The Common Pursuit (31 page)

a positive culture which has disappeared and for which modern revolutionaries, social reformers and Utopists do not commonly project any serious equivalent.

Contemplating one aspect of this past order Mr Tindall remarks that

the economic opinions of Bunyan, Baxter and the Quakers were the last moral vestiges of the Middle Ages.

This aspect causes some embarrassment to Mr Lindsay, who as a Marxist has to recognize that Bunyan (though of course we have to cheer him for standing up for his class) was wrong in opposing the development of the new economic order and trying to hold up the dialectic and hinder the growth of a proletariat: it was the rising bourgeoisie, trading, industrialist and capitalist, that was 4 doing the work of history'. But Mr Lindsay has no difficulty in making Bunyan's religious preoccupations respectable by reducing them, with the help of psycho-analysis and history, to explanation in terms of class-relations and methods of production. This last is an ugly sentence; but Mr Lindsay's idiom doesn't lend itself to elegant or lucid summary. Here are representative passages (the argument of the book consists of the repetitive development—if that is the word, and perhaps the musical sense conveys the right suggestion—of such formulations):

The sense of unity, developed by the productive advance with its intensified socialization of method, cannot in such conditions be actualized. What would actualization mean ? It would mean that social

BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES 209

relationships would be made as harmoniously coherent as the methods of production. But that is impossible in a class-society.

Therefore the sense of unity is abstracted.

So it is felt that if only a perfectly concordant scheme of son-father relationship can be imagined, this abstraction will balance the loss of unity in actual life. The religious intuition thus glosses over, emotionally cements, the discord between social relationship and productive methods. (38.)

Bunyan, according to Mr Lindsay (p. 192),

wanted to get outside the cramping, distorting social discord of his day into the fuller life of fellowship.

Though Mr Lindsay talks of * fuller life' he proffers emptiness; like most Marxist writers who undertake to explain art and culture, he produces the effect of having emptied life of content and everything of meaning.

It is impossible in any case to believe that the classless society produced by the process that the Marxist's History has determined on could have a cultural content comparable with that represented by The Pilgrim's Progress. And Mr Lindsay almost goes out of his way to bring home to us without realizing it the problem of the religious sanction:

The world of light is not the land of death. It is the future of fellowship. The tale tells of the passage from privation and obstruction to light and joy and plenty. The heaven-symbol is brought down from beyond-death; it becomes a symbol of what earth could be made by fellowship.

Thus the allegory, which superficially is a story of how to die, is a stimulus to further living. (192.)

It's all quite simple—for Mr Lindsay. But Bunyan, he points out, is muddled; he can't really see that it's as simple as that. For instance:

He makes Christiana wade over the river at the end and leave her children behind. The picture is ridiculous. Here are husband and wife rushing off to death as the consummation of their purpose, yet the children are left to wander about on the banks of the death-river before they too are allowed to get over into heaven.

Bunyan here confessed his sense that something was wrong about the idea of death as the goal of life. (193.)

Mr Lindsay, of course, has no sense of betraying here the shallowness of his own ideas of life and death. But who with any wisdom to offer, worth listening to, could have published that as his reaction to the incomparable end of Part Two of The Pilgrim's Progress, where the pilgrims, waiting by the river, receive one by one the summons to cross 2—Incomparable, for where else in prose can a like sustained exaltation be found ?

When the time was come for them to depart, they went to the Brink of the River. The last words of Mr Dispondency were, Farewell Night, welcome Day. His daughter went through the River singing, but none could understand what she said.

Then it came to pass a while after, that there was a Post in the town that enquired for Mr Honest. So he came to his house where he was, and delivered to his hand these lines. Thou art commanded to be ready against this day seven-night to present thyself before thy Lord at his Father's house. And for a Token diat my Message is true, All thy Daughters oj Mustek shall be brought low. Then Mr Honest called for his Friends, and said unto them, I die, but shall make no Will. As for my Honesty, it shall go with me; let him that comes after be told of this. When the day that he was to be gone was come, he addressed himself to go over the River. Now the River at the time overflowed the Banks in some places, but Mr Honest in his life-time had spoken to one Good-conscience to meet him there, the which he also did, and lent him his hand, and so helped him over. The last words of Mr Honest were, Grace reigns. So he left the World.

So it goes on, for pages, without a false or faltering note. It would be useless arguing with anyone who contended that the inspiration here was essentially a Utopian vision of what 'the earth might be made by fellowship'. Whatever of that element there may be in it, the whole effect is something far more complex and mature. It is something, clearly, that could not be reproduced to-day. Yet The Pilgrims Progress must leave us asking whether without something corresponding to what is supremely affirmed in that exaltation, without an equivalently sanctioned attitude to death that is at the same time 'a stimulus to further living' (the contradiction that Mr Lindsay sees), there can be such a thing as cultural health.

LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY

I MUST thank Dr Wellek l for bringing fundamental criticism to my work, and above all for raising in so complete a way an issue that a reviewer or two had more or less vaguely touched on —an issue of which no one can have been more conscious than myself, who had seen the recognition of it as an essential constituent of what I naturally (whatever the quality of my performance) hoped for: an appreciation of my undertaking. Dr Wellek points out, justly, that in my dealings with English poetry I have made a number of assumptions that I neither defend nor even state: 'I could wish', he says, 'that you had made your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically'. After offering me a summary of these assumptions, he asks me to 'defend this position abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical and, of course, ultimately, also aesdietic choices are involved'.

I in my turn would ask Dr Wellek to believe that if I omitted to undertake the defence he desiderates it was not from any lack of consciousness: I knew I was making assumptions (even if I didn't —and shouldn't now—state them to myself quite as he states them) and I was not less aware than I am now of what they involve. I am interested that he should be able to say that, tor the most part, he shares diem with me. But, he adds, he would 'have misgivings in pronouncing them without elaborating a specific defence or a theory in their defence'. That, I suggest, is because Dr Wellek is a philosopher; and my reply to him in the first place is that I myself am not a philosopher, and that I doubt whether in any case I could elaborate a theory that he would find satisfactory. I am not, however, relying upon modesty for my defence. If I profess myself so freely to be no philosopher it is because I feel that I can afford my modesty; it is because I have pretensions—

1 This is a reply to criticisms of my book Revaluation, contributed by Dr Wellek to Scrutiny for March, 1937.

pretensions to being a literary critic. And I would add that even if I had felt qualified to satisfy Dr Wellek on his own ground I should have declined to attempt it in that book.

Literary criticism and philosophy seem to me to be quite distinct and different kinds of discipline—at least, I think they ought to be (for while in my innocence I hope that philosophic writing commonly represents a serious discipline, I am quite sure that literary-critical writing commonly doesn't). This is not to suggest that a literary critic might not, as such, be the better for a philosophic training, but if he were, the advantage, I believe, would manifest itself partly in a surer realization that literary criticism is not philosophy. I pulled up just short of saying 'the two disciplines . . .', a phrase that might suggest too great a simplification: it is no doubt possible to point to valuable writing of various kinds representing varying lands of alliance between the literary critic and the philosopher. But I am not the less sure that it is necessary to have a strict literary criticism somewhere and to vindicate literary criticism as a distinct and separate discipline.

The difficulty that one who approaches with the habit of one kind of discipline has in duly recognizing the claims of a very different kind—the difficulty of reconciling the two in a working alliance—seems to me to be illustrated in Dr Wellek's way of referring to the business of literary criticism: 'Allow me', he says, 'to sketch your ideal of poetry, your "norm" with which you measure every poet . . / That he should slip into this way of putting things seems to me significant, for he would on being challenged agree, I imagine, that it suggests a false idea of the procedure of the critic. At any rate, he gives me an excuse for making, by way of reminder, some elementary observations about that procedure.

By the critic of poetry I understand the complete reader: the ideal critic is the ideal reader. The reading demanded by poetry is of a different kind from that demanded by philosophy. I should not find it easy to define the difference satisfactorily, but Dr Wellek knows what it is and could give at least as good an account of it as I could. Philosophy, we say, is 'abstract' (thus Dr Wellek asks me to defend my position 'more abstractly'), and poetry 'concrete'. Words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and judge but to 'feel into' or 'become'—to realize a complex ex-

perience that is given in the words. They demand, not merely a fuller-bodied response, but a completer responsiveness—a kind of responsiveness that is incompatible with the judicial, one-eye-on-the-standard approach suggested by Dr Wellek's phrase: 'your "norm" with which you measure every poet*. The critic—the reader of poetry—is indeed concerned with evaluation, but to figure him as measuring with a norm which he brings up to the object and applies from the outside is to misrepresent the process. The critic's aim is, first, to realize as sensitively and completely as possible this or that which claims his attention; and a certain valuing is implicit in the realizing. As he matures in experience of the new thing he asks, explicitly and implicitly: 'Where does this come e How does it stand in relation to .. . e How relatively important does it seem ?' And the organization into which it settles as a constituent in becoming 'placed* is an organization of similarly 'placed' things, things that have found their bearings with regard to one another, and not a theoretical system or a system determined by abstract considerations.

No doubt (as I have admitted) a philosophic training might possibly—ideally would—make a critic surer and more penetrating in the perception of significance and relation and in the judgment of value. But it is to be noted that the improvement we ask for is of the critic, the critic as critic, and to count on it would be to count on the attainment of an arduous ideal. It would be reasonable to fear—to fear blunting of edge, blurring of focus and muddled misdirection of attention: consequences of queering one discipline with the habits of another. The business of the literary critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of response and to observe a peculiarly strict relevance in developing his response into commentary; he must be on his guard against abstracting improperly from what is in front of Hm and against any premature or irrelevant genera.li.7ing—of it or from it. His first concern is to enter into possession of the given poem (let us say) in its concrete fulness, and his constant concern is never to lose his completeness of possession, but rather to increase it. In making value-judgments (and judgments as to significance), implicitly or explicitly, he does so out of that completeness of possession and with that fulness of response. He doesn't ask, 'How does this accord with these specifications of goodness in poetry ?'; he aims

to make fully conscious and articulate the immediate sense of value that 'places' the poem.

Of course, the process of 'making fully conscious and articulate' is a process of relating and organizing, and the 'immediate sense of value* should, as the critic matures with experience, represent a growing stability of organization (the problem is to combine stability with growth). What, on testing and re-testing and wider experience, turn out to be my more constant preferences, what the relative permanencies in my response, and what structure begins to assert itself in the field of poetry with which I am familiar ? What map or chart of English poetry as a whole represents my utmost consistency and most inclusive coherence of response?

From this consistency and this coherence (in so far as I have achieved them) it should, of course, be possible to elicit principles and abstractly formidable norms. Dr Wellek's first criticism of me is (to give it its least exceptionable force) that I haven't proceeded to elicit them: that, having written the book I undertook to write, I haven't gone on to write another book in which I develop the theoretical implications of the first (for it would be essentially a matter of two books, even if there were only one binding). To this I make again my modest reply that I doubt, in any case, my capacity to satisfy Dr Wellek in this respect. And I add again that I do not think my modesty has any adverse bearing on my qualifications for writing the book I did undertake to write. The cogency I hoped to achieve was to be for other readers of poetry—readers of poetry as such. I hoped, by putting in front of them, in a criticism that should keep as close to the concrete as possible, my own developed 'coherence of response', to get them to agree (with, no doubt, critical qualifications) that the map, the essential order, of English poetry seen as a whole did, when they interrogated their experience, look like that to them also. Ideally I ought perhaps (though, I repeat, I should not put my position in quite the terms Dr Wellek ascribes to me) to be able to complete the work with a theoretical statement. But I am sure that the kind of work that I have attempted comes first, and would, for such a theoretical statement to be worth anything, have to be done first.

If Dr Wellek should still insist that I ought, even if I declined to elaborate the philosophy implicit in my assumptions, at any rate

to have been more explicit about them, I can only reply that I think I have gone as far in explicitness as I could profitably attempt to go, and that I do not see what would be gained by the kind of explicitness he demands (though I see what is lost by it). Has any reader of my book been less aware of the essential criteria that emerge than he would have been if I had laid down such general propositions as: 'poetry must be in serious relation to actuality, it must have a firm grasp of the actual, of the object, it must be in relation to life, it must not be cut off from direct vulgar living, it should be normally human . . .' ? If, as I did, I avoided such generalities, it was not out of timidity; it was because they seemed too clumsy to be of any use. I thought I had provided something better. My whole effort was to work in terms of concrete judgments and particular analyses: 'This—doesn't it?—bears such a relation to that; this kind of thing—don't you find it so ?—wears better than that*, etc. If I had to generalize, my generalization regarding the relation between poetry and 'direct vulgar living' or the'actual' would run rather in die following way than in that suggested by Dr Wellek: traditions, or prevailing conventions or habits, that tend to cut poetry in general off from direct vulgar living and the actual, or that make it difficult for the poet to bring into poetry his most serious interests as an adult living in his own time, have a devitalizing effect. But I cannot see that I should have added to the clarity, cogency or usefulness of my book by enunciating such a proposition (or by arguing it theoretically). Again, I did not say that the language of poetry 'should not flatter the singing voice, should not be merely mellifluous', etc. I illustrated concretely in comparison and analysis the qualities indicated by those phrases, pointed to certain attendant limitations, and tried to show in terms of actual poetic history that there were serious disadvantages to be recognized in a tradition that insisted on such qualities as essential to poetry. In fact, though I am very much aware of the shortcomings of my work, I feel that by my own methods I have attained a relative precision that makes this summarizing seem intolerably clumsy and inadequate. I do not, again, argue in general terms that there should be 'no emotion for its own sake, no afflatus, no mere generous emotionality, no luxury in pain and joy'; but by choice, arrangement and analysis of concrete examples I give those phrases (in so far, that