The Common Pursuit (41 page)

Here, then, is an unfortunate consequence of the special restricted approach. But restricted approach and special interest are not the whole of the story—this is what we are made to realize when we come to the later criticism. When the critic's technical preoccupations cease to exercise a close direction over his criticism, he gives himself a great deal more to comprehensive and radical value-judgments, and it is then that we have to recognize a fundamental defect. I myself sec it in the essay on Tourneur, where

he makes what is to me an astonishing reference to Swift: 'We may think as we read Swift, " how loathsome human beings are "; in reading Tourneur we can only think " how horrible to loathe human beings so much as that"'. The phrase used here ofTourneur is precisely what I should have found fitting as applied to Swift. It was D. EL Lawrence who diagnosed Swift's case so well, and who was so quick to perceive, and sure in placing, the signs of such malady as Swift exhibits in that terribly extreme form. And it is Lawrence himself who, as subject, provides the capital instance of Mr Eliot's defect as a great critic. (Mr Eliot himself, in After Strange Gods, concedes enough to place the matter above the level of mere difference of judgment.) 'Against the living death of modern material civilization he spoke again and again, and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable'. Lawrence stood for life, and shows, in his criticism, tossed off as it was, for the most part, in the most marginal way, an extraordinarily quick and sure sense for the difference between that which makes for life and that which makes against it. He exhibits a profound, and for those who come to the criticism knowing only the fiction, perhaps surprising, centrality.

I myself think Lawrence sounder in judgment about the Joyce of Work in Progress than Mr Eliot, whose ascription of importance to it doesn't seem to imply importance as representative disintegration-phenomenon. (That the inventor of Basic English should take a keen interest in the Work always seemed to me appropriate.) However that may be, I am sure that so distinguished a mind as Mr Eliot's ought not to have been able to take Wyndham Lewis so seriously, or find him so sympathetic. Then there is Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: it deals, of course, with Evil—but surely Mr Eliot's estimate of it will stand as one of the curiosities of literature ? And to be able to refer favourably to Henry Miller—when I try to believe that some perversity of my imagination has invented this I recall, in detail, an unquestionable fact: the paragraph that finds promise for the future of English fiction in Lawrence DurrelTs Black Book. The inspiration of these works, in so far as they have any, seems to me to be the desire, in Laurentian idiom, to 'do dirt' on life. And I have to record the conviction that the reaction against the world of William Clissold (shall we say ?) represented by Mr Eliot's critical writings is, at any rate largely, of the wrong

kind. I put it naively no doubt, and I will go on to suggest that Lawrence's reaction against the same world (see his review in Phoenix of H. G. Wells and relate it to the Fantasia of the Unconscious) has much more of Tightness in it.

In general, where contemporary letters have been concerned, Mr Eliot's judgment has, it seems to me, been very much out— deflected by pulls and disturbances of various kinds. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of the radical nature of the major weakness that has been indicated, he remains a great critic. It is not only that he has re-orientated criticism and poetic practice, effecting a profound change in the operative current idea of the English tradition, and that in this achievement his critical writings have played an indispensable part. It is also that the best of these writings represent more powerfully and incisively the idea of literary criticism as a discipline—a special discipline of intelligence —than the work of any other critic in the language (or any in French that I know).

To this high distinction in criticism Miss Bradbrook's intentness on advancing unsustainable claims makes her incapable of doing justice. Thus she writes:

His purely destructive work has sometimes been the result of some temperamental aversion. Milton has survived the attack of Mr Eliot and the Battle of the Critics which it provoked. (Yet how strange that a taste for Landor should accompany a distaste for Milton.)

The taste for Landor always seemed to me strange. I could explain it only as a minor snobbism—one that was peculiarly unfortunate when it led to Landor's being adduced in illustration of impersonality. Lander's impersonality is that of the stiff suit of style that stands up empty—impersonal because there is nothing inside. For Miss Bradbrook, however, it is not the taste for Landor, but the critical attitude towards Milton that has to be deplored. Yet to talk in that way of an 'attack on Milton' ('purely destructive*) that Milton has survived is to expose an inappreciation of what Miss Bradbrook admits to be Mr Eliot's most vital criticism, to miss its force, and to deny the essence of that poetic achievement with which the criticism is so closely bound up. For poetry is made of words—words and rhythms, and 'sensibility alters from generation to generation in everyone . . . but expression is only

altered by a man of genius'. It was the informing presence everywhere, in the criticism, of the practitioner's preoccupation with his problem of putting words together—of inventing the ways of using words, the rhythms, and the versification, demanded by his essential interests—that gave his brief asides on Milton their potency. Milton is indeed still there, an impressive figure (in spite of some of his defenders), but if you can't see what is meant by saying that he was a prepotent influence in taste and poetic practice until Mr Eliot's work had its effect, and has since ceased to be, then you are not really appreciating Mr Eliot's genius or its achievement. And you make no real restitution by coming with this kind of offering:

But in general, Eliot's destructive criticism has also anticipated the more general verdict, even as in the poems Triumphal March and Difficulties of a Statesman (1932) he anticipated the spirit of Nazi Germany and die spirit of Munich with prophetic accuracy.

It is because I admire these poems so immensely, and think they have not had due recognition, that I feel obliged to say that this account of them seems to me nonsense—or mere incense.

I have concentrated on Miss Bradbrook's essay because, while it offers a representative opportunity for underlining what, for the reader who has (so to speak) lived through the history of Mr Eliot's reputation, must be the significance and the moral, there was still, it seemed to me, something that needed to be said on the criticism. All the other essays are on the poetry. The best of these are by the two American contributors, Mr Cleanth Brooks and Mr Philip Wheelwright, together with those by Miss Gardner and Mr Mankowitz. I was interested by Mr Brooks's argument against my view that The Waste Land ' exhibits no progression' (and touched, I must confess, by his generous acknowledgments to that pioneer book, written nearly twenty years ago—which has suffered more pillaging than acknowledging). But it still remains to inquire whether the intention noted by Mr Brooks (see pp. 129-30) is anything more: is it operative poetically, does it become something realized in the poeme This kind of question is, in general, not asked by the contributors to the symposium. They build on the antecedent work of criticism.

And this is the point at which to mention the general tendency in the literary-academic world to-day to substitute, the cue having been given, elucidation for criticism. Mr Brooks's kind of elucidation has, I can see, a function, though I can also see dangers in it. The dangers are illustrated by that phrase 'death-in-life' and the part it plays in Mr Brooks's exposition. By the grateful follower of the exposition such a phrase is readily taken as doing more than it does, while, in his sense of having grasped the 'meaning' of the poetry, he has grasped nothing but a phrase. At the risk of seeming egotistic I will say that, for unequivocal aid, one can't, I think, do much more than I tried to do in my own account of The Waste Land: commit oneself in clear and challenging terms to the necessary critical judgments, and indicate the nature of the essential organization.

It is when the elucidatory approach is Anglo-Catholic (or made from the point of view of doctrinal acceptance) that the dangers are greatest. They are apparent even in Miss Gardner's scrupulous and sensitive commentary on the Four Quartets. There is a clear tendency to frustrate the enormous labour expended by the poet in undercutting mere acceptance, inhibiting inert acquiescence, . and circumventing, at every level, what may be called cliche; a tendency, that is, to abet the reader's desire to arrive without having travelled. And the separation from criticism is apparent in the references to Family Reunion.

Miss Gardner's essay, however, could for the right reader perform a useful function. But Mrs Duncan Jones's commentary on Ash-Wednesday seems to me to do little but justify one's apprehensions about Anglo-Catholic elucidation. Starting with acceptance, it turns the poetry into something like illustrations of acceptances, poetical formulations of antecedently defined attitudes and beliefs. That is, it denies the poet's genius and deprives his poetry of its astonishing (and disturbing) life and its profound general interest and validity. She can say, for instance, of Salutation (as it was first called), a poem I intensely admire: 'The second poem ends on a note of absolute assurance and content*. To be able to say that of it you must, I am convinced, have missed something —something essential. And in general it is as if Mrs Duncan Jones were saying what Dr Rajan does actually say (p. 88): 'Mr Eliot means what is meant by any Christian'.

Dr Rajan does not, one gathers, himself write as an Anglo-Catholic. In fact, he intimates that he could, given room, correct Mr Eliot authoritatively about Krishna. And one suspects that the qualification which enables him to do so may be attended with a disadvantage; for after all, the Four Quartets are extremely subtle and difficult, and demand for their critical appreciation not only good analytic powers, but as complete an inwardness with the English language as any poetry that was ever written. However that may be, in his essay we have the extreme instance of the divorce of elucidation from criticism. This divorce is not the less apparent for his offering a good deal in the guise of critical and appreciative comment. It is mostly of this kind :

The confidence of the poetry is superb. It disdains analogies. It will have nothing to do with snapshot imagery. The resonant pride of those polysyllables summons all fact to a defining judgment and then, as the sibilants slow its clash and recoil, the open vowels hush it to repose. Against that liberating assurance the verse speaks again melodious and human.. ..

Surely this kind of commentary is sufficiently placed by Dr Rajan himself when he says:

Of the tremendous rhymed lyric of section four there is nothing I can say which would not be redundant. People to whom it is not immediately impressive are unlikely to be convinced by a description of its subtleties.

When he does offer comments of a kind that can be checked as tests of sensibility they are usually of this kind:

The 'fiery rain' which falls here falls also on burning London. Here Mr Eliot, fire-watcher and wanderer in Hades, meets his 'familiar compound ghost' which will provide the backbone for one hundred American theses and which as far as present knowledge can tell is Dante, Mallarme, and Arnaut Daniel together. The ghost promises Mr Eliot a suitably grisly future, but all that he can say, however terrible, is turned into sweetness by Eliot's terza rima.

This passage in terza rima is the one aboutwhich D. W. Harding (reviewing Little Gidding in Scrutiny, XI, 3) says:

The verse in this passage, with its regular measure and insistent alliter-

ation, so effective for combining the macabre with the urbane and the dreary, is a way to indicate and a way to control pressure of urgent misery and self-disgust. The motive power of this passage ... is repulsion.

I quote Harding by way of emphasizing that it is not just a case of one judgment against another. My response corroborates his account very forcibly, and it is a response that is contradicted violently by the description' sweet'. I can only say that Dr Rajan's account seems to me to betray a striking defect of sensibility. And I can't help associating that defect with the failure in tone and touch (characteristic, I think) represented by such phrases in the commentary as 'The ghost promises Mr Eliot a suitably grisly future'.

Further, I do not think that Dr Rajan could have permitted himself the indulgence of that easy superiority about' one hundred American theses' (two of the best contributions to his symposium are by Americans) if he had been really responding to the quality of what was in front of him—it is the passage in which (in Harding's words) 'the humanist's ghost sees in his life ... futility, isolation and guut on account of his self-assertive prowess', and one would have thought it, for the reader exposed to it, destructive of all easy complacencies:

... the laceration

Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

Almost always where Dr Rajan commits himself to judgments which can be challenged he seems to me to confirm the suspected defect of sensibility.

His tide is The Unity of the Quartets, but I cannot see that

he adds anything to the extant accounts of the organization of that work. When, for instance, he says, 'What his scheme is I should hesitate to specify, beyond suggesting that Burnt Norton is concerned with constructing concepts' we can see that this is D. W. Harding's 'creation of concepts'. But Dr^Rajan, as he indeed intimates, does nothing to extend Harding's account, or to explain the borrowed phrase, or to justify in any way the (unacknowledged) borrowing. His presumptive intention of explaining organization doesn't sufficiently control his commentary, as the large proportion of this which is devoted to a kind of Sitwellian quasi-creative pseudo-analysis betrays. And too often, in the guise of analytic guidance, we have such passages as this: