The Common Pursuit (40 page)

The inherent weakness becomes peculiarly apparent in such prose as this:

There was a long silence during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. 'One would lose something,' murmured Helen, apparently to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean ? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast ? Does she belong to those-who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity ? (p. 172.)

Mr Forster's * poetic' communication isn't all at this level of poeticality (which, had there been real grasp behind his intention, Mr Forster would have seen to be Wilcox rather than Schlegel), but it nevertheless lapses into such exaltations quite easily. And the * somehow' in that last sentence may fairly be seized on: the

intention that can thus innocently take vagueness of vision in these matters for a virtue proclaims its inadequacy and immaturity there.

In closing on this severe note my commentary on the pre-war novels I had perhaps better add explicitly (in case the implication may seem to have got lost) that they are all, as I see them, clearly the work of a significantly original talent, and they would have deserved to be still read and remembered, even if they had not been the early work of the author of A Passage to India.

In A Passage to India (1924), which comes fourteen years later (a remarkable abstention in an author who had enjoyed so decided a succbs d'estime), there are none of these staggering discrepancies. The prevailing mood testifies to the power of time and history. For the earlier lyrical indulgences we have (it may fairly be taken as representative) the evocation of Mrs Moore's reactions to the caves ('Pathos, poetry, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth/ etc.—see pp. 149-151). The tone characterizing the treatment of personal relations is fairly represented by this:

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air. Both man and woman were at the height of their powers—sensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke die same language, and held the same opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them. Yet they were dissatisfied. When they agreed, 'I want to go on living a bit*, or, 'I don't believe in God', the words were followed by a curious backwash as if the universe had displaced itself to fill up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own gestures from an immense height—dwarfs talking, shaking hands and assuring each other that they stood on the same footing of insight, (p. 265.)

Of course, tone and mood are specifically related to the given theme and setting of the novel. But the Indian sky and the Anglo-Indian circumstances must be taken as giving a particular focus and frame to the author's familiar preoccupations (exhibiting as these naturally do a more advanced maturity).

Fielding, the central figure in the book, who is clearly very dose to the author, represents in a maturer way what the Schlegels represented: what may still be called liberal culture—humanity, disinterestedness, tolerance and free intelligence, unassociated with dogma or religion or any very determinate set of traditional forms. He might indeed (if we leave out all that Howards End

stood for) be said to represent what was intended by Margaret's marrying Henry Wilcox, for he is level-headed and practical and qualified in the ways of the world. His agnosticism is explicit. Asked

Is it correct that most people are atheists in England now ?

he replies:

The educated thoughtful people. I should say so, though they don't like the name. The truth is that the West doesn't bother much over belief and disbelief in these days. Fifty years ago, or even when you and I were young, much more fuss was made. (p. 109.)

Nevertheless, though Fielding doesn't share it, the kind of preoccupation he so easily passes by has its place in A Passage to India as in Mr Forster's other novels, and again (though there is no longer the early crudity) its appearances are accompanied by something unsatisfactory in the novelist's art, a curious lack of grasp. The first Mrs Wilcox, that very symbolic person, and Miss Avery may be said to have their equivalents in Mrs Moore and Ralph, the son of her second marriage. Mrs Moore, as a matter of fact, is in the first part of the book an ordinary character, but she becomes, after her death, a vague pervasive suggestion of mystery. It is true that it is she who has the experience in die cave—the experience that concentrates the depressed ethos of the book—and the echo 'undermines her hold on life', but the effect should be to associate her with the reverse of the kind of mysteriousness that after her death is made to invest her name. For she and the odd boy Ralph (*born of too old a mother') are used as means of recognizing possibilities that lie outside Fielding's philosophy—though he is open-minded. There is, too, Ralph's sister Stella, whom Fielding marries:

She has ideas I don't share—indeed, when I'm away from her I think them ridiculous. When I'm with her, I suppose because I'm fond of her, I feel different, I feel half dead and half blind. My wife's after something. You and I and Miss Quested are, roughly speaking, not after anything. We jog on as decently as we can ... (p. 320.)

Our objection is that it's all too easy. It amounts to little more than saying, * There may be something in it', but it has the effect of taking itself for a good deal more. The very poise of Mr

Forster's art has something equivocal about it—it seems to be conditioned by its not knowing what kind of poise it is. The account of the Krishna ceremony, for instance, which is a characteristic piece by the sensitive, sympathetic, and whimsically ironic Mr Forster, slides nevertheless into place in the general effect-there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—that claims a proper impersonality. How radical is this uncertainty that takes on the guise of a sureness and personal distinction of touch may be seen in Mr Forster's prose when a real and characteristic distinction is unmistakably there. Here is an instance:

The other smiled, and looked at his watch. They both regretted the death, but they were middle-aged men who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance. It's only one's own dead who matter. If for a moment the sense of communion in sorrow came to them, it passed. How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones t The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.

The touch seems sure in the first three sentences—in fact, but for one phrase, in the whole passage. Consider, for instance, how different an effect the second sentence would have out of its context: one would suppose it to be in satiric tone. Here, however, it is a means to the precise definition of a very different tone, one fatigued and depressed but sympathetic. The lapse, it seems to me, comes in that close of the penultimate sentence: *... plants, and perhaps by the stones/ Once one's critical notice has fastened on it (for, significantly too, these things tend to slip by), can one do anything but reflect how extraordinary it is that so fine a writer should be able, in such a place, to be so little certain just how serious he is ? For surely that run-out of the sentence cannot be justified in terms of the dramatic mood that Mr Forster is offering to render ? I suppose the show of a case might be made out for it as an appropriate irony, or appropriate dramatically in some way, but it wouldn't be a convincing case to anyone who had observed Mr Forster's habit. Such a reader sees merely the easy, natural lapse of the very personal writer whose hand is *in Mt may seem a

not very important instance, but it is representative, and to say that is to pass a radical criticism.

Moreover, a general doubt arises regarding that personal distinction of style—that distinction which might seem to give Mr

J O O

Forster an advantage over, say, Mr L. H. Myers (to take another novelist who offers some obvious points of comparison). The doubt expresses itself in an emphasis on the * personal'.

Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.

Sir Gilbert, though not an enlightened man, held enlightened opinions.

Rorniy's religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics.

Incurably inaccurate, he already thought that this was what had occurred. He was inaccurate because he was sensitive. He did not like to remember Miss Quested's remark about polygamy, because it was unworthy of a guest, so he put it away from his mind, and with it the knowledge that he had bolted into a cave to get away from her. He was inaccurate because he desired to honour her, and—facts being entangled —he had to arrange them in her vicinity, as one tidies the ground after extracting a weeo.

What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite \ What dwelt in the first of the caves ? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself.

A larger assemblage of quotations (there would be no difficulty but that of space in going on indefinitely) would make the point fairly conclusively: Mr Forster's style is personal in the sense that it keeps us very much aware of the personality of the writer, so that even where actions, events and the experiences of characters are supposed to be speaking for themselves the turn of phrase and tone of voice bring the presenter and commentator into the foreground. Mr Forster's felicities and his charm, then, involve limitations. Even where he is not betrayed into lapses of the kind illustrated above, his habit doesn't favour the impersonality, the presentment of themes and experiences as things standing there in themselves, that would be necessary for convincing success at the level of his highest intention.

The comparative reference to Mr L. H. Myers thrown out above suggests a return to the question of Mr Forster's representative significance. When one has recognized the interest and value his work has as representing liberal culture in the early years of the twentieth century, there is perhaps a temptation to see the weaknesses too simply as representative. That that culture has of its very nature grave weaknesses Mr Forster's work itself constitutes an explicit recognition. But it seems worth while insisting at this point on the measure in which Mr Forster's weaknesses are personal ones, qualifying the gifts that have earned him (I believe) a lasting place in English literature. He seems then, for one so perceptive and sensitive, extraordinarily lacking in force, or robustness, of intelligence; it is, perhaps, a general lack of vitality. The deficiencies of his novels must be correlated with the weakness so apparent in his critical and journalistic writings— Aspects of the Novel, Abinger Harvest —the weakness that makes them representative in so disconcerting a way. They are disconcerting because they exhibit a lively critical mind accepting, it seems, uncritically the very inferior social-intellectual milieu in which it has developed. Mr Forster, we know, has been associated with Bloomsbury—the Bloomsbury which (to confine ourselves to one name) produced Lytton Strachey and took him for a great writer. And these writings of Mr Forster's are, in their amiable way, Bloomsbury. They are Bloomsbury in the valuations they accept (in spite of the showings of real critical perception), in the assumptions they innocently express, and in prevailing ethos.

It might, of course, be said that it is just die weakness of liberal culture—'bourgeois', die Marxist would say—that is manifested by Bloomsbury (which certainly had claims to some kind of representative status). But there seems no need to deal directly with such a proposition here, or to discuss at any length what significance shall be given to the terms * liberal' and 'culture'. The necessary point is made by insisting that the weaknesses of Mr Forster's work and of Bloomsbury are placed as such by standards implicit in what is best in that work. That those standards are not complete in themselves or securely based or sufficiently guaranteed by contemporary civilization there is no need to dispute: the recognition has been an essential part of the creative impulse in Mr Forster. But that, in the exploration of the radical problems, more

power than he commands may be shown by a creative writer who may equally be said to represent liberal culture appears well enough in The Root and the Flower —at least, I throw out this judgment as pretty obviously acceptable. And I cannot see how we can dispense with what they both stand for. They represent, the spokesmen of the finer consciousness of our time, the humane tradition as it emerges from a period of'bourgeois* security, divorced from dogma and left by social change, the breakdown of traditional forms and the loss of sanctions embarrassingly 'in the air'; no longer serenely confident or self-sufficient, but conscious of being not less than before the custodian of something essential. In these representatives it is far from the complacency of * freedom of thought', but they stand, nevertheless, for the free play of critical intelligence as a sine qua non of any hope for a human future. And it seems to me plain that this tradition really is, for all its weakness, the indispensable transmitter of something that humanity cannot afford to lose.

These rather commonplace observations seemed worth making because of the current fashion of using 'liberal' largely and loosely as a term of derogation: too much is too lightly dismissed with it. To enforce this remark it seems to me enough to point to A Passage to India —and it will be an occasion for ensuring that I shall not, in effect, have done Mr Forster a major critical injustice. For I have been assuming, tacitly, a general agreement that A Passage to India, all criticisms made, is a classic: not only a most significant document of our age, but a truly memorable work of literature. And that there is point in calling it a classic of the liberal spirit will, I suppose, be granted fairly readily, for the appropriateness of the adjective is obvious. In its touch upon racial and cultural problems, its treatment of personal relations, and in prevailing ethos die book is an expression, undeniably, of the liberal tradition; it has, as such, its fineness, its strength and its im-pressiveness; and it makes the achievement, the humane, decent and rational—the 'civilized'—habit, of that tradition appear the invaluable thing it is.

On this note I should like to make my parting salute. Mr Forster's is a name that, in these days, we should peculiarly honour.

APPROACHES TO T. S. ELIOT

HERE, 1 edited by a Fellow of Trinity, and contributed to by members of the Cambridge English Faculty and other respectable academics, is a volume of essays on T. S. Eliot, all treating him as a classic and an accepted glory of out language. As one contributor, Miss Bradbrook, indicates, such a thing was, not so very long ago, hardly conceivable; it means that a revolutionary change has been brought about. 'How was it done ?' Miss Brad-brook doesn't answer her question; but, while she slights one main part of the answer, her essay seems to me to illustrate the other. Referring back to die Cambridge of the nineteen-twentics, she surmises (exemplifying a tone and an attitude characteristic of her essay—I find them, I had better say outright, very distasteful): * -.. Mr Eliot may be relieved that the incense no longer fumes upon the local altars with quite its old intensity . . .* I can only comment that a pronounced fume, strongly suggesting incense, rises from Miss Bradbrook's own essay, and that it is of such a quality as to give us half the answer to her question. (I find her style, suggesting the influence of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers rather than Mr Eliot, corroborative.)

For it is 'certain that a marked change in Mr Eliot's standing followed the appearance of For Lancelot Andrewes and Ask* Wednesday, and that if so difficult and disturbing a poet is so generally accepted as an established institution it is for the kind of reason that makes a great many people (including, one gathers, Miss Bradbrook—see a footnote to p. 21) suppose that The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral inaugurated a revival of religious poetic drama. The part played by Mr Eliot's association with religious orthodoxy is to be read plainly in at least three of the eight essays presented by Dr Rajan.

Yet Mr Eliot would not have been there for Anglo-Catholic

intellectuals as a triumphantly acclaimable major poet, the great

living master, nor would the critical apparatus for confidently

appraising and elucidating him as such, if there had not been, in

theyears referred to by Miss Bradbrook, admirers capable of something more critical than burning incense. And, I must add, capable of something in the nature of courage that isn't necessary to-day— an aspect of that forgotten situation not done justice to by Miss Bradbrook, who says:

When The Sacred Wood and Homage to John Dryden appeared Mr Eliot was still the subject of frightened abuse in the weeklies, and also in some academic circles. But his views percolated downwards, and are now almost common form. How was it done ?

That 'still' must appear very odd to anyone who recalls the chronology of Mr Eliot's ceuvre. The Sacred Wood came out in 1920 and Homage to John Dryden in 1924 (when in most academic circles Mr Eliot's name would hardly have met with recognition). ' Still', I must testify, havingthe strongest of grounds for confident insistence, still in 1930 (and later), and in the academic circles that now receive Dr Rajan's enterprise without a flutter, Mr Eliot's mere name, however modestly mentioned, was as a red rag to a bull. I could tell Miss Bradbrook, privately, some piquant and true anecdotes in illustration. I will confine myself here to two reminiscences of sufficiently public fact. When in 1929 an innocent young editor printed an article of mine on Mr Eliot's criticism in The Cambridge Review (a reply to a contemptuous dismissal of him by a Cambridge 'English' don in Mr Desmond MacCarthy's Life and Letters) he very soon had cause to realize that he had committed a scandalous impropriety, and I myself was left in no doubt as to the unforgivableness of my offence. And when, in 1932, a book of mine came out that made a study of Mr Eliot die centre of an attempt to define the distinctive aspects of significant contemporary poetry, so much worse than imprudent was it found to be that the advanced 'English' intellectual of the day declined (or so the gloating whisper ran) to have anything to do with it, and The Cambridge Review could find no reviewer for it in Cambridge. I remember, too, with some amusement, the embarrassed notes I received from correct friends who felt that some form of congratulation on the appearance of a book had to be gone through, but knew also that the offence was rank, disastrous and unpardonable. Yet the matter of that offensive book is seen, in Dr Rajan's symposium, to be now 'common form'. How was it done ?

I have thought this note on the development of a literary-critical orthodoxy worth making, not only because history will go on repeating itself and, though it undoubtedly in any case will, there is always some point in insisting on the moral as presented by the nearest striking instance, but because such an orthodoxy naturally tends to discourage true respect for the genius it offers to exalt—to substitute, that is, deference. True respect is inseparable from the concern to see the object as in itself it really is, to insist on the necessary discriminations, and so to make the essential achievement, with the special life and virtue it embodies, effective as influence* Of this respect Miss Bradbrook seems to me to fail.

She is not, among Dr Rajan's contributors, alone in that. I read her first because so much, largely repetitive, had already been written about Mr Eliot's poetry, and the opportunity, I told myself, still lay open for a first-hand attempt to appraise the criticism. My disappointment is the heavier because such an appraisal seems to me very much to be desired. It would involve some firm disoiminating and delimiting, and until these are performed, the ambiguity that hangs about the nature and tendency of Mr Eliot's influence must impede the recognition of our debt. It is a debt that I recognize for myself as immense. By some accident (it must have been—I had not come on Mr Eliot's name before) I bought The Sacred Wood just after it came out, in 1920. For the next few years I read it through several times a year, pencil in hand. I got from it, of course, orientations, particular illuminations, and critical ideas of general instrumental value. But if I had to characterize the nature of the debt briefly I should say that it was a matter of having had incisively demonstrated, for pattern and incitement, what the disinterested and effective application of intelligence to literature looks like, what is the nature of purity of interest, and what is meant by the principle (as Mr Eliot himself states it) that * when you judge poetry it is as poetry you must judge it, and not as another dtung'.

There are few pieces of his criticism after For Lancelot Andrewes to which one would send the student of literature for such demonstration. 'When he stabilized his own style as a poet, some informing power departed from his critical writing. If for example the essay on In Memoriam be compared with that on Massinger, or

the introduction to the volume of Kipling's verse with the essay on Dryden, it will be seen that Mr Eliot has withdrawn from his subjects: he is no longer so closely engaged . ..' Ah, if that were all. It seems to me, in fact, that Miss Bradbrook's handling of the change isn't free from disingenuousness:

Mr Eliot has apologized for the 'pontifical solemnity' of some of his early writings. Nervous stiffness and defensive irony were inevitable in an age when 'a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs' could be imputed to him for righteousness. The later criticism exhibits rather a haughty humility—'The poem Gethsemane (by Kipling) which I do not think I understand . ..'; the implication being, *I expect you think it's simple, but that only shows how superficial your reading is'.

To find the difference between the earlier and the later criticism in the disappearance or diminution of nervousness—that is to me an extremely odd achievement. Mr Eliot's best criticism is remarkable for its directness, its concentrated purity of interest, its intense and rigorous concern to convey the essential perception and the bearing of this as realized by the critic. It exhibits the reverse of hesitation and diffidence; its qualities are intimately related to courage. I don't find these qualities in the Kipling introduction referred to by Miss Bradbrook. On the contrary, in that too characteristic specimen of the later writing the critic seems to me to have misapplied his dangerous gift of subtle statement to the development of a manner (it is surprisingly suggestive in places of G. K. Chesterton) that gainsays the very purpose of criticism, and to have done so because of a radical uncertainty about his intention and its validity. And is what we have here (from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) 'haughty humility' ?—

Mr Housxiian has given us an account of his own experience in writing poetry which is important evidence. Observation leads me to believe that different poets may compose in very different ways; my experience (for what it is worth) leads me to believe that Mr Housman is recounting the authentic process of a real poet. *I have seldom', he says, 'written poetry unless I was rather out of health'. I believe that I understand that sentence. If I do, it is a guarantee—if any guarantee of that nature is wanted—of the quality of Mr Housman's poetry.

It seems to me also that in Mr Eliot's critical writing from For Lancelot Andrewes onwards a limitation that is (on a pondered

appraisal) to be predicated of his earlier work asserts itself as a major weakness—a weakness of a kind that might seem to be disqualifying where claims to status as a great critic are in question. That the author of Selected Essays is (if not, where shall we find one ?) a great critic I don't for a moment doubt. But if he is, it is in spite of lacking a qualification that, sketching the 'idea', one would have postulated as perhaps the prime essential in a great critic. It is a qualification possessed pre-eminently by D. H. Lawrence, though he, clearly, is not to be accounted anything like as important in literary criticism as T. S. Eliot: a sure rightness in what, if one holds any serious view of the relation between literature and life, must appear to be the most radical and important kind of judgment.

As Miss Bradbrook intimates, Mr Eliot's best criticism was related in the closest of ways to his own problems as a poet—a practitioner who has rejected current conventions and modes as inadequate to his needs and so is committed to a labour of thorough-going technical innovation. Questions of technique— versification, convention, relation of diction to the spoken language, and so on—cannot be isolated from considerations of fundamental purpose, essential ethos, and quality of life. That is, one can hardly say where technical questions turn into questions that one wouldn't ordinarily call technical. 'The important critic is he who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear on the solution of those problems'. The attention that Mr Eliot's highly selective kind of interest (the definition just quoted is his own) directs upon Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Jonson, Marlowe, and the others, entails value-judgments. But it doesn't commit him to attempting any comprehensive evaluation or definitive placing. So that, by way of countering one's protests that he over-rates Dryden, one can adduce the very special interest with which he approaches and the strictly limiting end he has in view—one can adduce these, I must add, while deploring both the over-valuation of Dryden that he has certainly helped to establish as a fashion, and the attendant slighting of the incomparably greater Pope (without an appreciation of whom there can't be any but the most incomplete perception of Mr Eliot's seventeenth century—the seventeenth century of Jonson, Donne and Marvell).

But the major instance of the limiting approach, the instance where the limitation is most clearly seen to entail unfortunate consequences, is what we have in Mr Eliot's treatment of Jacobean drama. No one, I think, admires more than I do his contribution in that field, or can be more grateful for it. To approach it one needs to have started reading the Jacobeans when the Lamb-Swinburne tradition was unchallenged, and no better critical equipment for dealing with poetic drama was to hand than that which has its classical exponent in Bradley. No doubt, had one been put on to them, one might have found a tip or two, here and there, in scholarly sources. But only a fine and powerful critical intelligence, informed with the insight got in dealing with its own creative problems, could have brought effective aid, and it was Mr Eliot who brought it. He supplied the equipment of ideas about drama, the enlightenment about convention and verse, that made all the difference. What he did not, however, do, was to attempt any radical revaluation of the Jacobeans. The very marked tendency of his work, in fact (in spite of his admirable asides on Beaumont and Fletcher), has been to endorse the traditional valuations. (It seems to me highly significant that he has gone on reprinting that very unsatisfactory essay on Middleton.) What he hasn't done, no one else has had the courage or the perception to do. So that, though he insisted on the need to distinguish conventions from faults (see 'Four Elizabethan Dramatists'), scholars who, stimulated by him, have undertaken to investigate the conventions have tended to repeat, in inverted form, Archer's failing: that is, to make everything convention, thus emptying the term of its force. To have acted seriously on Mr Eliot's tip, and taken proper cognizance of faults, would have been to face the need for drastic revision of some consecrated valuations.