The Common Pursuit (32 page)

is, as I have achieved my purpose) a precision of meaning they

couldn't have got in any other way. There is, I hope, a chance that I may in this way have advanced theory, even if I haven't done the theorizing. I know that the cogency and precision I have aimed at are limited; but I believe that any approach involves limitations, and that it is by recognizing them and working within them that one may hope to get something done.

Dr Wellek has a further main criticism to bring against me: it is that my lack of interest in philosophy makes me unfair to the poets of die Romantic period. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his demonstration has, for me, mainly the effect of demonstrating how difficult it is to be a philosopher and a literary critic at the same time. The positive aim of his remarks he sums up as being 'to show that the romantic view of the world... underlies and pervades the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley, elucidates many apparent difficulties, and is, at least, a debatable view of the world'.—'The romantic view of the world', a view common to Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and others—yes, I have heard of it; but what interest can it have for the literary critic ? For the critic, for the reader whose primary interest is in poetry, those three poets are so radically different, immediately and finally, from one another that the offer to assimilate them in a common philosophy can only suggest the irrelevance of the philosophic approach.

My attitude towards Blake Dr Wellek, I think, misunderstands. He certainly misrepresents my verdict on the particular poem, the Introduction to Songs of Experience. The comparison with Ash-Wednesday has a context in the chapter to which the note challenged by Dr Wellek is appended, and, so far from arguing that Blake's poem is 'so ambiguous as to have no "right sense'", I have in that note the explicit aim of showing how Blake, with his astonishingly original technique, achieves something like the extraordinary precision of Ash-Wednesday. And in general, where Blake is concerned, my intention is the reverse of a slighting one. My view of the poem, in fact, seems to me more favourable than that implied by Dr Wellek, who says: 'Actually I think the poem has only one possible meaning, which can be ascertained by a study of the whole of Blake's symbolical philosophy'. I myself, a literary critic, am interested in Blake because it is possible to say

with reference to some of his work that his symbolical philosophy is one thing, his poetry another. I know that even in his best poetry symbolism appears, and I was aware of symbolism in the poem I picked on; but I judged that I might fairly avoid a large discussion that seemed inessential to the point I was proposing to make.

I will say now, though, that when in Blake's poetry his symbols function poetically they have, I believe, a life that is independent of his 'symbolical philosophy': for instance, 'Earth', 'starry pole', 'dewy grass' and 'wat'ry shore', in the Introduction to Songs of Experience, seem to me to have a direct evocative power. Knowledge of Blake's arbitrary assignment of value to a symbol may often help to explain why he should have written as he has done here, there and elsewhere; I do not believe that it will ever turn what was before an unsuccessful poem into a good one. And I think Hear the voice of the Bard! decidedly a good one. Dr Wellek's account of it seems to me to justify my assumption that I could fairly discuss the poem without talking about symbols; for I cannot see that his account tends to invalidate mine. I cannot, in fact, see why he should suppose it does. Or rather, I see it is because he assumes that what we are elucidating is a text of symbolical philosophy—written as such and to be read as such.

The confidence of his paraphrase made me open my eyes. It is a philosopher's confidence—the confidence of one who in the double strength of a philosophic training and a knowledge of Blake's system ignores the working of poetry. The main difference, one gathers, between the philosopher and the poet is that to the poet there may be allowed, in the interests of rhythm and mere formal matters like that, a certain looseness, a laxity of expression ; 'Delete "and" (in line 7) which was inserted only because of the rhythm and the sense is quite dear'—Yes, immediately clear, if one derives from a study of'the whole of Blake's symbolical philosophy' the confidence to perform these little operations. But I myself believe that in this poem Blake is using words with very unusual precision—the precision of a poet working as a poet.

And it is this precision that Dr Wellek ignores in his paraphrase and objects to my noticing:

In spite of his fall Man might yet control the universe ('the starry

pole'),.. The next 'that' cannot possibly refer to God, but to the soul or to Man, who after his rebirth might control the 'starry pole'. There is no need to evoke Lucifer.

'Man' capable of controlling the universe may surely be said to have taken on something of God and may be, I suggest, in Blake's syntax—in his peculiar organization of meaning—not so sharply distinguishable from God as Dr Wellek's notion of * clear sense' and 'one possible meaning* demands. And if'fallen, fallen light' does not for Dr Wellek bring into the complex of associations Lucifer—

from morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's day, and with the setting sun, Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, the Aegean isle

—then I think we have an instance of the philosopher disabling the critic; an instance of the philosophical approach inducing in the reader of poetry a serious impercipience or insensitiveness. Blake is not referring to abstract ideas of Man and rebirth; he works in the concrete, evoking by a quite unproselike (that was my point) use of associations a sense of a state of desolation that is the more grievous by contrast with an imagined state of bliss in which Man, in harmonious mastery of his full potentialities, might be godlike—an unfallen and unsinful Lucifer (Milton, we remember, was of the Devil's party without knowing it).

The twinkling stars in Blake mean always the light of Reason and the watery shore the limit of matter or of Time and Space. The identification of Earth and Man in this poem is explicitly recognized by Blake in the illustration to this very poem which represents a masculine figure lying upon the * watery shore* and, with the 'starry floor' as a background, painfully lifting his head.

I would call Dr Wellek's attention to the poem, Earth's Answer, immediately following that which is under discussion. It opens:

Earth raised up her head

From the darkness dread and drear.

Her light fled,

Stony dread!

And her locks cover'd with grey despair.

Prison'd on wat'ry shore.

Starry Jealousy does keep my den:

Cold and hoar,

Weeping o'er,

I hear the father of the ancient men.

I quote these stanzas as a way of suggesting to him that his neat and confident translation of symbols will not do (I am not saying that 'Reason' and 'Jealousy' could not be reconciled), and that even an argument from one of Blake's illustrations may not be as coercive as Dr Wellek supposes.

Again, where Wordsworth is concerned, Dr Wellek seems to misunderstand my intention. 'So contrary to your own conclusion' (p. 164), he says, 'I would maintain the coherence, unity, and subtlety of Wordsworth's thought'.—Well, I had heard of and read about Wordsworth's thought, which, indeed, has received a great deal of notice, but my business was with Wordsworth's poetry; I never proposed, and do not propose now, to consider him as a philosophic thinker. When I look up p. 164 in my book I find this as die only passage Dr Wellek can be referring to: 'His pHlosophizing (in the sense of the Hartleian studies and applications) had not the value he meant it to have; but it is an expression of his intense moral seriousness and a mode of that essential discipline of contemplation which gave consistency and stability to his experience'. In saying that Wordsworth's philosophizing hadn't the value he meant it to have I was pointing out that it hadn't the relation he supposed to his business as a poet, and my analysis still seems to me conclusive. Dr Wellek merely says in general terms that it isn't conclusive for him: 'I cannot see why the argument of Canto II of the Prelude could not be paraphrased'.—It can, I freely grant, be very easily paraphrased if one brings to it a general knowledge of the kind of thought involved and an assumption that poets put loosely what philosophers formulate with precision. For w v ould Dr Wellek in prose philosophy be satisfied with, or even take seriously, such looseness of statement and argument as Wordsworth's in his philosophic verse ? If so, he has a very much less strict criterion for philosophy as philosophy than I have for poetry as poetry. Even if Wordsworth had a philosophy, it is as a poet that he matters, and if we remember that even where he offers 'thought' the strength of

what he gives is the poet's, we shall, as critics, find something better to do than supply precision and completeness to his abstract argument.

I do not see what service Dr Wellek does either himself or philosophy by adducing chapter V of Science and the Modern World. That an eminent mathematician, logician and speculative philosopher should be so interested in poetry as Professor White-head there shows himself to be is pleasing; but I have always thought the quality of his dealings with poetry to be exactly what one would expect of an authority so qualified. I will add, perhaps wantonly and irrelevantly, that the utterances of Professor Whitehead's quoted by Dr Wellek look to me like bad poetry; in their context no doubt they become something different, but I cannot see why even then they should affect a literary critic's view of Wordsworth and Shelley.

When Dr Wellek comes to Shelley he hardly makes any serious show of sustaining his case against me and the weakness of his own approach is most clearly exposed. He is so interested in philosophy that he pays no real attention to my analyses of poetry. Take, for instance, his suggested interpretations of points in the Ode to the West Wind: it is not merely that they are, it seems to me, quite unacceptable; even if they were otherwise, they would make no substantial difference to my carefully elaborated analysis of the way in which Shelley's poetry works. And why should Dr Wellek suppose that he is defending Shelley in arguing that 'the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean may allude to "the old mystical conception of the two trees of Heaven and Earth intertwining'"? Not that I attack the Ode to the West Wind', I merely illustrate from it the characteristic working of Shelley's poetry.

Nor do I attack Mont Blanc. When Dr Wellek says, C I cannot see the slightest confusion in the opening paragraph of Mont Blanc 9 , he seems to me to be betraying an inappreciation of Shelley—an inappreciation explained by the approach intimated in his next sentence: *It states an epistemological proposition quite clearly'. Now to me the opening paragraph of Mont Blanc evokes with great vividness a state of excited bewilderment and wonder. The obvious Wordsworthian element in the poem suggests a comparison with Wordsworth, and, regarding as I do

the two poets, not as stating epistemological propositions or asserting general conceptions, but as reacting characteristically to similar concrete occasions, the comparison I actually make seems to me justified. When Dr Wellek tells me that the passage I quote from die Prelude *has philosophically nothing to do with the introduction of Shelley's Mont Blanc', he merely confirms my conviction that philosophy and literary criticism are very different things.

Having described certain Shelleyan habits I go on to point out that these carry with them a tendency to certain vices; vices such that, in diagnosing them, the literary critic finds himself becoming explicitly a moralist. I conduct the argument very carefully and in terms of particular analysis, and I cannot see that Dr Wellek makes any serious attempt to deal with it. I cannot see why he should think that his alternative interpretation of the third stanza of When the lamp is shattered makes that poem less bad in any of the ways in which I have judged it adversely. But I do see that, not reading as a literary critic, he fails to respond with his sensibility to the peculiarly Shelleyan virtue, the personal voice of the last stanza, and so fails to realize the force of my radical judgment on the poem (I cannot recapitulate the whole argument here).

Actually, of course, Dr Wellek's attention is elsewhere than on Shelley's poetry and my analysis. 'These notes', he slips into saying, 'are made only to support my main point that Shelley's philosophy, I think, is astonishingly unified, and perfectly coherent'—I do not consider it my business to discuss that proposition, and Dr Wellek has given me no grounds for judging Shelley's poetry to be anything other than I have judged it to be. If, in reply to my charge that Shelley's poetry is repetitive, vaporous, monotonously self-regarding and often emotionally cheap, and so, in no very long run, boring, Dr Wellek tells me that Shelley was an idealist, I can only wonder whether some unfavourable presumption has not been set up about idealism. Again, it is no consolation for disliking the characteristic Shelleyan vapour to be told:

This fusing of the spheres of the different senses in Shelley is exactly paralleled in his rapid transitions and fusions of the emotions, from pleasure to pain, from sorrow to joy. Shelley would like us similarly to ignore or rather to transcend the boundaries of individuality between

persons just as Indian philosophy or Schopenhauer wants us to overcome the curse and. burden of the prindpium individuationis.

Of course, according to that philosophy, poetry may be a mistake or illusion, something to be left behind. But Dr Wellek will hardly bring it against me that I have been unfair to Shelley's poetry out of lack of sympathy with such a view.

Unfairness to poets out of lack of interest in their philosophy he does, of course, in general charge me with. His note concludes:

Your book . . . raises anew the question of the poet's 'belief and how far sympathy with this belief and comprehension of it is necessary for an appreciation of the poetry. A question which has been debated a good deal, as you know, and which I would not like to solve too hastily on the basis of your book.