

154

CONCLUSION

pulation of lus tools. If, beyond keeping the mterest of cl.

crowd of people for that length of l1me, the author can

make a play wInch IS real poetry, so much the better.

I have not attempted any defillltlOn of poetry, because I

can dunk of none wInch does not assume that the reader

already knows what It IS, or wInch does not falsIfy by

leavIng out much more than it can mclude. Poetry begms,

I dare say, wIth a savage beatlng a drum ill a Jungle, and It

retams that essential of percussion and rhythm; hyper­

bohcally one might say that the poet IS older than other

human bemgs-but I do not want to be tempted to endmg

on dus sort of flourish. I have mSlsted rather on the varIety

of poetry, varIety so great that all the kInds seem to have

nothmg in common except the rhythm of verse instead of

the rhythm of prose: and that does not tell you much about

all poetry. Poetry IS of course not to be defined by Its uses.

If It commelnorates a pubhc occasIOn, or celebrates a

fesnval, or decorates a rehgious nte, or amuses a crowd, so

much the better. It may effect revolutions In sensIbility.

such as are perIodIcally needed; may help to break up the

conventional modes of perception and valuatIon wInch are

perpetually formmg, and make people see the world

afresh, or some new part of It. It may make us from time

to tlme a httle more aware of the deeper, unnamed feehngs

wInch form the substratum of our bemg, to which we

rarely penetrate; for our hves are mostly a constant evasion, of ourselves, and an evaSIOn of the VIslble and senSIble world. But to say all this is only to say what you know'

already, if you have felt poetry and thought about your I

feelings. And I fear that I have already, throughout these;

ISS

CONCLUSION

lectures, trespassed beyond the bounds wruch a htde self­knowledge tells me are Iny proper frontIer. If, as James Thomson observed, 'hps only smg when they cannot kIss', It may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my theonsmg about poetry at tills pomt. The sad ghost of Colendge beckons to me from

the shadows

1,56