CHAPTER XXVBadness in PoetryIl faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!Le Corbusier-Saugnier.Thetheory of badness in poetry has never received the study which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty. For with bad art even more than with good unless we are careful to distinguish the communicative from the value aspects, even when these are connected, we shall find the issues obscured. Sometimes art is bad because communication is defective, the vehicle inoperative; sometimes because the experience communicated is worthless; sometimes for both reasons. It would perhaps be best to restrict the term bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and to call the other cases defective art. But this is not the usual practice of critics, any work which produces an experience displeasing to the critic being commonly called bad, whether or not this experience is like that responsible for the work.Let us begin by considering an instance of defective communication; choosing an example in which it is likely that the original experience had some value.THE POOLAre you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you—banded one?I take a complete work to avoid possible unfairness. Here we have the whole of the link which is to mediate between the experiences of the author and of the reader. Aristotle, in a different connection, it is true, and for different reasons, affirmed that a work of art must possess a certain magnitude, and we can adapt his remark here. Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity, makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs, in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness and ambiguity. Even when, as here, the original experience is presumably slight, tenuous and fleeting, the mere correspondence of matter to form is insufficient. The experience evoked in the reader is not sufficiently specific. A poet may, it is true, make an unlimited demand upon his reader, and the greatest poets make the greatest claim, but the demand made must be proportional to the poet’s own contribution. The reader here supplies too much of the poem. Had the poet said only, “I went and poked about for rocklings and caught the pool itself”, the reader, who converts what is printed above into a poem, would still have been able to construct an experience of equal value; for what results is almost independent of the author.To pass to a case in which communication is successful, where the objection lies to what is communicated:After the fierce midsummer all ablazeHas burned itself to ashes and expiresIn the intensity of its own fires,Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.So after Love has led us, till he tiresOf his own throes and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gazeHe beckons us to follow, and acrossCool, verdant vales we wander free from care.Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.As to the success of the communication there can be no question. Both the popularity of the author, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of whose work this is a favourable specimen, and records of the response made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware of the authorship, leave this beyond doubt. It reproduces the state of mind of the writer very exactly. With a very numerous class of readers pleasure and admiration ensue. The explanation is, probably, in the soothing effect of aligning the very active Love-Friendship groups of impulses with so settled yet rich a group as the Summer-Autumn simile brings in. The mind finds for a moment an attitude in which to contemplate a pair of situations (Love and Friendship) together, situations which are for many minds particularly difficult to see together. The heavy regular rhythm, the dead stamp of the rimes, the obviousness of the descriptions (‘mellow, mild, St Martin’; ‘cool verdant vales’) their alliteration, the triteness of the close, all these accentuate the impression of conclusiveness. The restless spirit is appeased, one of its chief problems is made to seem as if, regarded from a lofty, all-embracing standpoint, it is no problem but a process of nature.This reconciliation, this appeasement, is common to much good and to much bad poetry alike. But the value of it depends upon the level of organisation at which it takes place, upon whether the reconciled impulses are adequate or inadequate. In this case those who have adequate impulses as regards any of the four main systems involved, Summer, Autumn, Love, Friendship, are not appeased. Only for those who make certain conventional, stereotyped maladjustments instead, does the magic work.The nature and source of these stock conventional attitudes is of great interest. Suggestion is very largely responsible for them. The normal child under the age of ten is probably free from them, or at least with him they have no fixity or privileged standing. But as general reflection develops the place of the free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organisation of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute. ‘Ideas’, as they are commonly called, arise. A boy’s ‘Idea’ of Friendship or of Summer or of his Country is not, though the name would seem to imply it, primarily an intellectual affair. It is rather an attitude, or set of attitudes, of tendencies to act in certain fashions rather than others. Now reflection, unless very prolonged and very arduous, tends to fix the attitude by making us dwell in it, byremoving us from experience. In the development of any attitude there are stages, points of rest, of relatively greater stability. These, as we dwell in them, become more and more difficult to pass, and it is not surprising that most people remain all their lives in various halfway houses.These stages or levels of emotional adjustment seem, for the most part, to be fixed not by any special suitability to circumstances, certainly not to present circumstances, but much more by social suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience, the one force which might push us further. At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc., are an influence of the first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things. Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars. The quite common opinion that the arts have after all very little effect upon the community shows only that too little attention is being paid to the effects of bad art.The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child. He is even in the most important things functionally unable to face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses.Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made. Any combination of these general Ideas, hit at the right level or halting point of development, is, if suitably advertised, certain of success. Best-sellers in all the arts, exemplifying as they do the most general levels of attitude development, are worthy of very close study. No theory of criticism is satisfactory which is not able to explain their wide appeal and to give clear reasons why those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed.*They are tested in a way which few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their judgment, and they are among the best indices available of what is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied, science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later under what conditions popularity and possible high value are compatible.The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted, is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organisation of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them, he would prefer. We must not, of course, forget those variations in psychological efficiency discussed in Chapter XXII as degrees of vigilance. Even a good critic at a sufficiently low ebb of neural potency might mistake such a sonnet for one of Shakespeare’s or with more ease for one of Rossetti’s. But when vigilance was restored he would see, or at least feel, the differences. The point is that a reader who, at a high degree of vigilance, thoroughly enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so organised that he will fail to respond to poetry. Time and much varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer be the same person.A general statement such as this about the incompatibility of inexpressibly complex adjustments must naturally be incapable of strict proof. Individuals with alternating personalities and subject to fugues would have to be considered. So would the phenomena of ‘mutations of regime’ unaccompanied by change of vigilance if such occur. None the less very much evidence substantiates the statement. The experience of all those who have passed through the stages in the development of attitudes presupposed by great poetry is probably conclusive.Even though the intricacies of the nervous system should be capable of getting round this objection, there remain sufficient other reasons why indulgence in verse of this character should be condemned. There can be no doubt whatever that the value of the experience which results from it is small. On a pleasure theory of value there might well be doubt, since those who do enjoy it certainly appear to enjoy it in a high degree. But on the theory here maintained, the fact that those who have passed through the stage of enjoying thePoems of Passionto that of enjoying the bulk of the contents of theGolden Treasury, for example, do not return, settles the matter. We must bear in mind, of course, the conditions which have to be satisfied before this test is conclusive. That a man who has passed through the stage of drinking nothing but beer to the stage of drinking nothing but brandy rarely returns, does not prove that brandy is the better drink. It merely proves that it is the more efficient intoxicant. We have to ask in applying the test what the responses in question are, and in the case of poetry they are so varied, so representative of all the activities of life, that actual universal preference on the part of those who have tried both kinds fairly is the same (on our view) as superiority in value of the one over the other. Keats, by universal qualified opinion, is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.CHAPTER XXVIJudgment and Divergent ReadingsThe Prime Minister—The misunderstanding—in so far as it is a misunderstanding—is purely a misunderstanding. . . .The Leader of the Opposition—With the utmost goodwill on this side, I find myself with far less grasp of the whole subject than I had. . . .—The Times, 8th July 1924.Ambiguityin a poem, as with any other communication, may be the fault of the poet or of the reader. The ambiguities due to erratic reading are as important for criticism as others, and practically more troublesome. There are strong social incentives for overlooking them. Talking to one another we assume, in nine cases out of ten like the merest simpletons, that our readings agree, and that when we differ in our opinions it is something else, not our experiences but our judgments about them which are at variance. Most discussion about works of art is waste of timeas communicationfor this reason. It may, of course, have great value as a means by which people may severally develop their own reactions.These assumptions which so densely obscure the issue raise innumerable practical difficulties both for criticism and for the construction of a theory of criticism. It is well worth while to analyse typical situations a little further.The closing lines of the Fifth Sonnet of Wordsworth’s River Duddon series will afford a convenient instance:—Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that playedWith thy clear voice, I caught the fitful soundWafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound,Unfruitful solitudes that seemed to upbraidThe sun in heaven!—but now, to form a shadeFor thee, green alders have together woundTheir foliage; ashes flung their arms around;And birch trees risen in silver colonnade.And thou hast also tempted here to rise,Mid sheltering pines, this cottage rude and grey;Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyesCarelessly watched, sport through the summer day,Thy pleased associates—light as endless MayOn infant bosoms lonely nature lies.Two readers who found themselves, as they thought, in entire agreement as to the excellence of this sonnet, and especially as to the beauty of its close, were surprised shortly afterwards to discover that they had been reading quite different poems. By the one the last sentence was interpreted as saying that the gloom of lonely nature, of sullen moss and craggy ground, however it might seem later on in life, had no oppressive effect upon the children. By the other it was read as saying that however barren and gloomy might be the scene, actually lonely nature there in itself had no such character, but was, as it were, floating “light as endless May on infant bosoms”. The two readings, by throwing their effect back upon what had preceded and in addition completely altering the rhythm of the close, produced what it is no exaggeration to describe as two different poems. Neither would be uncharacteristic of Wordsworth, although doubtless the first reading is the one to be accepted.This exemplifies what is perhaps the rarest case,*that in which agreement as to value covers an actual grave difference in the experiences valued. More usually there is some genuine source for the agreement, to be found in some common character of the experiences. What this common character is may be difficult to discover. It may be merely the rhythm, or the cadence of some phrase, or the form of a sequence of references. But sometimes, if it is a more obvious part, such as a description or metaphor, a discussion between critical readers, who are aware that their experiences differ, will bring it to light.Another common case is exemplified by some famous discussions ofHamlet. It is curious that people with such different conceptions of the character of Hamlet himself and of the action of the play, have been able to agree none the less as to its value as a whole, apart, of course, from its incidental values. Much has to be discounted in estimating this agreement. On some interpretations praise of the play as a whole is certainly insincere. On the interpretation which makes Claudius the hero, whose tragic frailty lies in the fact that his long-suffering patience with the baseless suspicions of the crazy nuisance Hamlet breaks down in the end and brings the noble monarch to disaster, there would be little beyond the playwright’s subtlety which could honestly be commended. But with all allowances it seems certain that widely different interpretations have seemed to good critics to result in the same peculiar high value of tragedy. The explanation is that tragic value is a general not a specific character of responses. Just as a collision between motorcars and a collision between ships are equally collisions, so the impulses whose equilibrium produces thecatharsisof tragedy may be very varied, provided that their relations to one another are correct.Very many of the values of the arts are of this general kind. Besides the experiences which result from the building up of connected attitudes, there are those produced by the breaking down of some attitude which is a clog and a bar to other activities. From Blake’s “Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce”,†to Voltaire’s “Bon père de famille est capable de tout”, such works can be found in all degrees. It matters little what the detail of the impulses which make up the obstructing attitude for different people in each case may be. This often varies, but when the attitude collapses the effect can be agreed upon. The great masters of irony—Rabelais and the Flaubert ofBouvard et Pécuchet—are the chief exponents of this kind of exorcism.CHAPTER XXVIILevels of Response and the Width of AppealL’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . .L’art est d’essence hautaine.—Le Corbusier-Saugnier.Therestill remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind at a number of different levels.Macbethis as good an example as any. Its very wide popularity is due to the fact that crude responses to its situations integrate with one another, not so well as more refined responses, but still in something of the same fashion. At one end of the scale it is a highly successful, easily apprehended, two-colour melodrama, at the other a peculiarly enigmatic and subtle tragedy, and in between there are various stages which give fairly satisfactory results. Thus people of very different capacities for discrimination and with their attitudes developed in very different degrees can join in admiring it. This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels*is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama.The Pilgrim’s Progress,Robinson Crusoe,Gulliver’s Travels, the Ballads, are other instances. The differences between such things and, for example, the work of Donne, Milton, Blake, Landor, Stendhal, Henry James, Baudelaire raise some of the most interesting of critical problems.There is a common opinion, sometimes very strongly held, that a work which appeals to all kinds and all degrees of men is thereby proved to be greater, more valuable, than one which appeals only to some. There may be a confusion in this opinion. The sum of value yielded, since men actually are of different degrees, the social value that is to say of such work, will naturally be greater. But it does not follow that the maximum value for the reader of the highest level need be greater. The common belief that it is necessarily greater, that the work of wide appeal must be in itself a more admirable thing than work which appeals only to those who discriminate finely, is due to the assumption that it appeals everywhere for the same reasons and thus is shown to touch something essential and fundamental in human nature. But no one in a position to judge, who has, for example, some experience of the teaching of English, will maintain that Shakespeare’s appeal, to take the chief instance, is homogeneous. Different people read and go to see the same play for utterly different reasons. Where two people applaud we tend to assume, in spite of our better knowledge, that their experiences have been the same: the experience of the first would often be nauseous to the second, if by accident they were exchanged, and the first would be left helpless, lost and bewildered. On this false assumption it is easy to build up a formidable theory about art’s concern with the basic elements of human nature and to arraign modern art for superficiality. But there have always been these two kinds, work with the wide, and work with only the special appeal. What actually are the differences between them?The one, the art which keeps the child from play and the old man from his chimney-corner, evidently builds up its attitudes with the simplest, most aboriginal impulses, and it handles them so that the undeveloped mind can weave them into some sort of satisfying fabric while the more mature mind, qualifying and complicating them until they perhaps lose all likeness to their earlier form, still finds them serve its needs. The other is built up from impulses which, except in a personality capable of very nice adjustments, do not unite in any valuable way, and often the impulses themselves are of a kind of which only a highly developed mind or one with special experience is capable. This last point, however, is separable, and raises a question which will be discussed later.Plainly each of the two methods has its advantages. The poet of wide appeal, it is tempting to suppose, has an advantage in that the impulses involved are general, have been interested all through life and are very representative of experience. And he has the further advantage perhaps of avoiding a certain dangerous finality. Impulses which adjust themselves at so many levels may go on doing so perhaps indefinitely. There may be something in the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than he knew. Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible. Together with this goes the sense in the reader that all had to be just as it is and not otherwise, whereas with much of Shakespeare we feel that anything might have been different and the result the same. “Not laboriously but luckily.”But this is only sometimes true of the sophisticated poet who makes no appeal below a certain level. It is not true of Pope, for example, or of Walt Whitman, to choose two unlike authors who at their best are not generally appreciated. And as a counterbalancing advantage for such poets their greater freedom must be noticed. Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. Drama, to secure audiences large enough to be encouraging, must make a wide-spread appeal; but the limitations which this condition imposes upon action are very strict. There are no similar restrictions for lyric poetry, and it is significant that the greatest lyrics have so often a high-level appeal only. TheMad Songof Blake,The Phœnix and the Turtle,The Hymn of Pan, most great sonnets, are instances in point.There is, too, no good reason why impulses which only begin to make up valuable attitudes in highly organised and discriminating minds should lead to attitudes less valuable or more fragile, more fixed and final than others. We must not allow the unique instance of Shakespeare to weigh too heavily; after all,King Lear, the most inexhaustible of his works, is not a thing which has great popular appeal.CHAPTER XXVIIIThe Allusiveness of Modern PoetryTehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!He tickles this age who canCall Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,And Leda’s goose a swan!Anon.Wehave distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.In the second chorus ofHellasin the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:A mortal shape to himWas like the vapour dimWhich the orient planet animates with light.Hell, sin, and slavery, came,Like bloodhounds mild and tame,Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:The moon of MahometArose, and it shall set:While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,The Cross leads generations on.The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter*of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same strange modulation:So fleet, so faint, so fair,The Powers of Earth and AirFled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.Apollo, Pan and Love,And even Olympian Jove,Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with theHymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativitywill respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in theTriumph of Lifeis described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:A ShapeSo sate within, as one whom years deform,Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crapeWas bent.Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’, and the reference†here to the guardian of Hell Gate,What seem’d his headThe likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,is not accidental or unimportant for the understanding of the poem.Some care is needed in considering the problem of allusions. There may be worthy and unworthy motives behind their employment ad their enjoyment. There are some to whom a familiarity with literature occasions a sense of superiority over others which is trivial and mean. The pleasure of recognition, proportional as it is to the difficulty or unobtrusiveness of the allusion is a thing of slight value, not to be confused with literary or poetic values. It is perfectly possible for a reader, familiar with theNativity Hymn, for example, to receive all that Shelley intended without ever noticing the allusion, without, that is to say, any recognition. But the erudite often forget that this happens. To turn the capacity of recognising recondite references into a shibboleth by which culture may be estimated is a perversion to which scholarly persons are too much addicted. The point is worth mentioning, since this snobbishness, percolating down (or, if the metaphor be preferred, by repercussion) is responsible for much insincerity and timidity, for wrong attitudes of many kinds towards literature, for irritation and oppression developing into distaste and neglect of poetry. Allusion is a trap for the writer almost as effective as for the academic critic. It invites insincerity. It may encourage and disguise laziness. When it becomes a habit it is a disease. But these dangers form no ground for denying to allusion, and the similar resources of which it is typical, a fit and justifiable place in poetry.Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specially acquired. And the difficulty which it raises is merely a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will probably increase for the poetry of the future. All the thought and feeling of recent man goes on in terms of experience which is much more likely to be special and peculiar to the individual, than, let us say, the experience of medieval man. The survival of medieval man on such a vast scale among us should not mislead in this matter. The people who are most keenly and variously interested, that is to say, the people whose lives are most valuable on our theory of value, the people for whom the poet writes and by his appeal to whom he is judged, inevitably build up their minds with far more varied elements than has ever been the case before. And the poet, in so far as he is equal to his opportunities, does the same. It is hard, and, in fact, impossible, to deny him his natural and necessary resources on the ground that a majority of his readers will not understand. This is not his fault but the fault of the social structure. Given present conditions and future developments in the directions indicated by the changes of the last two hundred years, it is extremely probable that poets will become not less but more allusive, that their work will depend more and more not only upon other poetry but upon all manner of special fields of familiarity.*Many of the finest and most widely significant experiences, and those therefore most suitable for poetry, come nowadays, for example, through reading pieces of advanced research. There is nothing new in this, of course, nothing that was not happening when Donne wrote. The difficulty springs from the fact that research is so much further ahead than it used to be.
CHAPTER XXVBadness in PoetryIl faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!Le Corbusier-Saugnier.Thetheory of badness in poetry has never received the study which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty. For with bad art even more than with good unless we are careful to distinguish the communicative from the value aspects, even when these are connected, we shall find the issues obscured. Sometimes art is bad because communication is defective, the vehicle inoperative; sometimes because the experience communicated is worthless; sometimes for both reasons. It would perhaps be best to restrict the term bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and to call the other cases defective art. But this is not the usual practice of critics, any work which produces an experience displeasing to the critic being commonly called bad, whether or not this experience is like that responsible for the work.Let us begin by considering an instance of defective communication; choosing an example in which it is likely that the original experience had some value.THE POOLAre you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you—banded one?I take a complete work to avoid possible unfairness. Here we have the whole of the link which is to mediate between the experiences of the author and of the reader. Aristotle, in a different connection, it is true, and for different reasons, affirmed that a work of art must possess a certain magnitude, and we can adapt his remark here. Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity, makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs, in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness and ambiguity. Even when, as here, the original experience is presumably slight, tenuous and fleeting, the mere correspondence of matter to form is insufficient. The experience evoked in the reader is not sufficiently specific. A poet may, it is true, make an unlimited demand upon his reader, and the greatest poets make the greatest claim, but the demand made must be proportional to the poet’s own contribution. The reader here supplies too much of the poem. Had the poet said only, “I went and poked about for rocklings and caught the pool itself”, the reader, who converts what is printed above into a poem, would still have been able to construct an experience of equal value; for what results is almost independent of the author.To pass to a case in which communication is successful, where the objection lies to what is communicated:After the fierce midsummer all ablazeHas burned itself to ashes and expiresIn the intensity of its own fires,Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.So after Love has led us, till he tiresOf his own throes and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gazeHe beckons us to follow, and acrossCool, verdant vales we wander free from care.Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.As to the success of the communication there can be no question. Both the popularity of the author, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of whose work this is a favourable specimen, and records of the response made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware of the authorship, leave this beyond doubt. It reproduces the state of mind of the writer very exactly. With a very numerous class of readers pleasure and admiration ensue. The explanation is, probably, in the soothing effect of aligning the very active Love-Friendship groups of impulses with so settled yet rich a group as the Summer-Autumn simile brings in. The mind finds for a moment an attitude in which to contemplate a pair of situations (Love and Friendship) together, situations which are for many minds particularly difficult to see together. The heavy regular rhythm, the dead stamp of the rimes, the obviousness of the descriptions (‘mellow, mild, St Martin’; ‘cool verdant vales’) their alliteration, the triteness of the close, all these accentuate the impression of conclusiveness. The restless spirit is appeased, one of its chief problems is made to seem as if, regarded from a lofty, all-embracing standpoint, it is no problem but a process of nature.This reconciliation, this appeasement, is common to much good and to much bad poetry alike. But the value of it depends upon the level of organisation at which it takes place, upon whether the reconciled impulses are adequate or inadequate. In this case those who have adequate impulses as regards any of the four main systems involved, Summer, Autumn, Love, Friendship, are not appeased. Only for those who make certain conventional, stereotyped maladjustments instead, does the magic work.The nature and source of these stock conventional attitudes is of great interest. Suggestion is very largely responsible for them. The normal child under the age of ten is probably free from them, or at least with him they have no fixity or privileged standing. But as general reflection develops the place of the free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organisation of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute. ‘Ideas’, as they are commonly called, arise. A boy’s ‘Idea’ of Friendship or of Summer or of his Country is not, though the name would seem to imply it, primarily an intellectual affair. It is rather an attitude, or set of attitudes, of tendencies to act in certain fashions rather than others. Now reflection, unless very prolonged and very arduous, tends to fix the attitude by making us dwell in it, byremoving us from experience. In the development of any attitude there are stages, points of rest, of relatively greater stability. These, as we dwell in them, become more and more difficult to pass, and it is not surprising that most people remain all their lives in various halfway houses.These stages or levels of emotional adjustment seem, for the most part, to be fixed not by any special suitability to circumstances, certainly not to present circumstances, but much more by social suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience, the one force which might push us further. At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc., are an influence of the first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things. Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars. The quite common opinion that the arts have after all very little effect upon the community shows only that too little attention is being paid to the effects of bad art.The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child. He is even in the most important things functionally unable to face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses.Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made. Any combination of these general Ideas, hit at the right level or halting point of development, is, if suitably advertised, certain of success. Best-sellers in all the arts, exemplifying as they do the most general levels of attitude development, are worthy of very close study. No theory of criticism is satisfactory which is not able to explain their wide appeal and to give clear reasons why those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed.*They are tested in a way which few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their judgment, and they are among the best indices available of what is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied, science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later under what conditions popularity and possible high value are compatible.The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted, is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organisation of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them, he would prefer. We must not, of course, forget those variations in psychological efficiency discussed in Chapter XXII as degrees of vigilance. Even a good critic at a sufficiently low ebb of neural potency might mistake such a sonnet for one of Shakespeare’s or with more ease for one of Rossetti’s. But when vigilance was restored he would see, or at least feel, the differences. The point is that a reader who, at a high degree of vigilance, thoroughly enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so organised that he will fail to respond to poetry. Time and much varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer be the same person.A general statement such as this about the incompatibility of inexpressibly complex adjustments must naturally be incapable of strict proof. Individuals with alternating personalities and subject to fugues would have to be considered. So would the phenomena of ‘mutations of regime’ unaccompanied by change of vigilance if such occur. None the less very much evidence substantiates the statement. The experience of all those who have passed through the stages in the development of attitudes presupposed by great poetry is probably conclusive.Even though the intricacies of the nervous system should be capable of getting round this objection, there remain sufficient other reasons why indulgence in verse of this character should be condemned. There can be no doubt whatever that the value of the experience which results from it is small. On a pleasure theory of value there might well be doubt, since those who do enjoy it certainly appear to enjoy it in a high degree. But on the theory here maintained, the fact that those who have passed through the stage of enjoying thePoems of Passionto that of enjoying the bulk of the contents of theGolden Treasury, for example, do not return, settles the matter. We must bear in mind, of course, the conditions which have to be satisfied before this test is conclusive. That a man who has passed through the stage of drinking nothing but beer to the stage of drinking nothing but brandy rarely returns, does not prove that brandy is the better drink. It merely proves that it is the more efficient intoxicant. We have to ask in applying the test what the responses in question are, and in the case of poetry they are so varied, so representative of all the activities of life, that actual universal preference on the part of those who have tried both kinds fairly is the same (on our view) as superiority in value of the one over the other. Keats, by universal qualified opinion, is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.CHAPTER XXVIJudgment and Divergent ReadingsThe Prime Minister—The misunderstanding—in so far as it is a misunderstanding—is purely a misunderstanding. . . .The Leader of the Opposition—With the utmost goodwill on this side, I find myself with far less grasp of the whole subject than I had. . . .—The Times, 8th July 1924.Ambiguityin a poem, as with any other communication, may be the fault of the poet or of the reader. The ambiguities due to erratic reading are as important for criticism as others, and practically more troublesome. There are strong social incentives for overlooking them. Talking to one another we assume, in nine cases out of ten like the merest simpletons, that our readings agree, and that when we differ in our opinions it is something else, not our experiences but our judgments about them which are at variance. Most discussion about works of art is waste of timeas communicationfor this reason. It may, of course, have great value as a means by which people may severally develop their own reactions.These assumptions which so densely obscure the issue raise innumerable practical difficulties both for criticism and for the construction of a theory of criticism. It is well worth while to analyse typical situations a little further.The closing lines of the Fifth Sonnet of Wordsworth’s River Duddon series will afford a convenient instance:—Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that playedWith thy clear voice, I caught the fitful soundWafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound,Unfruitful solitudes that seemed to upbraidThe sun in heaven!—but now, to form a shadeFor thee, green alders have together woundTheir foliage; ashes flung their arms around;And birch trees risen in silver colonnade.And thou hast also tempted here to rise,Mid sheltering pines, this cottage rude and grey;Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyesCarelessly watched, sport through the summer day,Thy pleased associates—light as endless MayOn infant bosoms lonely nature lies.Two readers who found themselves, as they thought, in entire agreement as to the excellence of this sonnet, and especially as to the beauty of its close, were surprised shortly afterwards to discover that they had been reading quite different poems. By the one the last sentence was interpreted as saying that the gloom of lonely nature, of sullen moss and craggy ground, however it might seem later on in life, had no oppressive effect upon the children. By the other it was read as saying that however barren and gloomy might be the scene, actually lonely nature there in itself had no such character, but was, as it were, floating “light as endless May on infant bosoms”. The two readings, by throwing their effect back upon what had preceded and in addition completely altering the rhythm of the close, produced what it is no exaggeration to describe as two different poems. Neither would be uncharacteristic of Wordsworth, although doubtless the first reading is the one to be accepted.This exemplifies what is perhaps the rarest case,*that in which agreement as to value covers an actual grave difference in the experiences valued. More usually there is some genuine source for the agreement, to be found in some common character of the experiences. What this common character is may be difficult to discover. It may be merely the rhythm, or the cadence of some phrase, or the form of a sequence of references. But sometimes, if it is a more obvious part, such as a description or metaphor, a discussion between critical readers, who are aware that their experiences differ, will bring it to light.Another common case is exemplified by some famous discussions ofHamlet. It is curious that people with such different conceptions of the character of Hamlet himself and of the action of the play, have been able to agree none the less as to its value as a whole, apart, of course, from its incidental values. Much has to be discounted in estimating this agreement. On some interpretations praise of the play as a whole is certainly insincere. On the interpretation which makes Claudius the hero, whose tragic frailty lies in the fact that his long-suffering patience with the baseless suspicions of the crazy nuisance Hamlet breaks down in the end and brings the noble monarch to disaster, there would be little beyond the playwright’s subtlety which could honestly be commended. But with all allowances it seems certain that widely different interpretations have seemed to good critics to result in the same peculiar high value of tragedy. The explanation is that tragic value is a general not a specific character of responses. Just as a collision between motorcars and a collision between ships are equally collisions, so the impulses whose equilibrium produces thecatharsisof tragedy may be very varied, provided that their relations to one another are correct.Very many of the values of the arts are of this general kind. Besides the experiences which result from the building up of connected attitudes, there are those produced by the breaking down of some attitude which is a clog and a bar to other activities. From Blake’s “Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce”,†to Voltaire’s “Bon père de famille est capable de tout”, such works can be found in all degrees. It matters little what the detail of the impulses which make up the obstructing attitude for different people in each case may be. This often varies, but when the attitude collapses the effect can be agreed upon. The great masters of irony—Rabelais and the Flaubert ofBouvard et Pécuchet—are the chief exponents of this kind of exorcism.CHAPTER XXVIILevels of Response and the Width of AppealL’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . .L’art est d’essence hautaine.—Le Corbusier-Saugnier.Therestill remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind at a number of different levels.Macbethis as good an example as any. Its very wide popularity is due to the fact that crude responses to its situations integrate with one another, not so well as more refined responses, but still in something of the same fashion. At one end of the scale it is a highly successful, easily apprehended, two-colour melodrama, at the other a peculiarly enigmatic and subtle tragedy, and in between there are various stages which give fairly satisfactory results. Thus people of very different capacities for discrimination and with their attitudes developed in very different degrees can join in admiring it. This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels*is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama.The Pilgrim’s Progress,Robinson Crusoe,Gulliver’s Travels, the Ballads, are other instances. The differences between such things and, for example, the work of Donne, Milton, Blake, Landor, Stendhal, Henry James, Baudelaire raise some of the most interesting of critical problems.There is a common opinion, sometimes very strongly held, that a work which appeals to all kinds and all degrees of men is thereby proved to be greater, more valuable, than one which appeals only to some. There may be a confusion in this opinion. The sum of value yielded, since men actually are of different degrees, the social value that is to say of such work, will naturally be greater. But it does not follow that the maximum value for the reader of the highest level need be greater. The common belief that it is necessarily greater, that the work of wide appeal must be in itself a more admirable thing than work which appeals only to those who discriminate finely, is due to the assumption that it appeals everywhere for the same reasons and thus is shown to touch something essential and fundamental in human nature. But no one in a position to judge, who has, for example, some experience of the teaching of English, will maintain that Shakespeare’s appeal, to take the chief instance, is homogeneous. Different people read and go to see the same play for utterly different reasons. Where two people applaud we tend to assume, in spite of our better knowledge, that their experiences have been the same: the experience of the first would often be nauseous to the second, if by accident they were exchanged, and the first would be left helpless, lost and bewildered. On this false assumption it is easy to build up a formidable theory about art’s concern with the basic elements of human nature and to arraign modern art for superficiality. But there have always been these two kinds, work with the wide, and work with only the special appeal. What actually are the differences between them?The one, the art which keeps the child from play and the old man from his chimney-corner, evidently builds up its attitudes with the simplest, most aboriginal impulses, and it handles them so that the undeveloped mind can weave them into some sort of satisfying fabric while the more mature mind, qualifying and complicating them until they perhaps lose all likeness to their earlier form, still finds them serve its needs. The other is built up from impulses which, except in a personality capable of very nice adjustments, do not unite in any valuable way, and often the impulses themselves are of a kind of which only a highly developed mind or one with special experience is capable. This last point, however, is separable, and raises a question which will be discussed later.Plainly each of the two methods has its advantages. The poet of wide appeal, it is tempting to suppose, has an advantage in that the impulses involved are general, have been interested all through life and are very representative of experience. And he has the further advantage perhaps of avoiding a certain dangerous finality. Impulses which adjust themselves at so many levels may go on doing so perhaps indefinitely. There may be something in the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than he knew. Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible. Together with this goes the sense in the reader that all had to be just as it is and not otherwise, whereas with much of Shakespeare we feel that anything might have been different and the result the same. “Not laboriously but luckily.”But this is only sometimes true of the sophisticated poet who makes no appeal below a certain level. It is not true of Pope, for example, or of Walt Whitman, to choose two unlike authors who at their best are not generally appreciated. And as a counterbalancing advantage for such poets their greater freedom must be noticed. Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. Drama, to secure audiences large enough to be encouraging, must make a wide-spread appeal; but the limitations which this condition imposes upon action are very strict. There are no similar restrictions for lyric poetry, and it is significant that the greatest lyrics have so often a high-level appeal only. TheMad Songof Blake,The Phœnix and the Turtle,The Hymn of Pan, most great sonnets, are instances in point.There is, too, no good reason why impulses which only begin to make up valuable attitudes in highly organised and discriminating minds should lead to attitudes less valuable or more fragile, more fixed and final than others. We must not allow the unique instance of Shakespeare to weigh too heavily; after all,King Lear, the most inexhaustible of his works, is not a thing which has great popular appeal.CHAPTER XXVIIIThe Allusiveness of Modern PoetryTehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!He tickles this age who canCall Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,And Leda’s goose a swan!Anon.Wehave distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.In the second chorus ofHellasin the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:A mortal shape to himWas like the vapour dimWhich the orient planet animates with light.Hell, sin, and slavery, came,Like bloodhounds mild and tame,Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:The moon of MahometArose, and it shall set:While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,The Cross leads generations on.The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter*of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same strange modulation:So fleet, so faint, so fair,The Powers of Earth and AirFled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.Apollo, Pan and Love,And even Olympian Jove,Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with theHymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativitywill respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in theTriumph of Lifeis described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:A ShapeSo sate within, as one whom years deform,Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crapeWas bent.Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’, and the reference†here to the guardian of Hell Gate,What seem’d his headThe likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,
Il faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!Le Corbusier-Saugnier.
Il faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!Le Corbusier-Saugnier.
Il faut dissiper un malentendu: nous sommes pourris d’art!
Le Corbusier-Saugnier.
Thetheory of badness in poetry has never received the study which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty. For with bad art even more than with good unless we are careful to distinguish the communicative from the value aspects, even when these are connected, we shall find the issues obscured. Sometimes art is bad because communication is defective, the vehicle inoperative; sometimes because the experience communicated is worthless; sometimes for both reasons. It would perhaps be best to restrict the term bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and to call the other cases defective art. But this is not the usual practice of critics, any work which produces an experience displeasing to the critic being commonly called bad, whether or not this experience is like that responsible for the work.
Let us begin by considering an instance of defective communication; choosing an example in which it is likely that the original experience had some value.
THE POOLAre you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you—banded one?I take a complete work to avoid possible unfairness. Here we have the whole of the link which is to mediate between the experiences of the author and of the reader. Aristotle, in a different connection, it is true, and for different reasons, affirmed that a work of art must possess a certain magnitude, and we can adapt his remark here. Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity, makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs, in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness and ambiguity. Even when, as here, the original experience is presumably slight, tenuous and fleeting, the mere correspondence of matter to form is insufficient. The experience evoked in the reader is not sufficiently specific. A poet may, it is true, make an unlimited demand upon his reader, and the greatest poets make the greatest claim, but the demand made must be proportional to the poet’s own contribution. The reader here supplies too much of the poem. Had the poet said only, “I went and poked about for rocklings and caught the pool itself”, the reader, who converts what is printed above into a poem, would still have been able to construct an experience of equal value; for what results is almost independent of the author.To pass to a case in which communication is successful, where the objection lies to what is communicated:After the fierce midsummer all ablazeHas burned itself to ashes and expiresIn the intensity of its own fires,Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.So after Love has led us, till he tiresOf his own throes and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gazeHe beckons us to follow, and acrossCool, verdant vales we wander free from care.Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.As to the success of the communication there can be no question. Both the popularity of the author, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of whose work this is a favourable specimen, and records of the response made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware of the authorship, leave this beyond doubt. It reproduces the state of mind of the writer very exactly. With a very numerous class of readers pleasure and admiration ensue. The explanation is, probably, in the soothing effect of aligning the very active Love-Friendship groups of impulses with so settled yet rich a group as the Summer-Autumn simile brings in. The mind finds for a moment an attitude in which to contemplate a pair of situations (Love and Friendship) together, situations which are for many minds particularly difficult to see together. The heavy regular rhythm, the dead stamp of the rimes, the obviousness of the descriptions (‘mellow, mild, St Martin’; ‘cool verdant vales’) their alliteration, the triteness of the close, all these accentuate the impression of conclusiveness. The restless spirit is appeased, one of its chief problems is made to seem as if, regarded from a lofty, all-embracing standpoint, it is no problem but a process of nature.This reconciliation, this appeasement, is common to much good and to much bad poetry alike. But the value of it depends upon the level of organisation at which it takes place, upon whether the reconciled impulses are adequate or inadequate. In this case those who have adequate impulses as regards any of the four main systems involved, Summer, Autumn, Love, Friendship, are not appeased. Only for those who make certain conventional, stereotyped maladjustments instead, does the magic work.The nature and source of these stock conventional attitudes is of great interest. Suggestion is very largely responsible for them. The normal child under the age of ten is probably free from them, or at least with him they have no fixity or privileged standing. But as general reflection develops the place of the free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organisation of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute. ‘Ideas’, as they are commonly called, arise. A boy’s ‘Idea’ of Friendship or of Summer or of his Country is not, though the name would seem to imply it, primarily an intellectual affair. It is rather an attitude, or set of attitudes, of tendencies to act in certain fashions rather than others. Now reflection, unless very prolonged and very arduous, tends to fix the attitude by making us dwell in it, byremoving us from experience. In the development of any attitude there are stages, points of rest, of relatively greater stability. These, as we dwell in them, become more and more difficult to pass, and it is not surprising that most people remain all their lives in various halfway houses.These stages or levels of emotional adjustment seem, for the most part, to be fixed not by any special suitability to circumstances, certainly not to present circumstances, but much more by social suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience, the one force which might push us further. At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc., are an influence of the first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things. Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars. The quite common opinion that the arts have after all very little effect upon the community shows only that too little attention is being paid to the effects of bad art.The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child. He is even in the most important things functionally unable to face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses.Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made. Any combination of these general Ideas, hit at the right level or halting point of development, is, if suitably advertised, certain of success. Best-sellers in all the arts, exemplifying as they do the most general levels of attitude development, are worthy of very close study. No theory of criticism is satisfactory which is not able to explain their wide appeal and to give clear reasons why those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed.*They are tested in a way which few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their judgment, and they are among the best indices available of what is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied, science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later under what conditions popularity and possible high value are compatible.The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted, is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organisation of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them, he would prefer. We must not, of course, forget those variations in psychological efficiency discussed in Chapter XXII as degrees of vigilance. Even a good critic at a sufficiently low ebb of neural potency might mistake such a sonnet for one of Shakespeare’s or with more ease for one of Rossetti’s. But when vigilance was restored he would see, or at least feel, the differences. The point is that a reader who, at a high degree of vigilance, thoroughly enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so organised that he will fail to respond to poetry. Time and much varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer be the same person.A general statement such as this about the incompatibility of inexpressibly complex adjustments must naturally be incapable of strict proof. Individuals with alternating personalities and subject to fugues would have to be considered. So would the phenomena of ‘mutations of regime’ unaccompanied by change of vigilance if such occur. None the less very much evidence substantiates the statement. The experience of all those who have passed through the stages in the development of attitudes presupposed by great poetry is probably conclusive.Even though the intricacies of the nervous system should be capable of getting round this objection, there remain sufficient other reasons why indulgence in verse of this character should be condemned. There can be no doubt whatever that the value of the experience which results from it is small. On a pleasure theory of value there might well be doubt, since those who do enjoy it certainly appear to enjoy it in a high degree. But on the theory here maintained, the fact that those who have passed through the stage of enjoying thePoems of Passionto that of enjoying the bulk of the contents of theGolden Treasury, for example, do not return, settles the matter. We must bear in mind, of course, the conditions which have to be satisfied before this test is conclusive. That a man who has passed through the stage of drinking nothing but beer to the stage of drinking nothing but brandy rarely returns, does not prove that brandy is the better drink. It merely proves that it is the more efficient intoxicant. We have to ask in applying the test what the responses in question are, and in the case of poetry they are so varied, so representative of all the activities of life, that actual universal preference on the part of those who have tried both kinds fairly is the same (on our view) as superiority in value of the one over the other. Keats, by universal qualified opinion, is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.
THE POOL
Are you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you—banded one?
Are you alive?I touch you.You quiver like a sea-fish.I cover you with my net.What are you—banded one?
I take a complete work to avoid possible unfairness. Here we have the whole of the link which is to mediate between the experiences of the author and of the reader. Aristotle, in a different connection, it is true, and for different reasons, affirmed that a work of art must possess a certain magnitude, and we can adapt his remark here. Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity, makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs, in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness and ambiguity. Even when, as here, the original experience is presumably slight, tenuous and fleeting, the mere correspondence of matter to form is insufficient. The experience evoked in the reader is not sufficiently specific. A poet may, it is true, make an unlimited demand upon his reader, and the greatest poets make the greatest claim, but the demand made must be proportional to the poet’s own contribution. The reader here supplies too much of the poem. Had the poet said only, “I went and poked about for rocklings and caught the pool itself”, the reader, who converts what is printed above into a poem, would still have been able to construct an experience of equal value; for what results is almost independent of the author.
To pass to a case in which communication is successful, where the objection lies to what is communicated:
After the fierce midsummer all ablazeHas burned itself to ashes and expiresIn the intensity of its own fires,Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.So after Love has led us, till he tiresOf his own throes and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gazeHe beckons us to follow, and acrossCool, verdant vales we wander free from care.Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
Then come the mellow, mild, St Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed Friendship: with a restful gaze
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool, verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
As to the success of the communication there can be no question. Both the popularity of the author, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of whose work this is a favourable specimen, and records of the response made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware of the authorship, leave this beyond doubt. It reproduces the state of mind of the writer very exactly. With a very numerous class of readers pleasure and admiration ensue. The explanation is, probably, in the soothing effect of aligning the very active Love-Friendship groups of impulses with so settled yet rich a group as the Summer-Autumn simile brings in. The mind finds for a moment an attitude in which to contemplate a pair of situations (Love and Friendship) together, situations which are for many minds particularly difficult to see together. The heavy regular rhythm, the dead stamp of the rimes, the obviousness of the descriptions (‘mellow, mild, St Martin’; ‘cool verdant vales’) their alliteration, the triteness of the close, all these accentuate the impression of conclusiveness. The restless spirit is appeased, one of its chief problems is made to seem as if, regarded from a lofty, all-embracing standpoint, it is no problem but a process of nature.
This reconciliation, this appeasement, is common to much good and to much bad poetry alike. But the value of it depends upon the level of organisation at which it takes place, upon whether the reconciled impulses are adequate or inadequate. In this case those who have adequate impulses as regards any of the four main systems involved, Summer, Autumn, Love, Friendship, are not appeased. Only for those who make certain conventional, stereotyped maladjustments instead, does the magic work.
The nature and source of these stock conventional attitudes is of great interest. Suggestion is very largely responsible for them. The normal child under the age of ten is probably free from them, or at least with him they have no fixity or privileged standing. But as general reflection develops the place of the free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organisation of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute. ‘Ideas’, as they are commonly called, arise. A boy’s ‘Idea’ of Friendship or of Summer or of his Country is not, though the name would seem to imply it, primarily an intellectual affair. It is rather an attitude, or set of attitudes, of tendencies to act in certain fashions rather than others. Now reflection, unless very prolonged and very arduous, tends to fix the attitude by making us dwell in it, byremoving us from experience. In the development of any attitude there are stages, points of rest, of relatively greater stability. These, as we dwell in them, become more and more difficult to pass, and it is not surprising that most people remain all their lives in various halfway houses.
These stages or levels of emotional adjustment seem, for the most part, to be fixed not by any special suitability to circumstances, certainly not to present circumstances, but much more by social suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience, the one force which might push us further. At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc., are an influence of the first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things. Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars. The quite common opinion that the arts have after all very little effect upon the community shows only that too little attention is being paid to the effects of bad art.
The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child. He is even in the most important things functionally unable to face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses.
Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made. Any combination of these general Ideas, hit at the right level or halting point of development, is, if suitably advertised, certain of success. Best-sellers in all the arts, exemplifying as they do the most general levels of attitude development, are worthy of very close study. No theory of criticism is satisfactory which is not able to explain their wide appeal and to give clear reasons why those who disdain them are not necessarily snobs.
The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted into poster designing. It is, however, doubtful whether their work pays. But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed.*They are tested in a way which few other forms of literature are tested, their effects are watched by adepts whose livelihood depends upon the accuracy of their judgment, and they are among the best indices available of what is happening to taste. Criticism will justify itself as an applied, science when it is able to indicate how an advertisement may be profitable without necessarily being crass. We shall see later under what conditions popularity and possible high value are compatible.
The strongest objection to, let us say, the sonnet we have quoted, is that a person who enjoys it, through the very organisation of his responses which enables him to enjoy it, is debarred from appreciating many things which, if he could appreciate them, he would prefer. We must not, of course, forget those variations in psychological efficiency discussed in Chapter XXII as degrees of vigilance. Even a good critic at a sufficiently low ebb of neural potency might mistake such a sonnet for one of Shakespeare’s or with more ease for one of Rossetti’s. But when vigilance was restored he would see, or at least feel, the differences. The point is that a reader who, at a high degree of vigilance, thoroughly enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so organised that he will fail to respond to poetry. Time and much varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer be the same person.
A general statement such as this about the incompatibility of inexpressibly complex adjustments must naturally be incapable of strict proof. Individuals with alternating personalities and subject to fugues would have to be considered. So would the phenomena of ‘mutations of regime’ unaccompanied by change of vigilance if such occur. None the less very much evidence substantiates the statement. The experience of all those who have passed through the stages in the development of attitudes presupposed by great poetry is probably conclusive.
Even though the intricacies of the nervous system should be capable of getting round this objection, there remain sufficient other reasons why indulgence in verse of this character should be condemned. There can be no doubt whatever that the value of the experience which results from it is small. On a pleasure theory of value there might well be doubt, since those who do enjoy it certainly appear to enjoy it in a high degree. But on the theory here maintained, the fact that those who have passed through the stage of enjoying thePoems of Passionto that of enjoying the bulk of the contents of theGolden Treasury, for example, do not return, settles the matter. We must bear in mind, of course, the conditions which have to be satisfied before this test is conclusive. That a man who has passed through the stage of drinking nothing but beer to the stage of drinking nothing but brandy rarely returns, does not prove that brandy is the better drink. It merely proves that it is the more efficient intoxicant. We have to ask in applying the test what the responses in question are, and in the case of poetry they are so varied, so representative of all the activities of life, that actual universal preference on the part of those who have tried both kinds fairly is the same (on our view) as superiority in value of the one over the other. Keats, by universal qualified opinion, is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.
CHAPTER XXVIJudgment and Divergent ReadingsThe Prime Minister—The misunderstanding—in so far as it is a misunderstanding—is purely a misunderstanding. . . .The Leader of the Opposition—With the utmost goodwill on this side, I find myself with far less grasp of the whole subject than I had. . . .—The Times, 8th July 1924.Ambiguityin a poem, as with any other communication, may be the fault of the poet or of the reader. The ambiguities due to erratic reading are as important for criticism as others, and practically more troublesome. There are strong social incentives for overlooking them. Talking to one another we assume, in nine cases out of ten like the merest simpletons, that our readings agree, and that when we differ in our opinions it is something else, not our experiences but our judgments about them which are at variance. Most discussion about works of art is waste of timeas communicationfor this reason. It may, of course, have great value as a means by which people may severally develop their own reactions.These assumptions which so densely obscure the issue raise innumerable practical difficulties both for criticism and for the construction of a theory of criticism. It is well worth while to analyse typical situations a little further.The closing lines of the Fifth Sonnet of Wordsworth’s River Duddon series will afford a convenient instance:—Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that playedWith thy clear voice, I caught the fitful soundWafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound,Unfruitful solitudes that seemed to upbraidThe sun in heaven!—but now, to form a shadeFor thee, green alders have together woundTheir foliage; ashes flung their arms around;And birch trees risen in silver colonnade.And thou hast also tempted here to rise,Mid sheltering pines, this cottage rude and grey;Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyesCarelessly watched, sport through the summer day,Thy pleased associates—light as endless MayOn infant bosoms lonely nature lies.Two readers who found themselves, as they thought, in entire agreement as to the excellence of this sonnet, and especially as to the beauty of its close, were surprised shortly afterwards to discover that they had been reading quite different poems. By the one the last sentence was interpreted as saying that the gloom of lonely nature, of sullen moss and craggy ground, however it might seem later on in life, had no oppressive effect upon the children. By the other it was read as saying that however barren and gloomy might be the scene, actually lonely nature there in itself had no such character, but was, as it were, floating “light as endless May on infant bosoms”. The two readings, by throwing their effect back upon what had preceded and in addition completely altering the rhythm of the close, produced what it is no exaggeration to describe as two different poems. Neither would be uncharacteristic of Wordsworth, although doubtless the first reading is the one to be accepted.This exemplifies what is perhaps the rarest case,*that in which agreement as to value covers an actual grave difference in the experiences valued. More usually there is some genuine source for the agreement, to be found in some common character of the experiences. What this common character is may be difficult to discover. It may be merely the rhythm, or the cadence of some phrase, or the form of a sequence of references. But sometimes, if it is a more obvious part, such as a description or metaphor, a discussion between critical readers, who are aware that their experiences differ, will bring it to light.Another common case is exemplified by some famous discussions ofHamlet. It is curious that people with such different conceptions of the character of Hamlet himself and of the action of the play, have been able to agree none the less as to its value as a whole, apart, of course, from its incidental values. Much has to be discounted in estimating this agreement. On some interpretations praise of the play as a whole is certainly insincere. On the interpretation which makes Claudius the hero, whose tragic frailty lies in the fact that his long-suffering patience with the baseless suspicions of the crazy nuisance Hamlet breaks down in the end and brings the noble monarch to disaster, there would be little beyond the playwright’s subtlety which could honestly be commended. But with all allowances it seems certain that widely different interpretations have seemed to good critics to result in the same peculiar high value of tragedy. The explanation is that tragic value is a general not a specific character of responses. Just as a collision between motorcars and a collision between ships are equally collisions, so the impulses whose equilibrium produces thecatharsisof tragedy may be very varied, provided that their relations to one another are correct.Very many of the values of the arts are of this general kind. Besides the experiences which result from the building up of connected attitudes, there are those produced by the breaking down of some attitude which is a clog and a bar to other activities. From Blake’s “Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce”,†to Voltaire’s “Bon père de famille est capable de tout”, such works can be found in all degrees. It matters little what the detail of the impulses which make up the obstructing attitude for different people in each case may be. This often varies, but when the attitude collapses the effect can be agreed upon. The great masters of irony—Rabelais and the Flaubert ofBouvard et Pécuchet—are the chief exponents of this kind of exorcism.
The Prime Minister—The misunderstanding—in so far as it is a misunderstanding—is purely a misunderstanding. . . .The Leader of the Opposition—With the utmost goodwill on this side, I find myself with far less grasp of the whole subject than I had. . . .—The Times, 8th July 1924.
The Prime Minister—The misunderstanding—in so far as it is a misunderstanding—is purely a misunderstanding. . . .
The Leader of the Opposition—With the utmost goodwill on this side, I find myself with far less grasp of the whole subject than I had. . . .—The Times, 8th July 1924.
Ambiguityin a poem, as with any other communication, may be the fault of the poet or of the reader. The ambiguities due to erratic reading are as important for criticism as others, and practically more troublesome. There are strong social incentives for overlooking them. Talking to one another we assume, in nine cases out of ten like the merest simpletons, that our readings agree, and that when we differ in our opinions it is something else, not our experiences but our judgments about them which are at variance. Most discussion about works of art is waste of timeas communicationfor this reason. It may, of course, have great value as a means by which people may severally develop their own reactions.
These assumptions which so densely obscure the issue raise innumerable practical difficulties both for criticism and for the construction of a theory of criticism. It is well worth while to analyse typical situations a little further.
The closing lines of the Fifth Sonnet of Wordsworth’s River Duddon series will afford a convenient instance:—
Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that playedWith thy clear voice, I caught the fitful soundWafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound,Unfruitful solitudes that seemed to upbraidThe sun in heaven!—but now, to form a shadeFor thee, green alders have together woundTheir foliage; ashes flung their arms around;And birch trees risen in silver colonnade.And thou hast also tempted here to rise,Mid sheltering pines, this cottage rude and grey;Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyesCarelessly watched, sport through the summer day,Thy pleased associates—light as endless MayOn infant bosoms lonely nature lies.
Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that playedWith thy clear voice, I caught the fitful soundWafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound,Unfruitful solitudes that seemed to upbraidThe sun in heaven!—but now, to form a shadeFor thee, green alders have together woundTheir foliage; ashes flung their arms around;And birch trees risen in silver colonnade.And thou hast also tempted here to rise,Mid sheltering pines, this cottage rude and grey;Whose ruddy children, by the mother’s eyesCarelessly watched, sport through the summer day,Thy pleased associates—light as endless MayOn infant bosoms lonely nature lies.
Two readers who found themselves, as they thought, in entire agreement as to the excellence of this sonnet, and especially as to the beauty of its close, were surprised shortly afterwards to discover that they had been reading quite different poems. By the one the last sentence was interpreted as saying that the gloom of lonely nature, of sullen moss and craggy ground, however it might seem later on in life, had no oppressive effect upon the children. By the other it was read as saying that however barren and gloomy might be the scene, actually lonely nature there in itself had no such character, but was, as it were, floating “light as endless May on infant bosoms”. The two readings, by throwing their effect back upon what had preceded and in addition completely altering the rhythm of the close, produced what it is no exaggeration to describe as two different poems. Neither would be uncharacteristic of Wordsworth, although doubtless the first reading is the one to be accepted.
This exemplifies what is perhaps the rarest case,*that in which agreement as to value covers an actual grave difference in the experiences valued. More usually there is some genuine source for the agreement, to be found in some common character of the experiences. What this common character is may be difficult to discover. It may be merely the rhythm, or the cadence of some phrase, or the form of a sequence of references. But sometimes, if it is a more obvious part, such as a description or metaphor, a discussion between critical readers, who are aware that their experiences differ, will bring it to light.
Another common case is exemplified by some famous discussions ofHamlet. It is curious that people with such different conceptions of the character of Hamlet himself and of the action of the play, have been able to agree none the less as to its value as a whole, apart, of course, from its incidental values. Much has to be discounted in estimating this agreement. On some interpretations praise of the play as a whole is certainly insincere. On the interpretation which makes Claudius the hero, whose tragic frailty lies in the fact that his long-suffering patience with the baseless suspicions of the crazy nuisance Hamlet breaks down in the end and brings the noble monarch to disaster, there would be little beyond the playwright’s subtlety which could honestly be commended. But with all allowances it seems certain that widely different interpretations have seemed to good critics to result in the same peculiar high value of tragedy. The explanation is that tragic value is a general not a specific character of responses. Just as a collision between motorcars and a collision between ships are equally collisions, so the impulses whose equilibrium produces thecatharsisof tragedy may be very varied, provided that their relations to one another are correct.
Very many of the values of the arts are of this general kind. Besides the experiences which result from the building up of connected attitudes, there are those produced by the breaking down of some attitude which is a clog and a bar to other activities. From Blake’s “Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce”,†to Voltaire’s “Bon père de famille est capable de tout”, such works can be found in all degrees. It matters little what the detail of the impulses which make up the obstructing attitude for different people in each case may be. This often varies, but when the attitude collapses the effect can be agreed upon. The great masters of irony—Rabelais and the Flaubert ofBouvard et Pécuchet—are the chief exponents of this kind of exorcism.
CHAPTER XXVIILevels of Response and the Width of AppealL’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . .L’art est d’essence hautaine.—Le Corbusier-Saugnier.Therestill remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind at a number of different levels.Macbethis as good an example as any. Its very wide popularity is due to the fact that crude responses to its situations integrate with one another, not so well as more refined responses, but still in something of the same fashion. At one end of the scale it is a highly successful, easily apprehended, two-colour melodrama, at the other a peculiarly enigmatic and subtle tragedy, and in between there are various stages which give fairly satisfactory results. Thus people of very different capacities for discrimination and with their attitudes developed in very different degrees can join in admiring it. This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels*is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama.The Pilgrim’s Progress,Robinson Crusoe,Gulliver’s Travels, the Ballads, are other instances. The differences between such things and, for example, the work of Donne, Milton, Blake, Landor, Stendhal, Henry James, Baudelaire raise some of the most interesting of critical problems.There is a common opinion, sometimes very strongly held, that a work which appeals to all kinds and all degrees of men is thereby proved to be greater, more valuable, than one which appeals only to some. There may be a confusion in this opinion. The sum of value yielded, since men actually are of different degrees, the social value that is to say of such work, will naturally be greater. But it does not follow that the maximum value for the reader of the highest level need be greater. The common belief that it is necessarily greater, that the work of wide appeal must be in itself a more admirable thing than work which appeals only to those who discriminate finely, is due to the assumption that it appeals everywhere for the same reasons and thus is shown to touch something essential and fundamental in human nature. But no one in a position to judge, who has, for example, some experience of the teaching of English, will maintain that Shakespeare’s appeal, to take the chief instance, is homogeneous. Different people read and go to see the same play for utterly different reasons. Where two people applaud we tend to assume, in spite of our better knowledge, that their experiences have been the same: the experience of the first would often be nauseous to the second, if by accident they were exchanged, and the first would be left helpless, lost and bewildered. On this false assumption it is easy to build up a formidable theory about art’s concern with the basic elements of human nature and to arraign modern art for superficiality. But there have always been these two kinds, work with the wide, and work with only the special appeal. What actually are the differences between them?The one, the art which keeps the child from play and the old man from his chimney-corner, evidently builds up its attitudes with the simplest, most aboriginal impulses, and it handles them so that the undeveloped mind can weave them into some sort of satisfying fabric while the more mature mind, qualifying and complicating them until they perhaps lose all likeness to their earlier form, still finds them serve its needs. The other is built up from impulses which, except in a personality capable of very nice adjustments, do not unite in any valuable way, and often the impulses themselves are of a kind of which only a highly developed mind or one with special experience is capable. This last point, however, is separable, and raises a question which will be discussed later.Plainly each of the two methods has its advantages. The poet of wide appeal, it is tempting to suppose, has an advantage in that the impulses involved are general, have been interested all through life and are very representative of experience. And he has the further advantage perhaps of avoiding a certain dangerous finality. Impulses which adjust themselves at so many levels may go on doing so perhaps indefinitely. There may be something in the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than he knew. Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible. Together with this goes the sense in the reader that all had to be just as it is and not otherwise, whereas with much of Shakespeare we feel that anything might have been different and the result the same. “Not laboriously but luckily.”But this is only sometimes true of the sophisticated poet who makes no appeal below a certain level. It is not true of Pope, for example, or of Walt Whitman, to choose two unlike authors who at their best are not generally appreciated. And as a counterbalancing advantage for such poets their greater freedom must be noticed. Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. Drama, to secure audiences large enough to be encouraging, must make a wide-spread appeal; but the limitations which this condition imposes upon action are very strict. There are no similar restrictions for lyric poetry, and it is significant that the greatest lyrics have so often a high-level appeal only. TheMad Songof Blake,The Phœnix and the Turtle,The Hymn of Pan, most great sonnets, are instances in point.There is, too, no good reason why impulses which only begin to make up valuable attitudes in highly organised and discriminating minds should lead to attitudes less valuable or more fragile, more fixed and final than others. We must not allow the unique instance of Shakespeare to weigh too heavily; after all,King Lear, the most inexhaustible of his works, is not a thing which has great popular appeal.
L’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . .L’art est d’essence hautaine.—Le Corbusier-Saugnier.
L’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . .L’art est d’essence hautaine.—Le Corbusier-Saugnier.
Therestill remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind at a number of different levels.Macbethis as good an example as any. Its very wide popularity is due to the fact that crude responses to its situations integrate with one another, not so well as more refined responses, but still in something of the same fashion. At one end of the scale it is a highly successful, easily apprehended, two-colour melodrama, at the other a peculiarly enigmatic and subtle tragedy, and in between there are various stages which give fairly satisfactory results. Thus people of very different capacities for discrimination and with their attitudes developed in very different degrees can join in admiring it. This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels*is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama.The Pilgrim’s Progress,Robinson Crusoe,Gulliver’s Travels, the Ballads, are other instances. The differences between such things and, for example, the work of Donne, Milton, Blake, Landor, Stendhal, Henry James, Baudelaire raise some of the most interesting of critical problems.
There is a common opinion, sometimes very strongly held, that a work which appeals to all kinds and all degrees of men is thereby proved to be greater, more valuable, than one which appeals only to some. There may be a confusion in this opinion. The sum of value yielded, since men actually are of different degrees, the social value that is to say of such work, will naturally be greater. But it does not follow that the maximum value for the reader of the highest level need be greater. The common belief that it is necessarily greater, that the work of wide appeal must be in itself a more admirable thing than work which appeals only to those who discriminate finely, is due to the assumption that it appeals everywhere for the same reasons and thus is shown to touch something essential and fundamental in human nature. But no one in a position to judge, who has, for example, some experience of the teaching of English, will maintain that Shakespeare’s appeal, to take the chief instance, is homogeneous. Different people read and go to see the same play for utterly different reasons. Where two people applaud we tend to assume, in spite of our better knowledge, that their experiences have been the same: the experience of the first would often be nauseous to the second, if by accident they were exchanged, and the first would be left helpless, lost and bewildered. On this false assumption it is easy to build up a formidable theory about art’s concern with the basic elements of human nature and to arraign modern art for superficiality. But there have always been these two kinds, work with the wide, and work with only the special appeal. What actually are the differences between them?
The one, the art which keeps the child from play and the old man from his chimney-corner, evidently builds up its attitudes with the simplest, most aboriginal impulses, and it handles them so that the undeveloped mind can weave them into some sort of satisfying fabric while the more mature mind, qualifying and complicating them until they perhaps lose all likeness to their earlier form, still finds them serve its needs. The other is built up from impulses which, except in a personality capable of very nice adjustments, do not unite in any valuable way, and often the impulses themselves are of a kind of which only a highly developed mind or one with special experience is capable. This last point, however, is separable, and raises a question which will be discussed later.
Plainly each of the two methods has its advantages. The poet of wide appeal, it is tempting to suppose, has an advantage in that the impulses involved are general, have been interested all through life and are very representative of experience. And he has the further advantage perhaps of avoiding a certain dangerous finality. Impulses which adjust themselves at so many levels may go on doing so perhaps indefinitely. There may be something in the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than he knew. Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible. Together with this goes the sense in the reader that all had to be just as it is and not otherwise, whereas with much of Shakespeare we feel that anything might have been different and the result the same. “Not laboriously but luckily.”
But this is only sometimes true of the sophisticated poet who makes no appeal below a certain level. It is not true of Pope, for example, or of Walt Whitman, to choose two unlike authors who at their best are not generally appreciated. And as a counterbalancing advantage for such poets their greater freedom must be noticed. Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. Drama, to secure audiences large enough to be encouraging, must make a wide-spread appeal; but the limitations which this condition imposes upon action are very strict. There are no similar restrictions for lyric poetry, and it is significant that the greatest lyrics have so often a high-level appeal only. TheMad Songof Blake,The Phœnix and the Turtle,The Hymn of Pan, most great sonnets, are instances in point.
There is, too, no good reason why impulses which only begin to make up valuable attitudes in highly organised and discriminating minds should lead to attitudes less valuable or more fragile, more fixed and final than others. We must not allow the unique instance of Shakespeare to weigh too heavily; after all,King Lear, the most inexhaustible of his works, is not a thing which has great popular appeal.
CHAPTER XXVIIIThe Allusiveness of Modern PoetryTehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!He tickles this age who canCall Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,And Leda’s goose a swan!Anon.Wehave distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.In the second chorus ofHellasin the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:A mortal shape to himWas like the vapour dimWhich the orient planet animates with light.Hell, sin, and slavery, came,Like bloodhounds mild and tame,Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:The moon of MahometArose, and it shall set:While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,The Cross leads generations on.The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter*of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same strange modulation:So fleet, so faint, so fair,The Powers of Earth and AirFled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.Apollo, Pan and Love,And even Olympian Jove,Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with theHymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativitywill respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in theTriumph of Lifeis described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:A ShapeSo sate within, as one whom years deform,Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crapeWas bent.
Tehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!He tickles this age who canCall Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,And Leda’s goose a swan!Anon.
Tehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!
He tickles this age who can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,
And Leda’s goose a swan!
Anon.
Wehave distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.
In the second chorus ofHellasin the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:
A mortal shape to himWas like the vapour dimWhich the orient planet animates with light.Hell, sin, and slavery, came,Like bloodhounds mild and tame,Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light.
Hell, sin, and slavery, came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.
And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:
The moon of MahometArose, and it shall set:While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,The Cross leads generations on.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:
While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.
The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter*of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same strange modulation:
So fleet, so faint, so fair,The Powers of Earth and AirFled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.Apollo, Pan and Love,And even Olympian Jove,Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The Powers of Earth and Air
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.
But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.
Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with theHymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativitywill respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in theTriumph of Lifeis described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:
A ShapeSo sate within, as one whom years deform,Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crapeWas bent.
Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’, and the reference†here to the guardian of Hell Gate,
What seem’d his headThe likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,
What seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,
is not accidental or unimportant for the understanding of the poem.
Some care is needed in considering the problem of allusions. There may be worthy and unworthy motives behind their employment ad their enjoyment. There are some to whom a familiarity with literature occasions a sense of superiority over others which is trivial and mean. The pleasure of recognition, proportional as it is to the difficulty or unobtrusiveness of the allusion is a thing of slight value, not to be confused with literary or poetic values. It is perfectly possible for a reader, familiar with theNativity Hymn, for example, to receive all that Shelley intended without ever noticing the allusion, without, that is to say, any recognition. But the erudite often forget that this happens. To turn the capacity of recognising recondite references into a shibboleth by which culture may be estimated is a perversion to which scholarly persons are too much addicted. The point is worth mentioning, since this snobbishness, percolating down (or, if the metaphor be preferred, by repercussion) is responsible for much insincerity and timidity, for wrong attitudes of many kinds towards literature, for irritation and oppression developing into distaste and neglect of poetry. Allusion is a trap for the writer almost as effective as for the academic critic. It invites insincerity. It may encourage and disguise laziness. When it becomes a habit it is a disease. But these dangers form no ground for denying to allusion, and the similar resources of which it is typical, a fit and justifiable place in poetry.
Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specially acquired. And the difficulty which it raises is merely a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will probably increase for the poetry of the future. All the thought and feeling of recent man goes on in terms of experience which is much more likely to be special and peculiar to the individual, than, let us say, the experience of medieval man. The survival of medieval man on such a vast scale among us should not mislead in this matter. The people who are most keenly and variously interested, that is to say, the people whose lives are most valuable on our theory of value, the people for whom the poet writes and by his appeal to whom he is judged, inevitably build up their minds with far more varied elements than has ever been the case before. And the poet, in so far as he is equal to his opportunities, does the same. It is hard, and, in fact, impossible, to deny him his natural and necessary resources on the ground that a majority of his readers will not understand. This is not his fault but the fault of the social structure. Given present conditions and future developments in the directions indicated by the changes of the last two hundred years, it is extremely probable that poets will become not less but more allusive, that their work will depend more and more not only upon other poetry but upon all manner of special fields of familiarity.*Many of the finest and most widely significant experiences, and those therefore most suitable for poetry, come nowadays, for example, through reading pieces of advanced research. There is nothing new in this, of course, nothing that was not happening when Donne wrote. The difficulty springs from the fact that research is so much further ahead than it used to be.