The Common Pursuit (6 page)

judged Shakespeare and Milton by the standards of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, there is no doubt that Shakespeare would fare the better.

What does this mean ? Perhaps by dint of questioning and suggestion some discussible proposition could be elicited from Dr Tillyard. But such a sentence (and the formula is repeated more than once in the book) couldn't have been written and left standing if the author hadn't been more concerned with the response he was relying on than the thought he supposed himself to be expressing. Again, a few lines further on, he writes:

Dr Leavis (who is a better critic when he encourages us to read Carew or Pope than when he puts Spenser or Shelley on the index)...

This is Dr Tillyard's way of referring to the fact that I have criticized Shelley adversely and to the deduction that I set a lower value on Spenser than on Chaucer, Jonson, Pope, Blake, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Byron, Yeats and Eliot. It is a way that no self-respecting critic should permit himself; it should be left to the Sunday reviewers.

Dr Tillyard at the same time, in his assumption that it is praiseworthy to find reasons for recommending accepted authors (I

1 1 hope Miss Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns are not going to become a pan of the 'modern critic's' outfit.

a Cf. 'A second primitive feeling may be deduced from the architectonic power which critics have so often praised in Milton* There is something quite uncommon, something alive and passionate, in the thorough manner in which Milton shapes and finishes off his plot,' etc. See p. 55.

cannot sec why he should have been convinced by the reasons I give in favour of Carew and Pope) and reprehensible to criticize such authors adversely, seems to me to exhibit one of the most deadeningly academic traits of the academic mind. To his phrase about 'putting on the index' I might retort that Dr Tillyard pursues the steady aim of putting on the list of works that students must drudge through, and learn to admire, everything that he sees a chance of disinterring from literary history. This representative passage will suggest the spirit and manner of his book:

I am not especially attracted by the Miltonizing blank verse of the eighteenth century, but if I read it more assiduously I might like it better. So might others who have said hard things of it. And it may well be that, conditioned as it was, eighteenth-century poetry did well to model itself in part on. Milton. Anyhow, I have not the slightest faith that by refusing to imitate Milton it would have developed powers that it does not now possess. However, this is not a topic I wish to pursue, and I will content myself with asking those who have condemned eighteenth-century Miltonics without having given the matter a great deal of attention to read (or re-read) Dr C. V. Deane's Aspects of Eighteenth-century Nature Poetry before they reiterate their condemnation, (p. 114.)

That a liking for the Miltonizing blank verse of the eighteenth century is (in spite of the generous inclusiveness of the project) not beyond Dr Tillyard's powers to achieve I am sufficiently convinced ; he has, I think, supplied plenty of evidence of it in this book. For instance, he is capable of convincing himself, with a show of analysis (I am perhaps prejudiced here, since his account of Keats's ode affects me as being like a miscomprehending and ruinous adaptation of the analysis which I myself elaborated two or three years ago), that Lycidas and the Ode to a Nightingale are almost identical in structure and significance (though Milton

does not let his despairing emotions prey on him quite so thoroughly; indeed, he insists on blending with them a measure of dogma and a conscientious sense of literary tradition), (p. 36.)

Again, it is, as I and everyone I have consulted judge it, a fairly ordinary piece of stiffjointed, pedantically-gaited Miltonic blank verse that, with enthusiasm, analysis and every appearance of con-

viction, Dr Tillyard, on pp. 132-4, pronounces superlatively remarkable for expressive sensitiveness of movement.

Outside Shakespeare and a few passages of the Elizabethan drama such perfectly modulated blank verse is not to be found in English.

The truly monumental instance in this book of the tendency to find new burdens for the literary student is Dr Tillyard's offer to bestow on him an English Epic Tradition:

Now in recent years there has been a distinct shift of opinion towards taking the Faerie Queene as something more than a pretty series of pageants and allowing it to speak for a whole civilization. With that shift I sympathize, and so sympathizing I should call the poem an epic. But what of Arcadia ? Even if it attempts to be an epic, does it succeed ? I answer that, for anyone who has the leisure and the patience to read it slowly, it does... The unfailing vitality of the prose rhythms matches the unfailing enchantment of Spenser's metre, (p. 158.)

Although the Davideis is a better poem than is usually allowed, only in one particular does it make any vital contribution to the English epic. (p. 162.)

There seems no point in arguing here. I will only state my own view that if the English Epic, or the English Epic Tradition, became anywhere a recognized academic subject of study, anyone who had furthered that end would have deserved ill both of the literary student and of Milton.

And that there seems no point in arguing with Dr Tillyard is what I have to say generally; between die unsatisfactory nature of his interest in poetry and his concern for an ultra-modernity of critical method he has, it seems, in the realm of criticism and scholarship, lost all sense of what an argument properly is. One can, of course, when he says (p. 118) that

Milton (sensitive once more to the trend of advanced opinion in his own day) reacted against the riot of verbiage that makes the Elizabethans and Jacobeans so exhilarating,

and refers to 'the antiquated method of profusion', ask certain obvious questions (Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Fletcher? Marlowe ? Ben Jonson ?) and suggest that an argument about style that starts comfortably with so large a feat of assimilation can hardly be expected to lurch into closeness and acuity* But I will

not go on accumulating such annotations. I will merely, taking the above illustrations as a sufficient warrant, say that Dr Tillyard's arguments, when he undertakes to dispose of either Mr Eliot's views or my own about Milton's verse, seem to me to be elaborating merely an incomprehension of the issues. And perhaps, in case I should be thought to accept the views that Dr Tillyard seems to attribute to me (or 'the modern critic'), I had better add finally that I have nowhere complained 'that Milton did not write Paradise Lost in the style of Shakespeare' (p. 119), or (what seems to me a different thing) 'in a conversational style 5 or 'the tone of ordinary speech'; and that I have never, I think, given anyone any excuse for supposing that I hold the 'language of small talk' to be 'the basis of all good poetry' (p. 21); nor can I believe that any critic, modern or other, has held the 'sole object of art', or the object of art at all, to be

to bring into consciousness, to maintain in an unrelaxed awareness, the daily traffic of an intelligent mind with the world around it. (p. 43.)

or has urged it against Milton as a poet that he does

not show a simultaneous awareness of the four senses to what is going on in the street outside, (p. 48.)

One gets used, of course, to having attributed to one for demolition views one has never advanced and never held. Even Professor Grierson l performs at my expense a substitution, and does it in full view. Having said (p. 128) that a charge

brought to-day against Milton is that he has broken the tradition of English poetic diction,

he quotes this passage from me:

The predominance in various forms of Milton, from Thomson through Gray, Cowper, and Akenside to Wordsworth and, although allied with Spenser, through Keats and Tennyson . . . must receive enough attention ... to bring out the significance of what we have witnessed in our time; the reconstitution of the English tradition by

1 Milton and Wordsworth.

the reopening of communications with the seventeenth century of Shakespeare, Donne, Middleton, Tourneur and so on.

He proceeds at once to comment:

This is a claim difficult to understand exactly. In his own age Donne was not regarded as a preserver of the English tradition but, by Drummond for example (as the late Professor W. P. Ker insisted), as an innovator. The tradition of English poetic diction as established by Chaucer had been renewed and enriched by Spenser .. .

And Professor Grierson goes on in this way, as if he were dealing with some proposition advanced in my paragraph. He has already, immediately before, having expressed himself unable to conjecture what I mean by talking about 'Milton's habit of exploiting language as a kind of musical medium outside himself', suggested (p. 127):

But Mr Leavis may mean that there are not the passionate ratio-cinative subtleties of Donne's songs and elegies. But surely these would have been out of place, and surely there may be more dian one kind of good poetry.

That I myself believe there may be more dian one kind of good poetry might, I diink, have been gathered from that paragraph of mine which Professor Grierson then quotes, and I cannot see what excuse he has for supposing me to make Donne the model and criterion: 'The seventeenth century of Shakespeare, Donne, Middleton and Tourneur', and, I might have added, of Ben Jonson, the Court poets and Marvell. These poets seem to me to exhibit between them a wide range of differences and to have written good poetry in a variety of manners. But all these manners have, in their different ways, a vital relation to speech, to die living language of the time. Milton invented a medium die distinction of which is to have denied itself the life of the living language. What I mean by this I still diink I have made sufficiently plain; in any case, the fact seems to me plain in itself. And it is a fact that seems to me unaffected by any amount of arguing, in Dr Tillyard's vein, diat Milton docs not latinize as much as some people suppose, or that Shakespeare has latinizing lines and phrases.

What is meant by saying that Milton exploits language as a kind of musical medium 1 outside himself and that his influence predominates in the nineteenth century comes out clearly enough (as I tried to show) when we compare Keats's Miltonizing Hyperion with the induction to the revised version and with the Ode to Autumn, and when we note the close affinities between Keats's Miltordzing style and the Tennysonian. Professor Grierson, though he criticizes views he produces as mine 2 and quotes the passage reproduced above, does not consider that argument (which has a closely woven context) and Dr Tillyard's discussion of what Keats says in the Letters doesn't affect it.

1 *Mr Eliot says that you have to read Milton twice: once for the sense, and once for the sound. Might not further readings yield a more unified result?* (The Miltonic Setting, p. 132). Mr Eliot makes the point admirably, giving a sufficient answer to Dr Tillyard's arguments (pp. 91-3) about the close of Lycidas and the passage from Paradise Lost; and Dr Tillyard's sally is, in its incomprehension, impertinent, following as it does on the suggestion that people who disagree with him about Milton do so because they haven't read Milton enough. Perhaps I had better put it on record that the pocket Milton I have referred to in writing this essay is falling to pieces from use, and that it is the only book I carried steadily in my pocket between 1915 and 1919.

2 He even seems to associate me (see p. 122) with the modern cult of Dryden, from which I have explicitly dissociated myself.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Hopkins has a permanent place among the English L poets may now be taken as established beyond challenge : academic scholarship has canonized him, and the love of 'a continuous literary decorum' has forgotten the terms in which it was apt to express itself only a decade ago. It is now timely to ask just what that place is. Perhaps, indeed, formal evaluation may be judged a needless formality, the nature and significance of Hopkins's work, once it has been fairly looked at, not being very notably obscure. However, the centenary year of his birth seems a proper occasion for attempting a brief explicit summing-up.

A poet born in 1844 was a Victorian: if one finds oneself proffering this chronological truism to-day, when the current acceptance of Hopkins goes with a recognition that something has happened in English poetry since Bridges' taste was formed, it is less likely to be a note of irony, invoking a background contrast for Hopkins, than an insistence, or the preface to it, on the essential respects in which Hopkins was, even in his originality, of Ins time. His school poem, A Vision of Mermaids, shows him starting very happily in a Keatsian line, a normal young contemporary of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and Rossetti — in the association of which three names, it will perhaps be granted, the idea of 'Victorian poet* takes on sufficient force and definition to give that 'normal' its point. The elements of Keats in Hopkins is radical and very striking :

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine : The can must be so sweet, the crust So fresh that come in fasts divine !

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend Upon the stir and keep of pride, What relish shall the censers send Along the sanctuary side !

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet That want the yield of plushy sward,

But you shall walk the golden street And you unhouse and house the Lord.

These stanzas come from an 'Early Poem' printed by Bridges immediately before The Wreck of the Deutschland. A contemporary reader, if we can imagine it published at the time of writing, might very well have judged that this very decided young talent was to be distinguished from among his fellow Victorian poets by his unique possession, in an age pervaded by Keatsian aspirations and influences, of the essential Keatsian strength. Such a Victorian reader might very well have pronounced him, this strength clearly being native and inward, unmistakably a poet born—a poet incomparably more like Keats, the poet's poet (Keats was something like that for the Tennysonian age), than the derivatively Keatsian could make themselves. Actually, the body of the mature work — The Wreck of the Deutschland onwards — in which Hopkins's distinctive bent and his idiosyncrasy develop themselves, doesn't prompt us with Keats's name so obviously. Yet the same strength, in its developed manifestations, is there.