The Common Pursuit (37 page)

Having thus absolved himself from the duty of making the essential discriminations, Mr Every can facilitate the business of pushing his own special line of goods by accepting with a large and reassuring catholicity, as established values, most of the current names. Auden, Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Alex Comfort, Herbert Read, Ronald Duncan, Edith Sitwell, a whole team of Christian poets, and not only Sidney Keyes, the boy war-casualty whom by some caprice it has been agreed to immortalize as a symbol of lost Genius (I can see no ground for his reputation), but his friend John Heath-Stubbs: in all these, and how many more, one gathers, one can study, in the same sense as one can in D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, the 'sensitive spot where a new response to life is taking shape'.

Mr Every's own line of goods is of course Christian. Dr Sitwell writes emotionally, with characteristic afflatus, about Christ, therefore she can be acclaimed as a great (if not yet quite a Christian) poet, of major significance in terms of the critic's concern with tie 'sensitive spot'. Of his own discovery and fostering Mr Every offers us, as poet and intellectual of established standing

(we are to assume), Mr Norman Nicholson—a writer in whom, I am bound to say, I can see no vestige of any gift, but only^inten-tions and pretensions that have gathered assurance from assiduous encouragement and from the sense of swimming, shoal-supported, with the tide. But then, I can see no reason for being interested in Charles Williams, whom we are offered as a major power, and Mr Nicholson's inspirer.

Mr Every gives us a whole chapter on 'The Poetic Influence of Charles Williams':

To-day critics are failing in their understanding of the younger poets because they are not aware of his later work.

Williams, Mr Every, without producing any arguments or evidence tending to make the valuation in the least plausible, confidently sets up as a great poet—a peer, at least, of Eliot. In what sense this is Christian Discrimination comes out with almost disarming naivet6 here:

Admiring Milton, he rejected Eliot, until the arch-classicist and ultramodern was revealed as an Anglo-Cadiolic lay theologian.. In 1935-36 Eliot and he wrote plays in succession to one another for the same Canterbury festival, Murder in the Cathedral and Thomas Cranmer. From that time on their mutual influence grew. In the long run Williams influenced Eliot more, because his own * effortless originality' was less open to any influence than Eliot's negative capacity, his infinite receptiveness.

The passages of Williams* verse quoted by Mr Every serve only to convince one that, however sound the poet's orthodoxy, he hadn't begun to be a poet, and that the critic is mistaken in supposing himself to be interested in poetry. But Mr Every can assure us, as one who knows (having it on the highest authority), that it was Williams* creative influence that changed Mr Eliot's attitude towards Milton:

The influence of Eliot is seen in repulsion as well as in attraction. In answer to the challenge thrown down by his attack on the Chinese wall, Milton's grand manner of verse, Charles Williams built a Chinese wall of his own to resist the decay of words. This wall in the end prevailed to modify Eliot's judgment where critical arguments failed. In one instance at least the imitation of Milton had been of use.

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It is one of the most revealing of contemporary fashions to suppose that Mr Eliot has seriously and radically changed his mind about Milton, and that the utterances giving colour to this view have significant critical bearings on his poetic development. I can only repeat that those who subscribe to this fashion can, it seems plain to me, never have taken an intelligent interest in his poetry, and never had any but a conventional respect for his genius. Mr Eliot, it is true, has referred in a commendatory way to Charles Williams' introduction to the 'World's Classics' Milton. Having taken the tip and looked at it I am obliged to report that I found it the merest attitudinizing and gesturing of a man who had nothing critically relevant to say. It may be an example of Christian Discrimination; I am sure it is not good literary criticism. As for Charles Williams' influence, all that we learn and divine of it leads me to the conclusion that here, in the milieu to which he belonged, we have a subject worth attention from the inquirer into the 'sociology' of contemporary literature. It seems to me that there is some danger of his verse-constructions being imposed on the student in succession to The Testament Oj Beauty.

What I want to say very earnestly to Bro. George Every is that, in so far as he is truly concerned for religion, I think he is doing his cause a great deal of harm. Charles Williams is ostensibly inspired by Christian doctrine, but if you approach as a literary critic, unstiffened by the determination to 'discriminate Christianly', or if you approach merely with ordinary sensitiveness and good sense, you can hardly fail to see that Williams' preoccupation with the 'horror of evil* is evidence of an arrest at the schoolboy (and -girl) stage rather than of spiritual maturity, and that his dealings in 'myth', mystery, the occult, and the supernatural belong essentially to the ethos of the thriller. To pass off his writings as spiritually edifying is to promote the opposite of spiritual health.

More generally, to debase the currency and abrogate the function of criticism, as Mr Every offers to do, can only, I am convinced, do harm by the standards of any real concern for religion. What, one may ask, does Mr Every offer his disciples in return for the great poet to whom he denies diem access ? He offers them (they were in the first place extension-lecturees, theological students, and training teachers) pretentious phrases, vague and

muddled ideas, a confused exaltation of self-importance, and help towards believing that to feel vaguely excited and impressed is to have grappled with serious problems. On the other hand, to take, in any measure, what Mr Eliot's poetry has to give is to be educated into a new understanding of the nature of precision in thought, and at the same time to experience intimately an emotional and spiritual discipline. And this holds, irrespective of whether or not the reader subscribes to Christian doctrine.

As for Christian Discrimination, it needs to be said that there can be no substitute for the scrupulous and disinterested approach of the literary critic. If Christian belief and Christian attitudes have really affected the critic's sensibility, then they will play their due part in his perceptions and judgments, without his summoning his creeds and doctrines to the job of discriminating and pronouncing. If, on the other hand, he does, like Bro. George Every, make a deliberate and determined set at * discriminating Christ-ianly', then the life of the spirit will suffer damage, more or less severe, in the ways that Bro. George Every's work merely exemplifies with a peculiarly rich obviousness. It is fair to add (if I may use a phrase that was once reported to me as having been applied by the Editor of The Criterion to something quite different) that he represents the most active and formidable of contemporary * gang-movements*.

KEYNES, LAWRENCE AND CAMBRIDGE

FOR the repugnance felt by Lawrence towards Mr David Garnett's friends, and the Cambridge-Bloomsbury milieu in general, Mr Garnett has a simple explanation: jealousy. 'He was a prophet who hated all those whose creeds protected them from ever becoming his disciples'. That Lawrence had gifts Mr Garnett readily perceived. In fact, he has 'never met a writer who appeared to have such genius. I greatly admired, and still admire, his short stories, his poems and several of his novels, particularly his first novel, The White Peacock'. (So, by way of paying one's tribute to James, one might say: 'Yes, tremendous! I particularly admire The American 9 . Or, a greater genius being in. question: 'I particularly admire Two Gentlemen of Verona 9 ). 'But', Mr Garnett continues,

I was a rationalist and a scientist, and I was repelled by his intuitive and dogmatic philosophy, whereas the ideas of my friends from Cambridge interested and attracted me.

It was thus inevitable that sooner or later Lawrence would spew me out of his mouth, since I could never take his philosophy seriously.

Keynes too, attempting his own explanation, invokes jealousy. But he feels that more is needed. His Memoir (the second of the pair that Mr Garnett introduces) is a piece of retrospective self-searching in which he asks whether he and his friends may not have provided Lawrence with some valid grounds for judging them adversely. Keynes, no one will question, was a distinguished mind, and the distinction is there, perhaps, in the very effort at self-criticism and a due humility. But the significance of what he offers is not what he is conscious of; it lies in the inadequacy of the effort, and in the justification he brings Lawrence when he least intends it, or suspects it.

The virtually intact complacency he exposes to our view gives us, at the outset, the assumptions on which the inquiry is to pro-

ceed: 'But when all that has been said, was there something true and right inwhatLawrence felt ?' The 'but'leaves the assumptions with us as implicitly granted, following as it does on this:

Lawrence was jealous of the other lot; and Cambridge rationalism and cynicism, then at their height, were, of course, repulsive to him. Bertie gave him what must have been, I think, his first glimpse of Cambridge. It overwhelmed, attracted and repulsed him—which was the other emotional disturbance. It was obviously a civilization, and not less obviously uncomfortable and unattainable for him—very repulsive and very attractive.

'It was obviously a civilization*—shocked as the provincial and puritanical Lawrence must inevitably have been, he 'obviously' can't but have admired and envied. That Lawrence, judging out of his experience of something incomparably more worthy to be called a 'civilization', loathed and despised what was in front of him merely because he saw just what it was, is inconceivable to Keynes.

The Memoir is devoted to explaining the serious substance underlying the 'brittle stuff' of the conversation in which Lawrence couldn't be brought to join. Such 'brittle stuff' continued, even in the maturer years of die Mite, to be a large part of the 'civilization'—at least one gathers so from the way in which Keynes (it is 1938) announces his theme:

if it will not shock the Club too much, I should like in this contribution to its proceedings to introduce for once mental or spiritual, instead of sexual, adventures, to try and recall the principal impacts on one's virgin mind and to wonder how it has all turned out, and whether one still holds by that youthful religion.

The 'religion' was derived from G. E. Moore, and the Memoir is largely taken up with describing his influence. 'Influence* here, of course, means what was made of him, not in any field of disciplined study, but at the level of undergraduate 'civilization'. That Moore himself deserves the high terms in which Keynes speaks of him no one will wish to question. But the 'influence'— I well remember the exasperated despair with which its manifestations (in mild forms, I now see) filled me when I met them, just after the 1914 war, in friendly seniors who had been formed in that climate at the beginning of the century. Keynes, looking

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back, describes the intellectualities of the coterie and its religion with a certain amused irony; but it is not the detached irony of a mature valuation. Still in 1938 he takes them seriously; he sees them, not as illustrating a familiar undergraduate phase which should in any case be left behind as soon as possible, and which the most intelligent men should escape, but as serious and admirable— even, it would seem, when cultivated well beyond undergraduate years. And that is what seems to me most significant in the Memoir, and most revelatory of the Cambridge-Bloomsbury ethos.

Of course, Keynes criticises the 'religion* for deficiencies and errors. But he can't see that, 'seriously* as it took itself, to be inimical to the development of any real seriousness was its essence. Articulateness and unreality cultivated together; callowness disguised from itself in articulateness; conceit casing itself safely in a confirmed sense of high sophistication; the uncertainty as to whether one is serious or not taking itself for ironic poise: who has not at some time observed the process ?

It did not prevent us from laughing most of the time and we enjoyed supreme self-confidence, superiority and contempt towards all the rest of the unconverted world.

Broadly speaking we all knew for certain what were good states of mind and that they consisted in communion with objects of love, beauty and truth.

And Keynes describes the dialectical play ('It was a stringent education in dialectic', he tells us) that was to merge into, and, one gathers, was ultimately superseded by, the more 'brittle stuff' —describes it whimsically, but without in the least realizing that what he and his friends were illustrating was die power of an ancient university, in some of its climatic pockets, to arrest development, and that what they were finding in their intellectual performances was sanction and reinforcement for an undergraduate immaturity: the more confident they grew in their sophistication, the less chance had they of discovering what seriousness was like.

The more worldly sophistication that Lawrence encountered in 1914 was not a more genuine maturity. One can readily imagine how the incontinendy flippant talk and the shiny complacency, snub-proof in its obtuse completeness, infuriated him. He loathed

the flippancy, not because he was an inexperienced prude, but for quite opposite reasons. He had been formed in a working-class culture, in which intellectual interests were bound up with the social life of home and chapel, and never out of touch with the daily business of ensuring the supply of the daily bread. The intellectual interests were not the less real for that: E. T.'s D. H. Lawrence, taken together with Sons and Lovers, shows what an intense cultivation they had enjoyed during the formative years at Eastwood and Nottingham. Nothing could be more ludicrously wide of the mark than the assumption that Lawrence must have felt inferior and ill-educated when introduced in Russell's rooms to the dazzling civilization of Cambridge. But the thing to stress is his enormous advantage in experience. The young ex-elementary school-teacher was in a position to judge of the most distinguished intellectual among his friends, as he does in a letter of a year or so later: