great literary artists, it is a pity that he takes the reputations of
the world too solemnly. This is probably due in part to remoteness in
space from the European centre. But it must be observed that English
solemnity and American solemnity are very different. I do not propose to
analyse the difference (it would be a valuable chapter in social
history); the American solemnity, it is enough to say, is more
primitive, more academic, more like that of the German professor. But it
is not the fault of Mr. More or Mr. Babbitt that the culture of ideas
has only been able to survive in America in the unfavourable atmosphere
of the university.
The French Intelligence
As the inspection of types of English irresistibly provoked a glance at
two American critics, so the inspection of the latter leads our
attention to the French. M. Julien Benda has the formal beauty which the
American critics lack, and a close affinity to them in point of view. He
restricts himself, perhaps, to a narrower field of ideas, but within
that field he manipulates the ideas with a very exceptional cogency and
clarity. To notice his last book (_Belphégor: essai sur l’esthétique de
la présente société française_) would be to quote from it. M. Benda is
not like Remy de Gourmont, the critical consciousness of a generation,
he could not supply the conscious formulas of a sensibility in process
of formation; he is rather the ideal scavenger of the rubbish of our
time. Much of his analysis of the decadence of contemporary French
society could be applied to London, although differences are observable
from his diagnosis.
Quant à la société en elle-même, on peut prévoir que ce soin qu’elle
met à éprouver de l’émoi par l’art, devenant cause à son tour, y
rendra la soif de ce plaisir de plus en plus intense, l’application
a la satisfaire de plus en plus jalouse et plus perfectionnée. On
entrevoit le jour où la bonne société française repudiera encore le
peu qu’elle supporte aujourd’hui d’idées et d’organisation dans
l’art, et ne se passionera plus que pour des gestes de comédiens,
pour des impressions de femmes ou d’enfants, pour des rugissements
de lyriques, pour des extases de fanatiques....
Almost the only person who has ever figured in England and attempted a
task at all similar to that of M. Benda is Matthew Arnold. Matthew
Arnold was intelligent, and by so much difference as the presence of one
intelligent man makes, our age is inferior to that of Arnold. But what
an advantage a man like M. Benda has over Arnold. It is not simply that
he has a critical tradition behind him, and that Arnold is using a
language which constantly tempts the user away from dispassionate
exposition into sarcasm and diatribe, a language less fitted for
criticism than the English of the eighteenth century. It is that the
follies and stupidities of the French, no matter how base, express
themselves in the form of ideas—Bergsonism itself is an intellectual
construction, and the mondaines who attended lectures at the College de
France were in a sense using their minds. A man of ideas needs ideas, or
pseudo-ideas, to fight against. And Arnold lacked the active resistance
which is necessary to keep a mind at its sharpest.
A society in which a mind like M. Benda’s can exercise itself, and in
which there are persons like M. Benda, is one which facilitates the task
of the creative artist. M. Benda cannot be attached, like Gourmont, to
any creative group. He does not wholly partake in that “conscious
creation of the field of the present out of the past” which Mr. More
considers to be part of the work of the critic. But in analysing the
maladies of the second-rate or corrupt literature of the time he makes
the labour of the creative artist lighter. The Charles Louis Philippes
of English literature are never done with, because there is no one to
kill their reputations; we still hear that George Meredith is a master
of prose, or even a profound philosopher. The creative artist in England
finds himself compelled, or at least tempted, to spend much of his time
and energy in criticism that he might reserve for the perfecting of his
proper work: simply because there is no one else to do it.
Tradition and the Individual Talent
I
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally
apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the
tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in
saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too
traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase
of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the
implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological
reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears
without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of
archæology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of
living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own
creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious
of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those
of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous
mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the
critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such
unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and
sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French
were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind
ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we
should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when
we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own
minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to
light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet,
upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else.
In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is
individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with
satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something
that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a
poet without his prejudice we shall often find that not only the best,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do
not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of
full maturity.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in
following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or
timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be
discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the
sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of
much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you
must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who
would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that
the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole
of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense
of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of
the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at
the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in
time, of his contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to
the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set
him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a
principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity
that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The
existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to
persist after the supervention of novelty, the _whole_ existing order
must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted;
and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved
this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will
not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present
as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is
aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be
judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by
them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead;
and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a
judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.
To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at
all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And
we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in;
but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can
only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible
judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps
individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly
likely to find that it is one and not the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet
to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate
bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations,
nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first
course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth,
and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet
must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow
invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite
aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material
of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of
Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be
much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes,
and that this change is a development which abandons nothing _en route_,
which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock
drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development,
refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of
view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement
from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we
imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics
and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is
that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to
an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we _know_ so
much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme
for the _métier_ of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires
a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be
rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even
be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility.
While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as
much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary
laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be
put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still
more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more
tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history
from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is
to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this
consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment
to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its
relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that
art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall,
therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action
which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced
into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.
II
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the
poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the
newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows,
we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not
Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we
shall seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the
importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors,
and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the
poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal
theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I
hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from
that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of
“personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more
to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which
special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new
combinations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is
present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of
platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained
inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of
platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of
the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates;
the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which
are its material.
The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence
of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings.
The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an
experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be
formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and
various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases
or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may
be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of
feelings solely. Canto XV of the _Inferno_ (Brunetto Latini) is a
working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect,
though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable
complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling
attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of
what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind
until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s
mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry
you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how
completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark.
For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the
components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so
to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode
of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of
the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the
supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more
intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has
not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in
the process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the
agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a
possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the _Agamemnon_, the
artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in
_Othello_ to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference
between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is
the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the
voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements.
The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing
particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale,
partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of
its reputation, served to bring together.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to
the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my
meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a
particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in
which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may
take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the
poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with
fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?...
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a
combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong
attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the
ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance
of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech
is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so
to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole
effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating
feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially
evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular
events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or
interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the
complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual
emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to
seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty
in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet
is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in
working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve
his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe
that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it
is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of
meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting
from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to
the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all;
it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of
deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally
unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive
attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious
and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he
ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those
who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape
from these things.
III
ὁ δὲ νοῦς ἴσως θειότερόν τι καὶ ἀπαθές ἐστιν
This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism,
and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by
the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the
poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster
estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who
appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a
smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But
very few know when there is expression of _significant_ emotion, emotion
which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The
emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be
done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in
what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past,
unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already
living.
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
The questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has
lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written
which can only be read, and read, if at all, without pleasure—have
become insipid, almost academic. The usual conclusion is either that
“conditions” are too much for us, or that we really prefer other types
of literature, or simply that we are uninspired. As for the last
alternative, it is not to be entertained; as for the second, what type
do we prefer?; and as for the first, no one has ever shown me
“conditions,” except of the most superficial. The reasons for raising
the question again are first that the majority, perhaps, certainly a
large number, of poets hanker for the stage; and second, that a not
negligible public appears to want verse plays. Surely there is some
legitimate craving, not restricted to a few persons, which only the
verse play can satisfy. And surely the critical attitude is to attempt
to analyse the conditions and the other data. If there comes to light
some conclusive obstacle, the investigation should at least help us to
turn our thoughts to more profitable pursuits; and if there is not, we
may hope to arrive eventually at some statement of conditions which
might be altered. Possibly we shall find that our incapacity has a
deeper source: the arts have at times flourished when there was no
drama; possibly we are incompetent altogether; in that case the stage
will be, not the seat, but at all events a symptom, of the malady.